One of my professors argues that WWII was because of oil. 
They could have accessed it, but they then would have to produce it which requires quite an investment of capital and machinery, not to mention the logistics of getting oil from Saudi Arabia to the European front.
IMHO, once they invaded Russia and declared war against the US, you essentially had Germany vs. the rest of the industrialized (and industrializing) world, a scenario in which it is difficult to imagine any realistic chance of them winning WW2, even if they secured Middle East oil prior to invading the USSR.
Japan’s case is a little different, in that everything had to be sent by ship to the Home Island industries.
I think it was easier to blockade Japan than to try to interuppt the flow of oil overland from the Caucasus to Germany.
My guess is it gives meaning to an otherwise unmitigated disaster and humiliation of the British being kicked off the continent by Germany yet again. Worse, the troops sent to Greece were pulled out of or were otherwise slated to be sent to North Africa where the British were successfully driving the Italians back in Libya; were it not for this diversion the British might have successfully wrapped up the North African campaign instead of being defeated there as well with the arrival of the Afrika Korps. Yugoslavia truly did fold like a house of cards; Germany only lost 151 killed overrunning the country.
It also makes Barbarossa seem like a much closer run affair than it actually was with the implication that but for those six weeks Germany would have won the war. It’s much like the myth of the Siberian divisions being released at the last moment from facing Japan, saving Moscow and being decisive in defeating the Germans; the reality was the Siberian troops were a tiny fraction of the forces thrown against the Germans, troops from Siberia had been going west to fight the Germans from the start of Barbarossa, and that Operation Typhoon was going to grind to a halt and the Soviets were going to launch a massive counter-offensive with or without them. There’s a pretty good dissection of the Siberian myth here. The truth was the Germans consistently and grossly underestimated the size of the STAVKA reserves. There were enough reserves for Stalin to make the mistake of expanding the counter-offensive against Army Group Center to a counter-offensive along the entire front from Leningrad to the Black Sea.
A bit of both, May 15 was a pretty optimistic start date even if the weather wasn’t unseasonably bad and would likely have been pushed back anyway. Hitler had a tendency to set dates that had to be postponed; he originally scheduled the invasion of France and the Low Countries for November 12, 1939(!) and it was postponed more than a dozen times, as late as a postponement from May 7, 1940 to May 10, 1940 when it was actually launched.
I don’t really know if that would have been feasible. The Texas Eastern line which transports natural gas from Texas to the North East traces its roots back to the necessity of transporting crude oil from Texas to the North East during World War II. Essentially, after Germany constantly sank tankers transporting crude, the Big Inch and Little Inch pipelines were built to send crude oil up to north. This wasn’t even in operation until mid 1943. Therefore, transporting natural gas would have been essentially impossible as it could not be transported by tanker and no pipeline existed at the time to get it up north.
Also, assuming we were able to use coal for ships, synthetic fuels for air, and natural gas for domestic manufacturing, how would we have fueled tanks?
This is exactly correct. My understanding is that H.L. Hunt alone produced almost as much oil as the entire Axis powers during the war. I have read that 6 billion of the 7 billion barrels of oil used by the Allies during World War II came from the United States.
If Hitler didn’t surrender after Berlin was reduced to a smoldering crater there probably would have been another assassination attempt, and it probably would have worked.
Thanks. From the Saudi Aramco link, it looks I was conflating this bit:
with discoveries around the region. Now I know better 
Well… I still think that depends on how big a difference controlling the oil makes for the Axis, whether it is enough to change the nuke-development timeline, and also whether the Germans expected a nuke of their own anytime soon.
If controlling the oil meant knocking Russia out of the war and also compromising the British, things might have turned out very differently.
As of now I still don’t know which way to go. From this page from Dissonance’s cite:
which really makes me wonder if the effects of an oil shortage might have magnified the Soviets’ shortcomings early in the war. But there’s this:
To the first point, there is the pincer operation Sailboat describes- the Germans make different choices that lead to the earlier capture/deprivation from the Soviets of the Baku oil (plus the small amount supplying the British coming out of the Middle East). With both belligerents compromised, and considering the serious difficulties both faced as it was, maybe swiping their oil would’ve been the the Axis’ road to victory. Over the Brits and Soviets anyway…
To the second point, well, you have a point. But this is a hypothetical involving a different strategic focus for the Axis. And they were Nazis. That plays like a joke, no? But then again, these guys were famous for being above-average in ‘frenzy’. I suspect they could have exploited Baku to some degree almost immediately, but you’re making wonder if they could procure a ‘significant quantity’ within, say, six months.
and there’s this:
Does that include the Soviets’ oil? If so, maybe Baku wasn’t such great shakes in the first place, and the answer to the hypothetical is, “not much”.
Still- Soviet tanks were running out of gas in 1941. If they continued to run out of gas in 1942, 1943, might they have been defeated, or at least forced to compromise? Say, the compromising of the other belligerents leads to U-boats preventing American re-supply of the Allies- could that have even happened? And if so, does even that much threaten to alter the ultimate outcome?
One thing that is rarely mentioned in these hypotheticals is Soviet sabotage - they would not have just left the Baku fields operational, they would have destroyed the wells and rigs in a scorched earth policy that would have made ramping up production even more difficult and costly than starting afresh with a new field. For example, on August 9th, 1942 the Germans captured the city of Maikop, one of the most westerly of the Caucaus oil fields, capable of producing approx. 1/10th of the oil that Baku generated. However, Soviet destruction of the fields, supplies, and equipment was so thorough that 5 months later, in January 1943, the Germans were able to wring a mere 70 barrels a day out of a field that produced 15,000 barrels a day just 6 months before.
By 1944, the German situation was so desperate that 57% of the 217,000 barrels produced daily by German industry was synthetic.
For the duration of the war, Germany had produced 240 million barrels of oil to sustain both its war effort and internal economy. Their efforts were bolstered by Romania, who produced an additional 180 million barrels, nearly all of it going to support the German military.
Compare that to American production, which grew from 3.7 million barrels/day in 1940 to 4.7 million barrels/day in 1945. In total, American production during the war was 5.8-6 billion barrels of oil, or twenty-five times German production.
The USSR was no slouch either, though it didn’t come close to equaling the Americans: 800 million barrels of oil were produced by the Soviets during the war, most of it in support of the Allies.
Hell, even the British produced more oil than Germany and Romania, with 650 million barrels produced, almost all of it in Palestine and in certain Commonwealth territories.
So, assuming that the Germans had captured Baku and was able to produce at the same rate as the Soviets, they would have had access to a maximum of 1.2 billion barrels of oil (and that’s assuming every drop produced by the Soviets went to Germany), which was still less than 1/5th of combined US + UK production.
Therefore, the numbers strongly suggest that even had the Germans captured Baku, they still would have faced a massive petroleum shortfall compared to the US+UK.
Cites: The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power, Daniel Yergin, and Military production during World War II - Wikipedia
The Soviets weren’t running out of gas in '41, the comment that “Many T-34s were abandoned and lost due to breakdown, being bogged down or simply out of fuel” relates to tanks being abandoned during retreat or encirclement, not a general lack of fuel to supply tanks with. Even if the USSR was somehow deprived of all of its domestic oil Germany could not stop the flow from the US. Historically Lend-Lease
Bolding mine. There was nothing Germany could do to stop the Pacific Route even if Murmansk and Persia were lost. The obvious solution would be for Japan to attack the USSR, but that opens another whole can of worms of why Japan attacking the USSR instead of the US/UK/Dutch wasn’t a feasible possibility.
It isn’t a party until everyone has opened a can of worms…
the german war machine was basically lacking all essential raw material to wage war longer than 3 years. to have all the oil they needed would have resulted to just an excess capacity on one aspect. by 1943, they were already lacking in steel, copper and lead.
Not so. Oil was discovered in Iran in 1908, and in Iraq in 1912. Both countries were substantial oil exporters by the 1930s.
The British North African campaign in WW2 was fuelled by Iranian oil.
Yeah ok, but what if the Axis controlled the oil, steel, copper, AND lead?
I’m just kidding.
That’s right. The Soviets had exactly such a plan ready to go at Baku. From the cite in my OP:
I’m probably giving the Germans too much credit for being frenzied maniacs- they would’ve caused more problems for the Russians by capturing Baku, but it doesn’t look like they would’ve gained much. Conquest just isn’t a great way to take control of oil- the faction losing control doesn’t want you to have it and sabotages the infrastructure.
But this last bit, along with the other figures you cite (and the weight of everybody else’s arguments) is what is doing it for me:
I hadn’t seen the summary of production for the Axis and Allies presented side by side like that. I did not realize the Axis were so wildly outclassed in nearly every category- I imagined the Axis to have been more competitive (the Americans produced more tanks than the Germans? Who knew?! But I was right that the Axis were sorely short of oil, relatively). I thought a different strategy might have delivered a knockout punch against the Soviets, and that that might have remedied the problem of being outnumbered. Now I seriously doubt it.
Now my question is: Why the heck did they even try? Either they didn’t know what they were getting into, or they were stark raving barking mad. Probably a bit of both?
again, they thought they wouldn’t be fighting anyone longer than 3 years. they thought most countries would go much the same way as czechoslovakia, austria and poland. they thought 7 years of stockpiling and that big a headstart in weapons R&D would take care of any adverse scenario that might come.
at its height, the nazi war machine out front went “VROOM-VROOM!” but at the rear, it went “CLIP-CLOP, CLIP-CLOP.”
That’s true. At the start of the Soviet invasion, the German army had 600,000 motor vehicles and 625,000 horses.
I don’t know, but I seriously doubt the American troops had a 1:1 ratio of vehicles to horses like that. I remember reading a passage with one boy remembering the Americans coming through his town in Italy, and all of them were in motor vehicles, with “nary a horse among them.”
Well, Hitler forgot the one of the most important lessons learned from WW1: Don’t fight the Americans - they’ll just overwhelm your ass with people and production.
Reading this reminds me of that joke that went around a few years ago, about what would WW2 be like if it was an online RTS:
http://www.strategypage.com/humor/articles/military_jokes_20057151.asp
And the Japanese were fighting a land war in Asia :smack:
Well maybe you’re making fun of me, but in any case it made me LOL
I’m not making fun of you at all! By “this”, I was referring to the thread, but I can see how I wrote it to be interpreted otherwise. 