-AMERICAN OIL ENSURES THE VICTORY OF THE ALLIES.
Such was the situation when hostilities began. Very quickly the consumption of petrol proved enormous. The destruction of numerous railway lines and the inadequacy of the French system behind the front led the generals to make greater and greater use of motor lorries for the trans port of troops ; then, in addition, there were the supply services in proximity to the trenches, the moving of heavy guns by tractors, the growing needs on account of aviation and the manufacture of explosives, not to mention the countless motors employed behind the lines. The Shell Transport scarcely sufficed to supply the British armies. As for France, nature had endowed her with neither centres of production nor reserves. She, therefore, had to approach the Royal Dutch, which provided her mainly with petrol for aviation, and above all, the Standard Oil. The Americans gladly lent their aid, thanks to which, in 1916, the army transported on motor lorries succeeded in saving Verdun.
In December, 1917, when the cartel of our ten oil mer chants which had undertaken to supply our armies, admitted that it was powerless to fulfil its engagements and that its stocks would be exhausted in March, 1918, on the eve of the spring campaign, M. Clemenceau addressed a despairing appeal to President Wilson.' Upon the orders of the latter—and in spite of certain intrigues on the part of the French group—the War Service Committee, consisting of the great heads of the American industry, immediately placed all the required tankers at the disposal of France. Thanks to the reserves thus built up, at the time of the great German push in Picardy, Marshal Foch was able to bring up heavy reinforcements by motor lorries and fill the gaps where the British front had been broken. The Allied Governments, after each had estab lished for itself a centralised control of the distribution of oil supplies, had already decided to pool the whole of their resources, and had set up the Inter-Allied Petroleum Con ference. Through the work of this body, in spite of the huge
consumption, the armies in France and Italy and Macedonia The text of this telegram was published by M. Henry Berenger in his book, Le Petrole et in France. We reproduce it in the Append ix never lacked a can of petrol for their lorries, or for their aeroplanes, or for their explosives.
And when at length the advance of the Salonika Force, by cutting off Rumanian oil from the German army, diminished its mobility, it was the use of motor transport on a large scale which enabled Marshal Foch to hammer the enemy army into fragments. It has well been said that " the victory of the Allies over Germany was the victory of the lorry over the locomotive." This time, the military and political importance of oil was apparent to every eye.
On the morrow of the Armistice (21st November, 1918), the triumph was celebrated with enthusiastic speeches at a dinner given by the British Government in London to the members of the Inter-Allied Petroleum Conference, when Lord Curzon made the memorable pronouncement : " The Allies floated to victory on a wave of oil." But from the moment when this simple product came to have so close a connection with victory, it was clear that the British would no longer be willing to leave it to others. From the end of 1918, the Standard Oil Company, anxious to reap the advantages which its supremacy for the time being gave it, resumed its freedom. Thus, the pooling of all resources and the complete co-operation which the War had imposed upon all the companies came to an end with the end of the War ; and the triumphal chorus of the Inter-Allied Petroleum Conference was also its funeral oration.