Empires fought over oil because they couldn’t fight a war without it. The Japanese successfully captured Java in 1942 to acquire Dutch oil resources, while America’s unrestricted submarine warfare by the end of 1944 starved the Japanese of fuel. The Germans’ desperate bid for those old Zoroastrian assets in Soviet Azerbaijan foundered at Stalingrad in the winter of 1942–43, while the Americans bombed Romanian oil fields in August 1943 to deny the Nazis their output.
