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Swedish iron ore was an important economic factor in the European Theatre of World War II. Both the Allies and the Third Reich were keen on the control of the mining district in northernmost Sweden, surrounding the mining towns of Gällivare and Kiruna. The importance of this issue increased after other sources were cut off from Germany by the British sea blockade during the Battle of the Atlantic. Both the planned Anglo-French support of Finland in the Winter War, and the following German occupation of Denmark and Norway (Operation Weserübung) were to a large extent motivated by the wish to deny their respective enemies iron critical for wartime production of steel. Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, was particularly concerned about Swedish exports of iron ore to Germany, and pushed for the British government to take military action to end the trade. From the beginning of the war Churchill tried to persuade his cabinet colleagues to send a British fleet into the Baltic Sea to stop shipping reaching Germany from the two Swedish iron ore ports, Luleå and Oxelösund. The project was called Project Catherine and was planned by Admiral of the Fleet William Boyle, 12th Earl of Cork. However, events overtook this project and it was canceled.〔The Twilight War. Winston Churchill 1948〕 Later, when the Baltic ports froze over and the Germans began shipping the iron ore from the Norwegian port of Narvik, Churchill pushed for the Royal Navy to mine the west coast of Norway to prevent the Germans travelling inside neutral territorial waters to escape Allied Contraband Control measures. ==Background== Upon the beginning of hostilities on 3 September 1939, Britain and France enacted a repeat of the blockade of Germany system used to great effect throughout the previous war. They were able to do this because they had vastly more powerful naval forces at their disposal than Germany, a country lacking in natural resources and heavily reliant on large scale imports of a wide range of goods. Perhaps the material Germany needed above all others was iron ore, a steady supply of which was imperative in the creation of steel to sustain its war effort and general economy. In the year before the war, Germany received 22 million tons of iron ore from various foreign sources. Although it was able to produce around 10m tons of its own iron ore each year, it was of low grade quality and needed to be mixed with high grade material from other countries such as Sweden, which annually supplied it with 9 million tons: 7 million from Kiruna and Gällivare in Lapland and 2 million from the central Swedish ore fields north-west of Stockholm. With the declaration of war and the start of the blockade, many of these foreign supplies were lost to Germany, and although it retained access to 3 million tons per annum from neutral Norway and Luxembourg, the supplies from Morocco and Spain were lost to it, and so the remaining supplies from neutral Scandinavia became of crucial importance. Grand Admiral Raeder, head of the German navy, declared that it would be "utterly impossible to make war should the navy not be able to secure the supplies of iron-ore from Sweden". Britain, who itself imported large quantities of iron ore, was fully aware of the Swedish exports to Germany and through its system of Contraband Control was routinely stopping ships of all nations to ensure they were not delivering important supplies to the enemy. Germany considered the allied blockade illegal, and to counter it embarked upon a system of unrestricted submarine warfare whereby enemy and neutral ships could be attacked without warning. As a result, during the first nine months of the war a large number of neutral ships were sunk with considerable loss of life. While the allies were keen to maintain the moral high ground and stressed at every opportunity the difference in impact between their approach compared to their enemy’s, they were mindful that many neutral mariners relied upon the Germany trade for their livelihoods, and so during the opening stages of the war they were careful not to be too strict with non-combatant vessels for fear the blockade would alienate neutral nations into joining the war on the side of Germany. The Anglo-German Naval Agreement (AGNA) of 1935, concluded between Britain and Germany, seriously challenged the independence of Sweden and its long-standing policy of peaceful neutrality. Despite provisions in the Treaty of Versailles, the AGNA allowed Germany to increase the size of its Kriegsmarine to one-third the size of the Royal Navy, which when completed in 1942 would have allowed Germany to dominate the Baltic. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Swedish iron-ore mining during World War II」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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