aspqrz02
Posts: 1024
Joined: 7/20/2004 Status: offline
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The Pacific war was, in a sense, entirely about Oil. The US ultimatum to Japan for them to get out of China (sort of) and the simultaneous embargo of three things - oil from US sources, US flagged shipping (almost all Japanese oil imports were moved in US flagged and owned ships) and the withdrawal of credit facilities that made it possible for the Japanese to buy oil from other sources (Venezuela, IIRC, rather than the DEI and Borneo) - left the militarist/military crazies in charge of Japan with, they believed, enough oil for about a year's operations - about six months leading up to a DoW followed by about six months of wartime operations thereafter ... after which they believed that their economy would be crippled. As it turns out, they were not only crazy, but grossly incompetent ... their oil reserves were actually considerably larger than they had estimated, and they were able to keep going into early 1943 before major problems arose with oil ... and, even then, they never really knew how much oil they actually had at any given time. It was evidently only the allied powers and their bureaucrats who were occupying/running Japan at the end of the war who actually ferreted out this last fact Germany had their Synthetic Oil plants, and had at least some idea of what they might be facing ... but even their usage estimates were way off. Their mechanized units, they found out, burned through fuel like it was going out of fashion ... To begin with, they captured enough oil in Poland to keep the economy and armed forces ticking over for the invasion of the west. Then they glommed enough oil in France and the Low Countries to keep things going for Barbarossa and the first year of the war in the east, more or less. But from late 1942 and, certainly, 1943 they were being forced to make strategic deployment decisions for army, navy and airforce units based purely on the amount of oil they actually had on hand. Things went downhill from there. And by the end of the war, late 1944 and 1945, their 'reserves' actually consisted of ONLY the oil in tanker cars on the way to the end user. That is, there WAS no reserve. (Note: The idea that they could have gained any oil from the Soviet fields is simply not on. The Soviets basically destroyed them and the Germans found that they simply didn't have the trained technical manpower or the special order long time delay equipment needed to get even the handful of wells they actually did get back into very limited production into serious operation. Then, of course, there was the problem that they had no actual capacity to ship it back to Germany as the Soviets had destroyed all the relevant rail lines and ports ... and, even if they hadn't, the Germans found during the war that they could never produce enough railway POL tanker cars to do more than barely meet shipping needs for their own homegrown and Western European production, so there weren't spare POL tankers to move it anyway. Much the same issues apply to the Iraqi and other Middle Eastern oil fields. Which is not to say they could never have gotten any oil from them - just they couldn't do it in the timeframe of the game. Insofar as the Oil rule makes this sort of situation probable, it is realistic). The Italians, on the other hand, were in a real pickle. They imported something like 90% of their POL (Germany only 70%), had virtually no reserves, and lost almost their entire tanker fleet (which was tiny anyway) on the DoW as it was overseas at the time! Things were so bad that they had to move POL to Libya in regular merchant ships in 44 gallon drums, just about the most inefficient and marginally effective way of doing this possible ... except for transporting it by air ... which they also did by 1943, loading 44 gallon drums or bladders into Me-232 Gigants and flying it across! The Italian fleet spent most of the war in port for the very good reason that they barely had enough oil in their bunkers to keep maintenance levels of steam up in their boilers. What little they did manage to procure came from Kriegsmarine stocks that Hitler ordered the KM to provide, against much bitter and vehement protest. So, yes, you could well say that 'many strategic decisions ... were related to oil' Phil
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Author, Space Opera (FGU); RBB #1 (FASA); Road to Armageddon; Farm, Forge and Steam; Orbis Mundi; Displaced (PGD) ---------------------------------------------- Email: aspqrz@tpg.com.au
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