27. German Fuel Was a Key Target of Allied Bombers in WWII
The “oil campaign”, which sought to destroy facilities that supplied Germany with fuel, was a major component of American and British strategy for bombing the Third Reich. Oil refineries, synthetic fuel factories, storage depots and other key infrastructure were high on the list of targets marked for destruction. The Romanian oil field and refinery complexes that surrounded Ploesti, about thirty miles north of Bucharest, were a vital source of oil for the Axis in WWII and provided the Wehrmacht military with roughly one-third of its needs.
The Germans had been alerted to Ploesti’s vulnerability in June of 1942 when the American bombers conducted a raid that met little opposition and inflicted little damage. So they surrounded the region with antiaircraft guns and set up one of the world’s densest and best-integrated air defense networks. When American bombers returned a year later, Ploesti was far more hardened than it had been in 1942. It was now protected by hundreds of 88mm flak guns and thousands of smaller ones, plus squadrons of Messerschmitt Bf 109 and Bf 110 fighter planes.
