Strategic Geography and the Changing Middle East: Concepts, Definitions, and Parameters

Impact of World War I on Oil Supplies

The outbreak of war in August 1914 prevented the implementation of theprogram recommended by Fisher's Royal Commission, which had called for a reserve equal to four years' worth of wartime consumption. In any case Churchill, mindful of colleagues within the cabinet who opposed huge naval expenditures, felt that four and a half months' wartime supply would be enough. 23 Even had a war not begun, however, the cost of stockpiling such a large fuel reserve would have been prohibitive.

Britain's failure to amass sufficient oil supplies did not greatly affect its strategy or its conduct of operations early in the war, with the exception that it considered it essential to land an army from India at Basra, at the head of the Persian Gulf, beginning in October 1914, to protect its newly acquired oil fields and the pipeline from Turkey. However, in February 1917 the Germans resumed their campaign of unrestricted submarine warfare, which nearly immobilized the Royal Navy for lack of oil as the number of tankers sunk began to rise drastically. At the onset of the campaign there were reserves of 5.1 months' consumption; by May the reserve level had been reduced to 2.9 months, with some bases down to only six days' supply. At that point the Admiralty staff calculated that if the trends in sinkings of tankers continued unabated and consumption rates of the fleet remained the same, by the end of 1917 the Royal Navy would have only six weeks' reserve on hand. 24

Owing to the dire situation the Admiralty had to send what one commentator has called urgent and humiliating telegrams to the United States saying that the Royal Navy would be immobilized unless more American tonnage became available to carry oil across the Atlantic. Despite its control of APOC the shortage of its own tankers forced Britain to draw about 80 percent of its oil supplies from North America. The Admiralty director of stores noted in September 1917 that, "without the aid of oil fuel from America our modern oil-burning fleet cannot keep the seas." 25 One recent writer has compared this fear on the part of British policy makers of having their oil supply cut off to a "castration complex," one which would haunt them from the submarine-induced crisis of 1917 to the Suez Crisis and until today (see map 8). 26

Britain managed to overcome the worst of its oil crisis in a novel manner: it used the ballast tanks of liners and cargo steamers as fuel-carrying "double bottoms." The British war cabinet ordered this measure in June 1917, and by November the 443 ships that had been outfitted had carried approximately 243,519 tons of oil from the United States, or the equivalent of the total capacity of fifteen tankers. The introduction during the summer of 1917 of the convoy system for the protection of trade further eased the fuel crisis.

Despite these measures, however, the Allies barely managed to meet their oil needs. The situation was sometimes so critical that the shipping controller suggested to the war cabinet in August 1917 that the Royal Navy should stop building ships fueled by oil and revert to coal. 27 Furthermore, the tonnage used to ship oil across the Atlantic resulted in cutbacks in other vital commodities -- most notably foodstuffs. By December 1917 approximately 900,000 tons of wheat originally destined for Britain remained at American ports owing to the shortage of vessels for shipping. 28 The widely discussed food shortage that eventually led to rationing in Britain at the beginning of 1918 can be seen as the result of a conscious decision on the part of the British war cabinet to solve the oil crisis by giving oil priority over foodstuffs in shipping.