I've been reading a book on the United States Merchant Marines and their role in the war and it got me thinking about all the shipping that was sunk by the Central, Entente, Axis and Allied powers. What were the known environmental and economic impacts of, say, oil tankers being torpedoed or industrial chemical tankers being sunk? Additionally, any good suggested material to read on the subject would be greatly appreciated.
Having just come from the annual meeting of American environmental historians, my compliments on an important question; environmental history is still such a relatively new field that there are still big gaps in the literature. War and the environment is definitely one of these growing and hot topics right now. Perhaps J. D. Hamblin "Environmental Dimensions of the Second World War." (In T. W. Zeiler & D. M. DuBois (Eds.), A Companion to World War II. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012.) will be able to point you in the right direction through some of his footnotes, although I don't know if your specific question has been answered in the scholarship yet.