What German Mechanics Found Inside American Tires in Tunisia

Name: What German Mechanics Found Inside American Tires in Tunisia
Uploaded: 2026-10-03T14:07:30+00:00
Duration: 54 min 18 s
Channel: WW2 Dossier

00:00February 23, 1943. A German workshop detachment on the road east of the Kasserine Pass,

00:07in central Tunisia. The battle has moved away. What is left behind is a recovery yard under

00:13camouflage netting, and in it stand American trucks taken in the past week, still carrying

00:18American unit markings, waiting to be made German. This was ordinary work. Every army

00:25reused what it captured, and the Wehrmacht in Tunisia needed wheels more than it needed

00:29almost anything else, because German workshops in Africa were losing more trucks to wear

00:33than to combat. So the vehicles that could be driven away were driven east, and at the

00:39end of that drive, a workshop sergeant walked down the line and made a decision about each

00:43one. Keep it running, strip it for parts, or leave it. In a German workshop in 1943, that

00:52decision began at the wheels. So he did what mechanics in every army did when they wanted

00:57the truth about a tire. He took a knife, and where the knife stopped, a hacksaw, and cut

01:02a wedge clean across the tread, down through the tread rubber, through the breaker, into

01:08the cord. A tire lies to you from the outside. Cut it open, and it cannot. Hold on to what

01:16he expected to find, because everything in this story turns on the gap between what he expected

01:21and what was in his hand. He expected a retread, a new tread cap vulcanized over a worn-out carcass,

01:29which, in a cut, shows up as a line, a scar running parallel to the surface. By 1943, every tire

01:37in

01:37German service that could be retreaded had been, sometimes twice, sometimes more. He expected reclaim,

01:44old rubber, ground up, cooked, and mixed back into the new compound to stretch it. In a cut, reclaim

01:52looks dull and slightly granular, and a fingernail tells you the rest. He expected cotton cord,

01:59because cotton was what Germany had, and he expected the carcass under the tread to be older than the

02:05tread on top of it. He found none of it. The cut face was uniform black from the surface down

02:10to the

02:10cord, one material, all the way through. No scar, no seam, no second life.

02:18The tread was full depth, barely worn, on a truck that had already crossed an ocean and a desert.

02:25The cord was smooth and faintly glassy, and it was not cotton. And when he turned the wedge over in

02:31the heat, the smell was wrong. Natural rubber warmed in the sun has a smell every mechanic in Europe knew

02:38from childhood, from bicycle tubes and hot roads. This had almost none. He was holding a piece of

02:46an American truck tire, and nothing in it had ever come off a tree. A like helps this story reach

02:53the

02:53people who look for it, and subscribing brings you the next one, on the American Army's War of Supply,

02:58and what it cost. Now, a question worth asking before we go further. Why does a cut-open truck tire

03:06deserve your attention for the next hour, when the same war contains tiger tanks and beachheads and men

03:12crossing the Rhine? Of the raw materials that decided the Second World War, three are famous, and one is

03:18not. Everyone knows about oil. Everyone knows about steel. Everyone has heard about the bomb. Almost nobody

03:27talks about rubber. And rubber was the one where the axis had, on paper, already won. Here is the

03:35situation at the start of 1942, and keep these numbers, because we come back to them. Rubber, the natural

03:42kind, grows on a tree. And that tree grows in commercial quantity in one belt of plantations. Malaya,

03:50Sumatra, Sumatra, Java, Borneo, French Indochina. Not in Europe. Not in North America. In the first

04:00weeks of 1942, the Japanese Army walked into that belt and took it. Singapore surrendered in February.

04:07With it went as much as 90% of the raw rubber supply of the United States. Think for a

04:13moment about what

04:14that meant for a country that had just decided to fight a mechanized war on the far side of two

04:19oceans.

04:20A division moved on rubber. Not as an accessory, as a structural component. Every truck, every jeep,

04:29every ambulance, every gun tractor rolled on it. Aircraft landed on it. Tank tracks were cushioned with it.

04:36Fuel lines. Gas masks. Life rafts. Self-sealing fuel tanks. The gaskets in every engine on every ship

04:45in the Atlantic. There was no substitute anywhere in American industry. And the stockpile sitting in

04:52the warehouses was measured against a national appetite that would eat through it in about a year.

04:58That is the position the United States was in when this became a world war.

05:03Not short of rubber. Cut off from it. And in Berlin, this was not a surprise. It was the plan.

05:12The German war economy had been built for years on the assumption that the sea could be closed,

05:17that anything growing in the tropics could be denied to the people who needed it, and that an enemy,

05:23strangled at the source, eventually stops moving. It was a coherent theory. It had worked once,

05:30against Germany itself, in the last war. And the men running the Reich had lived through that hunger

05:36as young officers. They knew what it did to an army. So when that sergeant in Tunisia cut open an

05:42American truck tire, he was holding, without knowing it, the test result of the entire theory.

05:49And the result was wrong. The tire had been built a year after the Japanese took every rubber

05:55plantation in the Pacific, and it had not been rationed, stretched, or patched. It had been

06:01built out of something that did not care about the Pacific at all. He had a word for what he

06:07was

06:07looking at. He had heard that word his whole working life. It was a German word, from a German

06:13laboratory, printed in German newspapers as a triumph of German chemistry years before the war began.

06:21That is the part that took longest to understand, and it is where we go next. How the formula sitting

06:27inside an American tire on a Tunisian road came to be invented in Germany, and who in America had

06:34been holding the license to it since 1929. April 1936

06:39A construction site on the Zala River near the village of Schkopau, south of Halle, in central Germany.

06:46Surveyors are laying out a chemical works next to a lignite field, and what they are laying out is

06:51not a factory in the ordinary sense. It is a bet about the next war. The bet was this. Germany

06:59had

06:59no colonies left, no tropical plantations, and no navy that could keep the Atlantic open. In the last war,

07:06the Royal Navy had closed the sea, and Germany had gone into its final winters cutting up old tires,

07:11running trucks on iron, and losing horses it could not feed. The men in power in 1936 had lived that

07:19as young officers. They had decided it would not happen to them twice. So they would make rubber out

07:25of coal. That autumn, Hitler put it in writing. In a memorandum on the four-year plan, he ordered that

07:32German production of synthetic fuel and synthetic rubber be driven forward on a scale the chemical

07:38industry itself considered reckless, and set a deadline. The German economy was to be fit for war

07:45in four years. Buna, the copolymer that IG Farben chemists had worked out from butadiene and styrene,

07:54was named as a material of state. Here is the part that tells you how serious they were.

08:01German tire makers did not want it. Early Buna was harder to mill, it built heat, and it wore in

08:09ways

08:10the trade hated. At the races, the proving ground everybody watched, German cars on German synthetic

08:17tires were coming in for rubber far sooner than anyone liked. The industry complained. The state,

08:25holding the contracts, told the industry to use it anyway. That is a decision worth pausing on,

08:32because it is the opposite of how the war is usually described. Germany did not stumble into

08:38synthetic rubber when the blockade came. Germany chose an inferior material, on purpose, years early,

08:46and paid for the plants with public money, because the alternative was to be strangled again.

08:52By 1940 that choice looked like foresight. Schopau was running. A second works at Huss in the Ruhr was

09:01coming on. A third was going up at Ludwigshafen. Germany was producing synthetic rubber by the tens

09:08of thousands of tons a year, and it was the only country on earth doing so at that scale.

09:15Now cross the Atlantic, because the same molecule has an American story running in parallel.

09:21And it is stranger than the German one. The United States did not need to invent Buna. The United

09:29States already had the rights to it. In 1929, Standard Oil of New Jersey and IG Farben had made a

09:36bargain

09:37that the men who signed it thought was the deal of the century. Farben handed over control, outside

09:43Germany, of its processes for making fuel from coal and oil. Standard handed over its interest in chemicals.

09:51They pooled patents in a jointly owned company, and the Buna rights for the United States sat inside

09:56that pool. Then the war came, and the pool became a problem because the two partners were now on

10:03opposite sides of it. Late September 1939. Poland has been overrun for three weeks. In The Hague, in neutral

10:12Holland, an American oil executive named Frank Howard sits down with his German counterparts to settle what

10:18happens to the patents now. They work out an arrangement to keep the joint holdings from being seized.

10:25Papers move. Signatures go on. And in America, the practical result was that the recipe stayed in a

10:31drawer. Farben had never wanted Buna licensed to American tire companies in any useful form.

10:38Without full access, American industry had no reason to build. Plantation rubber came off a ship,

10:45at a price no synthetic could touch. And there was a war on somewhere else.

10:50One company went ahead anyway. In June of 1940, B.F. Goodrich and Akron put a synthetic tire in front

10:57of the press. The man behind the chemistry, Waldo Semmon, had spent a decade in a laboratory that had

11:03already given the world vinyl, and he had a rubber substitute that worked. The tire rolled. The tire

11:10was real. Almost nobody ordered it. I want you to sit with that, because it is the whole American

11:18problem in one scene. It was not that the United States could not make synthetic rubber. It was that

11:25nothing in the country's arithmetic—not price, not demand, not the patent situation, not Washington—gave

11:32anyone a reason to make it by the 100,000 tons. Washington did look at the question. In August of

11:401940, a committee recommended a national synthetic rubber program of 100,000 tons a year. It was

11:47studied, argued over, and cut down to a fraction of that. The Reconstruction Finance Corporation's

11:53rubber arm went out and bought natural rubber instead, stockpiling it in warehouses, on the reasoning

12:00that stockpiling was cheap and plants were not. Underneath that decision was an assumption nobody

12:06wrote on the front page. The assumption was that the plantations would hold, that Malaya was British,

12:13that the Indies were Dutch, that the Pacific was a long way from Ohio, and that ships would keep arriving.

12:21Now take the two countries and put them side by side at the end of 1941 and hold the numbers,

12:27because the rest of this story is built on the gap between them.

12:32Germany. Three great synthetic rubber works in operation, output in the tens of thousands of tons,

12:39a decade of state investment behind it, and a war economy already designed around the assumption that

12:45no tropical ship would ever dock again. The United States. The license in a filing cabinet. A handful of

12:53pilot plants. An industry that had proved it could do it, and had no order to.

12:59Total American synthetic rubber production for the year 1941 came to 230 tons.

13:07230 tons. That is a few thousand truck tires. That is not a war program. That is a laboratory.

13:15Eight weeks after that year ended, Japanese troops walked into the rubber belt, and the ships stopped coming.

13:23What happened in Washington in the months after that has been argued about ever since. Because when

13:29Americans went looking for the reason their country had no synthetic rubber industry, the trail led

13:34straight back to a German drawer. And to a company on the New Jersey shore that had been sitting on

13:40the

13:40key. In March of 1942, a senator from Missouri opened hearings on it. And the word being used in that

13:48committee room was not incompetence. It was something closer to treason. The 26th of March, 1942. A committee

13:56room in the Senate office building in Washington. The day before, Standard Oil of New Jersey had signed a

14:02consent decree with the Justice Department over its pre-war arrangements with IG Farben. Now, Thurman

14:09Arnold, the assistant attorney general who had forced that decree, sat down in front of a special

14:14Senate committee investigating the national defense program, chaired by a plain-spoken senator from

14:19Missouri named Harry Truman, and told them why America had no rubber. His answer was that the

14:26country's synthetic rubber industry had been held back by a cartel arrangement with a German company.

14:32Standard's executives came in behind him and denied it, and the argument ran in the newspapers for weeks.

14:38The committee's own conclusion, when it came, was measured and damning. The company had hampered the

14:44development of synthetic rubber in the United States. You can argue that history either way, and

14:50historians still do. What could not be argued, in the spring of 1942, was the arithmetic. So let me give

14:58it to you the way it landed on desks that March, because this is the hole the country was standing

15:03in.

15:04American industry and the American military were going to want, at full stretch, something over 800,000

15:11tons of rubber a year. The plantations that had supplied nine-tenths of it were under Japanese control.

15:19The national stockpile was around 600,000 tons, some of it already committed. Synthetic production for

15:26the whole of the previous year, as I told you, had been 230 tons, which meant the United States had,

15:33at most, about a year of rubber, and no source of more. And here is the cruel part. Building a

15:41synthetic

15:41rubber industry from nothing takes two to three years. Not because of chemistry. Because of steel.

15:48Pipe. Compressors. Cracking towers. Trained crews. And railroads. The gap between what the country had,

15:56and what the country needed, was a gap in time. And there was only one way to buy time. Take

16:02it off the

16:03civilians. The rationing of rubber had, in fact, already begun. On the 5th of January 1942, tires became the

16:12first thing in America to be rationed in that war. Before gasoline, before sugar, before coffee, shoes,

16:19or meat. In every county, a local rationing board of three people, usually unpaid, usually neighbors,

16:26was handed a monthly quota of tires and the power to decide who got them. Doctors, farm trucks,

16:32fire departments. Everyone else went to the back of a line that did not move. Then it got tighter.

16:40Recapping was restricted. Owners were required to sell back any tire beyond five per car.

16:46That December, gasoline rationing went nationwide. And I want you to hear the reason, because it is

16:52not the one most people assume. There was no serious gasoline shortage in the United States

16:58in 1942. Fuel was rationed to keep Americans off the road so the tires already on their cars would last.

17:05A national speed limit of 35 miles an hour was put on for the same reason. And the newspapers called

17:11it

17:11the victory speed. That is how deep the hole was. A country with more oil than anyone on earth

17:18rationed gasoline to save rubber. Then came the attempt everyone remembers. On the 12th of June 1942,

17:28Roosevelt went on the radio and asked the country to bring in scrap rubber — old tires, garden hose,

17:34raincoats, bathing caps, rubber boots, floor mats — to filling stations for a penny a pound.

17:41Over two weeks in June, the country turned out. The pictures from that summer are extraordinary.

17:47Mountains of black rubbish outside gas stations. Children dragging hot water bottles down the street.

17:54The president's own dog reported as giving up his rubber toys. The drive brought in something like

18:01450,000 tons. And now the lesson, which is the reason this episode belongs in our story at all.

18:08Most of it was close to useless. Reclaimed street rubber came back dull and weak,

18:14fit for mats and heels, not for a truck tire carrying five tons over a broken road.

18:20The scrap drive was real, it was moving, and it did not solve the problem. Patriotism cannot be vulcanized.

18:28There was one more idea, and it is the one almost nobody has heard. Rubber does not only come from

18:35the Brazilian tree. It also comes from a gray desert shrub called Guayuli, which grows in Mexico and the

18:42American Southwest. In April of 1942, a Caltech scientist named Robert Emerson got permission to

18:50run a Guayuli laboratory inside a camp at Manzanar in the Owens Valley of California, one of the camps

18:57where the United States had just confined more than 100,000 of its own people of Japanese descent.

19:02Emerson would take the job only on one condition, that his team be drawn from the men and women

19:08behind that fence. So a group of American chemists, botanists, and nurserymen, held as prisoners by

19:14their own country, worked on the rubber problem with improvised equipment and cuttings smuggled in

19:20from a government station. They found ways to germinate seed faster, and to get more rubber out of each

19:25plant. By some accounts, more than twice what the large government project at Salinas was pulling from

19:30the same shrub. It was superb work, and it is worth knowing their names when you next hear the phrase

19:36home front. It was also never going to fill the gap. Shrubs grow on the calendar of shrubs.

19:43By September, the government had run out of ideas that could be argued about.

19:48On the 10th, a committee under Bernard Baruch, with the president of Harvard and the president of MIT

19:53beside him, delivered a report on the rubber situation that read like a verdict. The synthetic

19:59program was necessary and technically sound, and it was being strangled by divided authority.

20:04Put one man in charge of rubber, with full power. The next day, the job went to William Jeffers,

20:11president of the Union Pacific Railroad. Not a chemist. A man who moved freight.

20:17And the thing Jeffers was about to bet the war on was not a laboratory discovery, and not a shrub,

20:23and not the patriotic pile outside the gas station. It was a gas that American refineries had been

20:30treating as waste and burning off into the sky. October 1942

20:36The office of the rubber director in Washington, William Jeffers, has been in the job a matter of

20:40weeks, and he has already started a fight with the United States Army. The fight was about gas. Not

20:47gasoline in a tank. Gas in a pipe. To make the synthetic rubber the program needed, you needed

20:53butadiene. And the cheapest way to get butadiene, in enormous quantity, was to crack it out of the

20:59same refinery streams that fed the production of high-octane aviation fuel. One set of molecules,

21:05two desperate customers. The Army Air Forces wanted fuel for bombers. Jeffers wanted tires for

21:13everything the Army drove. A railroad man with no chemistry told the armed services, repeatedly and

21:19in public, that they could not have all of it. He made enemies fast, including in the War Department.

21:26And inside a year, the argument would cost him the job.

21:30But notice what the argument proves. By late 1942, the bottleneck in American rubber was no longer

21:37knowledge, money, or will. It was allocation. That is a completely different kind of problem,

21:43and it is the kind the United States was built to solve. Now, the decision that made all of it

21:50possible has nothing romantic about it, and it is the single most important thing in this entire story,

21:56so I am going to slow down on it. The companies gave up their recipes.

22:01In December of 1941, the government granted the rubber industry an exemption from antitrust law.

22:08In February of 1942, Goodyear, Goodrich, Firestone, and United States Rubber,

22:14four firms that had spent a generation suing each other over patents, signed an agreement to pool every

22:20scrap of synthetic rubber knowledge they had, with Standard Oil's processes in the pool beside them.

22:26Not sold. Pooled. Their chemists began meeting on a schedule, handing over test data, failures included.

22:34Out of that came a standard formula that the plants simply called the mutual recipe.

22:40Every plant in the country made the same rubber, to the same specification,

22:44by the same process, whoever owned the sign on the gate. Think about what that does. It means a tire

22:52plant

22:52in Akron does not care which state its rubber came from. It means a new plant does not have to

22:58invent

22:58anything. It copies. It means 51 separate construction projects are building the same machine. 51.

23:08That is how many synthetic rubber plants the United States built. Butadiene plants,

23:14styrene plants, copolymer plants, scattered across the Gulf Coast, the Ohio Valley, California,

23:22the Kanawha Valley in West Virginia, where a worksit institute became one of the great producers of the war.

23:28The Reconstruction Finance Corporation put up the money for nearly all of it. Government owned,

23:33company operated. The whole program cost roughly a third of what the atomic bomb cost, and almost nobody

23:40has heard of it. And it was built the way American construction was built that year. Mud, floodlights,

23:46three shifts, crews pulled from farms and shipyards, wives following husbands into boom towns with no housing,

23:54plants rising next to refineries because that was where the feedstock was.

23:59Now here is the part of the story that almost always gets told wrong, and I want you to remember

24:04it,

24:04because it comes back at the end of this film. There was a second route to butadiene,

24:10from alcohol, distilled from grain or from Cuban molasses. It was the farm state's route. Senator Guy

24:19Gillette of Iowa fought for it, the farm lobby pushed it, the oil men called it political pork. And on

24:26cost,

24:26they were right. By 1945, a pound of butadiene from petroleum ran about 10.5 cents. From alcohol,

24:35about 41. But the petroleum route used new cracking processes that were hard to scale,

24:41and they came on slowly. The alcohol plants were simpler, and they came on fast.

24:47So in 1943, the year the whole program had to deliver or fail, the alcohol plants,

24:53a minority of plant capacity and the ones everyone had sneered at, produced the large majority of

24:59America's butadiene. Something over four-fifths of it, the expensive, unfashionable, politically

25:06motivated option carried the year. And the year needed carrying, because 1943 came perilously close to

25:15disaster. Plants finished and would not run right. Copolymer came out off specification. Reactors

25:23fouled. The quotas slipped, and men in Washington did the arithmetic on the stockpile, and found that

25:30the country was still burning through its reserve faster than the new industry was filling it.

25:36In September, Jeffers went back to his railroad, and a chemist, Bradley Dewey, took the director's chair.

25:44Then it turned, not in one dramatic moment, in a thousand corrections made in parallel across 51

25:52plants that were all running the same recipe, so that a fix found in Texas in March was running in

25:57West Virginia in April. Here are the numbers. Hold them. Because in two parts, I'm going to set them

26:04against Germany's. 1941, 230 tons. 1942, 3,721 tons. 1943, 182,000 tons. From 230 tons to 182,000,

26:25in 24 months, in a country that had been told it needed three years and had spent the first of

26:32them

26:32arguing. And that is what was riding under an American truck in Tunisia in February of 1943.

26:39Not a better tire. A tire from an industry that had not existed when the war began, built to a

26:46shared

26:46formula in dozens of places at once, none of which was essential by itself. Now hold that phrase, none of

26:53which was essential by itself, and look at the other side. Germany's synthetic rubber did not come from

27:0051 plants. It came from three. Three enormous, irreplaceable, precisely mapped industrial complexes,

27:09built before the war, when nobody in Berlin imagined that enemy bombers would one day fly over the Ruhr in

27:15daylight in formations of 180. In the spring of 1943, in briefing huts in eastern England, American crews began

27:24to be shown photographs of one of them. The 22nd of June, 1943. Airfields in eastern England,

27:31before dawn. Crews file into briefing huts, the curtain comes off the map, and the ribbon runs east

27:38across the North Sea, across Holland, and into the Ruhr. The target is a chemical works at Hoos,

27:45near Recklinghausen. Most of the men in those huts have never heard of it. What they are told is that

27:51it

27:51makes synthetic rubber, that it makes a lot of it, and that it sits in the most heavily defended airspace

27:56in Germany. This was the first deep daylight penetration into Germany itself by the Eighth

28:02Air Force. Around 180 bombers went, including a handful of the experimental YB-40 gunships.

28:10Fortresses stuffed with extra guns instead of bombs, sent along to protect the formation because no

28:15fighter could yet go that far. One pilot described the trip afterward in language that has not aged at

28:22all. They hit us at the Dutch coast, he said, and it got progressively worse. Then, of the bomb run

28:29itself,

28:30a beautiful 55-second run, the pattern dropped square on the buildings alongside a burning tank

28:36that had exploded. And at the end, quietly, the sentence that tells you what that day cost.

28:42It was a rough mission, and we were beginning to wonder about the invincibility of the Flying Fortress.

28:49Four hundred and twenty-two tons of bombs went down. By the survey made after the war,

28:55eighty-eight and a half tons of that landed inside the plant fence. Sixteen bombers did not come home,

29:02one of them a YB-40, and the men in them are the price attached to the numbers I am

29:08about to give you.

29:08Because the numbers are these. The Hull's works, by itself, made close to three-tenths of Germany's

29:16synthetic rubber. After that morning, it shut down completely for a month. It did not reach full

29:22production again for about half a year. The plant's own figures put the loss at 12,000 tons of Buna.

29:30And here is what 12,000 tons meant. It pulled the entire rubber reserve of the German Reich down to

29:37roughly six weeks of consumption. Six weeks. Stop and think about what a six-week rubber reserve is

29:44for a country fighting on three fronts. It is not a supply. It is a countdown. Every tire on every

29:52truck

29:52in Russia, Italy, and France. Every gas mask. Every aircraft wheel. Every seal in every engine.

30:00Running against six weeks of cushion. Now put the two industries side by side. Because one morning

30:07in June is what makes the difference visible. American synthetic rubber, at that same moment,

30:13was coming out of dozens of plants spread from the Gulf of Mexico to West Virginia to California.

30:19all making the same product to the same recipe. There was no building in America whose destruction

30:25would have stopped it. There was no target. German synthetic rubber came out of three places.

30:32And the Ruhr was seven hours from an English runway. That is the whole argument of this film,

30:38delivered in a single day in the hardest possible form. There is a sting in the tail of it,

30:44and honesty requires it. The 8th Air Force never came back to Hohls in force. Other targets took

30:51priority. Fighters, ball bearings, oil. And by March of 1944, the plant had been repaired and was

30:58producing more than ever. The bombing survey, going through the wreckage of Germany after the war with

31:04the records in hand, concluded that three to five good attacks would have finished Hohls permanently.

31:11The Americans found the artery. They cut it once, and moved on. But Germany had learned what the

31:18attack meant. And the German answer is where this story turns very dark. They could not do what America

31:25had done. They could not scatter 51 plants across the country, because their synthetic rubber was made

31:30from coal and carbide, which meant colossal power demand, which meant siting plants where the electricity

31:37was, which meant building big and building slowly. A dispersed rubber industry was, for Germany,

31:45chemically impossible. So they built another giant, as far east as they could get it from English airfields.

31:52The site had been selected in 1941, on flat land in Upper Silesia, near a small town the Germans called

31:59Auschwitz, next to coal, water, and rail. The man who chose it, Otto Ambrose, was E.G. Farben's synthetic

32:09rubber chief. The same expertise, the same program, the same board. The complex became the largest industrial

32:17site in the world. It drew more electricity than the city of Berlin. The company put more than 700 million

32:24Reichsmarks into it. And it was built with the labor of prisoners, held in a camp attached to the works,

32:31marched out to the construction site, and returned to Auschwitz to be killed when they could no longer work.

32:36Around 25,000 people died in connection with that plant. It never produced synthetic rubber for the war.

32:43Not a ton that reached a German tire. 25,000 dead for a factory that made nothing.

32:50Meanwhile, the shortage was reaching into every street in Germany. By 1944, natural rubber had fallen

32:57to about 2% of German consumption. Tires were being made of nothing but reclaimed material.

33:03In Berlin, taxis ran on steel. In Vienna, post office vans and city buses were fitted with tires of

33:11wood, cork, and felt. And the Reich's plan to close the gap was this. In January of 1943,

33:19Hitler had ordered the construction of cargo submarines, 500 tons of capacity each, to bring raw

33:25rubber from the Far East, with an estimate that if enough were built, Germany might land 20,000 tons a

33:32year. Twenty thousand tons a year. Hold that against what you already know. By 1944, American plants were

33:43turning out more than that every ten days. On the mainland, with no ocean in the way.

33:50So we now know what was in the tire, in the chemical sense. And we know why the Reich could

33:56not match it.

33:57But we have not yet answered the question this film is actually built on. And that was the thing the

34:03German mechanics saw in his hand and could not process. It was not the chemistry. Any chemist in

34:10Germany could have told him what the compound was. It was that the tire was nearly new, on a truck

34:17being

34:17driven hard on a road in Africa. And that the Americans who had been using it were about to do

34:23something with tires that no man raised in the Reich's economy could imagine doing. Something that,

34:29in 100 days in France the following year, would consume 40,000 of them.

34:35The 21st of August 1944. A road junction in Normandy, west of Saint-Lô, where two ordinary

34:43French country roads have just been declared one way and closed to all other traffic. Signs go up.

34:51White on blue, a red ball painted on them. Military policemen take the junctions.

34:57At one of them stands Corporal Charles H. Johnson of the 783rd Military Police Battalion,

35:05waving trucks through. And he will stand at junctions like it, in the rain and the dark,

35:11for the next three months. Behind him, the armies have broken out of the hedgerows

35:16and are running east faster than any plan allowed for. The ports are still back at Cherbourg.

35:22The railways are wrecked. Between the supplies and the war, there is now a gap of 200, then 300,

35:31then 400 miles. And the only thing on earth that can close it is a truck.

35:37The Red Ball Express ran for 82 days. At its peak, around 6,000 vehicles were committed to it,

35:44with roughly 900 rolling at any given moment, day and night. The round trip from the beach dumps to

35:50Chartres took 54 hours. On the 29th of August, it delivered over 12,000 tons in a single day.

35:59By the time it closed down in November, it had moved more than 400,000 tons to 28 divisions.

36:07About three-quarters of the drivers were black American soldiers, men the army had largely refused

36:12to put in combat units and had assigned to service outfits instead, and who now carried the entire

36:18offensive on their backs for three months. Brigadier General Ewert Plank, who ran the operation,

36:25put the standard plainly. Let it never be said that a lack of supplies stopped Patton when the Germans

36:32couldn't. Now watch how they did it, because this is the part a German mechanic would not have believed.

36:40The trucks were governed to 35 miles an hour. Drivers disconnected the governors and ran them up to 60.

36:46The trucks were rated at 2.5 tons. They were loaded with 5, and often with 10. They ran at

36:53night,

36:53without headlights, on roads full of shell splinters, brick, wrecked metal, and torn-up verges.

37:00Crews drove until they could not stay awake, slept beside the wheels, and went again.

37:06And the tires paid for all of it. Here is the figure I promised you two parts ago.

37:12In 82 days, the Red Ball Express consumed 40,000 tires. 40,000. That is not tires damaged in combat.

37:22That is tires destroyed by being used the way the United States Army chose to use them.

37:28Overloaded, over-speeded, and driven flat out because time was worth more than rubber.

37:35I want to be straight with you here, because this is where the easy version of the story gets it

37:39wrong.

37:40It did not run smoothly. The shortage of tires and spare parts became one of the operation's worst

37:46problems. Thousands of vehicles went out of service. Maintenance could not keep up.

37:52Trucks were left standing on the verge because there were not enough wreckers to drag them in,

37:56and were stripped where they stood. So yes, the American Army ran short of tires in France in 1944.

38:05But look closely at what kind of shortage it was, because the difference between the two armies is

38:11sitting in that distinction.

38:13The American shortage was a problem of shipping and distribution. The rubber existed, in quantity,

38:19in plants in Texas and West Virginia, and in tire factories in Akron. And the difficulty was getting

38:26it across an ocean and up a road faster than young men could wear it out. It was a problem

38:31of logistics

38:32inside abundance.

38:34The German shortage was a problem of chemistry and geography. No amount of transport would fix it,

38:41because the rubber did not exist to be moved. And that is why, in the same season, the two armies

38:48looked like different centuries. On the American side, over 40 million heavy-duty truck tires produced

38:54during the war. An army that treated rubber as a consumable, like fuel, like ammunition. And an offensive

39:01whose speed was limited by how fast trucks could be reloaded. On the German side, in that same autumn,

39:08an infantry division of the 1944 pattern had, on its strength, something like 4,600 horses and 1,400

39:16horse-drawn vehicles, against roughly 600 motor vehicles. Across the whole war, the German army used

39:23around two and three-quarter million horses. The great majority of German military transport was pulled

39:29by animals, and the men leading those animals were retreating from men who were burning out 40,000

39:35tires in 82 days. Now, one correction, and it matters because I want you to have the accurate version

39:42rather than the clean one. That American tire in Tunisia, and most heavy truck tires the United States

39:48built, were not pure synthetic. Synthetic rubber of that generation was not a perfect substitute.

39:53It built heat, and it lacked the tack and the plasticity that a big load-carrying carcass needed.

40:00So heavy truck tires and aircraft tires were compounded as blends, with natural rubber still

40:06in them. Which is exactly why the natural rubber stockpile, and every ton that could still be bought

40:11out of Brazil and Liberia, stayed precious to the very end of the war. Which makes the American position

40:18stronger, not weaker, and here is why. The United States did not replace natural rubber. The United

40:25States removed natural rubber as a limit. It kept what it had for the jobs that truly needed it,

40:31and it manufactured the rest, hundreds of thousands of tons of the rest, so that the question of how much

40:38the army could drive was no longer answered by a plantation on the other side of the world.

40:44Germany, in 1944, was down to about 2% natural rubber in everything it made. Not by choice,

40:51because there was nothing else. So we have the chemistry, the plants, the bombing, and the consumption.

40:59What we do not yet have is the thing the man in the Tunisian workshop was really holding.

41:04And it is not a material at all. To get to it, we have to go back to that wedge

41:09of tire in his hand,

41:11look at the cord, the tread, and the compound one more time, and then look at the name of the

41:16company

41:16that had owned the patent rights to that compound in the United States since 1929. Because the joke,

41:23if you can call it that, is that the answer to the German mechanics question had been filed in German,

41:29by Germans, before he ever picked up a knife. Go back to the workshop yard in Tunisia, and put the

41:35wedge of tire back in the sergeant's hand. We now know enough to read it with him, layer by layer.

41:44The Tread Compound

41:46What he was looking at, in all probability, was GRS, Government Rubber Styrene, the standard

41:55product of the American program, a copolymer of butadiene and styrene, stiffened and toughened

42:02with carbon black. If that description sounds familiar, it should. It is the same family of

42:08material as Buna-S, out of the same chemistry, which Germany had been making at Schkopau since before

42:15the war. The cord underneath. Not cotton. On the tires taking the heaviest punishment,

42:23American plants were moving to high-tenacity rayon, a man-made cord that runs cooler and holds

42:29together under loads that cotton gives up on. And the carcass. Full depth, no retread seam, no reclaim,

42:38and, as we established last time, most likely a blend, with a share of natural rubber still in it,

42:44because a heavy truck tire of that generation needed some. That is the physical answer to the

42:50question in the title. Now the real one. The formula was German. The rights to it in the United States

42:57had been sitting since 1929 inside the patent pool Standard Oil of New Jersey had set up with E.G.

43:03Farben. That is not a rumor. It was the subject of a consent decree signed in Washington in March of

43:101942, and of a Senate committee that concluded the arrangement had held back the development of

43:16synthetic rubber in America. So when a German mechanic cut open an American tire in 1943,

43:22he was looking at German chemistry, licensed to an American oil company before Hitler took power,

43:28sat on for a decade, and then, when the country's back was against the wall, pooled among four rival

43:35corporations, standardized into a single recipe, and built into 51 plants in about two years.

43:42Germany invented it. America industrialized it. Those are two entirely different achievements,

43:49and only one of them wins a war.

43:52Now, the three things that wedge of rubber actually told anybody who could read it.

43:57This is the heart of the film, so take them one at a time. First, nothing about it required a

44:04tree,

44:05which meant the lever the axis had been pulling since 1939 – cut the sea lanes, take the plantations,

44:12strangle the enemy at the source – had stopped being connected to anything. The rubber belt of Southeast

44:18Asia was still Japanese. It no longer mattered the way it was supposed to matter. Second, it came out of

44:25oil. That is not a detail, it is the whole geometry of the thing. Coal and carbide rubber, the German

44:32route, demanded gigantic power supplies, which forced gigantic plants, which could be photographed,

44:39mapped, and bombed. And one of them was, on a single morning in June 1943, which put the entire Reich

44:46six weeks from empty. Petroleum rubber could be made in modest plants anywhere a refinery already

44:53stood. The American industry had no heart to cut out. Third, and this is the one that had him standing

45:00in a yard in North Africa staring at his own hand, the tire was nearly new, and the men who

45:06had been

45:06using it had not been nursing it. In the army he was fighting, rubber was capital, guarded and retreaded

45:13and stretched until it failed. In the army that made this tire, rubber was ammunition. You spent it.

45:22Put the two national ledgers side by side, and it stops being an argument. Germany's synthetic rubber

45:28output peaked around 117,000 tons in 1943, and then held on under bombing while natural rubber fell to

45:36about two percent of consumption, with the Reich's hopes pinned on cargo submarines that might, if

45:42everything went right, bring 20,000 tons a year around the Cape of Good Hope. The United States went from

45:49230 tons in 1941 to 3,700 in 1942, 182,000 in 1943, and something around 770,000 tons in

46:031944,

46:05running at over a million a year by the end. More than 40 million heavy-duty truck tires came out

46:12of

46:12that industry during the war. The entire program cost about a third of what the atomic bomb cost,

46:18and it was carried, in its worst year, by the alcohol plants the experts had called a political

46:24favor to farmers. Which brings us to the largest consequence of all, and I would like you to hold

46:30it against everything you know about why the Pacific War started. In December of 1941, Japan went south

46:38for oil, tin, and rubber. The rubber belt was one of the prizes the entire strategy was built to seize,

46:46and Japan seized it, completely, in about 90 days. It was a triumph of planning, and it worked exactly

46:54as designed. And within 30 months, it was worth almost nothing, because the country it was meant

47:00to cripple had stopped needing plantations. American factories in Texas, Louisiana, West Virginia,

47:07and California had made the conquest economically irrelevant while the conquest was still being

47:13celebrated. That is what German mechanics found when they cut open American tires. Not a better

47:20compound. Not a secret. They found the proof, in cross-section, that a war could no longer be won

47:27by controlling the places where things grow. Only by out-building the man on the other side of the

47:34hill. And the country they were fighting had just demonstrated that it could conjure an entire

47:39strategic material from nothing in 24 months while simultaneously fighting on two oceans. You can see

47:47why nobody wrote that up as a triumph. There was nothing in that tire to copy. There was only a

47:53verdict.

47:55There is one more thing to tell you, and it is the part that has stayed with me longest in

47:59putting

48:00this together. It concerns what happened afterward, to the 51 plants, to the American scientists who

48:06worked the rubber problem from inside a camp their own government had put them in, to the drivers who

48:12burned out 40,000 tires in 82 days, and to the man who chose a site in Silesia for a

48:19factory that killed

48:2025,000 people and never made a kilogram of rubber. Because he was tried and convicted, and he did not

48:28stay in prison long. And what he did for a living in the 1950s is the strangest footnote in this

48:35entire

48:36story. He was tried at Nuremberg, not in the famous trial, in the one that followed, in 1947 and 48,

48:43when the United States put 23 directors of IG Farben in the dock. Otto Ambrose, who had picked

48:50the site in Silesia, was convicted of slavery and mass murder and sentenced to eight years.

48:56He served a part of it. He was released in 1951, went back to West German industry, sat on boards,

49:03advised companies for good money for decades, and died in 1990 at the age of 89.

49:10The factory he built never produced rubber. The plants he had helped design before the war did,

49:16and some of them are chemical works to this day. Now the American ledger, which is where this ends.

49:23The 51 plants were owned by the government, and after the war the government sold them,

49:28to the companies that had been running them, under a Disposal Act passed in 1953.

49:33They did not close. They improved. The wartime process was refined into what the trade called

49:40cold rubber. And within a few years, most of the tires on most American cars were made of a material

49:46that, in 1940, almost nobody in the country had wanted to buy. If you learned to drive in the 1950s

49:54or 60s, you learned on this. Your father's car sat on the emergency of 1942. At Manzanar,

50:02the Gwaiuli Laboratory was shut down as the camps closed, and the men and women who had run it went

50:07out through the gate into a country that had locked them up and needed apologizing to. Robert Emerson

50:13went back to science. His team scattered into ordinary American working lives. Frank Hirosawa,

50:20one of the chemists behind that wire, spent much of his later career in Los Angeles on the problem of

50:25smog, working, in the end, on the air of the city that had watched his neighbors be taken away.

50:32The Red Ball drivers went home to a segregated country, mostly without medals, largely without

50:38notice. It took decades for the army's own histories to say plainly what those three months had been.

50:44Their trucks had carried 28 divisions across France, and the paperwork for it is a list of

50:49tonnages and tire consumption. And the man in the yard in Tunisia. We do not know his name. We know

50:57what happened to his war. Eleven weeks after that February morning, on the 13th of May, 1943,

51:05the Axis forces in Tunisia surrendered. Around a quarter of a million men. One of the largest

51:11capitulations of the war. Every vehicle, in every workshop yard from Tunis to Cape Bonn,

51:18changed hands. Whatever he had kept running, he lost. Whatever he had cut apart to learn from,

51:25he left in the sand. What he had learned, he had no way to act on. And this is the

51:32quiet tragedy of

51:33technical intelligence. A mechanic can hold the evidence of an entire industrial defeat in his

51:39hand, and be able to do nothing about it except file a report and go back to work.

51:44So let me answer the question we started with, as plainly as I can. When German mechanics cut open

51:50American tires, they found rubber that had never been near a tree, laid over cord that had never been

51:57near a cotton field, on a truck whose owners had shown no intention of making it last. They found

52:04the invention of German chemists, being made in quantities no German had ever been allowed to

52:10imagine, by a country that had solved the problem in 24 months after ignoring it for 10 years. And they

52:19found, if they were honest with themselves, the end of an idea. The idea that you can win by seizing

52:26the

52:26place where something grows. But the tire itself is not what stays with me. What stays with me is the

52:33ordinary nature of the people it took. Chemists in Akron and Baton Rouge who handed over formulas they had

52:40spent careers protecting because a committee asked them to. Distillery crews in the farm states, running a

52:46process everyone mocked, who carried the worst year of the program on their backs. Scientists behind

52:53barbed wire in the Owens Valley, working for a country that had taken their homes. Construction crews

53:00standing in the mud of the Kanawha Valley in the winter of 43. And a black corporal at a crossroads

53:07in

53:08Normandy in the rain, waving trucks through one after another for 82 days. That is what a German mechanic

53:17was actually holding in cross-section in a wedge of American tire. Not a compound, a country that had

53:26decided what it was going to do and then went and did it at a scale nobody on the other

53:32side had budgeted for.

53:36Thank you for staying with me through this one. If it was worth your time, a like genuinely helps. It

53:42is

53:42what pushes a story like this in front of the people who want it, instead of leaving it buried. Subscribe

53:48and turn on the bell if you'd like the next one when it comes. We go looking for these details

53:52in unit

53:53histories, after-action reports, and bombing surveys. And there are plenty more of them. And tell me in the

53:59comments where you're watching from. I'd also like to hear it if your father, grandfather, or uncle

54:04served in the Second World War. The name and the unit he served with, if you know it. A lot

54:10of what

54:11the American soldier did in that war was ordinary work, done well, and it is worth putting those names

54:16down where people can read them.

What German Mechanics Found Inside American Tires in Tunisia

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