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.