On April 9, 1940, Nazi tanks stormed into Denmark. A month later, they blitzed into Belgium, Holland and France. As American citizens grew increasingly more rattled by way of the spreading danger, a stunning position changed into an important to U.S. nationwide safety: the huge, ice-capped island of Greenland.
The island, a colony of Denmark’s on the time, used to be wealthy in mineral assets. The Nazi invasions left it and a number of other different Ecu colonies as world orphans.
Greenland used to be very important for air bases as U.S. planes flew to Europe, and likewise for strategic minerals. Greenland’s Ivittuut (previously Ivigtut) mine contained the sector’s simplest dependable provide of an important subject material you’ve most certainly by no means heard of: cryolite, a frosty white mineral that the U.S. and Canadian industries relied upon to refine bauxite into aluminum, and thus very important to putting together a contemporary air drive.
A month after the Nazis seized Denmark, 5 American Coast Guard cutters set sail for Greenland, partially to offer protection to the Ivittuut mine from the Nazis.
This April 1941 drawing by way of well-known political cartoonist Herbert L. Block, referred to as Herblock, used to be revealed in a while after Greenland changed into a de facto protectorate of the U.S.
A Herblock Cool animated film, © The Herb Block Basis
Other people once in a while overlook that Global Warfare II used to be a dog-eat-dog combat for assets – oil and uranium but in addition dozens of alternative fabrics, the whole lot from rubber to copper. With out those strategic fabrics, no fashionable army may just produce an important new guns equivalent to tanks and airplanes. The useful resource combat incessantly began sooner than exact combating.
Overseas fabrics fueled American world energy, but in addition raised difficult questions on get right of entry to to assets and about sovereignty, simply because the outdated Ecu imperial order used to be being rethought. As in 2026, U.S. presidents needed to skillfully steadiness drive and international relations.
Walter H. Beech and Olive Ann Beech view wartime manufacturing strains at Beech Airplane Corp. in Wichita, Kan., in 1942.
Courtesy of Wichita State College Libraries, Particular Collections and College Archives. Walter H. and Olive Ann Beech Assortment, wsu_ms97-02.3.9.1
As a historian at Macalester Faculty, I analysis how American citizens form environments world wide via their buying and nationwide safety wishes, and the way overseas landscapes allow and constrain American movements. As of late, regulate of Greenland’s herbal assets is once more on an American president’s radar as call for for essential minerals rises and provide tightens.
All over the spring of 1940, The usa and its Ecu allies mapped out patterns of useful resource use and concepts of worldwide interconnection that might form the world order for many years. Greenland helped give start to this new order.
Rethinking American vulnerability
On Might 16, 1940, President Franklin Roosevelt addressed a joint consultation of Congress, together with many “American first” isolationists cautious of Ecu entanglements. Roosevelt implored American citizens to get up to new threats on this planet – to, in his phrases, “recast their thinking about national protection.”
New guns, he warned, had contracted the sector, and oceans may just not defend the USA. The country’s destiny used to be inextricably tied to Europe’s. Not anything confirmed this higher than Greenland: “From the fiords of Greenland,” FDR warned, “it is four hours by air to Newfoundland; five hours to Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and to the province of Quebec; and only six hours to New England.”
Richard Edes Harrison’s well-known WWII maps in Fortune mag, together with this one from 1942, modified American understandings of vulnerability by way of highlighting quick aerial routes. Darkish spaces are thought to be Axis, dotted spaces pro-Axis impartial or Axis-occupied, crimson spaces Allies and yellow spaces impartial. Purple spaces, together with Greenland, had been thought to be Allies-occupied.
Cornell College – PJ Mode Selection of Persuasive Cartography
However Greenland prompt alarm bells for one more reason. To give protection to itself in a perilous global, Roosevelt famously known as for the U.S. to hammer out 50,000 planes a yr. However in 1938, The usa had produced just one,800 planes.
To fulfill this formidable objective, Roosevelt and his advisers knew that little may well be executed with out Greenland. No Greenland, no cryolite. No cryolite, no huge American air drive. With out cryolite, making 50,000 planes can be infinitely tougher.
The age of alloys
American citizens, Nationwide Geographic defined in 1942, lived in an “age of alloys.” With out aluminum alloys and different steel combos, meeting strains churning out fashionable tanks, vehicles and airplanes would grind to a halt. “More than any other struggle in history, this is a war of many metals, and the lack of a single one may be a blow far worse than the loss of a battle.”
Aluminum used to be an important for contemporary militaries. Mechanics take a look at an plane engine at Naval Air Station Corpus Christi, Texas, in November 1942.
Fenno Jacobs/Division of Protection
Few fabrics mattered greater than aluminum. Gentle but robust, aluminum shaped 60% of a heavy bomber’s engines, 90% of its wings and fuselage, and all of its propellers.
However there used to be an issue: Refining aluminum from bauxite ore required operating with dangerously scorching steel combos, over 2,000 levels Fahrenheit (1,100 levels Celsius). Cryolite solved the issue by way of lowering the temperature to a extra manageable 900 F (480 C).
The Nazis’ chemical trade had discovered an alternative to cryolite the use of fluorspar, however the U.S. most popular the extra resource-efficient cryolite and sought after to forestall the Germans from having it.
After the Nazis seized Denmark
Simply days after German tanks rolled into Denmark in April 1940, Allied officers huddled to plot tactics to offer protection to Ivittuut’s magical mineral. On Might 3, Danish Ambassador to the U.S. Henrik de Kauffmann, risking trial for treason, asked American help. On Might 10, the U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Comanche departed New England for Ivittuut. 4 others quickly adopted, one with weapons for the mine’s defenders.
The U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Comanche performed a task in protective Greenland mining operations beginning lengthy sooner than the U.S. formally entered Global Warfare II.
Thomas B. MacMillan, Courtesy of Peary-MacMillan Arctic Museum, Bowdoin Faculty
That very week in Washington, at a gathering of the Pan American Union, Roosevelt and his advisers spoke with masses of geologists and different representatives from Latin The usa — a resource-rich area that the U.S. noticed as a solution to its strategic fabrics shortages.
Apprehensive concerning the historical past of U.S. imperial high-handedness within the area, some Latin American citizens idea that their international locations will have to seal off their assets to out of doors regulate, as Mexico had in nationalizing U.S. and Ecu oil holdings in 1938.
Japan’s advances in Southeast Asia after Pearl Harbor bring to an end rubber from the Dutch East Indies and Malaysia, prompting a hurry for rubber within the Amazon and the advance of synthetics. Global Warfare II posters instructed American citizens to preserve rubber for the battle effort.
U.S. Govt Printing Workplace, Courtesy of Northwestern College Libraries
With Ecu empires crumbling, Roosevelt confronted a mild diplomatic dance with Greenland. He sought after to deal with the illusion of neutrality, stay skeptical isolationists in Congress from revolting and provides no provocations to Latin American anti-imperialists to bring to an end assets. Crucially, he additionally had to keep away from giving the resource-starved Jap a prison justification to grasp the oil-rich Dutch East Indies, now Indonesia – some other Ecu colony orphaned by way of the Nazi invasion.
Roosevelt’s resolution: enlist Coast Guard “volunteers” to protect Ivittuut. By means of the tip of the summer season, lengthy sooner than the U.S. formally entered the battle, 15 sailors resigned from their ships and took up place of abode close to the mine.
Seeing Greenland as an important to US safety
Roosevelt additionally were given ingenious with geography.
In an April 12, 1940, press convention, simply days after the Nazi invasion, he started to emphasise Greenland as a part of the Western Hemisphere, extra American than Ecu, and thus falling underneath Monroe Doctrine protections. To calm fears in Latin The usa, U.S. officers recast the doctrine as development-oriented hemispheric cohesion.
Maj. William S. Culbertson, a former U.S. business professional talking sooner than the Military Commercial Faculty in fall 1940, famous how the scramble for assets pulled the U.S. right into a type of nonmilitary struggle: “We are engaged at the present time in economic warfare with the totalitarian powers. Publicly, our politicians don’t state it quite as bluntly as that, but it is a fact.” For the remainder of the century, the entrance line used to be simply as most likely a far away mine as a real battlefield.
On April 9, 1941, precisely a yr after the Nazis seized Denmark, Kauffmann met with U.S. Secretary of State Cordell Hull to signal an settlement “on behalf of the King of Denmark” striking Greenland and its mines underneath the U.S. safety blanket. At Narsarsuaq, at the island’s southern tip, the U.S. started setting up an airbase named “Bluie West One.”
An aerial view displays Bluie West One, a U.S. air base at Narsarsuaq, Greenland, in June 1942. Later, right through the Chilly Warfare, the U.S. used Thule Air Base, now known as Pituffik Area Base, in northwest Greenland as a key missile protection website online on account of its proximity to the united states.
USAF Historic Analysis Company
All over the remainder of Global Warfare II and all over the Chilly Warfare, Greenland would space a number of necessary U.S. army installations, together with some that pressured Inuit households to relocate.
Important minerals nowadays
What transpired in Greenland within the 18 months sooner than Pearl Harbor have compatibility into a bigger rising development.
Because the U.S. ascended to world management and discovered that it couldn’t deal with army dominance with out large get right of entry to to overseas fabrics, it all started to revamp the worldwide gadget of useful resource flows and the foundations for this new world order.
A 1952 chart from the President’s Fabrics Coverage Fee, established by way of President Harry Truman to review the safety of U.S. uncooked fabrics right through the Chilly Warfare. The gang used to be recurrently referred to as the Paley Fee.
Sources for Freedom: A Report back to the President
It rejected the Axis’ “might makes right” territorial conquest for assets, however discovered different ways to ensure American get right of entry to to essential assets, together with loosening business restrictions in Ecu colonies.
The U.S. supplied a lifeline to the British with the destroyers-for-bases deal in September 1940 and the Lend-Hire Act in March 1941, however it additionally received strategic army bases world wide. It used support as leverage to additionally pry open the British Empire’s markets.
The end result used to be a postwar global interconnected by way of business and occasional price lists, but in addition an international community of U.S. bases and alliances of once in a while questionable legitimacy designed partially to offer protection to U.S. get right of entry to to strategic assets.
President John F Kennedy meets with Mobutu Sese Seko of the previous Belgian Congo, now the Democratic Republic of Congo, on the White Area in 1963. Beginning within the Forties, the African nation supplied the U.S. with cobalt and uranium, together with for the Hiroshima bomb. CIA-supported coups in 1960 and 1965 helped put Mobutu, recognized for corruption, in energy.
Keystone/Getty Pictures
All over the Chilly Warfare, those world assets helped defeat the Soviet Union. Alternatively, those safety imperatives additionally gave the U.S. license for improve of authoritarian regimes in puts like Iran, Congo and Indonesia.
The usa’s voracious urge for food for assets additionally incessantly displaced native populations and Indigenous communities, justified by way of the outdated declare that they misused the assets round them. It left environmental injury from the Arctic to the Amazon.
Donald Trump’s son visited Greenland in 2025, in a while after the U.S. president started speaking about short of to regulate the island and its assets. The folks with Donald Trump Jr., 2d from proper, are dressed in jackets studying ‘Trump Force One.’
Emil Stach/Ritzau Scanpix/AFP by means of Getty Pictures
Strategic assets had been on the middle of the American-led world gadget for many years. However U.S. movements nowadays are other. The cryolite mine used to be a operating mine, rarer than nowadays’s proposed essential mineral mines in Greenland, and the Nazi danger used to be impending. Maximum necessary, Roosevelt knew the right way to achieve what the U.S. wanted with out a “damn-what-the world-thinks” army takeover.
