1943 CURACAO & ARUBA magazine article, WWII, Oil, color photos

Description

Selling is a 1943 magazine article about:
CURACAO & ARUBA
Title: Curacao and Aruba on Guard
Author: W. Robert Moore
The article is about the Netherlands-owned islands of Curaçao and Aruba. Lots of info on the natives, oil refining, military preparations etc.  Many color photos too.
Quoting the first page “On Curacao and Aruba, tiny Dutch islands off the Venezuelan coast, two of the world's largest refineries and one smaller one are producing oil and high-octane gasoline to keep Allied planes in the air, tanks rolling in battle, and ships plowing sea lanes with men and munitions.
It is revealing no military secret to speak of these huge island installations. They've been in operation for years. Millions of barrels of gasoline, Diesel oil, and other oils pour annually from their busy refining and cracking plants. Almost everyone on both islands is "in oil" in one way or another.
When the Germans sent their blitzkrieg crashing into the Netherlands in May, 1940, British and French troops were dispatched immediately to help the local garrisons on Curacao and Aruba guard these fountainheads of precious fuel. After the sudden fall of France her troops were withdrawn.
The British remained until after United States forces came in February last year.
Less than a week after the announcement by our State Department that United States contingents had been sent to Curacao and Aruba, at the invitation of the Netherlands Government, Axis submarines bobbed up on the scene and fired their opening salvos in the Western Hemisphere.
Early in the morning of February 16, they launched torpedoes against several tankers and sent shells from deck guns hurtling over the big Lago refinery at Aruba.
Some tankers were damaged or set afire and sunk, but the shells all overshot their mark, except one which dented a Diesel oil tank and ricocheted harmlessly. Not a single part of the installations was damaged.
"True, the subs sank a few ships and gave us some fireworks for a while," said one official. "But, all in all, they missed the boat. They'll get some hot stuff thrown at them if they come back!"
Since that first foray, one submarine has returned. It fired a few ineffectual shells at some outlying storage tanks on Curacao, then crash-dived and fled.
There was a reason. Curacao and Aruba are on guard.
When I visited the islands, I saw American officers and men up to their sunburned necks in work perfecting the defense of these vital refineries.
Men, guns, and machines are dispersed over cactus-studded outposts ready to give any invader a deadly reception.
So alert to possible enemy action were the lookouts that night after night alarms were turned in to headquarters on suspected flashes of tracer bullets. They proved to be only the trails of particularly bright falling stars.
With its homeland conquered by Germany and the Netherlands Indies overrun by the Japanese, there is precious little of the Netherlands Empire still free.
These islands, together with Surinam (Dutch Guiana) on the northern coast of South America, are about all that remain at this writing.
The island of Bonaire, a few miles east of Curacao, and tiny Saba, St. Eustatius, and part of St. Martin in the Leeward Islands chain hemming the Caribbean, also are Dutch. However, they are of little commercial importance and have only a handful of people.
The main sources of wealth under Queen Wilhelmina's control are these refineries on Curacao and Aruba and Surinam's rich bauxite deposits-an important source of our aluminum supply. But with these two strategic weapons her refugee government still fights.
Despite this emphasis on oil, Curacao and Aruba themselves have not a single drop. Most of it comes from the Lake Maracaibo and other vast Venezuelan fields nearly 200 miles away.
A geological bottleneck in the ocean entrance to Lake Maracaibo allows the passage only of shallow-draft vessels.
To exploit the rich resources oil concerns needed deep-water facilities. Curacao, possessing a wide, landlocked harbor, and Aruba, affording a deep anchorage behind a reef, thus have risen as the industrial refining middlemen to the Venezuelan deposits.
A constant procession of shallow-draft tankers shuttles back and forth between Maracaibo and the islands, bringing loads of crude oil. Here it is first refined and then loaded into big ocean-going tankers.
On a plane packed with persons traveling on wartime priorities, I flew from Miami to Maracaibo. So large is Lake Maracaibo that…
7” x 10”, 22 pages, 12 B&W and 10 color photos plus a map.
These are pages from an actual 1943 magazine.
43B2
Please note the flat-rate shipping for my magazine articles. Please see my other auctions and store items for more old articles, advertising pages and non-fiction books.
Click Here To Visit My eBay Store: busybeas books and ads
Thousands of advertisement pages and old articles
Anything I find that looks interesting!
Please see my other auctions for more
goodies, books and magazines.
I'll combine wins to save on postage.
Thanks For Looking!
Luke 12: 15
Note to
CANADIAN
purchasers:
Since 2007 I've only been charging 5% GST on purchases. Thanks to a recent CRA audit I must change to the full GST/HST charge. Different provinces have different rates, though most are just 5%. My GST/HST number is 84416 2784 RT0001