ABSTRACT
The contribution of trade wars to the winning of wars has little register in historical writing. The battlefield is the principal focus of the historians and the effectiveness of blocking a protagonist's trading links is rarely acknowledged in a war's outcome. In the First World War, for example, Germany was compelled by 1918 to request an armistice through exhaustion of its economic and physical resources in spite of its army remaining strong and intact. It was the denial of resources through the loss of its trading links, caused considerably by the effectiveness of the British naval blockade, that forced Germany to seek an armistice. Adolf Hitler applied that lesson when planning the Second World War by harnessing the skills of I.G. Farben Industries and other German chemical finllS to make Germany independent of commodity imports through the production of chemically produced substitutes such as synthetic rubber, petrol from coal and other chemical-based resources. Hitler's awareness of the importance of the trade war was further demonstrated by his switching of naval resources to expand Germany's submarine campaign against Britain's transatlantic trade which resulted in severe strains on British war-fighting capacities. One of the most successful aspects of the American navy's submarine campaign in the Pacific War was the sinking of Japanese merchant shipping transporting essential raw materials from Southeast Asia to metropolitan Japan, thereby denying it the commodities for continuation of the war.
