by Dan McCaffery for the Sarnia Observer
(2003) If you wanted to, you could make a pretty good case that Sarnia saved the free world in 1942.
It happened during the darkest days of the Second World War when Japanese troops occupied the rubber plantations of Southeast Asia, cutting off the western world’s supply of natural rubber. The loss was critical because natural rubber was needed to produce a wide variety of products, including the tires of warplanes and army vehicles, the insulation of electrical cables, inflatable boats, piping, gaskets and shock absorbers.
Just how serious the situation was can be summed up by a report to the U.S. Congress which said, “of all the critical and strategic materials, rubber is the one that presents the greatest threat to the safety of our nation and the success of the Allied cause….if we fail to secure quickly a large new rubber supply, our war effort and our domestic economy will both collapse.”
In this atmosphere of crisis, Canadian Prime Minister Mackenzie King went to Washington for a summit meeting with U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt. The leaders decided to launch a crash program aimed at building several synthetic rubber plants – including one in Sarnia to be called Polymer Corporation. Construction of the plant was given priority second only to the building of the atomic bomb.
Ralph Rowzee, one of the few people in North America who knew anything about synthetic rubber, was asked to get the plant off the ground. He told The Observer the Allies had to do in the next 24 months what would normally take 12 years – or lose the war. “It was considered almost impossible,” he said later.
At the same time, because styrene is an essential raw material in the production of synthetic rubber, Dow Chemical also began construction of a Sarnia plant that same year. Amazingly, both the Polymer and Dow plants opened in the summer of 1943. Before long, Polymer was producing 40,000 tons of synthetic rubber a year. The Allies had the rubber they needed and, two years later, the war was won.
As for the rubber plant, it’s still going strong. But it’s no longer owned by Canadians. In what Rowzee described as an “ironic” twist of fate, it was purchased in 1991 by Bayer AG, which is headquartered in Leverkusen, Germany.