From the Japanese perspective, the Pacific War was fought largely over oil. When Japan occupied southern French Indochina in July of 1941, putting her forces within striking distance of Malaya and the Netherlands East Indies, the United States, Britain, and the Netherlands responded with an oil embargo. This threatened to strangle the economy of Japan, which imported 90% of its oil (domestic production being limited to small fields at Niigata and Akita.) Japan responded with devastating attacks on Pearl Harbor and Singapore, and then seized the rich oil fields of the Netherlands East Indies and Borneo in a swift and brilliant campaign. These fields produced 65 million barrels of oil in 1940, which should have been adequate for Japan’s needs.
Oil was vital for the kind of naval war fought in the Pacific. It provided fuel for ships and aircraft, as well as petrochemicals. The Allies would have been in serious trouble for lack of rubber if they had not succeeded in developing processes for making synthetic rubber from oil. The United States, unlike Japan, was a major producer of oil (over 1.3 billion barrels a year in 1941), and major fields were located in California where they were ideally situated for supplying the Navy’s needs. Further reserves were located at Venezuala and Aruba, and the British Far East Fleet was able to draw upon supplies in the Middle East. There were also fields in Burma and northeastern India.
When war broke out, the Japanese Navy had managed to
stockpile about
6.5 million tons of oil. This was thought to be sufficient for the
first year of war, but consumption greatly exceeded prewar
projections. Army and civilian reserves were much more limited.
The Japanese badly mismanaged their limited resources of oil. They took the logical step of trying to establish a synthetic oil industry based on their sizeable supplies of coal, but this effort failed because of a lack of technical expertise and shortages of alloying and catalytic metals for the synthetic oil plants. The Japanese also suffered a serious loss when an American submarine chanced upon and sank a transport carrying equipment and expert personnel to the southern oil fields. However, demolition of the oil fields of the Netherlands East Indies was carried out rather poorly and production rebounded quickly. The real problem was getting the oil to Japan. The Japanese tanker fleet was never adequate, and insufficient priority was given to building more tankers. Hence much of the production from Southeast Asia never made it to Japan. In the last two years of the war, the Japanese Fleet lost its advantage of interior lines of communication because of the necessity of basing much of the fleet near its fuel sources, at Singapore or Tawi Tawi.
References
The Pacific War Online Encyclopedia (c) 2006 by Kent G. Budge. Index