As you know, the Soviet Union learned about the German tungsten know-how after the counteroffensive near Moscow. Then the secret anti-caliber anti-tank shells with an unusually hard core fell into the hands of Soviet specialists. They were discovered by the 3rd rank military engineer Vladimir Boroshev when he was combing the warehouses of captured equipment near Moscow at the end of February 1942. New ammunition was found from the ammunition load of the new anti-tank gun (shotgun) 2, 8 cm s. Pz. B.41 with a unique tapered barrel. The caliber of the compact gun was reduced to the muzzle from 28 mm to 20 mm. At the same time, such a miniature cannon managed to successfully hit any medium tanks at close range, and with a good coincidence, even heavy ones of the KV type. In the winter of 1942, the Soviet Union already knew about the very good armor penetration of the new German shells and turned to the metallurgists of the Moscow Stalin plant for help in solving the problem. The results of crystallographic and chemical analysis showed that the core of a sub-caliber projectile. made of superhard compound - tungsten carbide WC.
In the literature, it is sometimes erroneously indicated that the Soviet artillerymen fell into the hands of a Pzgr. 41 H. K. from the more powerful anti-tank 7, 5 cm Pak 41 with a tapered barrel, but this is not true. The Krupp factories produced a limited (150 copies) batch of these expensive guns only in the spring of 1942. The overwhelming majority of them were sent to the Eastern Front, where almost all of them disappeared. As a trophy, one 7, 5 cm Pak 41 cannon with six shells hit the Red Army only at the end of the summer of 1942.
But back to tungsten carbide. On the Mohs scale of hardness, this unique substance reaches a value of 9, second only to diamond with its maximum possible "ten". Together with the high bond density and refractoriness, the cores made of this material turned out to be excellent fillers for anti-tank shells. On average, tungsten carbide contains up to 94% of an expensive metal. If you know that the industry of Nazi Germany produced about two million sub-caliber shells only for anti-tank guns with a tapered barrel, then you can imagine the level of Reich's need for tungsten. At the same time, the Germans did not have their own reserves of such a rare metal. From whom did they take the ore to obtain tungsten (with German "wolf foam")? The main supplier of strategically important material was neutral Portugal.
At the same time, the Germans were so interested in tungsten that they were ready to buy it for gold. Assessing the role of Portugal in World War II is very difficult. On the one hand, the leadership of this country helped the allies and leased the Lanee airbase in the Azores, and on the other hand, sold tungsten ore to the Germans and their enemies. At the same time, the Portuguese were actual monopolists in this market sector - at that time they controlled up to 90% of all natural reserves of refractory metal in Europe. It is worth saying that even before the war, Hitler tried to accumulate as much tungsten as possible, but by the beginning of the invasion of the USSR, these reserves were exhausted. The leader of Portugal, Antonio Salazar, an economist and lawyer by profession, offered his services to the Hitlerite industry on time and did not fail. The price of tungsten during the war jumped several times and began to bring a fabulous income to a small European country. In 1940, Salazar was selling a ton of ore for $ 1,100, and already in 1941 - for $ 20,000. Trains loaded with enriched tungsten ore went to Germany via occupied France and neutral Spain. According to some reports, at least 44 tons of gold, branded by the Nazi swastika, settled in the banks of Lisbon in payment for tungsten. The allies insistently demanded that Portugal stop the supply of a strategically important resource for Germany, especially this pressure increased when the mentioned anti-tank shells were discovered in the USSR. But in fact, the supply chain for Portuguese tungsten dried up only on July 7, 1944, after three years of speculation with the Nazis. However, the German arms industry already by 1943 felt a serious "tungsten hunger" and significantly reduced the production of ammunition with superhard cores. By this time, allied intelligence services had also blocked other sources of tungsten supplies from China, North and South America. In total, Portugal earned at least $ 170 million in the world war at the rate of the 40s. By the end of the war, the country's gold and foreign exchange reserves increased eightfold. Great Britain became one of the main debtors of the once backward state. The British still had to pay for the supply of Portuguese tungsten.
Fascist Germany was ready to pay dearly for tungsten. This provided a definite advantage for the German artillery on the battlefield. However, "wolf foam" was not the only metal for which the Germans literally had to fight.
Cursed Molly
During the First World War, tungsten was used for alloying armor steel, but the needs of the fronts many times exceeded the possibilities for the extraction of refractory metal. And then the engineer decided that molybdenum would be an excellent substitute for "wolf foam". It was necessary to add only 1.5-2% of this metal to the alloy, and expensive tungsten was no longer needed in tank armor. For this, molybdenum had the corresponding refractoriness and toughness, which acquired particular importance in artillery. But not when smelting shells, but when making the barrels of Krupp's guns. The famous "Big Bertha" ("Dicke Bertha"), which were capable of firing at targets at a distance of 14.5 km with projectiles weighing 960 kilograms, were impossible without alloying steel with molybdenum. A unique property of the metal was that it gave steel not only strength, but also eliminated the inevitable brittleness. That is, before molybdenum, the hardening of steel was always accompanied by an increased brittleness of such alloys. It is generally accepted that until 1916 the Entente countries did not even suspect about German technologies for mixing molybdenum into weapons-grade steels. Only when the French at random melted the captured cannon did it turn out that there was a small fraction of this refractory metal in the composition. This "wundermetal" was vitally necessary for the Second Reich, but Germany was not preparing at all for a protracted war, so it prepared limited reserves of magical molybdenum.
And when it dried up, I had to look at a lonely deposit of molybdenum near Mount Bartlett in distant Colorado. It is noteworthy that at the end of the 19th - beginning of the 20th century, no one really knew what to do with the molybdenite deposit discovered here. For more than twenty years, molybdenum has been worth a mere penny. But the First World War changed everything. The owner of the deposit was a certain Otis King, who in 1915 managed to bring down the world molybdenum market by inventing a new method of producing molybdenum. He was able to get 2.5 tons of metal from ore, and this covered half of the world's annual consumption. Prices fell and King was close to ruin.
The official representative of the German concern Krupp, Max Schott, came to the "help" and forced King to sell the mines for a measly 40 thousand dollars with extortion and threats. So, after the raider takeover, in 1916, the famous Climax Molybdenum Company was formed, which, under the nose of the Americans (or with their consent), supplied the valuable alloy metal to their homeland in Germany. Until now, historians argue about whether Max Schott's company supplied molybdenum to the British and French, bypassing the owners from the Krupp concern. Be that as it may, by the end of the war, Climax smelted more than 800 tons of metal from molybdenite, and by 1919 the price of molybdenum had fallen so much that the mine was closed. Many workers breathed a sigh of relief - such were the difficult working conditions in the mines of Mount Bartlett. Illiterate miners hardly even managed to pronounce the name of the metal, so they gave it the apt name "damned Molly" ("Molly be damned"), which was consonant with the English Molybdenum. The mine was reopened in 1924 and until 1980 it worked continuously - there were quite enough wars on the planet.
