Phil Egan

Not every general during the Second World War was in uniform.

Though they went to work each day in suits, J.R. Nicholson, E. Ralph Rowzee and Roger Hatch were as critical to the war effort as any officer in the Allied forces.

And their battlefield was right here in Sarnia.

As the Japanese Imperial Army swarmed across the islands of the South Pacific in the wake of the attack on Pearl Harbor, they created a crisis for Western nations in their conquering wake. As the rubber plantations of Southeast Asia fell under the Japanese yoke, the ensuing rubber shortage threatened to ground Allied aircraft and jeeps, trucks and armoured vehicles for lack of rubber tires.

Two weeks after the attack on the American Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Roosevelt met with Canadian Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King in Washington. King was accompanied by his Minister of Munitions and Supply, Clarence Decatur (C.D.) Howe.

The leaders decided to initiate a revolutionary new program for the mass manufacture of reliable synthetic rubber. The site they selected for the $800-million investment was the little city of Sarnia, population 18,000.

It was partly chosen for its transportation advantages, but also because the presence of Imperial Oil ensured the availability of needed petrochemical cracked gases for the production of butadiene, to be used in the polymerization process. Dow Chemical would also build a plant in Sarnia to provide further raw materials to Polymer.

Both plants opened together in 1942.

On the eve of war in 1939, the prospect of manufacturing synthetic rubber on a mass scale was a daunting challenge. A 1944 Maclean’s article said the feat presented complications “to even such deft broth blenders as Shakespeare’s three witches.”

Roger Hatch was a graduate student in organic chemistry at McGill University at war’s outbreak. He joined the Polymer team, working under general manager J.R. Nicholson to expedite the delivery of scarce wartime components and raw materials.

In the meantime, E. Ralph Rowzee, an executive at the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company, was busy designing a prototype facility that would become the model for the future Polymer Corporation.

All of these “best and brightest” future citizens of Sarnia worked together to produce the first fully integrated rubber plant in the British Empire, as the book, Profiting the Crown: a history of Polymer, described it.

The creation of Polymer would change the tide of war in the Allies’ favour, but it would also forever change Sarnia. A period of large-scale industrial and population growth would follow, as the Chemical Valley began to take shape and flourish.

The Polymer rubber plant was an achievement of war, but it set the stage for a coming era of peace.