章 49: Chapter 127 Script
After inspecting the arsenal, Wilhelm came to Skoda's car production room.
The Mladá Boleslav plant is Skoda's factory specializing in the production of cars. Wilhelm couldn't help but shake his head when he saw the noisy workshop where workers were still making manual equipment. "The production here is too backward, and the models produced are not advanced enough. Our army's truck production line is fully introduced." No matter how awesome the blitzkrieg is, it is useless without supporting logistics supplies; for armored forces, cars are as important as tanks. The Soviet Union was able to support such a huge tank force during World War II because the United States supported hundreds of thousands of vehicles. (The more than 400,000 trucks and 50,000 jeeps provided by the United States to the Soviet Union became the backbone of the Red Army's motorization. The automobile tires provided to the Soviet Union accounted for half of the Soviet Union's output, close to 4 million pieces)
There are currently three main types of German military trucks.
The first type is the Opel 3-ton military truck. At this time, Opel is not a poor thing to be acquired. Mercedes-Benz, BMW, Volvo and the like are just younger brothers in front of it.
The Opel 3-ton military truck has a 3.6 L in-line 6-cylinder water-cooled gasoline engine. This engine can enable a fully loaded 3-ton (actual load 3.31 tons) Opel military truck to fly on the road at a top speed of 85 kilometers per hour. Run. The car has a fuel tank volume of 82L and can be guaranteed to travel 320 kilometers on the road. Even if it travels off-road, it can have a maximum range of at least 230 kilometers.
It became the main vehicle used to transport the German army on the battlefield during World War II. The vehicle provided important support for the smooth conduct of the German blitzkrieg. It can be regarded as the battlefield backbone of the German army and the artery connecting the front line and the rear.
However, no matter how excellent the car is, it will be difficult to encounter the extremely bad road conditions on the Eastern Front.
Although German companies have made great efforts to repair Soviet roads over the years, not even one tenth of the road conditions have been improved, which is really nerve-wracking.
For this purpose, the second model Wilhelm chose the 6×4 GAZ AAA three-axle truck with a load capacity of 2 tons produced by the Gorky Automobile Plant of the Soviet Union. At that time, the Soviet GAZ AAA prototype had just been built and it participated in the famous Karakum Desert Rally, completing a 9,500-kilometer course of highways, country roads, wilderness areas, sand dunes, and quicksand areas.
After the outbreak of World War II in the original time and space, GAZ AAA trucks were often used as combat platforms. Equipped with a Maxin 1901M4 quadruple anti-aircraft machine gun, it is a very effective weapon for air defense and killing soft ground targets. During the war, the Soviet army often used this kind of truck to launch attacks in frontier areas lacking roads to attack enemy forces.
Wilhelm is going to "learn from the barbarians and learn skills to control the barbarians."
The third model is even more interesting, it is a Ford heavy truck.
That's right, it's the famous Ford company in the United States.
I don't know whether it was because of the profit-seeking nature of businessmen or because he was born a "hard" person, but Henry Ford, the founder of Ford, had a great fondness for Germany.
According to the history of the original time and space, Wilhelm sent people to visit him a few years ago with the mentality of giving it a try, and received a warm welcome from Henry Ford.
Things went smoothly next. Henry Ford first opened a car company in Berlin, Germany, to provide trucks for the German Army. Later, under his matchmaking, American industry giants such as International Telephone and Telegraph Company (referred to as ITT), "Standard Oil" Group, DuPont Company, Mobil Company, etc. went to Germany to invest and open factories.
Because under Wilhelm's instructions, these American companies have enjoyed considerable preferential policies in tax and other aspects. For example, the tax rate is only one-third of that in the United States. This huge profit made the profit-seeking businessmen overjoyed. In just a few years, 36 of the 100 largest companies in the United States had opened branches in Germany, and there were countless other small companies.
Even the giants of Wall Street have set their sights on Germany on the other side of the Atlantic, providing Germany with loans of more than 30 billion US dollars. It can be said that Germany's ability to get out of the economic crisis so quickly was inseparable from the funding of these "old friends" in the United States.
Moreover, driven by profits, many American companies have unscrupulously transferred technology to their German counterparts.
DuPont sold neoprene and aircraft anti-explosion technology to Farben. Standard Oil Company provided tank lubricant technology to its German partners. The successful establishment of the German Air Force was inseparable from the Standard Oil Company's aircraft-specific gasoline factory in Germany.
These behaviors were naturally discovered by the US military intelligence agencies stationed abroad, and reports were submitted to their superiors. "Our agents discovered that some American companies were illegally supplying products and technology to the Germans." However, the report had little effect. Obviously, those high-ranking figures have long been aware of these behaviors, but they have acquiesced.
Wilhelm certainly knew that some people wanted to use Germany as a knife to stab the British Empire, so that it could fall from its position as the world's number one hegemon.
If there had not been a time traveler like him, history would probably have continued according to the script of the original time and space.
What did Germany lack most during World War II?
Oil!
As early as the 1930s, Standard Oil and Germany's Farben had established a close cooperative relationship, and the two parties were even each other's major share holders. With the outbreak of war in Europe, this cooperation did not end.
While people in the United States and Britain had to queue up in long queues at gas stations due to gasoline shortages, Standard Oil was continuously shipping oil to Germany on the other side of the Atlantic through the neutral country of Switzerland.
Britain blocked the Atlantic sea route from the Arctic to the southern tip of South America, encircling all ships bound for Germany and confiscating their cargo. In this case, Standard Oil had to act in secret. They reached an agreement with neutral countries such as Switzerland, allowing the tankers to change their destination to these neutral countries, and then transport the oil to Germany from there. In this way, the British encirclement was easily broken through. Those agreements with neutral countries came to be known as "shadow agreements" because of their secret nature.
According to business records disclosed after the war, during World War II, 20% of the oil sold by Standard Oil around the world was exported to Germany.
The result was that the arrogant British Empire was beaten to the point of crying for its father and mother, begging its eldest cousin for help.
The United States said it could help, but it would not be free.
In desperation, Britain sold almost all its stocks and bonds in the United States, as well as its foreign exchange reserves and gold reserves. In order to allow the British to buy American things, the United States even adopted loans, allowing the British to slowly repay them after purchasing. In this way, the Americans emptied the pockets of the British little by little, and also made the British owe a lot of debt to the Americans. After the war, Britain owed tens of billions of dollars in debt to the United States, and these debts were repaid until 2006. This directly led to the decline of the British Empire, and the wealth and hegemony in finance, trade, shipping, etc. that the British had worked so hard to accumulate were transferred to the hands of the Americans.
Then the Americans said that since the money is gone, let's take the things.
Britain's aviation, radar, shipbuilding and other technologies were number one in the world at that time. These technologies were almost transferred to the United States at cabbage prices or even for free. Even the birth of the nuclear bomb in the late World War II was partly contributed to by the British. British atomic bomb research Therefore, they were all relocated to the United States and joined the Manhattan Project. With World War II, the United States obtained all the advanced technologies accumulated after the rise of the United Kingdom without spending a single soldier or soldier.
But the greedy Americans were not satisfied yet and exchanged 50 warships for 8 islands in the British Empire including the Bahamas, Jamaica, Saint Lucia, and Trinidad. Most of these warships are inventory from the First World War, and the youngest ship is 18 years old. Although these islands are leased to Americans, the lease term is 99 years, which is almost like giving them away for free. After the Americans obtained these islands, they quickly built 17 bases on the islands and constructed the so-called Western Hemisphere Defense Line.
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