This February saw the 75th anniversary of the surrender of the last frostbitten and starving German and other Axis soldiers to the Red Army at Stalingrad. Besides being a tragic story of human suffering, the battle is relevant today because of the reason it took place. In June 1942, Hitler sent his powerful armored columns farther east into Russia towards Stalin’s namesake city and south into the Caucasus Mountains to capture the Soviet Union’s vital oil fields . . . a commodity the Wehrmacht desperately needed to prosecute a two-continent war. Hitler never got his oil. Instead 850,000 Axis troops were erased from the order of battle, and the war turned against the Third Reich from then on. The year before the Japanese launched their own attacks bent on securing the oil fields of the Dutch East Indies. Indeed, ever since the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, converted the Royal Navy from ships that ran on domestic coal to foreign oil just before the outbreak of World War I, the path of history has been that of a series of wars either started, or propelled to ever greater violence and scope, in the quest for secure energy.
Throughout the 20th Century, nations lacking indigenous oil reserves cast covetous eyes upon their energy-rich neighbors and acted accordingly. When in 1942 Rommel’s Afrika Korps attacked across the desert towards Egypt, his target was the Suez Canal, through which Britain’s Mideast oil supplies flowed, only to be defeated decisively at Alamein. Had it not been for the pervasive influence of oil, Hitler’s twin disasters in Stalingrad and North Africa may never have happened.
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