While other navies used highly refined burner oil, in the last stages of World War II the Imperial Japanese Navy was directly using high quality crude oil obtained from the captured East Indian colonial possessions of the Netherlands and France. While quite functional as a boiler fuel, this crude carried a hazard; as the lighter fractions had not been distilled out they formed highly flammable vapors within the warships' fuel tanks. This would often lead to a tank compartment explosion during battle should a shell penetrate the compartment or venting lines.
Previously at Pacific War, since 30s period, Navy along Japanese Government, acquired German state manufacture license for installing the shale plant in Fushun, Manchukuo was perhaps capable of annual production of 200,000 tons of shale oil. The Imperial Japanese Navy also had an interest there in producing some diesel oil and gasoline, in low amounts, with some little shale extraction in Jehol province. Later such production was ampled with petrol pits recent acquired in Dutch Indies, French Indochina and Burma during wartimes.
Famous quotes containing the words imperial, japanese, navy and/or fuel:
“The imperial multiplicatornothing can nonplus:
My mother Nature is the origin of it all.”
—George Barker (b. 1913)
“The Japanese are, to the highest degree, both aggressive and unaggressive, both militaristic and aesthetic, both insolent and polite, rigid and adaptable, submissive and resentful of being pushed around, loyal and treacherous, brave and timid, conservative and hospitable to new ways.”
—Ruth Benedict (1887–1948)
“We all know the Navy is never wrong, but in this case it was a little weak on being right.”
—Wendell Mayes, U.S. screenwriter. Otto Preminger. CINCPAC II (Henry Fonda)
“I had an old axe which nobody claimed, with which by spells in winter days, on the sunny side of the house, I played about the stumps which I had got out of my bean-field. As my driver prophesied when I was plowing, they warmed me twice,—once while I was splitting them, and again when they were on the fire, so that no fuel could give out more heat. As for the axe,... if it was dull, it was at least hung true.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)