![]() Things changed after Germany defeated France. The importance of the Swedish magnetic deposits reached critical proportions because Germany imported 15% of its ore needs from France and another 3% from Spain, and these imports stopped with the onset of war. This route was impervious from British blockade and quite advantageous as a result !. The Scandinavians transported the ore by road to the nearby Swedish port of Lulea in the Gulf of Bothnia and then shipped it to German ports in the Baltic. About 27% ! of the iron ore required by the German industry came from the Kiruna and Malmberget mines in Northern Sweden, close to the Finnish border. ![]() Germany was only able to produce about a third of its needs, so its vulnerability in this regard was even more pronounced than in the case of oil. The most important fields in Europe were the deposits in Lorraine (France), Lapland (Sweden), Krivoi Rog (Ukraine), and the mines in eastern England. When the war started in September 1939, Germany was heavily dependent on iron ore imports for the manufacture of steel. The only alternative oil sources available for the Germans were in the Soviet Union and the Middle East fields controlled by Great Britain. Quite bluntly it signified an inexorable march to total defeat. It also meant the inability to execute large scale mobile offensives and hampered drastically the German industry because of its negative effect on transportation. The loss of Ploesti implied the inability to supply fuel to the Luftwaffe and thus permanent loss of air superiority. After Stalin’s aggression to Romania in June 1940, the distance decreased by 150 km (95 miles) greatly exposing the refineries to air attack or land invasion. In 1939 the distance from the Soviet Union to the refineries was only 350 km (220 miles) !, within range of the VVS bombers. The extremely exposed location of these refineries to attack by the Red Army only complicated matters for Berlin. Before the war, Germany purchased most of its imported oil from Mexico, but British blockade made overseas trade impossible.īy 1940 oil imports, coming mostly from the Ploesti oil refineries near Bucharest, were as much as 35% of total consumption, making them indispensable for Germany’s war effort. German scientists developed a process to produce synthetic oil from coal by hydrogenation and this became the main source of oil for Germany.ĭespite these successes, Germany did not attain self-sufficiency and remained reliant on oil acquired from abroad. Motor vehicles and aircraft among others, require liquid fuels. Coal is not convenient for all uses though. Germany’s oil consumption in 1938 was 6.2 million metric tons as compared with 10.6 million metric tons in Great Britain, 25.6 million metric tons in the USSR and 140 million metric tons in the US !. For an economy, as large as that of Great Britain and larger than the USSR !, the usage of oil was comparatively modest. ![]() Germany had an abundance of coal and was self-sufficient in foodstuffs, but it lacked every other strategic raw material in quantity, forcing Berlin to seek sources abroad.īecause Germany had coal in relative abundance, the Germans used it as much as possible to reduce dependence on liquid fuels. Germany’s raw material situation was much more precarious than that of its main enemies. Its absence prevents the manufacture of tanks, artillery, small arms, ships, submarines, ordnance, vehicles, and many other essential categories that equip an army. The second is the major ingredient in the manufacture of steel. The first enables the production of fuels and lubricants without which air and land armies cannot move. Other than the food, there are two other key strategic raw materials that countries waging war need in enormous quantities: oil and iron ore !. These raw materials must all be available if a tank is to roll out of the assembly lines. Steel, in turn, is an alloy made of iron with smaller quantities of carbon, nickel, chromium, manganese, and molybdenum. A German Panzer III tank used 39.000 kg of steel, 1.4 kg of tin, 50.1 kg of copper, 90.4 kg of aluminum, 71.1 kg of lead, 49.1 kg of zinc and 125 kg of rubber for its manufacture !. Sustaining the modern war effort requires access to multiple raw materials. The defeat may not be immediate since safety stocks give some latitude, but once the warehouses are empty the writing is on the wall. Losing control of any of them meant certain surrender !. Any major power with aspirations to win a major war had three essential conditions to fulfill: it required enough lands to grow its food it had to control the raw materials bases that supplied the inputs to its industry, and it had to dominate the routes used to move these resources where needed. Without raw materials, factories shut down.
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