The significance of fuel, and petroleum specifiically, to war operations is a significant part of Daniel Yergin's epic history of petroleum, The Prize.
It includes not only WWII, in which oil (much supplied by the US to both its own and allied forces, though with Russian and Romanian production also significant) was determinative, but WWI, in which the significance of oil, and its role in transforming infantry and cavalry to a mechanised army and nascent air forces was first realised.
I came here to say something along these lines. One statistic from that book I’ve always loved is that the Allies burned seven billion barrels of oil during WWII - and six billion of them were pumped from the United States.
The transformational force of oil, and the quantities involved, were indeed staggering.
I'd like to add: I don't share Yergin's sympathies and enthusiasm for the oil industry or petroleum itself. Despite that, his book really is a treasure, and is among the better histories of energy out there.
Yep, and lots from the Permian Basin in particular, which is of course still an extremely productive field to this day.
The resurgence of continental U.S. oil production is a fascinating story and a technological marvel. There are upsides and downsides to fossil fuel extraction at that scale, but like the original posted noted, the transformational impact cannot be understated.
Far and away the best book on the material and energy constraints that defined Germany's warpath in WW2 - including why it recklessly struck out to open the eastern front - is Adam Tooze's Wages of Destruction.
More than that, the book begins in the mid 19th century, to explain the discovery of oil as a source of superior fuels for the modern industrial world, which then became heavily dependent on acquiring it to maintain economic dominance. That securing control of oil rich territories was the main strategic goal of both World Wars. At least that’s what I took from the book.
Right. It opens in 1854 discussing the prelude to what would be the first successful petroleum well in the U.S. at Oil Creek, near Titusville, PA, by Col. Edwin Drake, completed in 1869.
Europe had already been drilling and refining oil in Silesia for a decade or more by the time of Drake's well.
Logistics has been a strength of the US since WWII. There are very few armies in the world prepared to Go Someplace and Do Something. Most can't sustain big units far from their home base for very long. The US does that routinely.
D-Day was postponed to 1945 to allow accumulating enough resources to overcome any opposition. The fiascoes of the Dieppe raid and Dunkirk made it clear this was necessary. In a way, those disasters helped. Otherwise, there would probably have been a failed invasion in 1944.
Eisenhower was a logistics officer by training and background. Which is exactly what was needed. He insisted on having solutions to all the potential logistics problems before attempting the invasion. These included some exotic schemes, such as prefabricated temporary ports and a temporary fuel pipeline across the English Channel, both of which were built and used. It included much special equipment, such as "flail tanks" that could thrash a minefield and get across a hostile beach. More than that, the backup was in place to sustain the follow-up behind the invasion. Very thorough backup, all the way down to prefabricated Coca-Cola bottling plants.
The fiascoes of Dieppe and Dunkirk did not really make it clear. The later fiasco of the Allied invasion of North Africa in November 1942 not only made clear that logistics was paramount, but shoved it directly in Eisenhower's face. Then a Lieutenant General, his operation was supposed to overtake Tunisia within a month, but ended up taking almost six months due to poor logistics and coordination. Logistical challenges in Algeria and Morocco allowed Rommel's Africa Corps to consolidate and build force in Tunisia, leading to drawn out conflict. Interestingly, unexpected resistance from Vichy France also delayed the advance. Not many people know that in the early days of our involvement in the war many of our troops were killed by the French! For those interested, a great introductory read is An Army At Dawn, by Rick Atkinson.
The Americans wanted to start with an invasion of France right in 1942. No messing about. The British had to convince them that it was ridiculous.
Then the Americans got an easy start in North Africa where they could learn from their mistakes and become the juggernaut they are known to be.
An Army At Dawn is a really good book filled with interesting anecdotes. It's perhaps a bit of a tough read because the good guys keep blundering. If you want a curbstomp battle, that's not it.
Yes, it’s certainly one of those books that leaves you both frustrated and awe-inspired. If you like Ambrose’s writing I highly recommend Crazy Horse and Custer.
Maybe not nitpick to your good comment: Flail tanks and the rest of Hobart’s Funny’s were pretty well accepted by the British, and favoured by Eisenhower but not so much by the likes of Bradley.
The Americans didn’t use them very much on D-Day, relative to the British.
Nuclear-powered e-fuels and old-fashioned stockpiles. Or just old-fashioned stockpiles.
Ground warfare might perhaps see some niches where the lower thermal and noise signature of battery power gets leveraged in one way or another, or the flexibility of motor-power wheel. But charging would still require are least a fallback to generator trucks (or to fuel cell trucks, if you think you can skip the fallback from mechanized logistics to jerry-cans)
"Blitzkrieg" gets a lot of ink in the basic history of WWII and it conveys this idea that Germany just had a ton of tanks and zerg-rushed their opponents. The reality on the ground is that they had a hell of a lot of soldiers marching on foot (apparently soldiers on all sides of the war were often given amphetimines for energy/morale) and despite Germany's reputation for mechanization, much of their military relied extremely heavily on manual labor and horses for transportation (which they often had to resort to eating during the most dire periods in the Russian winter).
I remember reading a collection first hand accounts from Germans taken after the war, and one thing that stuck with me was genuine shock from the Germans that the Americans landing on DDay didn't even bother to bring horses with them.
That still doesn't beat the Japanese officer who learned that the Americans had boats devoted to making ice cream. That would be a tough one to live down.
I remember from The Forgotten Soldier that German soldiers noticed that new recruits had worse and worse uniforms, with worse materials and lower quality dyes.
At some point Germany's new jet fighters were dragged by horses because fuel was so scarce.
This is often discussed on Quora. I think the quote from a German soldier was that he knew the war was lost after D-Day when he saw the Americans' endless lines of trucks, and realized that their logistics would overwhelm the Germans no matter what happened on the battlefield.
I may mis-understand but my reading of "from apes to warlords" by Solly Zuckerman (who was a scientist informing the Bombing campaign) is that Bomber Harris, and others, completely misunderstood the imperative in targetted bombing which in any case they couldn't really do, and so dismissed the evidence that targetted strategic bombing of critical supply chain elements was very high value.
Instead, they insisted "morale" carpet bombing made more sense, despite mounting unsustainable losses.
When finally the Oil, Ball Bearing and "transport plan" bombing was shown to work, the beginnings of the end of Bomber Harris started. Late in the war.
Scientific analysis post D-Day on bomb effects were telling.
Basically, they had the right idea. Bombing Ploesti Oil fields and ball bearing factories and rubber tyre plants, and the Buna artificial oil plants was the right thing to do, but it didn't suit the people in control, so they didn't keep the path long enough to find out.
The British spent enormous effort bombing V1 launch sites. Hitler apparently knew that the random hits of the V1 on London had little military significance, but it caused an enormous diversion of British resources to try and stop the V1. Hence Hitler kept it up.
Sometimes I wonder why the Germans didn't simply create lots of fake V1 launch sites out of sticks and cardboard.
Nonsense, any attacks on V1 sites were performed by completely different ground attack aircraft, and not the strategic bomber force. While the British might have allocated some resources to their destruction, to say it interrupted their nighttime bombing campaign is ridculous.
So what? I'm not arguing it was ineffective (it was).
V1 sites were dealt with by a completely different branch of the air arm, using ground attack aircraft.
They couldn't even hit them with the strategic bomber fleet, so they went on being infective with that on city sized targets. But to say that campaign was negatively affected by a focus on dealing with the V1s is both wrong and misleading.
"Over a quarter of the Combined Bomber Offensive's tonnage of bombs were used against V-weapon sites in July and August"
"Carl Spaatz, commander of U.S. Strategic Air Forces in Europe (USSTAF), responded on June 28[31] to 'complain that Crossbow was a 'diversion' from the main task of wearing down the Luftwaffe and bombing German industry' for the Combined Bomber Offensive, and to recommend instead that Crossbow be a secondary priority"
My cite was not about bombing effectiveness, but about the diversion of Allied effort towards bombing V1 sites, which made the V1 (unexpectedly) effective for the Germans.
Saddam Hussein's Scud missile attacks had the same effect. The US diverted a lot of its resources towards stopping those attacks, despite the Scud being so inaccurate it was militarily useless. (Ironically, the Scud missile is just an upgraded V2.)
The 8th AF was also pressed into bombing those sites, and the RAF also used bunker buster bombs on the concrete ones.
Besides, if you have X manufacturing capacity, if you build lots of bombs and ground attack aircraft to go after V1 sites, you're necessarily building fewer bombs and aircraft for Harris' carpetbombing program. The V1 defenses also diverted many squadrons of fighters on constant alert to shoot them down, and mass quantities of flak guns along the route to London.
Ground attack airplanes being prioritized for V1 launch sites weren't being used to attack other things, like railways, industry, etc.
The Germany's invasion of Poland in 1939 was heavily reliant on German air power, and not mentioned here is that a critical airplane fuel additive - 500 tons of tetraethyl lead - was at the time supplied by US Standard Oil via their partnership with German IG Farben.
The Standard Oil - IG Farben partnership of the 1930s revolved around their control of synthetic rubber and fuel oil patents (the Buna rubber process, and Fischer-Tropsch liquid fuel synthesis from coal). The 1930s East Texas oil discoveries caused Standard oil to lose interest in synthetic oil from coal, but Standard Oil's sales of fuel to the Nazi regime various various channels seem to have continued at some level until the 1942 Trading With The Enemy Act.
Some of this hisotry is detailed in Daneil Yergin's "The Prize", i.e. this chapter:
As I understand it though, these materials were manufactured in Germany or German occupied territories at IG Farben facilities. Standard Oil was a partner in the venture from before the war, but at the time had no way to prevent continued operations in Europe. IBM was in a similar position, its German subsidiary run by Germans in Germany continued to work for the German regime through the war, but the US management had no way to stop that happening.
I read this book regarding Dehomag and quiet control of it through Switzerland by IBM corporate offices in Armonk, NY.
IBM had much more influence over the German subsidiary than you think.
'David Cesarani of Southampton University stated that Black provided "shocking evidence" that IBM in America continued to provide punch cards and other services to the Nazis "in defiance of Allied regulations against trading with the enemy."'
> Hitler lost sight of his material goal and instead fastened on one of only symbolic importance - Stalingrad.
This is oversimplified. Stalingrad was of enormous military importance in securing the advance into the Caucasus, it was relatively starved of resources and reinforcements for nearly the entire battle, and the degree to which its symbolism factored into decision-making is massively overstated and indirect.
The idea that Hitler (or Stalin, for that matter) had an overriding primarily symbolic obsession with Stalingrad is substantially just popular myth.
I'm not sure that this isn't understanding causality the wrong way round. If the military could've run those supply lines with EVs, they really might've done so -- but the batteries were just not up to it. This situation is improving, but consider that about 400km is the maximum range of many common electric vehicles. About 640km is quite long distance for electric vehicles, quoted for electric pickups, but that is about parity with the lowest number on this recent listing of ranges for common gasoline pickup trucks:
For non-logistics use cases, it's also notable that one thing you can do with gas vehicles that you can not readily do with electric vehicles is extend the range by carrying gas in the vehicle.
An electric vehicle with a gas generator might offer a good compromise, since you'd maintain the low maintenance and simplicity of the electric drive system and the ability to run off of mains power in most situations while being able to extend the range if needed.
Could you explain the logic there? I understand the first statement, but I don't understand how the current military dependency on petroleum for land war blocks mass adoption of EVs in the civilian market.
Sorry, I should have said that I think the auto industry and national highway system in America were put in place in the 40s and 50s to create a strategic economic flow of petroleum consumption. I.e. should there be another big global land war it's far faster to (repurpose Ford, GM, etc for military vehicles to consume an existing petrol supply chain) than to (build those factories fresh to make vehicles that run on the cutting edge of the energy supply chain).
correction? IIUC from that link, America produced as much oil in a day as Japan in a year.
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Japan produced about 2.7 million barrels of oil domestically. The domestic wells were located at Akita, Niigata and Nutsu. This was about 0.1 percent of world production 1941). This was approximately comparable to a single day of American oil production.
For additional context, every day after completion of the Big Inch and Little Big Inch pipelines (1942-1944) to refineries in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, as much as 500,000 barrels of oil was pumped out of Texas to the refineries. That is just oil that was not pumped downstream to be refined in a Texas refinery every day.
I think you're misreading that essay. Those three domestic wells were "... about 0.1 percent of world production 1941). This was approximately comparable to a single day of American oil production."
According to a quote by the illustrious German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, the fight is fought and determined by the quartermasters before the gunfire starts. The value of logistics is often only acknowledged in passing by students of military history, who would rather read about artillery and tanks, mass movement, and attacks and counterattacks. The causes of that bias are simple to comprehend. It is getting easier and easier to think that wars are always fought on the battlefield because there is no obvious drama when looking at supply lines. For instance, several books have been published about the tactics and plans of World War II, but very little about how practically every significant choice made during that fight was influenced by the requirement for a single item that no modern army can function without—oil.
It includes not only WWII, in which oil (much supplied by the US to both its own and allied forces, though with Russian and Romanian production also significant) was determinative, but WWI, in which the significance of oil, and its role in transforming infantry and cavalry to a mechanised army and nascent air forces was first realised.
Very strongly recommended.
https://www.worldcat.org/title/255903487