We March Against England by Robert Forczyk

Author:Robert Forczyk
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781472814876
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2016-12-08T16:00:00+00:00

Kapitän zur See Gottfried Krüger’s 3/Skl (Foreign Navies Branch) was not unaware of the importance of oil to the British Empire and, early on, the Kriegsmarine identified enemy tankers as a high-priority target. Yet the Kriegsmarine made no special effort to attack oil delivery as a system during the first year of the war and only sank 10 per cent of the pre-war tanker fleet – which was quickly replaced. Random tanker sinkings were not going to deprive England of oil and even Dönitz’s Rudeltaktik system, when instituted, was a recipe for tactical, not strategic, success. Deploying small numbers of U-Boats across wide swathes of ocean to search for convoys was like looking for needles in a haystack and too many convoys were never sighted. Driven by his Tonnageschlacht metric, Dönitz preferred to sink vessels based on their gross tonnage, not what they were carrying. U-Boat ‘aces’ were recognized by most tonnage sunk, not most valuable cargoes eliminated. In war, when killing and destruction are disassociated from logical end goals that could lead to victory, the activity becomes random and meaningless.

In fact, the British oil infrastructure was highly vulnerable to attack by the Kriegsmarine. In 1940, 40 per cent of Britain’s oil came from the refineries on the Dutch island of Aruba, one refinery on Dutch-owned Curacao and one refinery on British-owned Trinidad.77 Britain usually imported refined fuel products and small amounts of crude oil, since it only had a handful of domestic refineries. Indeed, most of the RAF Fighter Command’s limited supply of 100-octane fuel came from Aruba.78 RAF Fighter Command had only begun to receive small quantities of 100-octane fuel in July but it was so rare that only Spitfire units received 100-octane fuel at this time. Although tanker losses were not significant in the first nine months of the war, the need to convoy greatly increased the amount of time required to move tankers across the Atlantic; instead of going directly from the Caribbean to Liverpool as they had before the war, they now had to proceed to Halifax to form into convoys. Consequently, delays reduced British monthly fuel imports by 25 per cent in late 1940 – irrespective of German attacks. Britain did get a considerable amount of fuel from Iraq, Burma and the Dutch East Indies, but the transit times were even longer and efforts were made to reduce this dependence.79 Literally, it was Caribbean oil keeping Britain in the war.

On 23 September 1939, President Roosevelt announced a Maritime Security Zone in the Western Hemisphere and declared that the United States Navy would mount a Neutrality Patrol to report on the movement of ships belonging to belligerents out to 300 miles from shore. Two US Navy heavy cruisers and four destroyers were assigned to patrol the Eastern Caribbean, but the security zone did not include foreign possessions or colonies. In substance, the American Neutrality Patrol was not serious and German merchant shipping was able to slip through it to try to return home. However, it

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