World War, SUPPLY: HITLER MISSED THE TANKER

Hitler Missed the Tanker?

Into narrow twisting Vladivostok one day last week slid the bulk of the U.S. oil tanker, L. P. St. Clair. To battling Russia she brought barrels of high octane gasoline. Next day the Associated was berthed beside her with 95,000 barrels more. Early thisweek another arrived. And strung like a chain across the Pacific still more tankers wallowed along from the U.S. to Russia, right between the Japanese islands of Honshu and Hokkaido. If not actively fighting Fascism, the U.S. was helping to fuel the fight against it.

The arrival of the L. P. St. Clair did than emphasize the fact of U.S. aid to Russia, underline the new and uncompromising U.S. policy toward Germany’s friend, Japan. It pointed a finger right at a key problem of World War II: the problem of oil.

“The Allies,” said Britain’s Foreign Secretary Lord Curzon after World War I, “floated to victory on a wave of oil.” To the mechanized armies of World War II, oil is life and death, has become the single most decisive “weapon” of the war.

Since the war’s beginning no week has passed without scarehead rumors and wishful guesses as to the state of the world’s oil supply. “Experts” proved alternately that Germany’s oil reserves could not support a month of Blitzkrieg, that her synthetic production could keep her going indefinitely.

In its September issue, FORTUNE published what seemed to be the most comprehensive analysis of the oil problem in World War II that has yet appeared. In hard figures of production and consumption it painted a picture that should look pretty indeed to Britain and the U.S.

So well-planned was her strategy that Germany actually burned only about 12,000,000 barrels in the tanks of her fighting machines from the first day of the attack on Poland to the last day of the Battle of France. This was little enough (only three days’ U.S. production), and was more than balanced by the 20,000,000 barrels captured in France and the Low Countries.

But Hitler’s Europe today, though it includes the large oil fields of Rumania, is short of oil. In the countries of the Axis, as well as in conquered countries, consumption has been cut to the bone, but still there is a shortage in sight for 1941. Europe this year, in spite of bombing and dislocation of transportation, may produce and refine as much as 100,000,000 barrels; 30,000,000 of it from the great German synthetic gasoline industry. She must use up at least 115,000,000 barrels.

The much-talked-of German oil reserves (which FORTUNE estimates at 33,000,000 barrels at the war’s beginning) would take care of this year’s shortage, perhaps 1942’s as well. They would not cover the needs of a longer war, might not even be sufficient for a dragged-out campaign in Russia.

From Russia’s huge oil fields in Transcaucasia, Hitler got 6,000,000 barrels in 1940, little more during the period of the Russo-German Pact. Most of Russia’s 210,000,000-barrel annual production was desperately needed at home. It is for these fields that Hitler is driving, presumably because he feels that they would be more practicable for German use than those of Iran and Iraq. But, should he get them and get them intact, he would still have the problem of organizing a 2,500-mile transportation line before he could use the oil against Britain, a problem more difficult than that of the U.S. in getting oil from the Gulf of Mexico to the Atlantic seaboard (see p. 13).

Britain, on the other hand, sits comparatively pretty. Though she must import all but 5% of her oil, she has access by sea to perhaps 85% of the world’s supply. Her consumption is 100,000,000 barrels a year, her problem, transportation. To supplement her own huge tanker fleet she has added Norwegian, Dutch, French and Belgian tonnage, as well as 80 U.S. tankers.

In spite of oil rationing in the East, which is a temporary matter of transportation, the U.S. has not only the oil she needs, but plenty to spare for Britain and Russia. According to FORTUNE’S figures, the U.S. oil industry is coasting along, can jack up production 30% at any time.

Most uncomfortably parched for oil is Japan, the eastern end of the Axis. The shutting off of supplies from the U.S. and The Netherlands Indies has at a stroke lost her 31,000,000 to 33,000,000 of the 45,000,000 barrels she uses each year. Her reserves, if any, are relatively small, her actual and potential domestic production insufficient. Unless Japan’s sword-rattlers want to give up the profession of war entirely, they must soon fight, not for the Emperor or Co-Prosperity, but simply and inevitably for oil.