[akdavis]

Originally Posted by Raptor1

Nothing happened in Trinidad during WWII...

So very wrong.

Most South American oil originated in two places: the rich fields under the shallow Lake Maracaibo, Venezuela, adn the British West Indies island of Trinidad...

...Most of the Trinidad oil ws refined on that island. Strategically located close off the northeast coast of Venezuela, Trinidad was also a port of call for ships southbound to Latin American and African ports and for a fleet of shallow-draft ships that carried bauxite (the base mineral for aluminum) north from British Guiana and Dutch Guiana (Surinam) to Trinidad, where the bauxite was transferred to larger ships...

...Of the two U-boats at Trinidad, the enw U-161, commanded by the twenty-eight-year-old Albrecht Achilles making his first patrol as skipper, had the first successes. Cruising bravely into the shallow, confined Gulf of Paria, separating Trinidad from mainland Venezuela, Achilles approached Trinidad's well-lighted principal city, Port of Spain, as though U-161 were a cruise ship. Lying on the surface off Port of Spain just before midnight on February 18 in thirty-six feet of water, Achilles fired a bow salvo at two ships. Two of the four torpedoes failed or missed, but the other two hit a 7,000 ton British tanker and a 7,500 ton American freighter. Both ships settled to the shallow bottom, but both were later salvaged and returned to service.

Fully alive to the strategic importance of Trinidad, both as a source of oil and as a way station for shipping, Admiral Hoover was in the process of creating a powerful ASW base on the island, comparable to that on Iceland. But the work had only just begun and Achilles caught the Allied forces by surprise. Thus he was able to make the long run through shallow waters to open seas on the surface without countermeasures. Although the results were in now way comparable, his bold penetration of the Gulf of Paria was to be compared to Prien's feat at Scapa Flow.[emphasis added]

-Clay Blair, Hitler's U-boat War: The Hunters, 1939-1942