German POWs Thought America Was Running Out of Fuel. Then They Saw the Oil Fields

A German headquarters vehicle stuck in the sand near Fuka on the night of November 4, 1942, revealed a problem that had been building for months. Rommel's army still had tanks, trucks, and men, but the fuel needed to move them was hundreds of miles behind the front. Nearly 5,000 tons had been unloaded at Benghazi that day. About 2,000 tons would be destroyed in British bombing. What remained was fuel that existed on paper, but could not reach the columns that needed it. Six months later, one of the men who had lived through that campaign arrived in Texas as a prisoner of war. Walter Littmann, a trained chemist who had served with the Afrika Korps, would spend part of his captivity at Mexia, less than a hundred miles from one of the most important oil refineries in the United States. He had fought in a war where fuel was measured in days. Now he was living inside an industrial system that measured it in millions of gallons. This episode follows the connection between those two worlds: Rommel's fuel crisis in North Africa, the German decision to manufacture aviation gasoline from coal, and the American refinery system that transformed crude oil into the high-octane fuel modern aircraft demanded. Along the way, we look at Baytown's wartime production, the rise of American 100-octane gasoline from roughly 44,000 to 525,000 barrels a day, and the billionth gallon of aviation gasoline produced at Baytown in December 1944. TIMECODES 0:00 Fuka and Rommel's Fuel Crisis 0:52 Four and a Half Days of Fuel 1:59 267,000 Prisoners 3:00 Walter Littmann in Texas 3:31 Baytown, Texas 5:38 44,000 to 525,000 Barrels a Day 6:40 Billion Gallon Day 7:09 Germany's Synthetic Fuel 7:20 "Fuel Must Be Obtained From the Ground" 8:05 "All the Aviation Gasoline" 8:10 Two Fuel Systems 9:47 One Billion Gallons 10:39 Final SOURCES John Pimlott, ed., Rommel in His Own Words (1994), chapter IX, "Afrika Korps in Retreat." Rommel's November 4, 1942 account of the retreat from El Alamein and the fuel crisis. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, "Tunisia Campaign." Information on the surrender of Axis forces in North Africa on May 13, 1943, including the 267,000 German and Italian prisoners of war. Ronald E. Marcello & Walter Littmann, Oral History Interview with Walter Littmann, May 12, 1990, University of North Texas Oral History Collection. German History in Documents and Images, "Hitler's Confidential Memo on Autarky (August 1936)." BIOS 1697, Synthetic Oil Production in Germany — Interrogation of Dr. Bütefisch. Walter Miller, "Review of Refinery Engineering for 1945," AIME, 1946. Production of 100-octane aviation gasoline from approximately 44,000 barrels per day at U.S. entry into the war to 525,000 barrels per day by the end of hostilities. ExxonMobil, Baytown: A Ninety-Year Legacy. Wartime production at Baytown and the December 14, 1944 "Billion Gallon Day." SOURCES & ARCHIVES U.S. National Archives University of North Texas Libraries German History in Documents and Images Library of Congress Internet Archive Wikimedia Commons Periscope Film ARCHIVAL FOOTAGE Archival footage: U.S. National Archives, Prelinger Archives, Ford Motor Company collection, Die Deutsche Wochenschau; some scenes use illustrative footage of the period not the people named. Archival film is re-edited to match the narration and combined with maps, document reconstructions, photographs and original graphics.