@mathew Somewhat. Of the set mentioned, Weissenbacher's Sources of Power does the most to tie both energy needs and energy capabilities to political and military events and history. Its span is so vast, though, that it devotes relatively little coverage to any one event.

But for a real eye-opener on the role of petroleum (and other fuels) in World Wars Sr. & Jr., I'd strongly recommend Daniel Yergin's The Prize.

And I say that despite strongly disagreeing with much of Yergin's largely favourable view of both oil and the oil industry. Even given that, the history he tells is absolutely phenomenal.

For WWI, there's the need for energy, Britain's recent conversion of its navy from coal (of which it had abundant domestic supplies) to oil (for which at the time it thought it had none --- North Sea oil was another 50 years in the future). The US had made a similar conversion, though it was rich in both coal and oil. The US Navy's strategic petroleum reserve played a key role in the highly-corrupt Harding administration (Teapot Dome Scandal).

And WWI was really the war in which the last vestiges of the nonmechanised military were converted to mechanised (and petroleum-fuelled). Navies, as noted, including submarines (finally coming into their own, and nuclear power another 40 years off), aircraft (a new development), tanks (ditto), lorries replacing horse-drawn wagons and carts, and if you stretch a bit, new explosives and propellants based on TNT and ammonia rather than gunpowerd (sulfur, saltpetre, and charcoal). Not to mention vastly enhanced industrial capacity.

WWII saw the further development of virtually all of these, as well as far more reliance on telecommunications (radio, telephone, telegraph, encrypted communications to varying degrees of "encrypted"). And the US's own petroleum extraction capacity fuelled the war on two fronts. Following D-Day, a critical link was a 9" pipeline across the English Channel through which Allied fuel was delivered, Operation PLUTO. And devastating German submarine raids on US coastal shipping traffic, including oil delivered from New Orleans to New Jersey, resulted in the US government financing development of inland pipelines from Texas to New Jersey, the Big Inch and Little Inch pipelines, still in use today AFAIU.

There was also Germany's thirst for petroleum, seeking it in Romania, North Africa, and Baku (now Azerbaijan, then the USSR). Japan had virtually no energy resources at all, which was why it had previously invaded Manchuria (Manchuko, as Japan called it), and had designs on Indonesia and SE Asia, both with significant oil reserves. The US submarine fleet torpedoed that last ambition, figuratively and literally. Much of the Japanese war was a desperate race to find, and make maximum use of, very limited liquid fuel resources, including boiling pine tree stumps and roots for turpentine-based fuel.

(Pretty much all of this is covered in Yergin.)

The Prize covers more, though what it has to say about oil and the world wars is on its own mind-blowing. The rest of the book is ... similarly boggling. I'm struck by how fast developments that strongly resemble present-day technologies appeared in the decade after oil was discovered in Titusville, PA (1859). The degree to which oil transforms virtually everything is staggering.

#Oil #Petroleum #History #WorldWarOne #WWI #WorldWarTwo #WWII #WorldWar1 #WorldWar2 #ThePrize #DanielYergin