[Music] To understand the strategic decisions of the
Second World War, you have to understand the struggle for resources that underpinned it. All wars to some extent are about resources, but this war was like no other conflict in history. To power the vast engine of war, to feed the complex machine that turned out tanks and bombs, trucks and ships, that kept millions of men fed, armed, and clothed
in the field, the combatants of World War II needed a diversity and a quantity of natural resources heretofore unconsidered in the annals of military planning. And everybody knew that if they didn't get those resources, it would just be a matter of time before the all-consuming engine of battle ground to a halt. It was this fear that drove the Axis planning throughout much of the war. If we look at the Allies, we see an unimaginable wealth of resources. There were the oil and coal fields of Russia, the vast farmland, minerals, and refineries of the United States, and the far-flung empires of France and Britain, which could draw in exotic resources from
across the globe. Now compare that to the Axis, with the small island nation of Japan, and the largely landlocked and noncolonial powers of Germany and Italy. The Allies could fuel the war on resources they already had. If the Axis was going to last at all, they needed to make up for what they lacked in war gains. And this dictated early policy. The Nazis knew that they were gonna lose their supplies of cobalt, copper and, most importantly, oil, as soon as the war began in earnest, for they had imported most of those materials from their soon-to-be enemies. So they needed to find an alternative. The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact with the Soviet Union not only assured that the Germans wouldn't have to fight a two-front war, but also laid out, in great detail, a trade agreement that would have the USSR provide Germany with the supplies of those resources it would need to prosecute the war. Next, the German planners had to tackle their lack of aluminum and iron. And this served as part of the impetus for the invasion of Norway. Not only would Norway serve as an
excellent location for aluminum production, but it secured German
access to Sweden, which is where the vast bulk of their iron imports came from. But
the Germans would also need food if they were going to feed and field an army of
millions, and France served as one of the most fertile regions in Europe. With a
rapid conquest of France, Germany could also hope to secure strategic reserves
that would buy them some time to pin down the other
resources they were lacking. And so, there's the first two years of the war.
Other concerns certainly factored into the strategic decision-making, but step
by step, throughout the early war you can follow the need to shore up the
resources the German economy lacked, but even after the massive German expansion
of 1940, this left German planners with one great concern: oil.
Even after Nazi efforts to support fascists in Romania brought the Romanian
oil fields under their control, the German war machine was consuming about
25 percent more oil than even the expanded Reich could produce. Month after
month, this shortfall was being made up for by shipments from the USSR, but Nazi
planners and the Nazi leadership lived in a state of continual paranoia where
the looming and perhaps quite real possibility of Stalin simply cutting off
oil shipments would spell an end to the Reich. And this is where the resource war
and the terrible ideology of the Third Reich merge. While there were a number of
military men who suggested that the fascist war machine should break through
North Africa and come to possess the oil fields of the Middle East, Hitler with
his need for Lebensraum, his hatred of the Slavs and the Jews, and his
foundational fear of communism instead decided that the Nazi armies would move
east into the heart of the Soviet Union and to take possession of the Soviet oil
fields. When this enormous effort stalled out, there were some desperate attempts
to turn south and pick up oil fields closer to the Middle East, but by then it
was too late. Germany had used most of its reserves
pushing into Russia, and as a result would suffer shortages for the rest of
the war. Japan faced a similar dilemma but was perhaps in yet more dire
straits because the overwhelming majority of its trade before now had
been with one single partner, the United States. Most Japanese planners recognized
this deficiency but also believed that any expansion in the Pacific would
almost certainly draw them into conflict with the U.S. This led directly to a
strategy that involved knocking the U.S. out of the war as quickly as possible,
but it also led to two other strategies for the coming conflict, a set of
strategies that would divide the Japanese forces. The Army favored what is
known as Hokushin-Ron, or the Northern Expansion Doctrine, which called for a
push through China into the resource-rich country of Siberia. The
central idea was that the army could simultaneously bring the majority of raw
materials that their economy needed under Japanese control and cripple the
Soviet Union's ability to prosecute a war against Japan. The Navy, on the other hand, advocated Nanshin-Ron or Southern Expansion
Doctrine, which proposed sweeping up the islands in the South Pacific to solve
Japan's economic shortfalls, and both of these doctrines would play a huge part
in how the Japanese prosecuted the war. in the outset of the war, with the
invasion of China, we see the beginning of the implementation of the Northern
Expansion Doctrine, but though little talked about in the history of World War II, this approach ground to a halt when the
Japanese tried to push up through Mongolia and were turned back by the
Soviets at the battles of Khalkhyn Gol. Over 100,000 men fought an
undeclared war there, and at its end, the Japanese army was forced to abandon its
dreams of Siberian conquest, which left their Navy ascendant and free to push
the doctrine that would win it the most prestige. And thus began Japan's rapid
expansion into the Pacific. The idea was to strip the European nations already
beleaguered by the war in the West of all of their colonial possessions in
Asia. And this became an utter necessity because, by this point, the United States,
Britain, China, and the Dutch government in exile who controlled the
all-important Dutch East Indies, had put an embargo on Japan, denying it nearly
80% of its oil. And though this empire was rolled back and finally shattered
over the course of the coming years, it does lead me to one last thing I wanted
to talk about. You see, as the Japanese expanded in the Pacific, they denied the
Allies one key war material: rubber. 90% of the world's rubber production came
from the territory overrun by the Japanese. So what did the Allies do? Left
with no alternative, they synthesized rubber. At the beginning of the Second
World War, only 0.4 percent of America's rubber was
synthetic. But by the end, refineries dotted America, and techniques for
synthesizing rubber had been established that underpin how we do it to this day
and even now, with no war or great international crisis, more of the world's
rubber is synthesized than harvested. And this may seem like a small thing, but it
tells us something very important about the Second World War.
if World War I was the first truly industrial war, the first war where mass
production and industrial capacity truly tipped the balance, World War II was the
first scientific war, where things like radar, computing, and the atomic bomb
would help to decide the world's fate. And not least among these scientific
advances were synthetics. Without synthetics, the resource war may have
been lost. And while the creation of synthetic
forms of many natural resources may not get heralded
the way that the radar or the jet engine do, it changed the war and changed the
world economy forever. So if you want to understand policy decisions in World War II, whether they be strategic or scientific, one good place to start is to
follow the resources. I hope some of these episodes got you thinking in a new
way about the Second World War. I know they're not our usual epic story fair,
but we wanted to take this opportunity to talk about tactics, ideas, and policies
that had a huge impact but sometimes get glossed over in the grand scheme of
things. This more or less concludes our discussion of resources in World War II,
but as long as we're talking World War II, we wanted to take a closer look at
the battle of Britain. So we'll see you soon for that.
Well the only mistake I see is that they only used the Communist Chinese flag when the Nationalist Chinese did a shit ton of the fighting.
This makes me want to play Hearts of Iron 4.......everything seems to make me want that game.....
i see a documentary about the war.... i listen to sabaton.... i play war thunder.... i watch world war wednesdays.... a talk that get's political or about history or about ww2...
all lead back to wanting to play HoI4.......:(
This video makes me more hyped for HOI 4 than HOI 4 trailers.