Strategic Map: Europe’s Sinews of War

In World War II the long-term measure of military striking power is the power to produce, and production is on the side of the nations with the heaviest industries. On the following two pages TIME presents a map of Europe showing the distribution of Europe’s productive capacity among the combatants. It shows above all the striking effects which Germany’s conquests have had on her capacity to wage modern war.

The Industrial Revolution determined the location of Europe’s heavy industries—close to the sources of coal and iron. Europe’s major coal field lies roughly in a great arc. Using Oslo as a centre it is possible to describe that arc with a compass. It begins in the Scottish Lowland and ends in Upper Silesia. On it or close to it are strewn the maroon areas of mining districts and the red areas of manufacturing—the English Midlands, South Wales, northern France, Belgium’s Sambre-Meuse Valley, Holland’s Limburg, the Saar, the Ruhr, middle Germany. Lesser mining and manufacturing areas are scattered in other quarters of Europe but neither in area nor in productive capacity are they of comparable significance.

Through this vast productive crescent, sprinkled with iron ore, the pattern of industry runs with scarcely an interruption—dingy houses, sooty factories, chimneys, smoke, grime. Here are the blast furnaces, iron foundries, rolling mills which turn out the indispensable metal of warfare—steel. Here is the crucible which forges the weapons of World War II.

Less than half of this crescent (and not the richest half) was in prewar Germany. Nonetheless with her great industrial talents Germany managed to produce about 20% of Europe’s manufactures. On the Lower Rhine near the coal of the Ruhr was four-fifths of her industry. In that neighborhood are 16 cities with populations of better than 100,000 apiece—among them Cologne, Essen, Düsseldorf, Duisborg-Ruhrort, world’s largest inland port. But the mills of industry do not grind without metal-bearing ores, and Germany was weak in them.

She had enough lead, zinc, and magnesium. That was all. Two-thirds of her iron ore and 85% of her copper had to be imported. To feed her highly-developed smelters at Leipzig, Breslau, etc., she had little or no bauxite (aluminum ore), antimony, tin or the critical ferro-alloy metals: molybdenum, tungsten, chrome, nickel. The map shows how conquest enlarged her resources. Fine lines show her post-Versailles boundaries, the heavy line her holdings at the end of year I of World War II.

Austria was the first victim. But Austria, which had not recovered from World War I, did not bring Germany much because her own industries were fed by imports. So were Czecho-Slovakia’s. From both of them Germany got an annual supply of nearly 4,000,000 tons of iron ore (a third of her own production). In the event that Germany should be bombed out of the Ruhr, Austria’s iron and steel industry at Graz, CzechoSlovakia’s well-developed heavy industry near Prague (including the mighty Skoda munitions works at Pilsen) will be important.

The conquest of Poland put the Third Reich’s zinc supply beyond exhaustion. Little Luxembourg with an area (998 sq. mi.) smaller than metropolitan Los Angeles was a greater prize. The output of her well-knit iron & steel industry was one-seventh as great as Germany’s while her share of the iron ore of Lorraine was equal to a third of Germany’s annual imports. Norway yielded 1,000,000 annual pounds of molybdenum, which Germany desperately needed for fashioning high-speed steels, stocks of chrome, aluminum, copper, nickel. It also yielded Narvik, the only winter outlet for the high-grade ore of Sweden’s northern iron mines. There were no metals in Denmark.

Ten miles from the German frontier, at Arnhem, is Holland’s great tin smelter, fed by ore from The Netherlands Indies. There Germany to her disappointment picked up perhaps a sixth of a year’s supply (2,500 tons) of tin. Anticipating such a move, Great Britain had let little tin trickle through the blockade to The Netherlands. With the capitulation of Belgium and the collapse of France, Germany’s steel capacity was secured.

Occupied France contained the cream of France’s industries (two-thirds as much as Germany’s)—19% of the world’s iron ore, 6% of its steel productive capacity. Unoccupied France was left with only the rubber industries of Clermont-Ferrand, west of Lyon, the textile factories of Lyon itself, and 19% of the world’s supply of bauxite (aluminum ore). That bauxite might as well be in German hands because France has no other market for it. It assures Germany of abundant supplies of aluminum for aircraft production.

Germany thus found herself holding two-thirds of Europe’s industrial crescent—just about two-thirds of the heavy industry, three-fourths of the manufacturing capacity of Europe. But Germany still lacks sufficient raw materials to feed these plants. Plentiful is her supply of iron ore, coal, bauxite, magnesite, zinc and lead, a few other metals. Stockpiles of the conquered nations supplied other critical and strategic metals, enough for a short war. Yet the British blockade still cut off the raw materials Germany needed for a long war: copper from Chile, nickel from Canada, tin and rubber from the East Indies, manganese from India, tungsten from China, industrial diamonds from South Africa, cotton from Brazil.

Conquer as she may, Germany cannot find adequate sources of these materials in Europe. Italy remains a have-not nation with no coal, a smattering of heavy industry around Milan and Turin, more mercury and bauxite than she can use, little else. Moreover, Italy competes with Germany for the small mineral output of the agricultural Balkans. Yugoslav copper, Hungarian bauxite, Greek antimony, others. Spain, flat on her back after her civil war, has a little copper, considerable iron ore (Bilbao) and mercury (Seville). Even the vast area of the Soviet Union next door to Europe cannot supply the deficiency. The very metals the Nazis wanted are also needed in Russia’s scattered industrial centres: Moscow, Krivoi Rog, the great Donets Coal Basin. The only metal Russia can export in quantity is manganese.

But even if she had adequate raw materials Germany could not use the plants she holds to the full. In France for example most factories are practically shut down because of flight of the population before the invader and general economic chaos. R.A.F. bombings have destroyed other factories in Germany and German-held territory and transportation has been disrupted by bombing and war. Although she holds two-thirds or more of Europe’s industrial capacity, Germany’s usable capacity is probably not much greater for the present than before the war. Her chief gain is in having taken reserves from her enemies.

Another German problem is oil and high-test gasoline for her tanks and warplanes. To her own plentiful stores she has added the undestroyed stocks of the conquered territories. Her own synthetic industry was good for 600,000 tons yearly; Poland added an annual 530,000 tons. But Germany needed at least 12,500,000 tons of oil a year for total war. Even the complete output of the Rumanian oil fields (production: one-tenth of Texas’) would supply only about a half of presumed needs. Technology-bound Russia, Europe’s largest producer, could do it—if the Nazis supplied the equipment and technical assistance to reorganize her oil industry and transport That would probably be a two-year job.

Although armies now march as much on their gas tanks as on their stomachs, food is still a vital war material. With her conquests Germany now holds two-fifths of the green fields of Europe. France gave up the Paris Basin, which normally grew all the wheat she needed. Denmark, Europe’s dairy and No. 1 world exporter of butter, was rifled of her stocks of butter, cheese, eggs, fodder, of her farm animals. Belgium, which just manages to feed herself, had no great surplus on hand, but The Netherlands had 2,750,000 head of cattle, 650,000 sheep, half a million pigs, tons of butter, cheese, meat, milk, margarine and vegetable oils that were added to the Nazi larder. So were Poland’s sugar beets.

The food supplies seized were an immediate gain for 70,000,000 Nazi gullets, fine for a short war. But Europe has never been able to feed herself, let alone secure a balanced diet, without importing great quantities of foodstuffs, fodder, fertilizers. France made up most of her deficit with imports from Morocco. The Balkan States have long been selling their small exportable food surplus to Germany. If there is surplus food in Russia with all her great grain fields, it is a State secret. As a whole the territory that Hitler took merely added to his domains more territory that cannot feed itself or can barely do so. In a long war his food problem will be worse than before unless he feeds his people by starving the conquered. In the long run also, it does not pay to starve your slaves.

By his conquests Hitler also destroyed most of the neutrals through whom he obtained a restricted flow of goods in spite of the British blockade. Italy, The Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark and Norway are leaks that have been plugged. Only Portugal, Spain, the Balkans and Russia remain, most of them strictly rationed by the blockade and with poor transportation systems for supplying him. Some copper, tin, a few other supplies can reach Germany by way of Vladivostok, but not in quantity. Germany cannot beat the blockade. She can only try to beat the blockader.

But if Germany did not gain materially in wartime industrial strength, Britain lost enough to make Germany’s conquests worthwhile. She lost access to Sweden’s iron ore, Norway’s refined and processed metals, dairy products from Denmark and The Netherlands, Scandinavian timber, Belgian steel, bauxite from France. But so long as she controlled the seas, had bottoms to carry goods in, ports to unload them at, she could call on the Empire and the Americas to replace what the Nazis had taken. In the folds of Britain’s Pennine Range were 19% of the world’s coal, 8% of its iron ore—enough to keep her basic war industries going. She had 10% of the world’s steel production. Nazi Germany had still to demonstrate that the great industrial centres of the English Midlands could be bombed into inactivity.

If war should end with the division of territory which Adolf Hitler has achieved, the situation would be different. Then Germany could put her great, captured industrial plant to work turning out manufactured goods for export. Fed by raw materials from the colonial empires of France and The Netherlands, manned by conscript labor, the workshops of Nazi Europe could offer competition in foreign trade that Britain could scarcely hope to meet. That would be an economic war in which the U.S. also would be in danger of defeat.