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matt_black
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Was the UK's drive to acquire civilian metals to use in WW2 necessary for the war effort?

This question was asked here recently:

Were World War II scrap drives in the United States truly necessary for the procurement of raw materials?

And it has produced some very solid analysis and fascinating statistics.

But the USA had a very different experience of war to the UK. The UK fought for longer and more intensely (the Germans could bomb UK factories and much of the UK supplies had to be shipped in in convoys suffering frequent U-boat attack). So the need to exploit every scrap of metal like iron and aluminium was far greater. So the UK ran similar "recycling" efforts to the USA but possible on a more extreme scale. For example, virtually every cast-iron fence on both private and public buildings were removed (the effects are still visible in the majority of pre-war buildings).

Were the recycling efforts in the UK far more significant for the war effort than the related efforts in the USA?

matt_black
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