McNair Paper Number 50, Chapter 11, August 1996

People were not the only shortage; there were numerous other scarcities that hampered the production and war effort.

The production process requires raw materials. Although the United States was rich in minerals, the amount being produced in 1940 was a fraction of what was needed, and some raw materials were not available at all, rubber being an example. (Note 1) When the war with Japan began, the United States was virtually cut off from essential natural rubber supplies. A whole new synthetic rubber industry was created from the ground up to help the war effort. First, the government created a synthetic rubber industry. Second, output from rubber producing areas still accessible to the United States was maximized. Third, the government eliminated rubber consumption of nonessential items and curtailed consumption on permitted items. Fourth, conservation measures were taken such as gasoline rationing primarily designed to conserve rubber, and tire rationing to conserve material for the military. Fifth, reclaimed rubber production was expanded. (Note 2) When the United States declared war, the entire rubber stockpile in the United States was 540,000 tons. The United States consumed about 500,000 tons per year in its civilian economy. Rubber had to be conserved until the synthetic rubber plants could be built, and rubber was elevated to a highest priority. In 1943, the new plants produced 234,000 tons; in the final year of the war, more than 800,000 tons were produced. (Note 3)

Another underproduced priority raw material was aluminum, needed especially for aircraft. In 1938 there was only a single United States producer of primary aluminum. This one producer was also the major aluminum fabricator, operating four bauxite reduction plants with an annual capacity of 300 million pounds. Secondary recovery produced only 100,000 pounds. When the wartime expansion program was completed, the country produced 2.3 billion pounds and secondary recovery had increased six fold. As a result of this government-financed construction, at the end of the war 42 percent of the world's aluminum manufacturing capacity was concentrated in the United States. (Note 4)

Copper was also a major raw material problem and it became a true bottleneck. By the beginning of 1942, copper was a most critical need. Bullets and artillery shells were the biggest requirement, but there were many other items, including wire, that demanded copper. Strenuous efforts were made to expand the mining, smelting and refining facilities, and miners especially had to be induced to work in copper mines. Gold mining was virtually stopped to encourage miners to seek employment where they were needed. The Army even released 2,800 copper miners from active duty in 1942 to help. The government formed a Metals Reserve Company to buy up ore from neutral countries, and the Combined Raw Materials Board worked to allocate copper between the United States and the United Kingdom. Substitutes for copper were tried and employed whenever a replacement was feasible (aluminum wiring and fuses, zinc pennies, etc). (Note 5)

In some cases, the government did not turn to increased construction, but rather to conservation and better management. Electricity was a prime example. Aluminum and magnesium manufacture and the Manhattan Project demanded vast increases in electricity. The demand for electricity in the country went from 16.3 billion kilowatt hours in 1939 to 279.5 billion in 1944. In the same period, generating capacity of the country's power plants was allowed to increase only 26 percent, from 49,400,000 to 62,000,000 kilowatt hours. Yet at no time during the war was it necessary to curtail power consumption because of insufficient supply. The United States ended the war with its lights burning and every machine fully powered and with power to spare. The War Production Board decided that workers skilled enough to build generating plants were needed elsewhere building munitions plants or munitions. In 1942, construction on all but the most critically urgent plants was stopped. By then all of the country's power systems--private, municipal, county, state, and federal--were essentially assembled into great operating pools. Power was allocated where it was needed by whatever power company, private or public, was most efficiently positioned to supply it. Federal regulations were waived; normal rules of competition were bent or eliminated; and integrated operating pools did the job without wasting time and money on unnecessary construction. (Note 6)