Play as · WW2 1939 · L1 · Allied Oil Supplier

Venezuela - September 1, 1939

Venezuela in 1939 is the most strategically important country in the Americas that has no intention of fighting anybody. It is the world's leading exporter of crude oil and the second-largest producer on earth, and almost all of it comes out of one place: the shallow, derrick-crowded water of Lake Maracaibo, pumped by Shell and by the Standard Oil companies, moved by shallow-draught tankers over the sand bar at the lake mouth, and refined not in Venezuela at all but on the Dutch islands of Aruba and Curacao a few hours' steaming to the north. Politically the country is four years out of the long dictatorship of Juan Vicente Gomez, who died in his bed in December 1935 after twenty-seven years, and is being governed cautiously by Eleazar Lopez Contreras, an officer of the old regime who has allowed newspapers, unions and parties to exist without allowing them to win. The strategic identity is a producer state: enormous leverage over other people's war, and almost no means of defending the thing that produces the leverage.

Starting position

The starting board is a pipeline with a country attached. The oil concessions and the technical staff belong to foreign companies operating under a 1938 petroleum law that has begun, cautiously, to ask for a larger national share; the refining capacity that turns Venezuelan crude into aviation spirit sits offshore under the Dutch flag; the tankers are foreign-flagged; and the customers are the industrial economies of the North Atlantic. The armed forces are a small professional army whose real historical function has been internal - a coup-proofing instrument built by Gomez - plus a coastguard that could not seriously contest anything. The country's own consumption is trivial next to its exports. What Venezuela does hold is the physical geography: the lake, the bar, the loading terminals, the short and utterly predictable sea route north past the Paraguana peninsula, and a long Caribbean coastline nobody has fortified. Add a treasury that is finally solvent, a population concentrated in the Andean and coastal north, and an interior that has almost nothing to do with any of it, and the position is clear - Venezuela is a strategic asset first and a state second, and the asset is the vulnerable part.

What turns the campaign

Venezuela declares neutrality within days of the European war opening and means it. The campaign does not turn on whether Caracas fights; it turns on whether the oil keeps moving and who guarantees that it does. From the first week the country is inside the Allied war economy whether it likes it or not: British and French purchasing, American strategic planning, and a refining chain on Dutch islands whose home government will be overrun within a year. Every step of that chain is a target. The tankers on the Maracaibo run are slow, shallow, unescorted and completely predictable - a submarine commander with a chart needs no intelligence at all to find them - and the refineries at Aruba and Curacao are two shore installations that between them fuel a large part of the Atlantic war. When German submarines finally arrive off the islands in February 1942 they shell the refineries and sink the lake tankers in a single night, and Venezuelan neutrality collapses in practice long before it changes on paper. The player's problem is the one Lopez Contreras and his successor faced: extract a better price for the oil, keep sovereignty over an industry run by foreigners, defend a coastline with a navy that does not exist, and decide how much of the war to formally join when the fighting has already reached the loading docks.

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