How America Moved Its Oil Underground in 350 Days

In 1942, German submarines were sinking tankers within sight of America's beaches, and ninety-five percent of the East Coast's oil still came by sea. So America buried a steel pipe two feet wide from East Texas to Pennsylvania, and finished it in 350 days. This file follows the Big Inch from Harold Ickes's 1940 letter to the last weld: the steel Washington refused to release, the tank cars that kept the East running in the meantime, eight construction crews pushing toward nine miles a day, the river crossings and the spring flood that stopped the oil for a week, and the first crude arriving in Phoenixville. Then the hard question. The U-boats had left the coast long before the oil arrived, so was the pipeline built too late? And what became of it after the war? CHAPTERS 00:00 Cold open 01:23 Ninety-Five Percent 03:25 Two Hundred Barrels 06:59 Nine Miles A Day 11:18 The Rivers 14:36 Day 350 18:11 Too Late? PRODUCTION LINE • Big Inch: 24-inch steel pipe, 1,254 miles from Longview, Texas, to Phoenixville, Pennsylvania • First pipe to last weld: 350 days (August 3, 1942 – July 19, 1943) • Little Big Inch: 20-inch pipe, about 1,475 miles, from Gulf Coast refineries to Linden, New Jersey • First full year of both lines: more than 185 million barrels; the Big Inch averaged about 308,000 barrels a day • 1947: both lines sold to Texas Eastern Transmission for $143 million SOURCES • Harold L. Ickes to Franklin D. Roosevelt, July 20, 1940 (quoted in Christopher J. Castaneda and Joseph A. Pratt, "From Texas to the East," 1993) • Texas Eastern / Louis Berger Group, "The Big Inch and Little Big Inch Pipelines: The Most Amazing Government-Industry Cooperation Ever Achieved" (2000), based on National Archives records of the Petroleum Administration for War (RG 253) • Texas State Historical Association, Handbook of Texas — "Big Inch and Little Big Inch" • American Oil & Gas Historical Society — "Big Inch Pipelines of WW II" • National Institute of Standards and Technology — "The Big Inch: Fueling America's WWII War Effort" (2018) • Eastern Sea Frontier War Diary, April 1942 • Cole Act, 55 Stat. 610 (July 30, 1941) • Harry S. Truman Library — Ralph K. Davies Papers (Petroleum Administration for War photographs) • Petroleum History Institute — tank cars in World War II (after "Oil for Victory," 1946) • W. Bernard Carlson, University of Virginia — on the wartime pipelines (2017) PHOTO & VIDEO CREDITS Public domain: U.S. National Archives (NARA); Library of Congress — FSA/OWI photographers John Vachon, Jack Delano, Marjory Collins, Alfred T. Palmer, Arthur Rothstein, Sheldon Dick, Russell Lee, Marion Post Wolcott, Louise Rosskam, Andreas Feininger, Horace Bristol, Harris & Ewing; Petroleum Administration for War (Harry S. Truman Library); U.S. Navy; U.S. Army; 110th Observation Squadron, Missouri National Guard; Abbie Rowe; E. D. Ray; Ike Vern; Royal Navy official photographers Lt H. A. Mason and Lt S. J. Beadell; Australian armed forces; Smallbones. Archival film (public domain, National Archives via Internet Archive): United News newsreels 1942–1945, U.S. Office of War Information (208-UN-12, 208-UN-23, 208-UN-55, 208-UN-158); U.S. Navy, Naval Photographic Center film of the tanker E. H. Blum (1942). • "SecHaroldIckes-RepEdwardTaylorCO" — BLM Wyoming, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons • "Bayway Oil Refinery 2" — jqpubliq, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons • "Big Inch Chambersburg building" — Acroterion, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons • "Winter along the Schuylkill Canal" — Montgomery County Planning Commission, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons • Anefo (Nationaal Archief), CC0; "Phoenixville in the 50's" — Historical Society of Phoenixville, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons • Stock footage from Pexels: Şaban Karabeli, Salva F. Ayala, Damir K, Luz Calor Som, William Laverty, Matthias Groeneveld, Marina Leonova, Miguel Á. Padriñán, KoolShooters, Sergei Starostin, Fot. Arkadiusz T, Tom Fisk, Jonathan David, Nick C, Nguyen Huu Duc, I Am Sorin, Wendy Laplume, Pawel Film, Tima Miroshnichenko, Emre Vonal, Case Joel, Jeremy Hardin, Lauri Poldre, TimePRO TV, Neil Hedley, Roman Odintsov, Attila Pergel Images were cropped, resized, color graded and animated; adapted CC BY-SA images remain under the same license. No endorsement by the authors is implied. Full credits are at the end of the video. Music: original score. Some scenes are AI-generated reconstructions (for example, the tanker at dusk off a lit beach town, the river crossings at night, the pump stations and the view through an old pipe). They contain no real people and are used only where no archival photograph exists. Did someone in your family dig, weld or walk the line of the Big Inch or the Little Big Inch? Tell us where they worked and what they remembered about it. #WWII #WorldWarII #AmericanHistory #MilitaryHistory #BigInch