Comments by "Steve Watson" (@stevewatson6839) on "Could Libyan OIL have solved the Axis oil crisis of WW2?" video.

@z000ey AH picks up the 'phone to Madrid. Franco would be attacking Gibraltar whether he wanted or not.
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@nicholasconder4703 DAK was fighting a holding action until the Caucasus were taken. No one expected Rommel to be that good, nor us to be that bad. Even then Rommel was stopped were you would expect him to be stopped. A Mediterranean strategy might look obvious but you have to start a lot earlier than Ferb '41 to have all your ducks in a row to make it possible.
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The Libyan oil was already known then and there was no money to do anything. Musso was pissing it up the wall in Ethiopia and Spain.
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Four mechanised divisions was all a North African front could have supported. The oil in the Middle East was used to support Mediterranean ops. The fields would have been demolished and the production transport infrastucture wrecked before the Panzers got there. The only bearing North Africa and the Middle East had on our war was that was were we could get at Jerry. Losing the Middle East was not an existential threat.
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In the early thirties Musso hated Dolphie. This only changed after Munich.
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@darkalan1562 ? Making sense isn't yours
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@nicholasconder4703 We fought in Cyrenicia in WW1. See "The Sanusi's Little War" by Russell McGurk.
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@ParabellumStoria Begin earlier. But, like most answers to Italian problems, the how depends on making Mussolini and the Fascists competent people in the first place; and if they were competent in the first place would they have entered the war or even tied themselves to Adolf at all?
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@ParabellumStoria Put a shout out for someone to do Italian to English subtitles for you. I know several channels that have gone the other way, English to whatever, successfully doing this.
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@verysilentmouse The shipping problem would have been solved already if they had been extracting already. The Regia Marina was actually quite successful overall in defending the shipping.
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@nicholasconder4703 I'm only referring to Cyrenecia where we had boots on the ground and needed accurate intel. What was going onelsewhere in Libya doesn't have any bearing and the two aren't mutually exclusive.
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@nicholasconder4703 Correct. At the time in question the Italins were pretty much beseiged on the coast, it wasn't safe for them to venture beyond their coastal enclaves.
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Thinking about every ecological "catastrophe" that never actually happened except in Greenpeace's imagination. In reality a couple of years after Exxon Valdez you coudn't tell there had been a spill. Wildlife is going gangbusters in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. Environmentalists big things up and/or talk bollox most of the time.
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This sort of thing concentrates minds wonderfully. The Folgore division and the Fallschirmjager would have dropped on Malta. The Regia Marina was actully good at protecting the sea lanes to Libya. This was one of the reasons an attack on Malta never went beyond the planning: the cost outweighed the benefit.
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