Daniel Yergin

What the Allies had is mobility that the Germans didn't have.

Yeah.

People say that the Spanish Civil War in the second half of the 1930s was the dress rehearsal for World War II, where a lot of technologies and techniques of warfare were developed.

And I think, sadly, if you look at Ukraine today, you see that happening today.

Because on one hand, it is the advanced technologies that is...

you know, information technologies, cyber warfare, and it's of course drones, you know, in a way that hadn't been conceived that hobby drones could become agents of war.

Obviously the automation of the battlefield, but it's also, you know, World War II war and that there's been tank battles.

And it's a World War I one that is called positional warfare, trench warfare.

So you have like a whole century of warfare there, but it is certainly the beta test for new technologies.

Well, I think you would have needed to get to a scale that they could never get to.

That was one thing, the synthetic fuel, which meant making oil out of coal using a chemical process.

But...

And the other thing is that the allies bombed the plants as well.

But the way I thought, you know, I intended when I wrote the prize to write one chapter in World War II, I ended up writing five because it was just so amazing.

World War II was not an oil war, but there was an oil war within World War II.

When Hitler invaded Russia, he was not only going for Moscow, he was also going for the oil fields of Baku.

When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, as Admiral Nimitz, who was the naval commander, said if they'd come back a third time and hit the oil tanks, World War II in the Pacific would have taken another two years.

General Rommel in North Africa runs out of oil.

He says...

He writes his wife, shortage of oil is enough to make one weep.