The impact of captured supplies on the operations of advancing armies has been discused a lot in the week-by-week coverage (particularly the Japanese in their southward thrust and in the North African campaign). I was wondering if there are cases where it was impossible for an advancing force to use captured enemy fuel, due to different engine/plumbing design. I imagine this problem would particularly affect aircraft engines with very strict fuel impurity requirements.
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Welcome to the community
As to your question most militaries historically used similar fuels being either gasoline or diesel which was and still is common to this day. Many militaries used and still use kerosene which can be interchanged with diesel with no issues. So in short I would say it was rare to not have a fuel that would run a different armies vehicles or aircraft also many vehicles were capable of using multiple types of fuel in a pinch.
If you look at todays militaries I would say the US military would have issues with finding fuel for their tanks as they use basically jet fuel or more commonly known as JP8 which is not very common for militaries outside North America.
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Okay, I figured that the different armed forces would use broadly similar types of fuel like diesel, gasoline, or kerosene. I was wondering more if the specific fuel chemistry (tetraethyllead levels, octane ratings, sulfur concentrations, etc) could lead to a case where, due to the specific design of a certain engine, attempting to use a similar, but not identical captured fuel could have led to engine damage or degraded performance. From what you’re saying, it sounds like that was generally not the case, though.
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Almost all gasoline of the day was leaded gas and there really wasn’t a difference in octanes or additives as pretty well any vehicle that was gasoline could run the fuel with no issues the same can be said for diesel and kerosene. Unlike today where there are grades of gasoline that can affect engine performance in the early days of vehicles fuel was fuel as long as it was good it was used simple as that.
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Good point but there were Octane differences and engines notably for planes were optimized for high octane.
The problem is that if you use lower octane fuel you likely get engine problems (called knock). A higher octane than required is no issue! (except that you are wasting more expensive fuel.
The fuel research is a bit more technical and less know than the cool looking planes.
High-Octane Victory – How New Super Fuels Powered the Allied Air War - MilitaryHistoryNow.com
Interesting article, thanks for sharing! From the article, it sounds like the Germans primarily used lower-octane fuels than the Allies, at least after 1940. The article also mentioned the Japanese using low-octane fuels throughout the war. It didn’t mention the Italian or Soviet air forces, unfortunately. However, based on this, it does sound like, at the very least, Allied armies in North Africa might have found themselves at a performance disadvantage if using captured German (and presumably Italian) fuel in modern aircraft types. Would be interesting to know if anything similar ever happened on the Eastern Front with either the Luftwaffe or the Red Air Force.
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