Wolfram Crisis

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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, with the latter seeking to block the Spanish exports of tungsten ore to Nazi Germany. "Wolfram" is an alternate name for tungsten.

The high demand for the scarce strategic mineral in war time had created a bubble in prices, with otherwise desolate Post-Civil War Spanish economy heftily profiting from it, as its income from Wolfram exports had increased from £73,000 in 1940 to £15.7 million in 1943.^[1] Wolfram exports accounted for nearly 1% of the Spanish GDP and 20% of the exports by 1943–44.^[2] On 18 November 1943 the US Ambassador to Spain delivered a memorandum to the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs demanding for the unconditional end to Wolfram exports to Germany.^[3] After the repeated rejection by Spain to comply with the US 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 US and the United Kingdom, in which Spain, in exchange for the re-establishment of oil supplies and a compromise for negotiating future economic concessions, pledged to drastically limit the 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 the Spanish capitulation, the Spanish diplomacy sold the deal as a success as the full termination of Tungsten exports to Germany ultimately ended up being "just" a heavy cap limiting the exports to a symbolic amount.^[7] The US, the most uncompromising part in principle, put the blame on 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[]

Bibliography[]

• 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). Madrid: Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (7). doi:10.5944/etfv.7.1994.3007. ISSN 1130-0124.
• 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.