Shortages, Substitutes, Synthetics

Introduction:  What happens when wool is in short supply during wartime?

 

Quotation:

“So you see that for every 1,000,000 men we send over the ocean we must have 20,000,000 full-grown sheep here at home or in some other part of the world, and this is in addition to the vast amount of wool we need to clothe our own people.”

 Frank G. Carpenter, “Twenty Sheep Needed for Every Soldier”

The Boston Globe, Jan. 27 1918. pg.SM9

The politics and economics of war require combatant and neutral nations alike to consider how they are going to acquire and control the commodities they rely on both for civilian populations and for their military needs. And until the mid-1950s, after the end of the Korean War, when new fibres derived from petrochemicals began to be introduced fairly regularly, wool was one commodity very few nations could do without.