In "Critical Path", Buckminster Fuller said that US scrap metal companies were furiously selling scrap to Germany & Japan in 1939 to capitalize on all-time high prices...
In Herman Wouk's novel The Winds of War, an admiral, aboard an aircraft carrier near Pearl Harbor in 1940 or -41, groused to his officers that (paraphrasing from memory) "sooner or later the [Japanese] are going to come steaming over the horizon, burning Texaco oil and shooting pieces of old Buicks at us."