During World War II, Royal Navy ships were stationed in Mindelo, later with Winston Churchill's interest in Cape Verde, in April 1941, thousands of Allied troops were stationed on the island. After the Second World War, the economy collapsed as the shipping traffic was drastically reduced. As the British coal industry went into decline in the 1980s, this source of income dried up, and British merchants had to abandon their Cape Verdean interests — which ended up being the final strike to the highly dependent local economy.