Financial History Issue 133 (Spring 2020) | Page 30

The Importance of Oil in World War II By Michael A. Martorelli It may be an overstatement to assert that World War II was all about oil. But the historical record suggests that concerns about supplying oil to mobile military forces on land, on the sea and in the air weighed heavy on the minds of senior leaders of the war’s major combatants. This examination of those efforts in Japan, Germany and the United States focuses on the raw material of oil rather than the hun- dreds of distillates required to operate and lubricate various types of trucks, tanks, planes, ships and other machines of war. Aerial view of bomb-damaged oil storage tanks at the I.G. Faben industrial plant on the bank of the Rhine River after an Allied air attack on the devastated city, circa 1945. Japan Faces a Continuous Challenge In the mid-1930s, Japanese leaders began laying plans for military and economic dominance over what they would later label the Greater East Asia Co-Prosper- ity Sphere. They realized that creating an “Asia for Asians” would require the aggressive development of their country’s limited natural resources and the “libera- tion” of many nearby resource-rich lands from their Western colonial powers. In 1937, army generals lusted after the min- eral deposits in Manchuria, Inner Mongo- lia and French Indochina. The admirals of the Imperial Navy coveted the oil fields of Borneo, Malaya and other islands in the Dutch East Indies, i.e. the Southern Zone. At that time, Japan was importing 80% of its growing oil requirements from the 28    FINANCIAL HISTORY  |  Spring 2020  | www.MoAF.org United States. So the government pushed for more production from the country’s own refining industry and re-established a long dormant (and ultimately unsuccess- ful) program trying to synthesize liquid fuel from coal. In July 1941, with its oil supplies steadily diminishing, Japan launched its long-con- templated invasion of southern Indochina. That action prompted President Franklin D. Roosevelt to freeze Japan’s financial assets in the United States and impose what became a de facto embargo on selling the country any more oil. Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the Commander in Chief of Japan’s Com- bined Fleet, believed a pre-emptive attack on the American Navy at Pearl Harbor was a worthwhile military objective. He also viewed the strike as both a way to provide protection for the Japanese army’s flank as