In the early months of 1942, you could stand on a white-sand beach in Trinidad — palm trees swaying in the salty breeze and fishing boats bobbing in the shallows — look out at a calm, blue-green Caribbean, and almost forget that you were in a war zone.
Yet this was one of the most dangerous stretches of sea in the Western Hemisphere.
Just out of sight, past the fishing boats, beneath that glassy water, German submarines were lying in wait.
The Nazis were hunting freighters. Slow, heavy ships riding low in the water, loaded with a dull reddish ore that almost no American had ever heard of.
The ore was bauxite. Bauxite, refined and smelted, becomes aluminium.
And the United States needed a staggering amount of it. Over the course of World War II, the US would build nearly 300,000 warplanes, most of them framed in aluminium.
Most of it traced back to two small colonies on the northern coast of South America: Dutch Guiana, today called Suriname, and neighboring British Guiana.
By the height of the war, Suriname alone was supplying around 60% of America’s bauxite. It had to travel by sea, up through the Caribbean, to reach the refineries and smelters of the United States.
The Germans understood this vulnerability perfectly. Sink the bauxite, and you ground the planes before they were ever built.
So after Pearl Harbor brought the United States into the war, Germany’s U-boat commander, Karl Dönitz, sent his U-boats across the Atlantic and into American waters.
The campaign was code-named Operation Neuland, and it is remembered for its opening blow — simultaneous strikes in February 1942 on the oil facilities at Aruba, Curaçao, and Maracaibo.
But oil was only half of the job. The same submarines were also working the bauxite route, and one of them, U-129, spent its patrol parked southeast of Trinidad doing nothing but intercepting the ore freighters as they came up from the Guianas. In under a month, the Germans sent more than 40 ships to the bottom of the Caribbean.
Washington had seen it coming. Just weeks before America was even formally at war, in November 1941, the United States had moved some 2,000 troops into Suriname to guard the mines and the loading docks — a small army stationed in the jungle of South America for the sole purpose of protecting a supply of rock.
The industrial might of the United States — the air force that would darken the skies over Europe and the Pacific — rested on a thin thread of slow ships crossing a single body of water, carrying ore from a handful of mines in someone else’s colony.
The entire war effort hung on a single chokepoint, and for a few months in 1942, the Germans had it by the throat.
When the US won the war, it built a world designed to make sure that never happened again.
American naval power took ownership of the world’s shipping lanes. The Bretton Woods system put the dollar at the center of global trade. Through NATO, the Marshall Plan, and eventually the World Trade Organization, the architecture of the postwar order rested on the promise that raw materials would always flow freely.
And for decades it held. Bauxite became an invisible line item. A manufacturer in Pittsburgh never had to think about where his aluminium came from.
But while America guaranteed safe passage, it did not actually eliminate the chokepoint.
And that guarantee is now breaking down.
Trade is being weaponized, shipping lanes are contested once more, and the great industrial powers are again deciding who gets access to what.
Around the world, countries are once again moving to lock down their own supplies of critical materials — hoarding them, restricting exports, and racing to secure mines and refineries before their rivals do. The free flow the postwar order promised is giving way, and the old logic is back: control the supply, and you control who gets to build.
Which is why producers of a critical material like bauxite — operating in stable, friendly jurisdictions — become extraordinarily valuable in exactly this environment.
That is what we want to show you this month.
– Peter Schiff & James Hickman
Intro The thesis we laid out when I began editing this publication in late 2022 was simple. Most countries had taken on far, far too much debt, and had spent too many years dumping all that debt-fueled money into their economies to artificially boost economic growth. I wrote that these heavily indebted governments and central…
