There is a temptation, watching India’s LPG crisis unfold in March 2026, to invoke the Second World War as a counterpoint, an era when civilisation itself was at stake, yet somehow, fuel still moved, kitchens still burned, and industrial supply chains held together well enough to sustain a global war effort. The comparison is emotionally satisfying. It is also, at first glance, historically plausible. But the data tells a more complicated and ultimately more instructive story.
The Second World War did not prove that fuel flows survive war. It proved that fuel flows survive war only when the world’s largest oil producer is also the one doing the fighting and is nowhere near the front lines.
The American Exception
In 1940, the United States produced approximately four million barrels of oil per day accounting for over sixty percent of worldwide production. This was not merely an economic fact. It was a strategic reality of the first order. The country with the most military power and the deepest industrial base happened also to be sitting on the world’s most abundant, most developed, and most geographically protected oil reserves. American oilfields in Texas, California, and Oklahoma were thousands of miles from any active theatre of conflict. The Atlantic Ocean though contested by German U-boats was never physically closed. Supply lines were disrupted, but never severed.
The consequence was decisive. Approximately 90 percent of the oil required for the British and French war effort was supplied by the United States. Britain, for all its imperial reach, was almost entirely energy-dependent on a single ally across an ocean. That dependency proved sustainable only because the supplier was geographically untouchable. Winston Churchill’s celebrated confidence in the Allied war effort rested, in no small part, on the simple geographic fortune that the wells feeding it were beyond any Axis reach.
The Axis Experience: Rationing, Improvisation, Collapse
The mirror image of this picture is what happened to powers that lacked a similarly secure oil supply. Germany, acutely aware of its vulnerability from the outset, pursued two parallel strategies. It dramatically increased oil imports from Romania from roughly ten thousand barrels per day before the war to approximately fifty thousand by the early 1940s. Simultaneously, it invested massively in synthetic fuel production from coal, scaling output from approximately two thousand to one hundred thousand barrels per day.
These were extraordinary feats of industrial engineering. They were also never enough. When American strategic bombers identified Germany’s synthetic fuel plants as their primary industrial target, the resulting campaign became the first in aviation history to achieve what the post-war official analysis called ‘catastrophic‘ damage to an enemy’s war-fighting capacity. Germany’s civilian economy had effectively ceased to function on petroleum fuel well before the war ended.
Japan’s experience was even more directly analogous to India’s current predicament. Japanese-controlled territories reached peak oil production of approximately four million barrels per month in 1943. But production at the wellhead was only half the problem. The tanker fleet responsible for moving that oil from Southeast Asian fields back to the Japanese home islands was never adequate for the volume required and as American submarines systematically destroyed it, imports to Japan never exceeded approximately 1.4 million barrels per month, regardless of what was being pumped at the source.
Japan was, in effect, a large economy whose energy supply lines ran directly through an active war zone, with no domestic fallback and no overland alternative. It ran on rationing, improvisation, and eventually, fumes.
China’s situation was starker still. The country had a single significant producing oilfield at Yumen generating only about fifty thousand tonnes per year. To supplement this, eighty-two percent of China’s entire national alcohol production capacity was redirected toward motor fuel substitution. The lesson is consistent across all three non-American belligerents: where oil came from a foreign source, and where the supply route passed through a contested zone, the outcome was shortage, rationing, and industrial degradation.
India, 2026: Japan’s Problem in a New Century
Measured against this historical framework, India’s structural position in March 2026 is closer to Japan in 1943 than to Britain in 1943. The arithmetic is unambiguous. India imports approximately 67 percent of its LPG requirements, with roughly 80 to 85 percent of those imports transiting through the Strait of Hormuz. Domestic crude oil production covers only thirteen percent of the country’s total energy needs.
When American and Israeli forces struck Iran on February 28, 2026, and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) effectively closed the Strait, daily tanker traffic through the chokepoint collapsed from an average of 138 vessels to just 21 within a week an 85 percent drop in under 8 days. The last Indian-flagged VLGCs carrying LPG cargo, the Desh Vaibhav, Desh Viraat, and Desh Vishal loaded at Gulf ports in the final hours before the closure, heading to Vadinar, Mumbai, and Visakhapatnam.
They were carrying what was, in all likelihood, India’s last Hormuz-routed LPG for the foreseeable future. India’s strategic reserve buffer stands at 25 – 30 days. The earliest realistic arrival of alternative supply US LPG routed via the Cape of Good Hope, since the Suez Canal remains disrupted by Houthi activity is approximately April 25, some 44 days from departure. The gap between reserve depletion and first replacement supply arriving is not a rounding error. It is three weeks of empty pipeline.
The Refining Paradox
Here the comparison with the Second World War reveals another uncomfortable truth. Germany, faced with supply disruption, had a synthetic fuel programme capable of partially bridging the gap. Japan had nothing comparable. India in 2026 has world-class refining infrastructure of 258.1 million metric tonnes per annum of installed capacity, one of the largest complexes in Asia but finds itself in the same structural bind as Japan nonetheless.
The reason is a basic yield problem. LPG constitutes only 3 to 5 percent of what a barrel of crude oil produces when refined. Redirecting refinery output to maximise LPG which the government mandated under the Natural Gas Supply Regulation Order of March 5, 2026, directing all C3 and C4 stream output exclusively to state oil companies still cannot substitute for the sheer volume of imported cargo that has stopped moving. Worse, the crude feedstock that India’s refineries depend on comes largely through the same blocked strait. The refinery is running. The raw material is not arriving.
The cruel irony is one that no wartime analogy quite captures. India is a net exporter of refined petroleum products to Europe and Africa. It produces enough petrol and diesel to supply international markets. And yet its own kitchens are in fear of running short of cooking gas. This is not a failure of industrial capacity. It is a failure of supply chain architecture specifically, the consequence of allowing a single 21 mile waterway to become the controlling bottleneck of a nation’s domestic energy security.
Ending Note
The Second World War did not prove that fuel flows survive conflict through ethical restraint or superior logistics. It proved that fuel flows survive conflict through geography. The country that produced 60 percent of the world’s oil in 1940 was the country furthest from the fighting. Its oilfields were never bombed. Its shipping lanes were disrupted but never closed. Britain survived because its supplier was invulnerable. Germany and Japan did not survive, in significant part, because their oil ran out.
India’s Hormuz exposure is a 21st century version of Japan’s tanker problem: a large, import-dependent economy whose critical supply lines run directly through the most contested maritime chokepoint in the world, with domestic production insufficient to bridge any meaningful gap and alternative routes too distant to rescue the situation in time. The strategic lesson is the same one that Tokyo ignored and Washington inherently understood: in a world where energy supply can be weaponised by geography, self-reliance is not an ideological preference. It is an arithmetic necessity.
Featured Image Credit: THE VIYUG.
About the Author
Anirudh Phadke is the Founder, Publisher & Editor of The Viyug. He previously worked for International Criminal Police Organization (INTERPOL). He was also a Member of the Board of Studies (BoS) for the Department of Defence & Strategic Studies at the Guru Nanak College (Autonomous). Anirudh holds a Master of Science in Strategic Studies along with a Certificate in Terrorism Studies from S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS) at Nanyang Technological University (NTU). He completed Bachelor’s degree in Defence & Strategic Studies from Guru Nanak College (Autonomous).
