The Quest for Fuel in World War II (1993)
eiaonline.com
eiaonline.com
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.
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.
I'd include the more broadly-scoped works by Vaclav Smil (Energy and Civilization <https://www.worldcat.org/title/959698256> and Energy in World History <https://www.worldcat.org/title/30398523>) and Manfred Weissenbacher (Sources of Power <https://www.worldcat.org/title/416715097>).
Wiessenbacher in particular emphasizes the political and military implications of energy regimes.
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.
Hopefully (and most usually) far more of the latter than former.
Europe had already been drilling and refining oil in Silesia for a decade or more by the time of Drake's well.
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.
It's hard to imagine fuel pipelines working again. Or would it?
Are batteries or solar power part of this, or is that inconsequential?
It seems like everything can be dual-use...
Read "Moving Mountains", by Gen. Patronis, who was in charge of logistics for the Gulf War.
https://www.amazon.com/Moving-Mountains-Lessons-Leadership-L...
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)
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.
The Americans didn’t use them very much on D-Day, relative to the British.
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.
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.
Sometimes I wonder why the Germans didn't simply create lots of fake V1 launch sites out of sticks and cardboard.
"Impact" by Benjamin King, pg 321
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.
"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"
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.
War being war they flew over the factories so they could bomb the scientists living quarters.
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:
https://www.e-education.psu.edu/egee120/book/export/html/242
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."'
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust
This is a famous photo of Thomas J. Watson (CEO of IBM) meeting with Adolf Hitler:
https://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/punched-cards/2/1...](
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.
These days we only fight wars when dictators make us. Resources are completely irrelevant or at best, a minor side issue.
At least that is what most people seem to have been led to believe.
That would be nice wouldn't it?
We won't have mass adoption of EVs until this fact changes or becomes irrelevant (eg if land wars become irrelevant).
https://news.pickuptrucks.com/2015/07/how-far-can-you-drive-...
The longest range quoted is more than 1250km!
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.
--- 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.