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INDUSTRIAL DIAMONDS: IN WAR AND PEACE
many.
A few days later the board required all dealers in Great Britain to
report within fourteen days all stocks of diamonds not set in jewelry.
As a result, the Ministry of Economic Warfare had a list of all stocks
of industrial diamonds and curbed their shipments, except to the United
States and, for a time, Switzerland. But the British had not fully
checkmated the Germans. Nazi agents, following the invasion of Poland,
began to penetrate the Brazilian diamond fields, offering to pay four
and five times the regular prices for industrial diamonds. But they
were checkmated there because it was discovered that Brazil produces
only 3 per cent of the world's diamond yield and it would be necessary
to get large stocks of stones largely from South Africa, a unit of the
British Empire.
Now
what was the reason for this frenzied, diamond-studded chess game? Why
was the diamond, which we have here been considering only in a romantic
light, so all-important a force in the bloodiest war game the world has
ever known? It was because the tough little industrial stone, homelier
than its more elegant brother but of the same carbonic heritage, had
become a potent force in war. Because of it, Germany knew and England
knew and now we know, it was possible for diamond-impregnated tools to
true the precision tools which grind gun bores and airplane and
automobile crankshafts, valves, and gears; to saw and prove plastics
and ebonite sheets for insulators, time switches; to grind pistons,
valve seats, and lenses for binoculars, range finders, bomb sights,
and navigation instruments; to test the hardness of ball and roller
bearings and rings; to draw precision wire for electric transmission,
mine-sweeping cables, airplane control cables and bracing wires, plane
detectors, radio valve filaments, magneto windings, and surgical uses;
to help create hypodermic needles and ship
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