Читать книгу Power Trip: From Oil Wells to Solar Cells – Our Ride to the Renewable Future - Amanda Little - Страница 22

While the “fateful plunge” from coal to petroleum undoubtedly gave the Allies a leg up in World War I, by World War II oil had become more than an advantage—it was a tactical necessity. To get a full-color account of this first fully oil-dependent war, I visited David Painter, a professor of history at Georgetown University and one of the leading experts on America’s energy diplomacy. Reference books consumed almost every inch of space in Painter’s office—filling the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and rising in stacks like stalagmites from the floor. The only section of visible wall in the room held a print of a Christo sketch of half a million stacked oil drums, titled America: The Third Century. Painter wore round horn-rimmed glasses and a necktie slightly askew, and had the introspective patience of a man who’s spent a lifetime searching the past for clues to understand the present.

Painter explained that World War II was a high-tech, heavy-artillery operation, one in which Allied forces used 7 billion barrels of oil—many times more fuel than they did in World War I, when machinery was mostly powered by coal. Oil is the most convenient form of energy—it generates 40 percent more thermal capacity than coal, which means it can take vehicles greater distances at higher speeds. The major weapons systems used in World War II—long-range bombers and other aircraft, aircraft carriers, surface warships, submarines, tanks, and trucks—were fueled by oil, and most had been produced in American factories. Moreover, the United States had become the main source for the 100-octane fuel and specialty lubricants that improved the speed, power, and reliability of the most sophisticated aircraft engines. “The high-performance engines climbed faster, flew higher, and got better mileage—huge tactical advantages,” said Painter. American citizens, for their part, understood the importance of oil in fueling this war, and were asked, as a patriotic duty, to carpool, ration gasoline, ban auto racing, and observe no-driving days.

What surprised me more than the sheer volume of oil consumed in World War II battles were Painter’s stories of how the capture and control of oil had been, for the first time in history, a motivation for war. When the United States entered World War II, it produced two-thirds of the world’s petroleum. Nearly all the oil—6 billion of the 7 billion gallons—that fueled the Allied war effort came from U.S. fields. Only the Soviet Union, among the other great powers, had any significant oil production, while Britain and France were short on domestic oil and dependent on foreign suppliers. “Oil was known as the ‘master resource,’” Painter explained, “in the sense that it enables you to do so many things: energy for mining, for agriculture, for manufacturing, for home heating, for transportation—not just for direct military use.”

The Germans and Japanese also had extremely limited domestic petroleum reserves and had been shut out of the major foreign oil-producing areas, leaving both nations highly vulnerable. Nazi leader Adolf Hitler understood this vulnerability—how could he build an autonomous Third Reich if it relied on foreign countries to fuel its industries? So Hitler advanced a technology that the United States is now exploring seventy-five years later: he pushed the development of synthetic fuels from coal (a resource abundant inside German borders) shortly after taking power in 1933. By the outbreak of World War II, coal-derived “synfuels” accounted for nearly half of Germany’s oil needs. But the process of deriving fuel from coal was complicated and expensive, and it required huge installations of steel that could be spotted by surveillance planes and became easy targets for Allied bombers.

Germany relied mainly on the Soviet Union and Romania for its oil supplies, but Hitler quickly realized this wouldn’t be enough to fuel his military machine and sustain his long-term vision of the Third Reich. He began eyeing as a potential fuel source the oil-rich fields in Russia’s Caucasus Mountains. This was one of his primary motivations for Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. When Hitler’s intent became clear, Russian troops destroyed their oil fields, refining equipment, and pipelines to prevent their resources from being tapped—one of several desperate measures ordered by Joseph Stalin. “Not one step back!” Stalin told his army. “The execution of this task means the preservation of our country, the destruction of our enemy, and a guarantee of victory.”

Like Germany, Japan was heavily motivated by oil. The “master resource” was a driving factor in Japan’s infamous attack on U.S. forces at the Hawaiian base of Pearl Harbor. By the end of the 1930s, Japan depended on the United States to provide the vast majority of its oil needs. Even after Japan announced its “Axis” alliance with Germany and Italy, the United States continued to supply it with petroleum. (As internal documents would later reveal, Roosevelt did not want to do anything that Japan might interpret as provocative, such as banning oil, for fear that this would trigger an attack before the United States was prepared to respond.) When Japan suddenly tried to import massive amounts of 100-octane aviation fuel, Roosevelt and the State Department limited oil exports to Japan to 86 octane. “If we stopped all oil, it would simply drive the Japanese down to the Dutch East Indies,” Roosevelt wrote to his secretary of state, who was urging an oil ban, “and it would mean war in the Pacific.”

But Japan was already conspiring to capture its own fuel source in order to fulfill its nationalistic ambitions, which were much like Germany’s. “Japan hoped to conquer all of Southeast Asia, including the oil fields of the East Indies, and open the shipping lanes between those fields and Japan,” Painter told me, gesturing at a worn World War II–era map. The bombing of Pearl Harbor was an attempt to immobilize the U.S. Pacific fleet so it could not cut off Japanese forces when they moved south on the East Indies. Japanese planes launched the first bomb at 7:55 a.m. One eyewitness, U.S. Navy Commander Hubert Gano, would later recall, “Ships were sunk and burning everywhere. [Battleships] had tried to escape but ran aground at the entrance to the harbor. Entire squadrons of our airplanes were destroyed on the ground. I saw aircraft engines in puddles of molten aluminum.” A dozen battleships were sunk and hundreds of U.S. planes went down. Within hours, 2,335 American soldiers and 68 civilians had been killed.

Rather than disable the United States, the attack only quickened its resolve to lead the Allies to victory—and to starve the Axis nations of essential fuel. As the Allies systematically destroyed German and Japanese tankers and trains delivering oil, and sabotaged their fuel supply routes, the Axis powers were eventually forced to design programs and battle tactics around gas shortages. Hitler’s blitzkrieg (lightning war) attack style was a case in point: the idea was to strike quickly and forcefully before fuel supply problems could arise. The Japanese, meanwhile, were driven to pursue a desperate “pine root campaign” that brandished the slogan “Two hundred pine roots will keep a plane in the air for an hour.” Civilians were frantically exhorted to dig up pine roots in the hope that the vegetation could be fermented to produce an alternative to oil. Though pine root fuel production reached 70,000 barrels per month, the entire operation was ultimately a bust—the refining process was riddled with problems, and Japanese planes could barely get off the ground with the botched alternative fuel.

“Ravenous for oil, Japan was facing defeat,” Painter told me. “It was a nation running on empty.” In part because of petroleum shortages, Japan resorted to its tragic strategy of kamikaze attacks, whereby suicide pilots crashed their planes into the decks of Allied ships. Such an attack was portrayed as an act of glory—a sacrifice for the good of the Japanese nation—but it also served a horribly practical purpose for a country lacking oil: if the pilots were going only one way, they would need just half the fuel.

German general Erwin Rommel summed up the desperate challenge of fueling war in a letter to his wife written as the tide of battle turned against his forces in North Africa: “Shortage of petrol!” the stoic general wrote. “It’s enough to make one weep.”

In a sense, General Zilmer’s appeal for relief from fossil fuels is reminiscent of Rommel’s lament. While the challenges the two generals faced were technically different—Zilmer was hamstrung by a flawed fuel-delivery system and Rommel by a supply shortage—both felt the tactical vulnerability that comes with relying on oil. Just as Germany and Japan relied on their foes Russia and America for fuel before World War II, now America relies on volatile nations—most notably in the Middle East—to fuel our daily demands and to sustain our military presence in this oil-rich region. It is a dependence that had its origins in those final years of World War II.