Please pardon my curiosity, but what was the fuel and what island was the source?
I’d guess rum. Cuba maybe?
I would imagine the fuel was progressively higher-octane aviation gas made possible by an unlimited supply of American oil.
Unlike the Luftwaffe which was limited to 84-87 octane from captured oilfields in the East, and liquid fuel derived from coal.
Don’t know about the island.
There was and is a small refinery in The Bahamas. The only reason I know about it is that a friend of mine worked contract in that plant for about a year. I think Sunoco owns it now.
It was Aruba. The reason the showing was unsuccessful was that the german gone malfunctioned and blew up in the barrel. The Germans were forced to withdraw, and they cut off the barrel to make their deck gun kind of a snub nose until they got home. But at that time, the British also got oil from Iran , ultimately Texas oil was critical for the war.
He's exaggerating, but not entirely.
At the start of the war, the RAF ran on 87 octane avgas and their fighters were slower than the ME109.
In 1930, 100/130 avgas was roughly hundred times (100x) more expensive to make than 87 avgas, too expensive for anybody but air racing pilots to use. In 1937 Sunoco figured out how to do it cost-effectively (the Houdry process) and started manufacturing it in secret.
Jimmy Doolittle had left active duty after WWI and was working for Shell Oil as a racing pilot and head of their aviation fuel program. He was the most recognizable name among the very small group that were SCREAMING at the top of their lungs that the US needed to solve the 100/130 riddle in the interest of national security. His foresight played a YUGE role in America's preparedness for WWII (a bit like Kelly Johnson in that respect).
During the battle of Britain, the US gave the RAF a limited supply of 100/130 to test and it worked so well they switched to it entirely afterwards. Not only did it make the fighters 25-40 knots faster (depending who you believe) at 10,000 feet, the (tetraethyl) lead built up in the engines so much slower than with 87 octane that it doubled the rebuild interval.
Literally one day the Nazis thought they could toy with Spitfires and destroy them at will, and the next day they couldn't catch them. It also made the RAF's bombers faster (not so much, but a little) and doubled the rebuild interval.
It made so much difference in performance that Merlin started building updated engines with higher compression and bigger turbochargers because the old engines couldn't extract all the power from the 100/130.
There were three places the 100/130 was manufactured, Houston, Baton Rouge and Trinidad (which is, as promised, a Caribbean island).
So it wasn't the only fuel the Spitfire could run on, and Trinidad wasn't the only place where it was made. But it was a secret weapon that gave the RAF and later the Army Air Corps a YUGE advantage over the Luftwaffe, who had their own high octane fuels but couldn't manufacture them in the quantities the US could.
The reason the first 100/130 island refinery was on Trinidad is that the British built it and built it in (what at that time was) a British holding. It also was the only of the three original 100/130 refineries that wasn’t American-controlled.
There had been refineries on both Aruba and CuraƧao since about 1920, but at that time the “ABC Islands” (Aruba, Bonaire & CuraƧao) were Dutch. I can’t see the British financing the construction of a refinery on a Dutch island.
Like everything to do with war material, as the war grew nearer (and especially after Pearl Harbor), the manufacture got spread around so once America got in the war I expect anybody with a cracking tower in their back yard was manufacturing mogas and/or 100/130.