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The Wolfram Crisis (Spanish: Crisis del wolframio) was a diplomatic conflict during World War II between Francoist Spain and the Allied powers, which sought to block Spanish exports of tungsten ore to Nazi Germany. "Wolfram" is an alternate name for tungsten, a strategic material used in anti-tank weapons and machine tools. Most of the wolframite mines in Europe, such as the Barruecopardo mine, are in northwestern Spain and northern Portugal.[a]
The high demand for this scarce strategic mineral in war time had created a bubble in prices, with the otherwise desolate post-Civil War Spanish economy heftily profiting from it, as its income from tungsten exports had increased from £73,000 in 1940 to £15.7 million in 1943.[1] Tungsten exports accounted for nearly 1% of the Spanish GDP and 20% of its exports by 1943–44.[2] On 18 November 1943, the United States Ambassador to Spain delivered a memorandum to the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs demanding for the unconditional end to tungsten exports to Germany.[3] After the repeated refusal by Spain to comply with the U.S. demand, the United States decreed an embargo on oil supplies to Spain on 28 January 1944.[4] A short time later, additional restriction on Spanish exports of cotton products was enforced, threatening the Catalan textile industry.[5]
On 2 May 1944 a secret deal was signed between Spain, the U.S., and the United Kingdom, in which Spain, in exchange for the reestablishment of oil supplies and a compromise for negotiating future economic concessions, pledged to drastically limit tungsten exports to Germany (a cap of 20 tonnes in May, 20 tonnes in June, and 40 tonnes from then on), to close the German Consulate in Tangiers and expel its members, to prevent any logistic support to Germans in airports, to expel German spies and saboteurs from Spanish soil, to solve a litigation regarding Italian ships trapped in the Balearic Islands, and to recall the last remaining Spanish volunteers on the Eastern Front.[5][6]
Despite their capitulation, Spanish diplomats sold the deal as a success, as they had negotiated the Allied demand for full termination of tungsten exports to Germany down to a cap on exports to a "symbolic" amount.[7] The U.S., the most uncompromising party in principle, blamed the failure to achieve a complete end to the exports on the British diplomacy, while Winston Churchill kindly commended Spain for its "services" in a late May intervention in the House of Commons.[8]
References
edit- Notes
- ^ In Britain, the Drakelands Mine in Devon and the Castle an Dinas mine in Cornwall were worked during the war.
- Citations
- ^ Buchanan 2009, p. 106–107.
- ^ Caruana de las Cagigas & González Calleja 2014, p. 209.
- ^ Collado Seidel 1994, p. 57.
- ^ Fernández de Miguel 2012, p. 182.
- ^ a b Moradiellos 2016, p. 72.
- ^ Collado Seidel 1994, p. 61–62.
- ^ Collado Seidel 1994, p. 68.
- ^ Buchanan 2014, p. 217–218.
Bibliography
edit- Buchanan, Andrew N. (2009). "Washington's 'silent ally' in World War II? United States policy towards Spain, 1939–1945". Journal of Transatlantic Studies. 7 (2): 93–117. doi:10.1080/14794010902868199. ISSN 1479-4012. S2CID 144649684.
- Buchanan, Andrew (2014). American Grand Strategy in the Mediterranean during World War II. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9781107661356.
- Caruana de las Cagigas, Leonardo; González Calleja, Eduardo (2014). "La producción y contrabando de wolframio en España durante la Primera Guerra Mundial" (PDF). Ayer: 183–209.
- Collado Seidel, Carlos (1994). "¿De Hendaya a San Francisco? Londres y Washington contra Franco y la Falange (1942-1945)". Espacio Tiempo y Forma. Serie V, Historia Contemporánea (in Spanish) (7). Madrid: Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia. doi:10.5944/etfv.7.1994.3007 (inactive 1 November 2024). ISSN 1130-0124.
{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: DOI inactive as of November 2024 (link) - Fernández de Miguel, Daniel (2012). El enemigo yanqui: Las raices conservadoras del antiamericanismo español (in Spanish). Santander: Universidad de Cantabria. ISBN 9788494018633.
- Moradiellos, Enrique (2016). "España y la segunda guerra mundial, 1939-1945: entre resignaciones neutralistas y tentaciones beligerantes" (PDF). In Carlos Navajas Zubeldia & Diego Iturriaga Barco (ed.). Siglo. Actas del V Congreso Internacional de Historia de Nuestro Tiempo. Logroño: Universidad de la Rioja. pp. 72–73.