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Long Night of the Tankers: Hitler's War Against Caribbean Oil , by David Bercuson and Holger H. Herwig

2015; University of Toronto Press; Volume: 50; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.3138/cjh.ach.50.2.rev29

2292-8502

Rüdiger Graf,

Maritime and Coastal Archaeology

Long Night of the Tankers: Hitler's War Against Caribbean Oil, by David Bercuson and Holger El. Herwig. Calgary, University of Calgary Press, 2014. xix, 344 pp. $39.95 US (paper). David Bercuson and Holger H. Herwig, both historians at the Centre for Military and Strategic Studies at the University of Calgary, have written a highly readable and at times suspenseful history of the so-called operation Neuland (newland), the German submarine campaign against Allied shipping in the Caribbean in 1942, which so far has not received major attention in the historiography on the Battle of the Atlantic. Reading the book with a particular interest in the history of oil, one may be slightly disappointed as the authors approach their topic the angle of military history and especially submarine warfare. Even the book's catchy title is somewhat misleading, considering the authors' basic and convincing contention that Admiral Karl Donitz was not particularly focusing the campaign on tankers and Allied oil supply but rather following a simpler tonnage strategy according to which any sunken Allied ship was undermining the enemy's war effort (p. 123L, 155). This misconception may have reduced the effectiveness of Operation Neuland, which the book presents in an exciting, largely chronological narrative with a passion for technical and military detail which will delight readers interested in military history. As it caught the allies largely by surprise and there were, at the beginning, no effective counterstrategies, Operation Neuland was initially highly effective. In the first twelve days after their arrival in the Caribbean in February 1942, German submarines sank seventeen allied tankers and ships with a combined carrying capacity of 115,856 tons (p. 72). Until the end of that year they destroyed so many tankers that oil shipments the Caribbean to the US sank from the 1941 average of 1.42 million barrels per day to just 391,000 barrels in 1942 (p. 199). In one chapter, the authors claim that, due to oil's central position in every modern war machinery, these shortfalls had a significant effect on the Allied war effort and the supply situation on the US east coast, but they do not explore this effect within the larger war economy of oil in great detail. However, they show that the problems to transport Caribbean oil to the American East coast were crucial for the decision to build the pipelines Big Inch and Little Big Inch in order to transport oil the Texas oil fields to Illinois, Pennsylvania, and New York in June 1942. …