(4 of 4)
But if Germany did not gain materially in wartime industrial strength, Britain lost enough to make Germany's conquests worthwhile. She lost access to Sweden's iron ore, Norway's refined and processed metals, dairy products from Denmark and The Netherlands, Scandinavian timber, Belgian steel, bauxite from France. But so long as she controlled the seas, had bottoms to carry goods in, ports to unload them at, she could call on the Empire and the Americas to replace what the Nazis had taken. In the folds of Britain's Pennine Range were 19% of the world's coal, 8% of its iron ore—enough to keep her basic war industries going. She had 10% of the world's steel production. Nazi Germany had still to demonstrate that the great industrial centres of the English Midlands could be bombed into inactivity.
If war should end with the division of territory which Adolf Hitler has achieved, the situation would be different. Then Germany could put her great, captured industrial plant to work turning out manufactured goods for export. Fed by raw materials from the colonial empires of France and The Netherlands, manned by conscript labor, the workshops of Nazi Europe could offer competition in foreign trade that Britain could scarcely hope to meet. That would be an economic war in which the U.S. also would be in danger of defeat.