Word: rubbers
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...reporters moved out over the Saxony plains to a great cluster of tall smokestacks marking the Buna plant built by I. G. Farben in 1936 to supply the Wehrmacht's synthetic rubber tires. The plant manager told them that while there had been 11,000 workers at the end of the war, there were now 9,000, producing 1,500 tons of rubber monthly, about 60% of the peak of war production...
...steel. Although the number of steelworkers was comparatively small, if they stayed out long enough they would ultimately force a serious coke shortage and the laying off of 423,000 other Canadians dependent on steel for their jobs. (Some 36,000 workers were still on strike in rubber, electric works, printing, foundries, mines and autos...
...World War II, Brazil transported two armies. One sailed to Italy and fought, returned to a heroes' acclaim. Another, an 18,000-strong labor army, went north to the Amazon to gather rubber for a needy Ally-and never came back. By last week, its disappearance was a major national scandal...
...story began in 1942, when the U.S., shut off from the East Indies, wanted natural rubber at any cost.*Brazil was a possible source. Contracts were signed with the Brazilian Government, which, for $100 a head, agreed to round up and carry workers to the Amazon. Glowing advertisements brought in many a drought-ridden farmer of Brazil's Northeast. Others were shanghaied...
Banded together in springless trucks and dusty cattle cars, the rubber troops began their trek. Some turned out to be vagrants and rogues who brawled and thieved. Foreign-Legion-like, these seldom asked each others' names, got along with boondock handles like Negrao (Big Nigger), Bexiginha (Pock Face), and Bichhv ho (Little Bug). When Brazilian rubber officials let them go unfed, the men broke away and foraged for themselves. Soon they were met at stopping-places by town police, who threw them into stockades until the journey continued...