I found this online. Any thoughts on the validity of these statements?

"In WWII, it was not unusual for German tanks to drive or be towed to the battlefield powered by flammable gas made from wood. At the battlefield the tanks would be converted to burn synthetic fuel in battle. The tide of war turned against Germany when the synthetic fuel plants were bombed and fuel production stopped. In 1944 General George Patton was speeding across Germany with the objective of being the first Allied force to reach Berlin. His forces outpaced his supply lines and his progress stopped. Patton ordered that synthetic fuel be drained from captured or abandoned German vehicles, and some of Patton's Sherman tanks and personnel carries were converted to run on synthetic fuel."

Patent Pending Blog - Patents and the History of Technology: Vehicle Patents/technology

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For the first time I have seen "History" at close quarters,and I know that its actual process is very different from what is presented to Posterity. - WWI General Max Hoffman.

I'm the "Confederate with a pipe"!! LOL

I first read about "wood burning" vehicles in a book, Journey through the night. The family car was converted to run on fuel from a small tank on the back of the car that burned wood. When using the vehicle, they often had to stop and stoke the fire! I have no idea, however how it worked!

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This is a pair of Dutch resistance crystal radios, built into a small metal can, and a matchbox. The image is from a postcard bought at a Dutch Resistance Museum in Amsterdam. The matchbox is marked in Swedish, but Swedish matches were sold in Holland for many years..
Scott

Wood gas generators work on the following principle:

You have a wood fire buring to heat a chamber in which additional wood is placed. The secondary chamber has no combustion air so the wood in it off gasses all of its volitile chemicals like methane, etc. This is then piped to the carburator on the engine and used as fuel.
In operation virtually any organic material can generate the gas. You occassionally have to stop and add more fuel for the fire and for the gas chamber to run the vehicle.

Tactical vehicles in the German army were rarely run on a wood gas generator. Synthetic fuel is gasoline manufactured by one of several processes that generates it from coal.

I think there may be a misconception here based on several late war enquiries by German engineers into gas power for tanks etc.
There's also something in my rather dull memory about gas being used for proving ground work on newly completed armoured vehicles, I'd have to check the books to be more certain where it was applied though, the machines were certainly switched back to more conventional fuel for service life.

Nice shot of a Kubel converted with a wood-gas generator:


Cheers,
Adam.

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It's only the Internet.

I was particularly interested in this statement,

"In 1944 General George Patton was speeding across Germany with the objective of being the first Allied force to reach Berlin. His forces outpaced his supply lines and his progress stopped. Patton ordered that synthetic fuel be drained from captured or abandoned German vehicles, and some of Patton's Sherman tanks and personnel carries were converted to run on synthetic fuel."

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For the first time I have seen "History" at close quarters,and I know that its actual process is very different from what is presented to Posterity. - WWI General Max Hoffman.

I'm the "Confederate with a pipe"!! LOL

It seems the germans missed their diesel engine properties. Diesel engines can run without any changes on a variety of fuels (the biodiesel talk running around is one of the many cases).
Now, syntetic fuel is manufactored mainly from coal but can also be from Natural Gas (tough in WWII I don't know if they knew this process).
In theory a veichle shouldn't need any alteration to run on synthetic fuel however, the lower octanes in German synthetic fuel however (since it's harder and more expensive to produce higher octane fuel in synthetic fuel (kinda redundant)) could make a conversion needed so the engine wouldn't break or at least see it's service life seriously reduced (If you try to run a modern 95 octane car on 40 octane fuel you won't get such a good result).


EDIT: Here's a good arcticle on Germanys synthetic fuel:
http://www.airpower.maxwell.af.mil/a...aug/becker.htm

Cheers...

We actually discussed Germany and synthetic fuels in this thread.

Synthetic fuel

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For the first time I have seen "History" at close quarters,and I know that its actual process is very different from what is presented to Posterity. - WWI General Max Hoffman.

I'm the "Confederate with a pipe"!! LOL

"In 1944 General George S. Patton's Third Army was racing across southern France. In his haste to be the first U.S. commander to cross into Germany, however, Patton overextended his supply lines. His armored columns ground to a dead stop. Faced the choice of waiting until he could be resupplied or draining the fuel of captured German vehicles, Patton chose the latter. His tanks and armored personnel carriers continued to steamroll toward Germany, powered by the German's own ersatz gasoline – synthetic fuel manufactured from coal."

DOE - Fossil Energy: auto created


Cut-away illustration of the US Sherman tank possibly with a
synthetic fuel conversion kit

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For the first time I have seen "History" at close quarters,and I know that its actual process is very different from what is presented to Posterity. - WWI General Max Hoffman.

I'm the "Confederate with a pipe"!! LOL

Synthetic fuel in short is weakly rated gasoline generated at large plants, see the link at Miguel B.'s post. Autonomous wood gas generators is something entirely different, and only provides a very low energy product. It was used as a war energency measure by Germany to power some trucks and some training Pz Is. No relation at all between both. The vehicle in the second case is overloaded with a huge wood-gas converter.

Woodgas



What a POS! http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~pu4i-aok/cooldata2/gassification/buggye.htm

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So Im taking it that no one knows of any other information about the synthetic fuel being used in US vehicles?

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For the first time I have seen "History" at close quarters,and I know that its actual process is very different from what is presented to Posterity. - WWI General Max Hoffman.

I'm the "Confederate with a pipe"!! LOL

What's your question after all? Your original post is very strange as wood-gas is not tank fuel; and you can't switch from WG to gasoline that easily. Looks like the author is mixing things up. And by looking at the rest of your link, I wouldn't put much faith on it.

Gasoline either "mineral" or synthetic is more or less the same (although the German synfuel was low octane only), but you can run syn-gasoline through a tank's engine, no problem there. So if Patton was used captured gasoline to supplement whatever was lacking from the normal supply, then good for him

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HMMMM....My question is very simple there Za. What do people think of the validity of the statements about Patton and the use of synthetic fuels? DID the units under Patton use German synthetic fuel and if so did thay have to convert the engines to do so? Perhaps I should have left off the statements about the wood burning.

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For the first time I have seen "History" at close quarters,and I know that its actual process is very different from what is presented to Posterity. - WWI General Max Hoffman.

I'm the "Confederate with a pipe"!! LOL

Convert the engines? I don't think so, theoretically synth fuel is as good as mineral fuel of the same octane level. Problem is that when you drain a half-full tank (in the German case a half-empty one ) from a vehicle you found in some dump or ditch, you don't know what's in it, nor how contaminated it is.

Would you drain the fuel from a crashed car to fill yours, not knowing how long it has been there nor what kind of moonshine was poured in it in the first place? I'd like to see your face when explaining to your company fleet manager why the engine of the car you were issued with suddenly seized

Now if you found a fuel dump and your tech sargeant sez the fuel is good enough for the deuce-and-a-halfs in your company, then go ahead, help yourself.

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"and some of Patton's Sherman tanks and personnel carries were converted to run on synthetic fuel."

Hence the reason for my question LOL.

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For the first time I have seen "History" at close quarters,and I know that its actual process is very different from what is presented to Posterity. - WWI General Max Hoffman.

I'm the "Confederate with a pipe"!! LOL

I told you the article was crappy. Do you prefer to believe me or the Internet?

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I agree with Za. As I said earlier, the only possible problem would be the lower octane but then again, your engine would still run normaly (tough for a shorter period of time) .



Cheers...

I have a choice?? LOL .

__________________
For the first time I have seen "History" at close quarters,and I know that its actual process is very different from what is presented to Posterity. - WWI General Max Hoffman.

I'm the "Confederate with a pipe"!! LOL