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 LordofHats wrote:
Yeah. The Soviet's just went straight diesel, while many western nations tried to make more conventional gasoline engines work, or even experimented with electric engines. I think it's easy to forget that in the 30s the internal combustion engine was still new technology. Much of the war machine of the participant nations in WWII was still horse drawn in the late 30s and early 40s. The US and the USSR were the only nations to come out of the war with the industrial capacity and technology to have true fully mechanized armies.

The Soviets went with Diesel mostly because they simply didn't have the gas production to sustain gasoline engines. IIRC this was also a mistake of the Germans during WW2 when they went with Gasoline instead of diesel for lack of a good diesel engine for most of their tanks. It made their fuel woes even worse.

 LordofHats wrote:
I think the logistics of refueling were less significant than the domestic production ability of the countries involved.

Domestically tractors were a big industry in the USSR at the time, and the USSR used diesel engines in their tractors. So, obviously, when building tanks they built what they knew. Diesel engines.

Likewise, the US and Germany had big commercial car industries, used gasoline engines, so when they built their tanks they used gasoline. The Germans experimented with diesel engines and found they lacked the industrial expertise and capacity to do so. It would cost more to switch to diesel than to just keep building gasoline engines (or petrol, I know the difference between gas and diesel but I can't say I'm clear on the difference with petrol).

It was actually a surprisingly big part of the military planning of all the Western European nations prior to WWII. The infrastructure in Western Europe was really good and dense, and a significant part of what allowed Germany to neglect logistical preparation so much in their planning- roads and railways are plentiful and good, bridges are good, food and petrol stations and horse fodder plentiful, landing strips plentiful. A large degree of living off the land for military units is achievable, and what needs transporting is done efficiently. This is why they struggled so much logistically when invading the USSR (especially with the Soviet scorched earth policy).

There is an interesting video by MHV or the Chieftain talking about this (can't remember which). It basically boils down to logistics being of secondary importance to operational needs in Western European campaigns, and this has long been a feature of Western European warfare. The Battle of France is the textbook example. Of course, logistics are vitally important when shipping supplies across an ocean, which is why the US has invested so much in this area over the last century. They also become increasingly important the longer a war drags on, as the resources and infrastructure get depleted.

 Grey Templar wrote:

 LordofHats wrote:
Yeah. The Soviet's just went straight diesel, while many western nations tried to make more conventional gasoline engines work, or even experimented with electric engines. I think it's easy to forget that in the 30s the internal combustion engine was still new technology. Much of the war machine of the participant nations in WWII was still horse drawn in the late 30s and early 40s. The US and the USSR were the only nations to come out of the war with the industrial capacity and technology to have true fully mechanized armies.

The Soviets went with Diesel mostly because they simply didn't have the gas production to sustain gasoline engines. IIRC this was also a mistake of the Germans during WW2 when they went with Gasoline instead of diesel for lack of a good diesel engine for most of their tanks. It made their fuel woes even worse.

In part the Germans choice of Petrol (Gasoline) as their primary fuel was pragmatic, they didn't have decent supplies of oil to make either and it's far easier to make synthetic petrol than it is synthetic diesel, so their late war fuel shortages would have been a lot worse if they'd gone down that route