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Long Night of the Tankers: Hitler's War Against Caribbean University of Calgary PRISM: University of Calgary's Digital Repository University of Calgary Press University of Calgary Press Open Access Books 2014 Long Night of the Tankers: Hitler’s War Against Caribbean Oil Bercuson, David J.; Herwig, Holger H. University of Calgary Press Bercuson, D. J. & Herwig, H. H. "Long Night of the Tankers: Hitler’s War Against Caribbean Oil". Beyond Boundaries: Canadian Defence and Strategic Studies Series; 4. University of Calgary Press, Calgary, Alberta, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/1880/49998 book http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives 4.0 International Downloaded from PRISM: https://prism.ucalgary.ca University of Calgary Press www.uofcpress.com LONG NIGHT OF THE TANKERS: HITLER’S WAR AGAINST CARIBBEAN OIL David J. Bercuson and Holger H. Herwig ISBN 978-1-55238-760-3 THIS BOOK IS AN OPEN ACCESS E-BOOK. It is an electronic version of a book that can be purchased in physical form through any bookseller or on-line retailer, or from our distributors. Please support this open access publication by requesting that your university purchase a print copy of this book, or by purchasing a copy yourself. If you have any questions, please contact us at [email protected] Cover Art: The artwork on the cover of this book is not open access and falls under traditional copyright provisions; it cannot be reproduced in any way without written permission of the artists and their agents. The cover can be displayed as a complete cover image for the purposes of publicizing this work, but the artwork cannot be extracted from the context of the cover of this specific work without breaching the artist’s copyright. COPYRIGHT NOTICE: This open-access work is published under a Creative Commons licence. This means that you are free to copy, distribute, display or perform the work as long as you clearly attribute the work to its authors and publisher, that you do not use this work for any commercial gain in any form, and that you in no way alter, transform, or build on the work outside of its use in normal academic scholarship without our express permission. If you want to reuse or distribute the work, you must inform its new audience of the licence terms of this work. For more information, see details of the Creative Commons licence at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ UNDER THE CREATIVE UNDER THE CREATIVE COMMONS LICENCE YOU COMMONS LICENCE YOU MAY: MAY NOT: • read and store this document • gain financially from the work in any way; free of charge; • sell the work or seek monies in relation to the distribution • distribute it for personal use of the work; free of charge; • use the work in any commercial activity of any kind; • print sections of the work for • profit a third party indirectly via use or distribution of the work; personal use; • distribute in or through a commercial body (with the exception • read or perform parts of the of academic usage within educational institutions such as work in a context where no schools and universities); financial transactions take • reproduce, distribute, or store the cover image outside of its place. function as a cover of this work; • alter or build on the work outside of normal academic scholarship. Acknowledgement: We acknowledge the wording around open access used by Australian publisher, re.press, and thank them for giving us permission to adapt their wording to our policy http://www.re-press.org 11 WHITE CHRISTMAS The Hollywood blockbuster for the fall of 1942 was the musicalHoliday Inn with Bing Crosby, Fred Astaire, Marjorie Reynolds, Virginia Dale, and Walter Abel. Released in August, the picture became a national phe- nomenon in just a few months. As summer gave way to fall the movie’s big number, “White Christmas,” written by Irving Berlin and sung by Crosby, became the unofficial anthem of the holiday season for the rest of the war. By the end of November 1942, more than 600,000 records as well as more than a million copies of the sheet music had been sold. “White Christmas” became the longest-running song ever played on the weekly radio show “Your Hit Parade.” In that dreary Christmas of 1942 – the second Christmas coming in the midst of war in the United States – Berlin’s melancholy words gave voice to the heartfelt wishes of millions of Americans, at home and overseas, for a Christmas more joyous and brighter than the one they were about to celebrate. A modern American Christmas is a holiday of light – the colorful Christmas lights of homes and businesses, shop windows all ablaze, every city and town putting a tableau of the manger in Bethlehem by the old court house or town square, home fireplaces and Yule logs, and the na- tional Christmas tree on the White House grounds. But that year the deepening energy crisis in the United States, and especially in the coun- try’s most populous region and the heartland of its industry – the north- east and the Ohio River Valley – made Christmas a lot darker. Outdoor holiday lights were dimmer where they were found at all. Posters every- where exhorted Americans to save energy for the fight at the front and for the production of the machines of war that would ensure victory. Coal, oil, and gasoline for personal civilian use were tightly restricted. Car trips 197 to visit family were virtually out of the question. On top of all that, it was a cold and dry winter with little snow. Well did Americans wish for a white Christmas that year.1 The severe energy and particularly oil shortage in the American northeast (and eastern Canada) was the inevitable result of the war that Admiral Karl Dönitz’s “gray sharks” had been waging against all shipping since September 1939, but especially against tankers. Tanker losses had started to mount over the winter of 1939–40, but the Anglo-French allies had initially been able to counter those losses by leasing neutral tankers, rationalizing tanker traffic, convoying, and other means. The constant struggle to preserve tanker capacity, and possibly to build more tankers than the enemy was destroying, suffered a severe blow with the entry of the United States into the war. Suddenly, every tanker in the Atlantic, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Caribbean was at risk. Shortly after his American offensive began, Dönitz told the German people over the radio: “Our U-boats are operating close in shore along the coast of the United States … so that bathers and sometimes entire coastal cities are witnesses to the drama of war, whose visual climaxes are constituted by the red glorioles of blazing tankers.”2 Those “red glorioles” erupted 64 times between mid-January and mid-June 1942, when as many tankers (along with 62 other ships) were sent into Davey Jones’ Locker off the US east coast.3 But these were not the only tankers lost in American waters or in proximity to American waters; from the opening of the sub- marine offensive in the Caribbean on February 16, 1942, until the end of that year, another 75 tankers were destroyed in the Caribbean, along with 310 other ships. Every tanker loss meant that nearly 100,000 passenger cars on the east coast would be devoid of gasoline; 35,000 homes or small businesses would suffer with little or no heating oil for up to a year. The average tanker on an east coast run carried 80,000 barrels of oil up from the Gulf or the Caribbean every 20 days, thus delivering 4,000 barrels a day. This translated into 1.5 million barrels per year of carrying capacity.4 When multiplied by the 222 US, British, and other Allied or Allied-chartered tankers lost in 1942,5 the impact was staggering – 330 million barrels of carrying capacity lost. The Germans did almost no damage to the drilling, lifting, or refining capacity of the United States, Venezuela, or Trinidad. 198 Long Night of the Tankers But they were making it very difficult to get any of that oil to points vital to the Allied war effort. The result of the great damage to the transporting capability of the tanker fleet was felt up and down the line. In the first six months of 1942, Venezuela was forced to curtail production by 12.5 million, Mexico by 2.95 million, Colombia by 1.15 million, and Trinidad by 0.2 million bar- rels. The oil could not be shipped, so it had to be left in the ground – “shut in” – or stored somewhere near the drilling site.6 No one had foreseen the need for major oil storage facilities, so the oil was left in place. Local and even national economies suffered. United States production destined for the northeast was drastically cut back. No pipelines existed to carry oil from Texas or Louisiana to New York or New Jersey.7 Daily tanker shipments from the Gulf of Mexico to the eastern seaboard dropped from the 1941 average of 1.42 million barrels per day to just 391,000 barrels in 1942.8 The excess was either shut in or stored in local tank farms. Here, too, production stopped, workers were laid off, local economies suffered. As early as the beginning of March 1942, Texas oilmen began to talk about reducing production by at least 10 per cent to ease the growing demand for above-ground storage.9 As early as the end of the first week of March 1942, US east coast stocks were 10.74 million barrels lower than they had been the previous year.
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