Pictured: Relinquished Axis vehicles on the road to Amba Alagi, dated May 1941.
Per Professor Gian Giacomo Migone’s The United States and Fascist Italy, page 328, ‘Italian East Africa’s’ oil imports in 1934 were as follows: Soviet Union: 24.5%; Iran and Dutch Indies: 41.4%; Imperial America: 7.8%; Other: 26.3%.
In August–November 1935: Romania: 14.6%; Soviet Union: 5.9%; Iran and Dutch Indies: 16.7%; Imperial America: 26.9%; Other: 35.9%.
As tensions were worsening and war broke out in October, imports from Imperial America only rose by a whooping 19.1%! (It is interesting to note that the trend in the Soviet Union was almost the exact opposite: oil imports thence decreased by 18.6%.)
When Hull and Rosso had their meeting, at a moment when in Geneva the extension of the embargos to oil was being seriously considered, [Fascist] Italy had already begun revising its import strategy for raw materials. First of all there was a drop in imports from those countries that appeared most hostile to Mussolini’s Ethiopian project and were most committed to the sanctions already in place.
The imports from the Soviet Union, while remaining consistent, diminished notably starting in 1934. The same was true for Iran, which marked its total dependence on British imperial policy. Imports from the United States, however, grew proportionally starting in the autumn of 1935.102 This impression is strengthened by observing the data regarding the imports directly to the theater of war, which throw into greater relief the political influence on the overall configuration of [Fascist] imports.
[The Kingdom of] Romania not only remained the principal source but increased its overall share during the period considered. The relatively modest amount of [Fascist] demand satisfied by American oil became greater, which one can tell was destined to serve military needs by disaggregating the various subproducts. According to the League of Nations data, in the period 1932–1934, [Fascist] Italy imported from America 14.9 percent of its crude oil, 9.4 percent of its diesel, 3.5 percent of its gasoline, and a whopping 48.3 percent of its total lubricant demand.103
Page 329:
Turning to the total American figures for raw material exports to [Fascist] Italy, the effect of the Ethiopian war and the League of Nations sanctions becomes very clear. But the data on raw materials only make sense in the context of the overall commercial relationship between [Fascist] Italy and [Imperial] America.
The failure of the United States to participate in the sanctions had a strong effect even on their early phase, which aimed to limit purchases of [Fascist] imports (and which were, obviously, closely tied to the problem of Italy’s access to raw materials, inasmuch as they provided the hard currency necessary to do business with suppliers who, as was the case with American oil companies, dealt in cash in order to avoid tax‐based governmental sanctions as well as to be more sure of a client that was obviously in precarious financial straits and therefore not a good credit risk).104
Indeed, the United States and [the Third Reich], which were not members of the League of Nations, were responsible for the purchase of 23 percent of [Fascist] Italy’s exports in 1934. The United States by itself made the following transactions:
Fascist imports (percentage of total) shrunk from 15.0% in 1933 to 12.5% in 1934, and Fascist exports (percentage of total) shrunk from 8.7% to 7.4% during the same period.
Source: Feis, Seen from E.A., p. 304.
If we extend the comparison to the years affected by the Ethiopian war, the result is significant:
American Commerce with Italy (in millions of dollars of that year)
Fascist imports rose from 276 in 1934 to a disturbing 4,558 in 1935 before shrinking to 771 in 1936. Exports rose from 213 to 218 to 224 during the same period.
Source: Feis, Seen from E.A., p. 304.
Disaggregating these numbers by month makes the connection to the war even more evident:
What follows is a large table whose data can best be summarized as ‘worrisome’.
It is clear that the overall amounts of trade between the two countries, especially [Fascist] imports, were dramatically influenced by the war, reaching an apex in the final months of 1935. The figures for Italian East Africa are notable to the extent that they demonstrate how the war transformed a fundamentally nonexistent trade in that region into a fevered trade — or rather, import — situation that can only be explained in terms of the war.
The table that follows, instead, specifically illustrates [Fascist] imports of raw materials and machinery from the United States. These figures also show an effect from the war, including the effects of extending sanctions.
As the table shows, all raw materials and products except cotton underwent a very strong increase (hovering around 100%) from 1934 to 1935, without however nearing the levels of 1928, before the Depression. The only exception is machinery and transport vehicles, which deserve a short and separate explanation. A large part of the controversies in this era swirled around raw materials, and especially oil.
The available figures indicate that purchases of trucks from Ford and General Motors were of great importance for what was the first motorized war of substantive size and which played out almost exclusively through communication and supply lines.
If we add to the figures in the table the fact that the exports of such products to Italian East Africa had gone from a value of $172,706 in the first ten months of 1934 to the enormous amount of $2,961,681 in the first ten months of 1935,105 there can be no other possible conclusion than that the motorization of the [Fascist] war effort was largely guaranteed (to be more precise would require the data on other available vehicles, but the sum of purchases still constitutes clear evidence) by the import of American vehicles.106
What follows is another worrisome table; suffice to say that Imperial American oil exported to Fascist Italy in 1935 amounted to $2,368,584.
Source: CFR, Information for Members, attached to Council on Foreign Relations, Conference on American Neutrality Policy, New York, November 13, 1935.
The data specifically on oil are equally revealing. Beyond the figures recorded in the table of the Council, it may be observed that, according to data from the Department of Commerce and cited by Herbert Feis, when Hull received Rosso’s visit he already knew that exports of oil to [Fascist] Italy and Italian Africa for the month of October had reached a sum of $1,084,000 dollars, while in that same month in 1934 they had only been about a third of that ($382,857).
In the following months, the situation would become even more acute. Given that the monthly average of all petroleum exports to [Fascist] Italy between 1932 and 1934 had been $480,000, there was an extraordinary growth in imports due to the war even if one discounts the usual seasonal increase of 10 percent.107 In November 1935, it was $1,684,000; December, $1935, 2,674,000; and in the last three months of 1935 it reached the stunning total of $5,442,000.
This is in comparison to a total for the entire year of 1934 of $6,062,000.108 Herbert Feis, at that time the economic adviser to the State Department, observed: “Included in our shipments during the last three months of 1935 was $828,000 sent directly to Italian East Africa — that is, directly supplied for the use of the Italian Army and Navy and Merchant Marine.”109
This progression of data regarding American oil exports clearly demonstrates that, starting in the month of October, the [Fascist] government had begun to modify its choice of suppliers in preparation for imminent sanctions from the League of Nations, especially depending on American oil to provision the expedition corps in African territory. The total amount indicates the significant, even determinative, weight of American oil in the [Fascist] war effort.
The reasoning of the British petroleum companies as set out in a memorandum for the cabinet was even bolder in coming to this conclusion.110 According to that memorandum, the United States produced around 400,000 tons of crude per day. Even if the major oil companies were willing to respect the moral embargo proclaimed by the Roosevelt administration, the minor companies and producers were completely uncontrollable in this way; their production alone amounted to 80,000 tons of crude per day (60% of world demand).111
Their conclusion: the normal [Fascist] demand was 8,000 tons per day, so that, even without supplies from Romania and the Soviet Union, and allowing for an exceptionally large demand from [Fascist] Italy in wartime, [Fascist] Italy would be able to obtain all the oil it wanted simply by turning to the wildcat American oil companies.
(Emphasis added in all cases.)
Thus, not only did U.S. capitalists contribute a significant amount of oil to the Fascists, it was critical to the Fascist war machine! (Contrary to what free market purists would teach, we really have no good reason to believe that a ‘true’ free market would have prevented this situation, since the capitalists ignored the embargo anyway.)
[Click here for some context]
It is difficult to transcribe tables with this software, which is why I opened the subject by manually summarizing the data myself. Nonetheless, you can rely on this crude transcription if you need the context. While it is disappointingly true that a substantial amount of Fascist Italy’s oil came from the Soviet Union, the data are misleading because they refer to Fascist Italy proper rather than its colonies.
It is impossible to make an exact calculation of the [Fascist] demand for oil in the period of the Ethiopian war, but the following figures on total oil imports offer a useful, initial overview.
Period Tonnage
1933 1,738,000
1934 1,856,000
1935 (Jan.–June) 1,012,000
1935 (July–Sept.) 531,000Source: PRO‐CAB 245/257, Memorandum by Petroleum Department of the Board of Trade, London, 27 November 1935, p. 4.
Remember in considering the data for 1934 that about 600,000 tons should be added because the figure in the chart does not include the oil that had not yet cleared customs or the oil left over from the previous period. Further, these figures do not include the amount of oil imported directly by Italian East Africa. Taking into account that the real amount of oil imports for 1934 was about 2,500,000 tons, and extrapolating from the data for the period July–September 1935 to the later months, the total annual demand for oil in 1935 was a minimum of 2,700,000 tons.
But this is a minimum estimate that does not take into account the increase in demand due to the war, which was presumably an exponential rise. As a matter of fact, the oil companies themselves made the more generous estimation of an annual [Fascist] demand of 3,800,000 tons, based on a daily demand of 8,000 tons.101
The crucial aspect of the sanctions’ possible effectiveness, with or without the cooperation of the United States, was the supply sources. Where did Italy get those 2.5 million tons of oil it needed in the two previous years, and where could it find that same amount (actually more, due to the war) in 1935 and 1936?
This table, furnished by the Petroleum Department of the Board of Trade (of the British Foreign Commerce Ministry), answers the first question:
Exporting Nation (by percentage) 1933 1934 1935* 1935**
Romania 35.2 34.1 40.6 59.1
Soviet Union 29.6 21.7 21.7 20.0
Iran 9.8 11.6 15.0 3.2
United States of America 9.0 11.2 7.1 8.5
Dutch Indies 7.5 8.2 10.7
Other countries 8.9 12.9 10.6 19.2
(*)Sources: PRO‐CAB, 245/257, Memorandum by Petroleum Department, p. 4; PRO‐CAB, 245/257, Memorandum by the Oil Companies. Oil Sanctions and Italy, London, December 1935, p. 1
* These figures are for January–June, inclusive.
** August–November 15: data furnished by the British Petroleum companies.
(*) Venezuela accounted for 12.4 percent in this number.The expert subcommittee nominated by the League of Nations made a different set of calculations for 1934:
Romania 32.2
Soviet Union 27.8
Iran 10.3
United States of America 6.4
Latin America 17.4
Other countries 5.9Source: H. Feis, Seen from E.A.: Three International Episodes, New York: 1947, p. 309.
The only substantive difference between the two calculations had to do with the proportion represented by Latin America, primarily Venezuela. In the figures from the Board of Trade, it was estimated to be around 12 percent, included under “Other countries,” whereas the League of Nations experts attributed 17.4 percent of Italy’s total imports to it in 1934. The Board of Trade attributed 10.7 percent to the Dutch Indies in the same period, while the experts in Geneva put the amount at about 5.9 percent in “Other countries.”
These discrepancies are not sufficient to modify the most important conclusions suggested by comparing the last three columns of each table, however. The following data regarding exports to Italian East Africa further accentuate them:
Provenance 1934 August–November 15, 1935
Romania _ 14.6
Soviet Union 24.5 5.9
Venezuela – –
Iran and Dutch Indies 41.4 16.7
United States of America 7.8 26.9
Other 26.3 35.9
Total 100.0 100.0Source: PRO‐CAB, 245/257, Memorandum by the Oil Companies. Oil Sanctions and Italy, London, December 1935, p. 2.
Events that happened today (September 2):
1878: Werner von Blomberg, Reich field marshal, was born.
1923: Amid rumors that Koreans had been conducting acts of sabotage in the aftermath of the 1923 Great Kantō earthquake, lynch mobs of Japanese began massacring thousands of civilians over the course of several weeks, mainly ethnic minorities such as Koreans and Chinese.
1933: Rome and Moscow signed a Pact of ‘Friendship, Non‐Aggression, and Neutrality’, regrettably. (For a commentary on that, see here.)
1939: Following the start of the invasion of Poland the previous day, the Third Reich annexed the Free City of Danzig (now Gdańsk, Poland).
1945: Tōkyō and the major warring powers aboard the battleship USS Missouri in Tōkyō Bay signed the Japanese Instrument of Surrender, officially ending World War II.