The Shortest War in History

Among the myriad of reasons for the first world war, the mounting problems of imperialism rank high on the list.  The Western powers had effectively divided up the developing countries like a pizza at a frat house party, and some of the bigger boys had grabbed more than their share.

This was particularly true of Great Britain and Germany, each of whom was intent on grabbing as much of Africa as possible.  (If you are wondering, France was still recovering from the end of its last period of monarchy—at least so far—with the ouster of Napoleon III.  And yes, I managed to sneak Napoleon into another blog post.  In a few more paragraphs, I’ll do it again.)

In the 1880’s, ministers from both Great Britain and Germany had meetings to divide the remaining “unclaimed” territories.  Maps were redrawn, a few geographical locations swapped, and treaties were signed.  It is noteworthy that no Africans were invited to attend these meetings, and none would have been admitted had they shown the temerity to show up.  As a result, as World War I began, the only independent country on the African continent was Liberia, the country the United States had founded with repatriated former slaves.  Naturally, these divisions brought on numerous wars, not only between colonizers and the colonized, but between the European powers themselves.  All of Africa would have been far more peaceful if the various heads of Europe had just played a couple of hands of poker using the various African territories as poker chips.

One of those private treaties signed far from Africa and almost as far from any Africans was the Heligoland–Zanzibar Treaty, which gave Germany a few islands in the North Sea and access to the Zambezi River in Africa (not to be confused with the gray-green, greasy Limpopo River, which was already jointly held by the British and the Elephant’s Child).  The British gained territory in Africa including Zanzibar and a ten-mile strip of coastal land in present day Kenya that was referred to as the Zanz.  The new transferal of title was to come as a shock to the Sultan who ruled the area.

The Sultan was not removed, of course:  Britain just established Zanz as a Protectorate, sending advisors from the colonial office, along with enough ships from the British Navy to ensure that the advisors were listened to.  If you are unsure exactly what a Protectorate is, British Prime Minister Salisbury defined it for us:

The condition of a protected dependency is more acceptable to the half civilized races, and more suitable for them than direct dominion. It is cheaper, simpler, less wounding to their self-esteem, gives them more career as public officials, and spares them unnecessary contact with white men.

Exactly who was really in power became transparent when Sultan Hamad bin Thuwaini died on 25 August 1896.  Wisely listening to his viziers who had counted the number of guns on the British warships in the harbor, the sultan had been pro-British, at least publicly.  His successor, Sultan Khalid bin Barghash, hated the British and was absolutely not acceptable to the British Foreign Office.

The British waited two whole days, then ordered Khalid to step down so that a more agreeable Sultan could take the throne.  Khalid refused, gathered together his palace guard, and hastily began erecting barricades at the wooden palace which was unfortunately located way too close to the harbor.  Eventually, the defenders numbered 2,800, including Khalid’s slaves and servants.  These troops were poorly armed with an aging Gatling gun, two Maxim machine guns (a gift from Germany), two 12” field guns, and a 17th century bronze cannon.

The entire Zanzibar Navy was also present:  one aging royal yacht, the wooden hulled sloop, the HHS Glasgow.  She was armed with seven ancient 9-inch cannon and a Gatling gun that ironically had been a present to the previous sultan from Queen Victoria.  This ship had already been retired, but was brought back into service for the looming battle.

Note.  The HHS stood for ‘His Highness’ Ship’.  If the varying prefixes in front of the names of ships are confusing, I suggest you read this.

The British had a force that included three cruisers, two gunboats, 150 Marines and the official Zanzibar Army (a force of 900 locals under the command of a British general).  If you believe, as I do, the old military maxim that God is always on the side of the heaviest artillery, Sultan Khalid was screwed.  

The British gave Sultan Khalid until 9:00 AM on August 27, 1896 to surrender and vacate the palace.  Starting about an hour before the deadline, a series of messages went back and forth between the British and the Sultan, and while I could quote them exactly, the gist of the messages was the Sultan saying, “I don’t think you will really do it” with the British responding with “Yes, we will.”

When no surrender was received, the British fleet began firing at 9:02, with the first volley destroying much of the Zanzibar defending artillery.  Wooden barricades on a wooden building proved to be no match for the high explosive rounds fired by the British warships.

At 9:05, the HHS Glasgow fired on the British cruiser, the HMS St. George.  The cruiser returned fire, immediately holing the Glasgow below the waterline.  The Glasgow immediately raised a Union Jack as a sign of surrender as the old ship settled to the bottom, her jutting masts still visible.  Lifeboats from the five British ships that were literally surrounding the doomed vessel, rescued all of the ship’s crew.  (Part of the ship is still in the harbor, occasionally visited by sport divers.)

The British ships also began firing on the Palace and its defenders, knocking out all of the defending artillery within a few minutes.  The shelling from the British ships continued until 9:40, by which point there was little left to fire on.  The Palace was in ruins—even the Sultan’s flag had been shot away.  Unfortunately, the Sultan’s nearby harem was also destroyed. 

While the Sultan managed to escape out the back door of the palace, over 500 of the defenders had been killed during the bombardment.  On the British side, one sailor was wounded but recovered.  The British ships and crews had fired around 500 shells, 4,100 machine gun rounds and 1,000 rifle rounds during the engagement.  Depending on whether you believe the war started when the deadline ran out or when the ships began their barrage, what became known as the Anglo-Zanzibar War lasted either 38 or 40 minutes, easily the shortest war in history.

The territory of Zanz remained a protectorate until 1963.  And what happened to Khalid, the deposed Sultan?  The British captured him during World War I and for a time kept him prisoner on St. Helena, once the island where the British had kept Napoleon prisoner.  Eventually, Winston Churchill allowed Khalid to return home.

Where Are the Seaplanes?

It is a commonly understood maxim of war that conflict accelerates the rate of change and innovation.  Military historians usually concentrate on the rapid rate of technical innovation and how the use of new weaponry dramatically changes the way wars are fought.

These fascinating technological changes are easy to see.  Aviation in World War II, for example, began with the military still using cloth-covered biplanes, but by the time the war was over, both rocket and jet planes were being flown.  Unfortunately, nowhere does mankind show more creativity and innovation than when improving the ways we can kill each other.  

Almost forgotten—at least by military historians—are the ways that war changes society, too.  In the twentieth century, America’s wars helped end segregation, boosted the status of women, founded new cities, and improved health care by promoting the use of antibiotics and streamlining the ways that health care was delivered.  The HMO, for example, was developed to provide medical care to the workers who built Liberty Ships at the Kaiser Shipyards.  Today, Kaiser Permanente serves 12 million members.

Among the forgotten social changes brought on by that war is one that has affected almost everyone alive today.  During the decade before the war, the most common method of transcontinental air travel was by using a flying boat.  Huge lumbering seaplanes connected America with Europe, island-hopped across the Pacific, and made regular trips to Central and South America.  

The flying public—what little there was of it—liked the idea of flying boats.  If something should happen to the plane, it could safely land in the middle of the ocean and await rescue (perhaps done quickly by another flying boat).  And these huge flying boats were comfortable, with large roomy seats that could be converted to full bunks, as well as lounges where passengers could relax, eating their luxurious meals in a dining room crewed by chefs hired away from four-star hotels.  This kind of luxury was a necessity to satisfy wealthy passengers who were paying the equivalent of today's $15,000 for a nineteen-hour flight from New York to London.  These luxurious planes were obviously the wave of the future, according to anyone who knew about them. 

Planes like the Boeing Flying Clippers were the standard of luxury.  These planes were 106 feet long and carried a crew of 11 that tended to the 36 passengers as the plane cruised at less that 200 mph across the Atlantic.  The only flying boat larger than the Clippers was the Spruce Goose, (actually officially called the H4 Hercules)—a plane that was designed to carry 750 men over 3000 miles at the incredible speed of 250 mph.  (Though Howard Hughes designed, built, and piloted the plane on its only flight, it was actually Henry Kaiser, the man who built the Liberty Boats and started the first HMO, who came up with the idea for the plane.)

The safety record for land-based planes surviving a ditching at sea is poor, even today.  There are a few surprising stories of planes forced to land in the ocean without casualties (the miraculous story of Pan Am Flight 943 comes to mind), but the public preferred the idea of a safe flying boat.

Flying boats had another advantage over land-based aircraft:  In the decades before the war, few metropolitan areas either in America or abroad had the large amount of open land required to locate an airport and the few towns that did have an airfield usually had muddy, grass-covered runways that were too short for all but the smallest of planes.  Large bodies of water, however, could be found close to almost every large city anywhere in the world.

Even today, over a third of the world’s population lives within an hour’s drive of an ocean.  Add in large rivers and lakes, and the number of sites at which seaplanes could be used goes up to serve over half the population of the world.  Even here in New Mexico, I live within just a few miles of the mighty Rio Grande.  (And while that river has water in it only about six months a year, the entire state will have beach front property as soon as the ‘Big One’ hits California.)

Even in pre-war America, with a population just over a third the size of today’s, the cost of buying and clearing enough land to build runways a mile and half long in already urbanized areas was too cost prohibitive for most cities to even contemplate.  Then, the war started and airports, with new long and wide concrete runways became a military priority in every country.  Within just a few years, it would become hard to find a large city in either America or Europe that lacked a decent airport.

During the war, flying boats were used successfully for reconnaissance and rescue, but large, land-based aircraft were being built by the tens of thousands and each new generation of planes was larger and faster than the previous models.  While seaplanes were used during the war, they were smaller, hardier work horses like the PBY Catalina, not the flying luxurious flying boats that carried rich passengers.

Years ago, I knew a retired doctor who had served in World War II as a navigator aboard B-17’s flying over Europe.  After his plane reached 25 missions, almost a miracle at the time, the crew was sent home.  Eventually, he was redeployed as a navigator on a PBY in the South Pacific.  According to him, his actual job on the plane was to keep track of a rubber hammer and a bag of golf tees.  After every water landing, he would race around the bottom hull of the plane looking for popped rivets, promptly hammering in a golf tee to stop the leak before the plane sank.  While I didn’t swallow this story whole, I’m pretty sure it is somewhere near the truth.

Those old flying boats, like the Boeing Clippers, were too slow to fly in a war zone and were grounded for the rest of the war.  Not a single example would survive the next decade.  If you want to see one today, the closest you will come is a non-flying replica in a museum in Ireland.

With the war’s end, land-based aircraft were easier to produce, safer to fly, cheaper to operate, and were much easier for pilots to learn how to fly.  The day of the flying boat, except for a few limited special operations, was over.  One company thought otherwise and tried one last grand experiment to revive the transatlantic use of seaplanes.

In 1943, the British aircraft manufacturer began designing a new generation of luxury flying boats, including a plane large enough to carry a hundred passengers and crew over 5,000 miles at the amazing speed of 360 mph.  Naturally, since 1943 was in the middle of the war, the company had to wait a few years to actually build this marvel, but the SR.45 Princess, was finally built after the war, taking flight in 1951.  Unfortunately, that was also the first year for a jet-powered transport plane, the de Havilland Comet, to become operational.  Though the Princess was built and actually flew, no airlines were interested in trying to turn back the aviation clock, preferring to buy jet aircraft instead of flying boats.  After years in storage, the Princess was scrapped.  There are still seaplanes, but the days of grand flying boats ae over.

Today, none of those grand old flying boats remain and traveling on airlines today has all the class and comfort of spending the weekend in the county jail.  If the war had never occurred, perhaps we would still be flying on luxurious seaplanes, enjoying fine meals in spacious dining rooms.  This is all something to think about the next time you are crammed into a small seat designed for children, hoping to score a miniature bag of peanuts from an overworked flight attendant.  

Buried Napoleons and Other Nonsense

Today is the Ides of April and my thoughts keep spinning around the sinking of the Titanic, the assassination of Lincoln, and (unfortunately) Napoleon.  I say “unfortunately” because every time I write about the little emperor, angry readers send email reminding me that I have written way, way too frequently about the diminutive Corsican whom the British monarchy referred to as the “Beast”.

I apologize in advance.  While many of the posts in this blog tell an orderly story, with a solid beginning, lots of details, and a solid conclusion…. too many others bounce along, jumping from topic to topic to topic, reminiscent of a ping-pong ball going down a long flight of stairs.  This is one of the latter.

Napoleon, of course, wrote his last will and testament on April 15, 1821, just three weeks before he died of stomach cancer,… or gallstones,… or pneumonia.  Or, maybe, he was assassinated by the British oligarchy, as Napoleon declared in his will.  Famously, the second line of his will states: “It is my wish that my ashes may repose on the banks of the Seine, in the midst of the French people, whom I have loved so well.”

The phrase “my ashes” has caused no end of confusion with historians for years.  Napoleon was not cremated nor did he wish to be, the word ashes refers to a French idiom, referring to the whole remains of deceased person, much like the phrase “dust to dust” in English.  The confusion also led to endless speculation that Napoleon was secretly smuggled off St. Helena to plan his triumphant return to Europe.  (Publicly, I can neither confirm nor deny that Napoleon is currently shacked up in a messy love triangle with Elvis and Amelia Earhart at Camp David.)

When the Emperor died in 1821, an autopsy was performed, discovering a stomach tumor that was attributed to gallstones.  His viscera were removed and placed in a large soup tureen until jars could be located.  The body, along with those jars, was placed in a tin coffin that was soldered shut, which in turn was placed in a mahogany coffin that was closed and fastened with screws.  This coffin was then placed inside a lead coffin with the seams soldered shut, then finally placed inside a larger mahogany enclosure, which was buried in a stone-lined crypt and covered with cement.  Evidently, the British were just a little afraid that the Beast might decide to wake up and raise another army.

Almost two decades later, King Louis Philippe of France decided that the emperor’s remains had to be brought back to Paris.  In the presence of both English and French officials who had been present at the 1821 funeral, the coffin was dug up, the outer wooden coffin demolished and the three inner coffins opened.  Napoleon was still recognizable to those present.  Then, the three coffins were resealed, with both the tin and lead coffins having their seams soldered shut again.  The body was then shipped to Paris and placed in the sarcophagus at Les Invalides where it still remains.  Despite the persistent rumors, there is no reason to believe that the coffins have been opened since 1840.

Which brings us back to Napoleon’s will.  The emperor had not only been generous, he was a little overly generous, leaving more bequests than his estate could handle.  Worse, he left sums of money to people that the authorities—including King Louis Philippe—didn’t really like.  All of this meant lawsuits and court cases that lasted until 1860.  A significant part of the problem was that Napoleon’s principle heir, his son Napoleon II, died in 1832 at the age of 22, long before the estate was finalized.

Young Napoleon II died of pneumonia in Vienna.  As his mother was a Hapsburg, the family followed the royal tradition and carefully removed his heart and viscera.  Following the long-established Hapsburg tradition, his heart was stored in Urn 42 in the Herzgruff (Heart Crypt) and his other assorted viscera are stored in Urn 76 a couple of blocks away at the Kaisergruft (Ducal Crypt).  The rest of him was buried.  Over a century later, Adolf Hitler moved the body to Paris and buried him underground in his father’s tomb, but left the squishy parts in their jars in Vienna.

While it has been fairly common knowledge that removing the internal organs will aid in the preservation of a body—that’s why the ancient Egyptians stored the organs of the deceased in canopic jars—this doesn’t seem to be the reason for why the monarchs of Austria believed in home canning.  Why did the Hapsburgs decide to pickle intestines?  Well, compared to what the other branch of the Hapsburg family does with their deceased, it’s almost normal.  When thinking about any part of the Hapsburg dynasty, it’s useful to remember that the family is so inbred that if common sense were leather, the collected brains of the whole family couldn’t shoe a flea.

Which brings us to Napoleon III, the first president of the French Republic who later seized the throne and became the second Emperor of France.  Louis Napoleon, the nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte, was kind of a jack of all trades.  He was once a London constable, wrote a manual for artillery, was a friend of Charles Dickens, and after his abdication, spent his years in exile in England trying to develop an energy efficient stove.  Like his famous uncle, he developed gallstones and died from complications after the second surgery to correct the problem.

Napoleon III’s son, wasn’t officially Napoleon IV—though I’m going to call him that—he was Napoléon Eugène Louis Jean Joseph Bonaparte, The Prince Imperial or just plain Lou-Lou to his friends.  He did what every Napoleon before him had done:  he went to a military school and joined the army.  In Lou-Lou’s case, it was the Royal Military Academy and the Royal Artillery.  Unlikely as it seems, Napoleon IV was a Lieutenant in the British Army.  Equally weird, Queen Victoria was planning on marrying her youngest daughter, Beatrice to the young man as soon as his military unit returned from fighting the Zulus in Africa.  

Note:  The Queen had a plan to homestead all of Europe by marrying eight of her nine children off to the heads of European countries.  The idea was that if the head of every European nation were a member of the same family, this would prevent war, right?  During the First World War, the Russian Czar, the German Kaiser, and the King of England were all first cousins, and despite sharing a royal grandmother, they still took the world to war.  

Unfortunately, from the picture at right, you can see that Lou-Lou did not live long enough to fulfill his destiny and reestablish French Monarchy.  After dying in a skirmish with the Zulu, his body was returned to his mother, who buried both her son and her husband in the Imperial Crypt at St Michael's Abbey, Farnborough, Hampshire, England.  I cannot find evidence of any other monument in England honoring a Napoleon.

One last thing about Napoleon IV.  All of the history books say he was killed by an assegai spear.  If you actually read the official report, he had eighteen separate stab wounds, including the fatal one that punctured his left eye and pierced his brain.  These wounds, however, weren’t from an assegai spear.

The original assegai spear is slightly more than six and a half feet long, with a metal double edge tip.  Shaka Zulu, the legendary Zulu leader, modified the weapon, shortening the wooden handle to just two feet while lengthening the sharp blade to a full foot, this giving the warrior a weapon that could be thrown, or used in close combat as a combination sword and ax.  This weapon, called the iklwa or ixwa, was the weapon that killed Napoleon IV.

The strangely named weapon is pronounced as E-KWA, which according to the Zulu, is the sound the weapon makes when you pull it out of your victim.

How to Pick a Vice-President

When Porfirio Diaz seized the presidency of Mexico in 1876, the country had been almost bypassed by the social and industrial revolutions that had changed most of the modern world in the nineteenth century.  Mexico was blessed with abundant natural resources but had, in the three decades prior, suffered through a violent civil war and two foreign invasions that had caused both the loss of half her territory and the destruction of the economy.

Though Diaz ruled as a dictator, who crushed political rivals and allowed editors personal freedoms only when it benefitted himself, he did modernize the country.  Where his predecessor, Benito Juarez, had felt that “there should be a desert between the rich and the poor”, Diaz immediately encouraged trade with the United States, having compared the shape of his country to a cornucopia that poured out her riches into her northern neighbor—who was eager to buy what Mexico could export.

As President, Diaz prospered during the rapid modernization of Mexico.  Within the span of twenty years, Mexico paid off the national debt, balanced its budget, laid thousands of miles of railroad lines, expanded the mining industry, and made the ruling elite truly rich.  

While the favored few became prosperous, the lives of ordinary peasants were little changed and arguably worse off than when Cortez had conquered the Aztecs four centuries earlier.   What Diaz actually did was create two societies within a single country.  If you were rich, you rode electric street cars down well-lighted boulevards to the new opera house.  If you were poor, you lived in squalor and watched your wife die during childbirth in a dirt-floored hovel.  While Mexican government bonds were highly sought after as a safe form of investment in London and New York, agricultural workers in Mexican fields needed the written permission of their hacienda owners to move and seek employment elsewhere.

Diaz learned political survival skills rapidly, eventually holding onto his office so long that the people of Mexico began referring to him as Don Perpetuo—no mean feat in a country previously noted for its frequent revolutions.  (In the previous 55 years following Mexico’s separation from Spain, the Mexican head of state had changed more than eighty times and the list of rulers included two monarchs.  One man, Antonio Lopez de Santa Ana appears on the list seven times.)

Diaz had a talent for co-opting the positions of his political opponents before they could gain sufficient prominence to be serious rivals.  If an opponent complained that Diaz wasn’t doing enough to provide housing for the poor, for example, Diaz would agree, hire the opponent as his new Minister of Housing, provide him with a big salary and an office, and give him just enough authority to keep him busy.  Diaz learned that it was better to keep his enemies inside the tent pissing out than outside it pissing in.

Diaz knew the power of the press, and knew that it was all but impossible to keep Mexican newspapers from printing the obvious truth that he was ruling as a dictator, rigging elections, buying off the opponents who were greedy and utilizing assassins to handle those who weren’t.  So Diaz bought the more prominent newspapers and closed their competition.  Since Diaz was smart enough to know there are always underground newspapers, Diaz secretly owned them, too, firing the good writers and keeping those less skilled and ineffectual.

Truly skilled at political survival, Diaz had the record for being the longest surviving Latin American dictator until the new high-water mark was set by Fidel Castro (who had studied Porfirio Diaz).  Almost the only political flaw in Diaz’s political armor was his age.  Aged 46 when he seized control, by the turn of the century he was…. well, my age.  No longer quite as flexible as in his early years (even his collection of crony ministers was aging), and now,  Diaz faced new pressures.

One frequent request to the Mexican president was that he appoint a Vice-President, something that the wily Diaz had always avoided.  Now in his seventies, Diaz agreed and began searching for a suitable politician to share a small measure of power.  Eventually, he settled on Ramon Corral, the governor of the Mexico City Federal District.  (The Mexican Distrito Federal or D.F. is roughly analogous with our Washington D.C.—the location of the capitol but not part of any state.)

Corral got his start in Sonora, where the post revolution chaos offered plenty of economic opportunities for a politician ruthless enough to seize the property of Yaquis, widows or anyone who had been displaced by the violence of war.  When dealing with the local Indians, Ramon Corral had a reputation for being harsh and unforgiving, allowing him to quickly prosper.   It didn’t take long for the politician to outgrow the opportunities that Sonora had to offer, so he accepted the new job in Mexico City.

Porfirio Diaz, once a general famous for defeating the French Army, was now desperately trying to remake most of upper Mexican society to resemble Paris.  Men dressed in the latest French fashion, spoke French, and drank imported champagne.  Corral was put in charge of an urban renewal project that would transform the capitol into the new French style Diaz craved.  To create the new wide boulevards and parks, the homes of the poor were torn down.  Streets were torn up to install the new electric lines the streetcars required.  And Corral spent a fortune building new sidewalks and installing electric lights in the richest part of town.  For the poorer parts of town, Corral did almost nothing.

Of all the men that Porfirio Diaz could have picked to be his vice-president, Ramon Corral was a baffling choice to many Mexicans.  Not only was Corral universally despised by the people, but Diaz had ignored several other politicians who were far more popular.  General Reyes of the Mexican Army, for example, was widely respected and would have gained popular support from the citizens, whereas Corral had few friends and many enemies.

For those more familiar with President Diaz, however, the choice of a universally despised politician for his second in command made perfect sense.  Insiders joked that with Ramon Corral as vice-president, all of Mexico went to bed every night earnestly praying for the continued good health of President Diaz.

The Strategic Oil Reserve

It started with the 1973 oil crisis.  The Middle Eastern oil exporting nations, led by Saudi Arabia, were angry about losing to Israel in the Yom Kippur War.  Since Israel had been supported both economically and militarily by Western Europe and the United States, the Saudis and their allies responded with a new weapon: oil.

Declaring an embargo, these countries stopped exporting oil to the western allies of Israel, creating shortages of gasoline and sending the price of petroleum products through the roof.  Before the embargo was stopped six months later,  price of oil rose from $3 a barrel to $12 a barrel.  The twin shocks of rising prices and market shortages triggered a tidal wave of political actions in the United States, almost none of which were based on economic reality (or even on common sense).

Cheap foreign oil had shut down a lot of US domestic oil production, slowing exploration for new fields.  While many of those older oil fields could begin production again, the lag between drilling for oil and pumping refined gasoline into the tank of your car meant that there were bound to be shortages and rapidly rising prices.  All of America panicked and rushed those huge American land yachts to the nearest gas station to fill up the tanks.

At least, they tried to:  At any given time in the next year, about 20% of the nation’s gas stations were shut down, sold out of gasoline.  And this is when the federal government stepped in and started being stupid.  Gasoline sales were limited to a maximum of 10 gallons and motorists could only pump that limited amount on alternating days, assigned by the last digit of their license plates.  Odd-numbered plates could wait in line to buy gas only on odd numbered days, alternating with those with even-numbered plates, who lined up on even dates.  The level of cooperation required of the public was slightly beyond its reach, so violence between angry drivers waiting in line was frequent.

I remember that at a hotel where I was working during what became known as the ‘Middle East Oil Crisis’, about once a month we caught someone stealing gas in the parking lot with an ‘Oklahoma Gas Tank’.  For those of you not lucky enough to be from Texas, that’s about six feet of rubber hose.

This rationing system, like almost all rationing historically, was completely backwards.  Consumers, fearing the day when they would be unable to start the family car, waited in line as often as they were allowed, buying tiny amounts of gasoline to ‘top off’ a tank.  A more logical system would have mandated a 10-gallon minimum sale, and allowed people to purchase every day of the week.  Most of the panic among consumers was perpetuated by—if not caused by—illogical government mandates. 

President Nixon also imposed wage and price controls for the second time during his presidency.  (Why not?—they had already failed spectacularly the first time.)  Oil producers were allowed to raise prices on production from new wells, but not on that from existing wells, despite rising inflation that made operating the old wells increasingly costly.  Naturally, the oil producers simply shut down the old wells completely, worsening the oil shortage.  Since increased regulations and price restrictions discouraged new production, there was also little incentive for new exploration or energy innovation.  

Suddenly faced with the reality of sudden oil shortages, Congress created the Energy Policy and Conservation Agency in 1975, tasked with the responsibility of safely stockpiling an emergency supply of petroleum.  The kinds of emergencies envisioned ranged from war, to another embargo, to a major hurricane striking the Gulf Coast.   Up to a billion barrels of oil was to be stored underground in salt domes.  (And no—the risk of contamination of the water table is very low since the salt domes are far below the water table.)

While the emergency reserves have never actually been filled to capacity, under presidential authority, the stockpiles have been tapped successfully several times to offset temporary shortages and forestall impending price increases.  During the Arab Spring uprisings that disrupted exports and following the shutdown of Gulf Coast refineries from Hurricane Katrina, millions of barrels of oil were auctioned off to nearby refineries to stabilize production.  Such releases from the reserves have generally been successful, keeping employment relatively high and forestalling short term shortages of gasoline and heating oil.

Far less successful have been the times that presidents have ordered releases in an attempt to lower the market price of gasoline.  In total, the United States has the capacity to store slightly more than a billion barrels of oil, and has the theoretical ability to transfer that oil back to refineries at the rate of 4 million barrels of oil a day.  These numbers sound staggeringly high, but in reality, it is nowhere near the amount of oil the world uses daily.  Our entire reserves, if stocked to capacity, would supply the petroleum the world currently uses for about one day.  Technically, this is a flea fart in a hurricane.  And America has slightly more than half the reserves currently being stockpiled globally.  

Today, with rising inflation and skyrocketing energy prices, there are once again calls for governments to impose price controls.  Mexico is close to putting limits on the price of food, almost guaranteeing shortages and starvation.  Albania is drafting legislation to curb price hikes on oil and gas.  Some politicians in Washington are proposing that the price of heating oil and gasoline be determined by the Department of Energy.  And President Biden has just authorized the release of a million barrels of oil per day from the strategic reserves for the next six months in an attempt to lower the price of gas at the pump.

There are three big reasons why this is a bad idea.

First, there are currently only 585 million barrels of oil in the reserve (roughly half of the capacity of what those salt domes will hold).  If we release the oil as planned, there will be roughly 450 million barrels remaining as we enter hurricane season.  Should a major hurricane cripple production and refining along the Gulf Coast, we might see gas prices even higher than we have now.

Second, Congress is a bunch of cheap bastards and when it comes time to buy oil to fill those reserves, they always opt for the cheapest grades of petroleum on the market.  Our reserves are not filled with West Texas Intermediate.  No—our government fills those reserves with ‘sour’ crude, oil with very high sulfur content that is relatively more expensive to refine into gasoline.  While none of that oil has been purchased yet, it is far more likely that this dirty oil will be used to produce heating oil rather than gasoline.  And don’t forget that oil has to be replaced, so, when the government finally gets around to refilling the reserve, it will end up buying more crap oil but paying a higher price for it.

And third, price fixing by Washington never works.  America uses about 100 million barrels of oil a day and suddenly adding an extra 1% of dirty oil to the supply on the market.... will do nothing pricewise.  And I can prove it.  Do you remember how much the price of gasoline dropped last November when the government released 30 million barrels of oil to help lower prices?

No, and neither does anyone else.