Cornuck wrote: ↑Thu Feb 22, 2018 9:30 am
Per wrote: ↑Thu Feb 22, 2018 1:59 am
And to honour our neutral stance we delivered ball bearings that were essential for the production of tanks and aircraft to both sides.
Slightly more to Germany, but the British got a better discount.
https://es.handels.gu.se/digitalAssets/ ... golson.pdf
So, not really neutral, just war profiteers.
Neutral, which means we treated both sides the same. The Brits needed our ball bearings for their Spitfires, without which the Battle of Britain would probably have been lost. After Denmark and Norway had been occupied by Germany it became hard to ship them to the UK, so the English tried to replace them with American ball bearings, but since the Americans still used medieval measurements rather than the modern metric system, they could not deliver parts that fit. Meanwhile the Germans also used our ball bearings for their tanks... SKF already had subsidiaries in both Germany and the UK before the war, so some of the bearings could be produced locally, but the factories were still dependent on the high grade Swedish steel necessary to make the bearings. And seriously, as a neutral country, why shouldn't we be exporting our products to both sides?
To some extent we did sort of taint the neutral stance though; "
When the Soviet Union attacked Finland in November 1939, many Swedes favored some sort of involvement in the conflict, both on a humanitarian and on a military basis. Sweden's interest in Finland lay in the fact that Finland had been an integrated part of Sweden for more than six hundred years, with Sweden losing control of its eastern provinces in 1809. Despite several pleas from the Finnish government, the Swedish government declined to engage militarily with the Red Army as it advanced during the Winter War. However, Sweden declared itself "non-belligerent" rather than neutral during the conflict and as many as 8,000 Swedes voluntarily went to Finland to fight. The Swedish government and public also sent food, clothing, medicine, weapons and ammunition to aid the Finns during this conflict. This military aid included:[15]
135,402 rifles, 347 machine guns, 450 light machine guns with 50,013,300 rounds of small arms ammunition;
144 field guns, 100 anti-aircraft guns and 92 anti-tank guns with 301,846 shells;
300 naval mines and 500 depth charges;
17 fighter aircraft, 5 light bombers, 1 DC-2 transport aircraft turned into a bomber, and 3 reconnaissance aircraft.
Twelve of Sweden's most modern fighter aircraft, British Gloster Gladiators, were flown by volunteer Swedish pilots under Finnish insignia.[16] These aircraft constituted one third of Sweden's fighter force at the time. In addition, Sweden received some 70,000 Finnish children who were sent to Sweden to find safety during the 1940s.[17]"
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweden_ ... rld_War_II
Now, keep in mind that in 1939 Germany and the Soviet Union were basically allies, under the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, so our help to Finland was originally against German interests. Later during the war Germany and the Soviet Union became enemies, and then our help to the Finns was in Germany's interest, but our support to Finland had nothing to do with Germany, it was simply support to a neighbouring country with which we shared a common history. For the same reason we also trained Norwegian and Danish refugees in "police work", including how to handle guns...
