The sub., 1944-02-03

Wake Island and began to drop their bombs. That was the open ing attack of two-day clustering of the Japs on Wake Island by the largest sea-air force ever to be as- sembled in the history of the war.
 cannot tell you how many ships were in that task force, not even how many aircraft carriers. I can say, however, that there were more aircraft carriers off Wake at that time than ever were assem- bled in one place in Naval history and you can draw your own par tial conclusions from the fact that the Japs are known to have sent four carriers against Midway in June, 1942. Our carriers were more than 2,0OO miles from the closest American Naval base at Pearl Harbor.
 Placing that great armada of sea-air power of Wake Island and flying the planes in to bomb the Japs was a demonstration of the importance of petroleum to this war. The ships that steamed up to Wake were. driven by fuel oil, the planes that dropped the bombs and shot down the Zeros were powered by high octane gasoline. The engines in the planes and in the ships and every moving part on both ships and planes were lu- bricated by petroleum products.
 While it cannot be revealed how many thousands of gallons of pe- troleurn' were required to bomb Wake for two days, because that information would give our enemy some clue to the striking range of our Naval forces, it can be said that the amount was enormous. Our planes alone, while they were engaged on this operation, used enough gasoline to give 150 aver age American motorists their nor nal peacetime supply of gasoline for one year.
 The attack on Wake Island was the second appearance in combat of the Navy's big, fast, new fight CT plane, the Hellcat. To keep a Hellcat in the air for one hour re- quires as much gas as you would need to drive your car from Chi cago to Los Angeles. If you drove very hard and very fast you might make that trip in something like three and a half days. A single Hellcat used up that much gas i'll the time that it would take you to play nine holes of golf, and there were scores of Hellcats over Wake.
 The cruise and attack by that task force is only one of scores of military operations, all of which drink up enormous quantities of petroleum. Secretary Ickes has said that for 1000 four-motored Flying Fortresses to fly a six-hour mission requires 1,800,0OO gallons of gas. Tn order to move an armored divi- sion of our ground forces one mile we must burn up 800 to 900 gall Ions of gas per mile and there are 15O miles between Salerno and Rome, to say nothing of the add ed hundreds of miles from Rome to Berlin.
 The largest single military use of petroleum products is for avia- tion gas. think what happens to our aviation gas is fairly obvi- ous. You read about it in the headlines every morning. It IS needed not only for those battles which appear in every newspaper but also for the multitudinous training projects which make the battles possible. repeat that avi- ation gas is the largest military use of petroleum today, fact which speaks volumes about Amer ica's use of air power. Of course, most of the aviation gas goes to the Army Air Forces but very sizeable fraction is used by the Navy Air Arm.
 The second largest military use of petroleum products is motor fuel. Most of the motor fuel goes to the Army ground forces who use it in tanks, jeeps, trucks, half tracks, ducks, self-propelled gun carriages, and scores of other mo- tor-driven vehicles which make up a modern mechanized Army.