The Tango War

by Mary Jo McConahay

  3.

  WHITE GOLD, THE STORY OF THE RUBBER SOLDIERS

  The year is 1943. Deep in the Amazon jungle, a tapper makes a diagonal cut in the trunk of a rubber tree in the predawn darkness, when its sap flows most freely. During the day the milky latex travels down a ladder of older cuts to the base of the tree where it drips into a tin cup. Clean leaves have been placed on the forest floor to catch any precious bead that jumps from bark or cup.

  In the green light of late afternoon, the tapper collects the milk in a bucket and carries it to a field station where it’s shaped into oblongs and smoked over a fire of palm nuts until hard. Then, along with other tappers, he carries the rounded blocks on his back to a dock where they are loaded aboard a steamer that heads at top speed down the longest river in the world. The river widens to meet the rough Atlantic.

  There in quick succession a German U-boat sinks the steamer, and a U.S. Navy ship dispatches the sub. The U.S. crew rescues survivors and pays fishermen to salvage the blocks. Officers secure the rubber onto another ship to continue its journey to the United States. Crewmen receive citations for their quick thinking, for salvaging a strategic material absolutely fundamental to winning the war.

  More than fifty years later, on assignment in the Amazon, I trekked with rubber tappers in the stretch of jungle where they worked, rising in the chill before dawn, following a lantern beam along mushy trails to one Hevea brasiliensis tree after another. Diffuse light arrived with the morning, and the songs of presumably resplendent birds sounded deep in the canopy. The tappers, called seringueiros, made the same kind of artful cuts in the bark that their predecessors had made during the war. The process seemed timeless. Yet between 1942 and 1945, the fathers of some of these seringueiros worked under conditions of extreme urgency to produce rubber for the Allies.

  The war ran on rubber, indispensable to manufacturing millions of tires for jeeps and trucks, to making gliders and PT boats. Some battleships required as many as twenty thousand rubber parts. Rubber went into thousands of items that meant life or death in the field. Tanks and airplanes needed gaskets, belts, hoses. Rubber was essential to lifeboats and oxygen masks, cameras, radar equipment, surgical gloves, cable wires.

  There is probably no other inert substance which so excites the mind.

  —CHARLES GOODYEAR, INVENTOR, 1838

  More than a thousand years before Christ, the Mexican Gulf Coast civilization called the Olmecs—their name means “the Rubber People”—developed a sacred ball game that reenacted a contest between heroes and the lords of darkness at the beginning of the world. The Olmecs’ daughter cultures, complex pre-Columbian societies such as the Maya and the Aztec, repeated the game for another thousand years in long, stone courts—their remnants can be seen today at sites from Arizona to Nicaragua. At the center of the ritual was the heavy, solid ball of rubber, made from the jungle tree whose milky fluid represented life forces—semen, blood.

  Over the centuries, Europeans used latex from the Americas to waterproof shoes and stockings; but the substance they first called caoutchouc remained mostly a curiosity. In 1770, the British inventor Edward Nairne discovered that a lump of caoutchouc could rub away unwanted pencil marks, and he began to sell “rubber” erasers. Other inventors used rubber to make life preservers, bottles, mailbags, and raincoats. But the products went brittle in the cold and became sticky in the summer heat, when they did not melt down altogether into shapeless lumps.

  In 1834, a would-be inventor named Charles Goodyear, just out of debtor’s prison, was passing the New York outlet of a rubber products company when a life preserver in the window caught his eye. Believing he could improve its valve, Goodyear bought the preserver and developed his own version of a valve to inflate it. He took the invention back to show the store manager. Forget it, said the manager, the company wasn’t in the market for valves, it might go out of business altogether. He showed Goodyear a pile of goods that had melted into a smelly glob. Rubber products just couldn’t withstand extreme temperatures.

  Goodyear began experimenting systematically and obsessively, often without a steady income, oblivious to his growing reputation as a madman. Eventually he developed a process that used heat to combine rubber with sulfur, hardening the rubber yet maintaining its elasticity. He patented the process in 1844, calling it “vulcanizing” after Vulcan, the Roman god of fire. Vulcanizing made rubber strong in all weather. Charles Goodyear was the object of adulation and accolades, but he did not have the business acumen to earn a living from his discovery. He was also afflicted by bad luck. He tried but failed to establish factories. Others infringed on his patent and he spent years in court fighting usurpers. He never made enough money to keep his family out of debt.

  Nevertheless, vulcanized rubber was an invention whose time had come. A few years after Goodyear died, European and American inventors developed the internal combustion engine, and in 1886 two Germans, Karl Friedrich Benz and Gottlieb Daimler, patented the first motorcars. The stage was set for the world to roll into the twentieth century on tires of vulcanized rubber. Soon rubber cured by Goodyear’s process would become a key strategic material in war.

  God created war so Americans would learn geography.

  —ATTRIBUTED TO MARK TWAIN

  In the 1930s the U.S. Rubber Manufacturers Association and the financier Bernard Baruch, confidant of presidents, advised Roosevelt to stockpile rubber in the event of war. U.S. generals and admirals had begun to worry about hostile Japanese action in Asia as early as 1931, when Japan invaded Manchuria. Washington bartered surplus cotton for some British supplies, but stocks did not increase sufficiently to satisfy even growing U.S. domestic consumption—some thirty million cars were on the road. In case of war, Washington would not have enough rubber for both military and civilian needs.

  Artificial rubber was not an answer for the United States and Britain. In 1940, only 1.2 percent of U.S. rubber was man-made, and the British had had little motivation to concoct the artificial product because their Asian colonies had produced a glut of natural rubber after World War I. Other countries were far more advanced. Russia began developing synthetic rubber using ethyl alcohol and petroleum after the October Revolution in 1917 to reduce dependency on the British and Dutch monopoly on world supplies. By 1940, the Soviet Union had the world’s largest synthetic rubber industry. But Germany was catching up fast.

  Without rubber-producing colonies abroad, Germany had deep incentives after World War I to develop the synthetic product. Prices for natural rubber fluctuated wildly, an unstable market for which neither government nor industry could plan. Utilities supervisors were reduced to insulating power and phone lines with tarred paper, for lack of rubber. In 1935, scientists at IG Farben began mass-producing the synthetic Buna-N, now known as NBR. By the end of the decade, the Reich was manufacturing seventy thousand tons of synthetic rubber a year, the United States a mere eight thousand.

  Three months after Pearl Harbor, catastrophe hit the Allies’ natural rubber pipeline. In February 1942, the Japanese occupied British Malaya, then moved on to the Dutch East Indies. At a stroke, the United States lost access to 90 percent of its global supply. The British retained some production in India and still held on to Ceylon, although the Japanese were advancing on the island. The total amount of rubber remaining to countries fighting the Axis—from South America, Mexico, and Africa—amounted to the equivalent of no more than two weeks of U.S. prewar consumption.

  Where to get more?

  The United States Department of Agriculture researchers found favorable areas of Latin America to grow Hevea brasiliensis, the most productive tree. Department operatives brought in seeds, established nurseries, worked with private landowners and on government properties in Costa Rica, Panama, and Guatemala. They distributed booklets with photos that showed step by step how to start a rubber plantation, the depth to which seeds should be planted, the distance between plants, at what height to graft and transplant. In Guatemala, where the biggest pl
antation in the region is still known as “Uncle Sam,” the campaign gave life to a national rubber industry.

  But Hevea brasiliensis, commonly called the Pará rubber tree, or just “rubber tree,” takes five to seven years to grow. A shortage in the interim was certain to threaten Allied military success.

  In September 1942, Bernard Baruch, as head of Roosevelt’s Rubber Survey Committee, issued a report advocating the “urgent” acceleration of efforts to produce synthetic rubber, establishing more than fifty programs in various parts of the country. But that option would take time, too. Besides, synthetic rubber alone would never solve the crisis: the most promising processes required petroleum, itself a precious wartime commodity, and key items like tires required at least some wild rubber.

  Baruch’s committee recommended immediate measures to save tires (no new tires at all were manufactured during most of 1942): recapping, reducing the speed limit to thirty-five miles per hour, limiting annual use to five thousand miles per vehicle. “Carpooling” was encouraged, enabling passengers to comply with rationing, save money, and feel patriotic all at the same time. “When You Ride Alone You Ride With Hitler!” advised a government poster. In Britain the national Tyre Control authority instituted strong conservation measures and an efficient distribution system. A continued shortage in the United States, however, would have decisive effects on waging the war, according to Baruch’s report. Left unresolved, the U.S. rubber crisis could lead to Allied defeat.

  As factories converted to military production, the government asked citizens to turn in whatever they could spare for recycling: used tires, garden hoses, old raincoats. An illustrated poster indicated how much rubber was required for a gas mask (1.11 pounds), a life raft (17 to 100 pounds), a “scout car” (306 pounds), and a heavy bomber (1,825 pounds). Despite restrictions, scrap drives, and efforts to raise awareness about thrift, however, planners foresaw a fearsome shortfall represented in hard numbers: by 1944 the army alone would need 842,000 tons of rubber, but only about 631,000 would be available.

  When Japan cut off Asian supplies, Washington determined that the most likely place within U.S. reach to find an immediate and stable rubber supply was the Amazon. Of eight South American countries that shared the basin of the great river and its high tributaries, only Brazil could provide wild rubber in required amounts—60 percent of the Amazon region lay within its borders.

  But convincing Brazil that its jungles should be mined for the Allied cause would not be easy. In 1934, Germany had become Brazil’s biggest trading partner, largely because of its purchase of coffee and cacao, and by the end of the decade German and Japanese demands for rubber were beginning to revive the dormant Brazilian industry. Rio was reluctant to harm its excellent market relations with the Reich. When the war began in 1939, Rio declared its neutrality; but squeezed by Washington, it stopped selling rubber to the Axis in 1940. Nevertheless, President Getúlio Vargas presided over a fascist-like state, and he was determined to take an independent political stand before the United States, the colossus of the north.

  * * *

  Short, portly, and vain, but affable and charismatic too, Vargas had run Brazil since 1930 with a combination of populism and an iron hand. He was an autocrat on the model of his contemporaries António Salazar of Portugal or Mussolini in Italy. In 1937, Vargas dissolved state legislatures and put a padlock on Parliament, shutting out lawmakers and ruling by decree. The Brazilian president was acutely aware of Washington’s tradition of gunboat diplomacy, obstructing or overturning governments it didn’t like, sometimes sending in the military to support U.S. business. Notwithstanding “Good Neighbor” promises, Vargas would not look good to other Latin leaders or segments of his own population if he seemed to bend to U.S. desires, especially for such a valuable commodity as rubber.

  In Washington, however, military commanders had long been considering an invasion of northeast Brazil to establish a base for ships and planes in time of war, whether Vargas agreed or not. As early as 1938, the U.S. Department of War charged a joint commission with determining from what points an attack on the United States might come. The answers: South America, and the Panama Canal. U.S. planners established the southern limit of the nation’s defense perimeter not on the U.S. border but on the hump of Brazil, the country with half of South America’s territory and half its population. By 1939, protecting the bulge of Brazil against Axis aggression became the keystone of American military plans for defending the Atlantic front.

  The hump of northeastern Brazil bulges like a gigantic fist into the Atlantic. Its outermost edge lies only eighteen hundred miles from West Africa, less than the distance between Los Angeles and Chicago. In 1939, concerned about Japanese belligerence in China and desiring an additional route to Asia besides the Pacific, the U.S. joint military command proposed establishing U.S. bases in northeast Brazil. The fist was an ideal staging ground for forces heading to French West Africa and the Far East beyond.

  The U.S. timeline for enacting its plan became more pressing in June 1940 when Paris fell to the Nazis and French colonies in West Africa came under control of the collaborationist Vichy government. The Reich had established a virtual beachhead only a few hours’ flight time from Brazil’s northeast region, which was poor, ignored by politicians, and virtually unprotected. A May 1941 U.S. Army report read, “Assumption: That immediate and vigorous preparations are being made to extend Axis political, economic and military power to South America.”

  Most of Vargas’s army was deployed to the extreme south of the country where it could keep an eye on Argentina, its southern neighbor; Rio suspected Argentine designs on Brazilian territory. The military also wanted to keep an eye on the million Germans in southern Brazil, whose loyalty it questioned. The northeast was an afterthought.

  But not to the U.S. high command. Roosevelt ordered a contingency plan for speeding one hundred thousand U.S. troops to line the Brazilian coast from Belém to Rio de Janeiro. The Brazilians objected. Their own soldiers could defend the nation should the need arise. Nevertheless, immediately after Pearl Harbor, the U.S. military produced the “Joint Basic Plan for the Occupation of Northern Brazil [Joint], Serial 737 of 21 December 1941,” calling for an amphibious landing to take key cities and ports. At the same time, the plan would secure the gateway region to the Amazon.

  An armed confrontation appeared imminent. The secret operation’s nickname: Plan Rubber.

  * * *

  Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles, the tireless and golden-tongued diplomat, convinced President Vargas to allow 150 U.S. Marines disguised as airplane mechanics onto facilities at Belém, Natal, and Recife. The Marines had orders to guarantee the safety and security of the airfields and transiting U.S. aircraft but to keep in mind that they were present by invitation. Vargas was still insisting on a neutral Brazil.

  Yet even this apparently small concession to the Americans sparked fears of a counterblast against Vargas from Nazi sympathizers. If he fell, the Allies’ situation would be even worse. In Washington, commanders pushed to execute Plan Rubber and invade Brazil’s northeast. But Roosevelt resisted in favor of delicate diplomacy.

  Meanwhile, the wily Vargas made his assessments and finally bet that the Allies would win the war. Brazil dropped its “neutrality” in January 1942, a move just short of declaring war. Fascist-leaning but pragmatic, and not an ideologue, Vargas envisioned an important postwar role in the world for Brazil if he cooperated with the Allies. He signed a landmark agreement called the Washington Accords, which took effect in May 1942. The armed invasion was off, but another kind of invasion was on.

  The accords, officially named the Brazil–United States Political-Military Agreement, opened the door for one of the navy’s biggest base-building projects in history. The Brazilian coast became dotted with air (in cooperation with Pan American Airlines) and ship bases vital to the antisubmarine campaign in the South Atlantic. Until the Allied landings in North Africa in late 1942, the agreement’s air routes prov
ided insurance against a German invasion of the New World. In 1943, the bases were vital to provisioning the Allied invasion of Sicily, which decisively took the fight against the Axis powers to Europe.

  And although the cost was high, the agreement secured the strategic raw materials of the largest country in Latin America for the Allied cause.

  * * *

  A 1943 U.S. propaganda documentary made by the Office of War Information showed handsome, fit, young Brazilian men doing military training exercises, and crowds cheering President Vargas. The images flashed across the screen in a grand style that looked borrowed from Leni Riefenstahl’s Nazi classic Triumph of the Will. Brazil’s raw materials, the film told Americans, made the country “doubly valuable as an ally.”

  “These war factories in the United States use large quantities of Brazilian manganese, highest grade iron ore, zinc, nickel, and other minerals essential to the manufacture of tanks, machine guns, warships,” said the narrator over shots of busy workers. “Bauxite from which the aluminum in our combat planes is made … the world’s only source of high-grade crystal in substantial quantities so essential in the manufacture of electrical, optical, and precision instruments … one of the world’s largest producers of industrial diamonds used in cutting the hard metals” for machine tools. “She can produce enough of the basic materials for making explosives to supply the entire world.”

  The alliance relieved anxiety over the U.S. rubber crisis, relief felt beyond U.S. borders. “Brazil’s production of rubber alone may be a decisive factor in winning this war,” said the film.

  The massive rubber campaign envisioned in the Washington Accords also conveniently gave Vargas solutions to problems at home unrelated to the war, helping him to stay in power. The national rubber industry—second only to coffee in exports—had been flagging despite sales, but now was certain to take off again. And Vargas could kill two other birds with a single stone: by sending restive residents of the drought-ravaged northeast to collect rubber in the jungle, he could defuse that political time bomb while reinforcing claims to the Brazilian frontier, which neighboring countries disputed. For the Brazilian dictator, the campaign was a gift on a silver platter. He grandly named it Batalha da Borracha, the Battle for Rubber.