Sorry guys OP here. Good points all, I'm just coming back to this after a busy few days of school.
According to the table I put in Post 10 Romania produce 8.5 million tons of crude petroleum in 1936, which declined to 6.1 million tons in 1939 and 5.2 million tons in 1943.
So production in 1939 was 2.4 million tons less than 1936 and production in 1943 was 3.3 million tons less than 1936.
I don't know. However, you may have answered this question in Post 12.
That is, the decline in production many have been because the Germans didn't have anything the Romanians wanted to trade for the extra 2½ to 3 million tons of oil that they were capable of producing.
However, some of the reduction in Romania's production between 1936 and 1943 was compensated for by increases in production elsewhere.
- Austria's production increased from 7,348 tons in 1936 to one million tons in 1943.
- Hungary's production increased from nothing in 1936 to 800,000 tons in 1943.
- The oilfields in eastern Poland were captured in the second half of 1941. They produced 373,000 tons in 1942 and 395,000 tons in 1944.
There is also the increase in Germany's synthetic oil production over this period, which I don't have any figures for.
Good point, that's probably true. No way that the Germans alone could have made it worth their while to provide them all the oil they were exporting to the whole world in 1936. That and the allied bombing wouldn't have pushed production towards 100% capacity.
As the topic is about the Axis getting some oil from Iraq it's useful to know how much oil that country was capable of producing in the first half of the 1940s.
According to the table below (which is from the same source as the table in Post 10) Iraq's maximum annual production between 1938 and 1945 was 4.3 million tons. IIRC the combined capacity of the oil pipelines from Kirkuk to Haifa and Tripoli (the one in Lebanon) was 4 million tons a year. IIRC Haifa and Tripoli were also where the refineries were.
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Thanks.
I was thinking more of them exporting it along the railway through Turkey and to the Soviet Union. Plausible or nah do you think?
Well, it could be 'set up' .. (I'm guessing that having 20,000 tanks, even T26's, means Stalin is confident he can impose his will by military force should it come to that)
You can assume Stalin is going to invade Poland even without the Nazi-Soviet Pact. After that you have Nazi's and Soviets sharing a common border .. plus there's the Danziog / Polish Corridor issue all over again (but with Hitler demanding Stalin hand it over) .. Easy enough to assume a Soviet grab of Estonia, Lativa and Lithuania ends with the Red Army rolling on into East Prussia to eliminate the Polish Corridor issue .. and bingo you have your war ...
On the other hand, you can have Stalin, who sees plots everywhere, convince himself that he has to grab Rumania before Hitler does. Hitler sees his oil supplies under thrteat .. and then gets into a war when the Red Army rolls on into Hungary ...
I doubt it. Stalin was really cautious before WWII. He wouldn't have done something that bold unless he thought there was absolutely no way it could backfire on him.
You maybe be right the Italians cannot control themed on their own, but with increasing numbers of Germany aircraft based in Italy and North Africa they could control the trade routes to the oil fields.
Italy would not make much money for oil as it was very cheap before the war.
They do save hard currency needed to pay for imported oil.
A neutral Italy would have to limit its oil imports to its' own needs, or the royal navy will blockade oil imports.
OTL the only county the British could not stop exporting oil to Germany was the Soviet Union.
Oil in Lybia makes the control of north Africa more important than taking the oil fields of Baku. So no big pressure for Germany to invade the Soviet Union.
In this scenario though, the British are really, really going to focus on taking North Africa quickly. I doubt they'd even try to fight in Greece, it would simply be too important to finish off the Axis oil supply. There's no way they can overwhelm the amount of force the Wallies can bring to bear on them.
A lot easier to get oil from Lybia than Baku or Iraq.
Taking the Suez canal forces British shipping to go around South Africa.
The oil in Lybia could make the med the centre of the conflict to no battle of Britian. The main air battle r=eraly in the war would be around Malta and the sea lanes to Lybia.
Not sure about that. It would require them to build a huge amount of infrastructure in North Africa AND to build an enormous fleet of tankers to handle the crude. I do not think that's necessarily easier than buying from the USSR in larger quantities and illicitly purchasing in the international market while developing sources at home.
No, the USSR was a net oil exporter in this era. Any major imports of oil are going to grab attention, and not a good way.
That actually isn't true, at least not in a significant way. The Soviets briefly reentered the international oil export market in the late 1920s and then pulled out within a few years. By the late 1930s,
almost all of their oil went to internal use, and it was widely known even at the time
that Stalin's five year plan to jump start their oil industry failed miserably. The Vozhd himself complained that the USSR's oil industry was totally backwards. In that situation, and given what a black box the country was regarding credible economic data during Stalin's reign, it might not cause too much suspicion if they quietly started buying a million tons a year on the international market.
This is silly. All of the oil fields in the Middle East were owned and operated by the Allies.
Rashid Ali came to power only because Rommel's offensive in Libya gave the impression that the Axis would drive into the Middle East; the German onslaught into Greece reinforced this. But if Syria had declared for Free France, Iraq would have been completely isolated and I doubt that the "Golden Square" would dare to move against Britain.
In which case Iraq (and its oil) remains firmly under the British thumb.
So there's no way that say Iran or Iraq could export to the Soviets or Turks? IIRC weren't there some smaller fields that the west didn't control?
He was Prime Minister though before the coup, the Golden Square Coup was his effort to grab everything. If he remained in that position without launching the coup, he might be able to continue exerting pro-Axis influence.
I wonder if the Iraqi coup had been more succesful (and perhaps the initial British reaction less successful) if the Turks would have allowed the shipment of the oil to the Reich? If so would we see the Allies launch a direct intervention into Turkey? I don't think Turkey would have been as ridiculously easy to subdue as Iran. So if Turkey is directly forced into the Axis camp what would happen with Turkey post war? Would we see different allied occupation regions set up? Perhaps the Soviets might force an annexation of the Straits region (a la East Prussia ending up as Kalingrad).
I really don't see them going to war with Turkey just because there are no scenarios where it would be easier to do that than to just retake Iraq and garrison it.
