Word: basin
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Britain also realized last week that she may not be able to enforce anti-Japanese quotas for some of her East African possessions because of the Congo Basin treaties which assure commercial equality in the Congo Basin to the signatory powers. Tanganyika Territory in East Africa, excluded because it is a British mandate, was glad. Reporters found an overworked doctor in Tanganyika who announced...
...went. Germany, throughout the war, had urgent need of nickel, aluminum, and chemicals like glycerin for explosives. France, because the rich Briey basin and other sources were out of her control, had to scratch hard for iron and steel. Continuously, therefore, what one nation lacked, the armament manufacturers of an enemy nation did their urgent best to provide. Month after month. German heavy industries exported an average of 150,000 tons of scrap iron, steel, or barbed wire to Switzerland, where, having been smelted to a more convenient form, it was then transshipped to France. France, in her turn, shipped...
Before 1914 the great iron mines and smelters in the Briey basin provided 70 per cent of the ore used by France. The German advance wrested them from the political control of France--and quite naturally the German artillery chiefs saw to it that the mines were so protected from shell fire that they could be taken over intact. Thenceforth the mines of the Briey basin were operated for the benefit of Germany--in association with other mines in Lorraine which had been in German hands since 1871 they supplied Germany with some three quarters of the ore she consumed...
...some two years later, the Briey basin came once again within the potential grasp of the French. Throughout the second battle of Verdun. Briey was within range of the operations of the French Second Army. The Briey mines and smelters were turning out tons of raw materials per day which were being continuously turned into weapons of death against French troops, and the naive civilian would therefore suppose that the French Second Army would new into loose its bombing planes and blast out of existence a principal source of enemy supply...
...entire course of the war. There were even line officers who shared civilian naivete enough to question Fernch G. H. Q. on the immunity of Briey. A reasonable explanation could have been that the French were withholding, fire from Briey because they, in turn, hoped to recapture the basin and turn its products back to France...