I hadn't heard of the incident with the U-boats. I was under the impression that Portugal was always willing to sell tungsten to Germany but as the war progressed other sources dried up and Germany was left dependent on Portuguese ones. You're correct on the terms of sale. Portugal demanded payment in gold and refused German offers of credit lines in exchange for the tungsten.
someone upthread said:
I'm thinking Portugal was wary of which way the Spanish were going to jump and just wanted to stay out of the line of fire.
Yes. Portugal's policy was to prevent itself from becoming involved in the war and to profit as much as possible from it. A large part of that was keeping an eye on Spain's position and making itself valuable enough to both sides that neither would want to attack.
I think that Portugal has even less reason ITTL to side with the Allies than it did OTL precisely BECAUSE the Allies are doing better.
That would seem to put the kibosh on a notion I was kicking around earlier this morning for yet another harebrained land front to engage the Germans on--The Iberian Front!
I quite appreciate that neither Spain nor Portugal wanted to get drawn into the war.
But it does seem to me that with Britain in a stronger position, the UK has more leverage to demand that Portugal stop allowing the Germans access to tungsten on any terms. It's a very different situation from the Swedes continuing to sell iron to the Nazis; the Swedes were completely surrounded by Nazi allies or conquests and even before Hitler took Norway and came in on the Finnish side as part of his attack on the Soviets, Sweden was already largely at Germany's mercy.
Portugal on the other hand is much more at Britain's, and as US power builds, America's mercy.
I can see how it was that in OTL the Anglo-Americans didn't have quite enough leverage to attempt to forbid Portugal selling tungsten to the Germans, but I think here in this timeline they have more, much earlier. So it's a question of how much could they hurt the German war effort simply by cutting off their tungsten supply? If the stakes are high enough, I can see it becoming a hard demand the Western Allies make, bearing in mind that if Salazar threatens to join the Axis, the Anglo-Americans can simply cut off all their colonies, forever, as well as shut down their overseas trade.
So, seeing that, suppose Salazar tries to stall by saying "Ah, but what if Franco throws in with Hitler and my poor country is invaded?"
If the western allies are serious about cutting off Hitler's access to tungsten, they will need to leverage Franco too then. Franco in turn could legitimately be worried about the prospect of a German attack on the northern border with France. The W-Allies would have to offer to commit some forces to guard that border, and yet promise not to use them to attack Hitler's France unless the Germans strike first. So such forces would be tied down uselessly, it would seem, and still from Franco's point of view be a dangerous provocation of Hitler and at the same time a dangerous Trojan Horse of Allied force on his own soil. It would be a hard sell.
Again the question is, just how crippling would it be to Hitler to lose access to Portuguese tungsten?
Because if Franco could be persuaded (and it might take a combination of painful arm-twisting and heavy bribery to do it, if it could be done at all) and Hitler is pretty much forced to go ape and invade Spain---
What the western Allies need at this point is a battlefield on which they can engage German forces directly. If they can assure Franco they can move enough forces in quickly enough that the battlefield won't be on Spanish soil but on French, they might be able to get it.
Now I don't think they are ready for that yet. But it could well be that it makes a lot more sense to try for this Pyrennian front rather than to try to invade via the Balkans or wait until enough force is massed for Overlord.
Not this year, but a year hence, can the Americans supplement the British forces enough so that they can pledge to move in enough force to shore up the northern Spanish border fast enough that the Wehrmacht won't get through to Spanish soil, and fight their way north from there?
If they can do this, they not only gain the needed land front striking near the core of German strength but also cut the German war machine off from a vital supply.
It again hinges on how important tungsten is, whether the Germans really had no alternate supply, and whether Salazar and Franco could be somehow brought on board.
Now the more I think about it, the more harebrained and far-fetched this scenario seems. I presume Hitler did OTL have a substantial force already based on the Spanish border, and only Spanish neutrality prevented that force from coming into Spain and reinforcing its defenses? Presumably he'd have that here too, and there's no reasonable way Spain could be brought on the Allied side, not even as a neutral leaning Westward enough to stop the tungsten trade. (I presume the Germans brought their tungsten to the Reich overland, through Spain and Vichy France, because sending it north to French ports in ships would be too risky as the RN would capture the ships or the RAF would sink them, as war contraband.)
But the flip side of it, OTL and ITTL, is that both Franco and Salazar are locked into neutrality--if they won't go west, they can't go east either because then the gloves are off and the Allies might take the opportunity to establish a beachhead in Portugal or Spain before the Germans can help either dictator reinforce their defenses well enough, and then gradually fight their way to France and northeast from there. Not to mention stripping them both of their overseas colonies and all that.
So I guess cutting off the Reich's tungsten is out, until the Allies can conquer at least southern France by another route. But neither do the Allies have to worry about Portugal or Spain turning on them either.
Well, I guess this clears up the mystery of Portuguese neutrality then!