By early 1942 Japan controlled almost all of the rubber resources in the world.
Where did the Allies get their rubber from?
Actually they were just talking about that on the history channel last night but I was busy. Im sure it will be on again tonight. There was alot of pressure to make synthetic rubber.
Please pay more attention in future, in case you’re watching something that interests me. 
There was alot of pressure to make synthetic rubber.
How do they make synthetic rubber?
Presumably a petroleum by-product?
When we think of the huge number of rubber tyred vehicles that the Allies put into the field from early 1942, it must have been a huge effort.
Did the Germans have the same problem, or were their Japanese mates sending them raw rubber?
The Germans made synthetic rubber. So did the Americans. But the US had an ace in the hole: Brazil from which rubber was also imported in prodigious quantities. It was hard slogging and many Brazilians died in this emergency enterprise to harvest rubber in the rain forest.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/11/14/news/brazil.php
The rubber soldier program originated in an agreement between the United States and Brazil. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor had cut the United States off from its main source of rubber, in Malaysia, and President Franklin Roosevelt had persuaded Getúlio Vargas, the Brazilian dictator, to fill that strategic gap in return for millions of dollars in loans, credits and equipment.
According to Brazilian government records, more than 55,000 people, almost all of them from the drought-ridden and poverty-stricken northeast, were sent to the Amazon to harvest rubber for the Allied war effort. There are no official figures on how many of them succumbed to disease or animal attacks, but historians estimate than nearly half perished before Japan surrendered in September 1945.
…
Interestingly, the Japanese already had a source for rubber because they could get it out of Indochina. One of the beneficial side effects of their drive for oil in the Dutch East Indies was capturing Malayan rubber production which occurred with the fall of Singapore, thus denying the allies access to their major source. In response, artificial rubber was produced, but natural sources in the Brazilian rainforest were also exploited to the detriment of a lot of young Brazilian men.
More from:
http://www.100.nist.gov/ph_worldwar.htm
1943
Launching the Synthetic Rubber Industry
Synthetic rubber became a precious commodity during World War II when imports of natural rubber from the Far East were cut off. Indeed, natural rubber became so rare in the United States that gasoline was rationed to discourage people from driving cars (which, of course, ran on rubber tires). Ultimately, the nation spent as much on its rubber program as it did on the atomic bomb.
NIST helped win the rubber battle in several ways. As the government purchased any natural rubber it could find from South and Central America and Africa, NIST set up a lab to test and grade these rubbers and helped the Brazilian government organize its own lab to do the same.
The U.S. government also organized a consortium to study synthetic rubbers and invested in the construction of 15 production plants, which had to produce rubber that met uniform specifications. Prewar NIST work on the thermodynamics of rubber suggested which types of synthetics to use and how to test them.
Part of the “dirty” collusion between the US Standard Oil and the IG Farben company of Germany during the war:
"The transfer of ethyl technology for the Nazi war machine was repeated in the case of synthetic rubber. There is no question that the ability of the German Wehrmacht to fight World War II depended on synthetic rubber — as well as on synthetic petroleum — because Germany has no natural rubber, and war would have been impossible without Farben’s synthetic rubber production. Farben had a virtual monopoly of this field and the program to produce the large quantities necessary was financed by the Reich:
The volume of planned production in this field was far beyond the needs of peacetime economy. The huge costs involved were consistent only with military considerations in which the need for self-sufficiency without regard to cost was decisive.16
As in the ethyl technology transfers, Standard Oil of New Jersey was intimately associated with I.G. Farben’s synthetic rubber. A series of joint cartel agreements were made in the late 1920s aimed at a joint world monopoly of synthetic rubber. Hitler’s Four Year Plan went into effect in 1937 and in 1938 Standard provided I.G. Farben with its new butyl rubber process. On the other hand Standard kept the German buna process secret within the United States and it was not until June 1940 that Firestone and U.S. Rubber were allowed to participate in testing butyl and granted the buna manufacturing licenses. Even then Standard tried to get the U.S. Government to finance a large-scale buna program — reserving its own funds for the more promising butyl process."
Every time you think we are squeaky clean, we discover an American company - Texaco was another - in collusion with the Germans during the war. George Bush father (the first president Bush), Prescott Bush had financial dealings with the Nazis up until the time the US entered the war. Sad.
RS, aren’t you sorry you asked? LOL
Not in the least.
Thanks for all that info.
Fascinating stuff about Brazil. Sounds almost like a Brazilian version of the Burma railway, with voluntary instead of forced labour, or am I way off the mark?
P.S. I should have said in my last post:
“Sounds almost like a Brazilian version of the Burma railway combined with the company store, with semi-voluntary labour, or am I way off the mark?”
Ok, natural rubber is a polymer made up out of lots of isoprene molecules.
German chemists developed a method to produce a compound out of a very similar molecule, butadiene, which can be synthesised out of coal (over various steps, the first one would be the manufacture of calcium carbide out of the coal, which would then react with water to form acetylene gas. This gas is the base of a whole branch of German chemistry. The US had lots of oil, so the American chemical industry based their synhesises on oil, while Germany had lots of coal, but very little oil.). The first catalyst used to polymerise butadiene with styrene was metalic sodium, Natrium in German. This led to the name BUNA S for the first synthetic rubber. Later developments replaced the sodium with other chemicals, but the name stuck.
The Americans and the Germans independently developed a rubberlike compound using a chlorinated version of butadiene, 2-chloro-1,3-butadiene, which had similar properties as rubber, but was resistant to petrol and other hydrocarbons. This new compound was called Chloroprene or Neoprene.
Later various mixtures of monomeres like butadiene, 2-chloro-1,3-butadiene, styrene, isoprene and others were used to produce rubbers with different properties. The main thing is that the monomer molecules need to have a double bond at each end.
Jan
BTW, Ford had a huge rubber plantation in Brazil, Ford City.
Jan
Walther
Thanks for all that information.
Did the production of synthetic rubber from coal have any serious impact on Germany’s war effort?
Such as by diverting coal which was needed elsewhere to rubber?
Actually up to the 1950s ( in Eastern Germany up to the early 1990s) coal was the base of the German chemical industry. There is still plenty of coal around especially in the Ruhr area, the only reason the mines a being closed is that at the current prices they can not compete with cheap coal imported fron China and Australia. The reason is that the German coal seams are about 1-2 meters thick and at a depth of about 500-100 meters, while the australian ones are 8-10 meters thick and just below the surface and in China the miner’s health and safety is of little concern (just look at how many miiners get killed every year in China). Since labour is expensive in Germany, the German coal mining technology is one of the most advanced worldwide, a lot of the underground processes is automated. But for politicians and bankers coal mining is an outdated technology which the country has to get rid of within the next 12 years.
IMO this is shortsighted attitude, since coal is the only native energy source we have and also the base of a whole chemical industry, which would give us a certain independence of the oil markets. Also, who guarantes us that the price of imported coal will stay low? Once a mine is closed, the land sold, the shafts filled in and run full of water it is prohibitly expensive to reopen.
Aloso our very advanced mining technology industry will cease to exist.
The German steel manufactureres noticed this already: In the old days every steel mill had it’s own coke factory (coke being the reducing agent in the manufacture of iron and steel). About 15 years ago the last coke factory was closed, dismanteled and sold China. The reasoning back then was that the Chinese could supply our steel mills with cheaper coke anyway. Now, with the economic boom in China and no other place to go to to buy coke, suddenly the Chinese raised the prices of coke for two reasons: First, if they have an almost monopoly, why shouldn’t they take advantage of it? And secondly, they needed most of the coke they manufactured themselves.
This, among other factors, led to a dramatic increase in the prices of steel here in Germany. Nowadays you’ll have roaming scrap dealers driving through the villages with their lorries to pick up anything made up out of metal.
Back to your question: As long as there existed enough manpower for the mines and transport (railways) for the coal, I don’t think that the use of coal for synthetic rubber caused any problems.
Don’t forget that using synthetic rubber compared to natural one, you can tailor it’s properties to the task needed.
BTW, the Americans developed Nylon 6,6 out of chemicals produced from oil (hexamethylene diamine, adipic acid), which the Germans developed a very similar plastic called Perlon, which’s manufacture was based on oil.
Jan
Walther
Thanks again for all that information.
It’s cleared up something that I’ve never understood about how the Allies continued after losing Malaya and other rubber-producing areas in the region.
This might be outside your area, but did Japan really need the rubber in Malaya etc or could it have got by with synthetic rubber? This bears upon its reasons for going to war.
Do you know if there were sufficient coal resources in Japan and China, or even oil resources in China?
Did Japan have the knowledge and technology to make synthetic rubber?
Regarding your comments about cheap coal from Australia, it’s about twenty five years since that area had any vague relevance to what I was doing, but I seem to remember that the Japanese were very skilful then at combining in coal export negotiations and getting a price that was marginally profitable for Australian coal exporters, who negotiated individually rather than collectively like the Japanese. The Australians were picked off one by one and sold their coal too cheaply. I seem to recall that Australian coal exporters switched to a collective negotiation strategy at some stage and got better prices.
Now we have a new problem getting coal out, which is adding to the cost.
As state and federal governments bicker about how to fix the bottlenecks crippling Australia’s ability to exploit the explosive demand for its coal, a near-record 153 idle ships were offshore yesterday, cluttering ports in NSW and Queensland.
The ships - destined for markets in Japan, Korea and China - are waiting up to 25 days to load 14 million tonnes of coal, worth $850 million to the economy.
Not only are the delays costing the country in stalled export earnings, mining companies and their customers are incurring demurrage costs, or penalties for delaying ships, of more than $400,000 a ship.
“It’s stifling the industry,” Brian Flannery, chief executive of Queensland-based coalminer Felix Resources, told The Australian. “All we’re doing is sending money offshore and not getting the coal out.”
The coalmining industry is bearing the brunt of the bottlenecks in rail and port infrastructure in the wake of the China-led commodities boom.
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,21537070-601,00.html
But, currently, they can’t even lie idle at anchor.
http://www.abc.net.au/newcastle/stories/s1945881.htm?nsw
I don’t know, but I heard a little Ant delivered it?
The Ant reference is lost on me, but I have a sneaking suspicion it’s related to Durex.
In the English sense of Durex, not the Australian one which caused much merriment when we had the ten pound tourists landing on our shores.
“Whoooops there goes another…”
Just like the other.
I hate to burst your balloon :D, but Durex in Australia was a brand name for sticky tape. Like Sellotape.
Poms working in offices used to be aghast the first time they heard an Aussie say something like “Pass me the Durex.”.
Ilike the ballon quip, but Iwas really refering to ‘Frank’.
Frank?
Is that the Ant’s name?
Now I’m totally lost.