ORIGINAL: Ron Saueracker
ORIGINAL: eMonticello
I found these tidbits of information in the US Army in WW2 Series, The Technical Service, The Transportation Corps: Operations Overseas.
Port Operations
* Sydney, Brisbane, Townsville, and Cairns did not have a regularly assigned USA port organization, all port operations were conducted locally.
Ports
* Sydney - April 1942
- There were 177 ship berths of which 44 were connected to railways and included cranes. The port could accomodate 81 ocean going vessels at one time and 10-15 at anchor.
* Brisbane - 1942
- There were 50 marginal wharves with 28 berths, of which 14 were connected to railways. In March 1943, several cranes were added. Storage space was widely scattered and there was a constant danger of congestion at the port.
* Townsville
- This port was smaller than Brisbane and poorly equipped. No new piers were built during the war. There was an anchorage for 75 vessels from 2-6 miles off-shore. There were two piers for large ships and 6 berths connected to the railways. Cargo discharge was conducted by local longshoremen and was considered to be slow and inefficient. Townsville was considered a stop-over point and in Sept 43 had as many as 36 ships waiting to head to New Guinea.
* Cairns
- This port was used when Townsville exceeded its capacity. It had anchorage for 7 ocean-going vessels at one time.
Ship-related tidbits
- 61 American, British, and Dutch ships took refuge in Australia in late 1941-early 1942.
- When War Shipping Adminstration (WSA) ships moved into theater, they were often hijacked by theater commanders and used for theater operations.
- China Navigation Company (British) and Koninklijke Paketvaart Maatschappij (KPM - Royal Packet Navigation Co)(Dutch) were two companies that operated in this region.
http://www.timetableimages.com/maritime/index.htm
- Supplies to India were shared by ships whose origination ports were located in the Gulf of Mexico, Atlantic Ocean, and the Pacific Ocean.
Makes one wonder where the port size figures in the game came from.
Really.
Of course one of my big beefs is the way Noumea can be somehow turned into another Boston almost overnight. Then again, as the war progressed the Navy (actually the army sorted out Noumea's problems) found one way after another to make "ports" literally in the middle of nowhere.
Still, there's no getting around the fact that you need actual space for ships to be moored. The data supplied for Cairns above is telling in this respect. [:D]
Seriously, though, one might well spend as much time as went into the entire WitP project just looking deeply into the logistics side of it and trying to wrestle with all that effectively. And I wish they had. Afterall, that's pretty much what the war was about from the Allied side of it: a giant complex problem in logistics. Not to take anything away from the people who did the actual fighting, but without the movement of mountains of myriad supply across many thousands of miles of ocean nothing would have happened at all.
