Understanding World War II-Japan & Synthetic Rubber
This is a reprint of something I originally wrote for Gather.
When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, they won a tactical victory, but at the cost of starting a war with a country with enormously more resources at almost every level-more people, more industry, more access to raw materials. The US had enough ships in the pipeline that whatever happened at Pearl Harbor or at Midway or at Guadalcanal the Japanese would simply be buried in the mass of US men and material by sometime in 1944. Why did the Japanese do it? Why did they attack?
A lot of people over the years have scratched their heads over that. They’ve wondered what on Earth the Japanese were thinking. Most of the explanations revolve around the Samurai Spirit or lack of understand of the power of the US. They boil down to the Japanese leadership emphasizing the wrong qualities and not really living in the real world.
I suspect that there was something else behind Japanese thinking, an edge that they thought they had. I suspect that the Japanese expected the US economy to choke in about eighteen months from lack of rubber.
The US synthetic rubber industry was virtually non-existent in late 1941. When Japan took Indochina, Malaya, and the Dutch East Indies, they grabbed over 90% of the world’s sources of natural rubber. Rubber had been a source of economic power for the British, French and Dutch through the 1920s and 1930s, a key piece of everyone’s economy.
Attempts to grow rubber elsewhere floundered. Rubber was essential for manufacturing just about everything involving military power. Planes averaged half a ton of rubber, while a tank took a ton. How about all of those battleships and carriers that were going to bury the Japanese. You don’t even want to think about how much rubber it took to build them. Want to build merchant ships to replace the ones the u-boats were sinking in the Atlantic. Easy to do as long as you have rubber, tons of it. Add in tires for military trucks and airplanes and replacement tires for the cars and trucks that kept the civilian economy going, and you see the problem.
The Roosevelt administration understood the precariousness of the rubber supply. They had begun to build stockpiles of rubber before the US entered the war and had various tools like gas rationing that would conserve rubber. They also had plans to recycle rubber. That would get the country through about 18 months before lack of rubber severely cut into manufacturing war materials.
Fortunately, the US of the Greatest Generation came through. They built a synthetic rubber industry almost from scratch and in ample time to avoid significant disruption and to produce the flood of US arms that overwhelmed Germany and Japan. That synthetic rubber industry was even able to export synthetic rubber to the Soviet Union, which was in even more dire need of it than the US was.
This was a quiet victory, far from the battlefield, won without evident drama and outside of the attention span of most of the public and most of the media. At the same time, it was a victory that all of the other Allied victories of late 1943 and 1944 depended on. It was crucial, and I can certainly understand the Japanese not believing that we could win it.
I don’t want to idealize the US of the 1940s. Most of us wouldn’t like the US of that time period if we were to suddenly find ourselves living there. We would find ourselves appalled by the casual racism, homophobia, sexism and disregard for the environment and for worker safety that were accepted parts of US culture back then. At the same time, I have to admire the fact that these were people, both in the government and in industry, who got things done.
The fact that the US of the 1940s built an entire huge industry in 18 months boggles my mind. In today’s US, in 18 months we probably couldn’t even get all of the permits to build the factories if we tried doing something comparable,