Bauxite & Oil

The tightening of the Allied blockade which proved so grim for Scandinavia, also stirred the Balkans. German shells and bombs are made from Swedish steel, but airplanes are built of duralumin, a copper alloy of aluminum, which is extracted from bauxite. Since the war began Germany has been dependent for bauxite almost entirely on Hungary and Yugo slavia, which produce 22% of the world tonnage.

The Ankara, a 4,768-ton freighter whose home port is Bremen, one of 28 German ships that holed up in Trieste when war began, last month ran down to Dubrovnik (better known to tourists as Ragusa), loaded, then lay for days while Belgrade hemmed & hawed. The Germans asked for a naval escort through Yugoslavia's neutral waters, hoping to establish a system whereby Nazi freighters could ply all around the neutral Balkan peninsula from Russia's Black Sea oil ports. But Yugoslavs had no wish to offend the Allies.

One dawn at week's end, without escort and with a pilot who demanded $1,200 for the 425-mile run to Trieste, the Ankara started creeping up inside the islands which fringe that rugged coast. The Ankara made Trieste unattacked. More bauxite boats were due to follow. Italy and Yugoslavia conferred over the weekend about closing the Adriatic to belligerent warships.

Meanwhile Rumania had a parallel problem. Rumanian police, acting on a tip supposedly supplied by the pro-Nazi Iron Guard, detained a fleet of dynamite carrying British barges in the Danube. Their supposed destiny: to blast the Iron Gate (the narrow gorge where the Danube cuts through the Carpathians) and block the channel to other barges carrying Rumanian oil to Germany.

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