To Have and Have Not: Southeast Asian Raw Materials and the Origins of the Pacific War

by Jonathan Marshall

Jonathan Marshall makes a provocative it was not ideological or national security considerations that led the United States into war with Japan in 1941. Instead, he argues, it was a struggle for access to Southeast Asia's vast storehouse of commodities—rubber, oil, and tin—that drew the U.S. into the conflict. Boldly departing from conventional wisdom, Marshall reexamines the political landscape of the time and recreates the mounting tension and fear that gripped U.S. officials in the months before the war.

Unusual in its extensive use of previously ignored documents and studies, this work records the dilemmas of the Roosevelt it initially hoped to avoid conflict with Japan and, after many diplomatic overtures, it came to see war as inevitable. Marshall also explores the ways that international conflicts often stem from rivalries over land, food, energy, and industry. His insights into "resource war," the competition for essential commodities, will shed new light on U.S. involvement in other conflicts—notably in Vietnam and the Persian Gulf.

Genres: World War II, History

296 pages, Hardcover

First published January 20, 1995

Reviews

[Tommy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Claims the Pacific war was really about defence of raw materials which were considered strategic (i.e. those which modern life would be totally disorganized without) and critical (i.e. those which would present serious but not insurmountable difficulties if unavailable) in South East Asia. Any ideological passion over China was just background noise. There was a fear amongst policy experts that cutting off access to those foreign markets would lead to the necessity of planning of distribution of scarce resources and the total breakdown of any liberal order. Also claims FDR's oil embargo on Japan was more forced on him by popular opposition to exporting oil to Japan when oil prices were going up on the East Coast.
On the Council on Foreign Relations:
The truest measure of the council's astonishing influence was not felt until the fall of 1939. Within days of the German blitzkrieg through Poland, Foreign Affairs editor Hamilton Fish Armstrong and the CFR's executive director, Walter Mallory, visited the State Department with a bold proposition: In view of the department's inadequate resources and overworked staff, the council would undertake to begin postwar planning for it. Secretary Hull, buried in work from the European crisis, accepted with alacrity. He appointed a State Department group to coordinate the secret effort, including council members Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles, Assistant Secretary George Messersmith, special assistant Leo Pasvolsky, economic adviser Herbert Feis, political adviser Stanley Hornbeck, and Jay Pierrepont Moffat, chief of the Division of European Affairs. Welles chaired the committee. The council, for its part, quickly lined up the first of many grants from the Rockefeller Foundation to fund its work. The first organizing meeting was held at Messersmith's home in Washington on December 8, 1939.
In the six years of the program's existence, the CFR produced a total of 682 studies of "American Interests in the War and Peace" for the State Department and White House. The participants had the time, resources, and independence to step back from day-to-day crises and think conceptually about those interests. Their findings thus carried particular weight. Walter Mallory, a China expert and active participant in the study groups, commented when it was all over, "This project, I believe, represented a new departure in the history of our Government. It marked the first time, so far as I know, in which the services of private individuals, through a private organization, were put at the disposal of the Government systematically and which had a direct and continuing impact on the formulation of policy." Mallory was not simply patting his colleagues on the back. Hull, too, praised the council's contribution in glowing terms.
At the heart of the council's work in 1940 and 1941 was a lengthy and continuing analysis of the implications for the United States of the "division of the world into two great political and economic entities, each almost wholly self-sufficient with a bare minimum of trade between the two giant political and economic blocs." Under what conditions could the United States survive the rapid absorption of the globe into the closed, autarkic trading blocs of Germany, Japan, and possibly the Soviet Union? As one participant put it, the question was how much "elbow room" the U.S. economy needed "in order to survive without major readjustments."
The council's extensive study of trade flows came to one conclusion: The United States could not live bottled up in the Western Hemisphere alone. "A longer-run maintenance of power by the Western Hemisphere or, more specifically, the United States, certainly requires the preservation of the Pacific area and the countries of the Far East," one major analysis of trading blocs concluded in 1941. Council groups coined a term for the "living space" needed by the United States: the "Grand Area." They defined it as "the amount of the world the United States can defend most economically, that is, with the least readjustment of the American economy." It included Great Britain, the Western Hemisphere, and Southeast Asia. The latter region was deemed "more complementary with the United States . . . than any other important area of the world." Study after study documented the vulnerability of the U.S. economy to raw material embargoes from that region.
Any shrinkage of U.S. access to the Grand Area would powerfully threaten national interests, council studies asserted: "To maintain a maximum defense effort, the United States must avoid economic readjustment caused by constriction of the trading area. . . . What such constriction might mean in weakening the defense economy can best be seen by imagining the strain on American supplies of labor, materials and industrial capacity of the attempt to manufacture substitutes for or to do without rubber, tin, jute, and numerous vegetable oils, instead of importing these products from southeastern Asia." To this end, the study groups concluded, "it was essential . . . to keep Japan from dominating Southeastern Asia." Should Japan succeed in its aims there, "the position of the free world would then be fraught with greatest danger," and "the United States would be hemmed in, economically as well as militarily, by a unified totalitarian world."