7

BLOCKADE

THE NORTH SEA

Britain was the financier and armourer of the Entente; Germany was the military mainstay of the Central Powers. By 1916 both were, to varying degrees, the principal props of their allies. If it was a principle of strategy that mass should be concentrated on the decisive point, one needed to knock out the other in order to win the war. Thus the Anglo-German antagonism became the pivot of the conflict. The polarity was best expressed in competing ideologies: liberalism and individualism against militarism and collectivism, the pursuit of mammon against the spirit of heroism. However, the bitterness of the rhetoric could not be easily converted into strategy. When the war broke out, neither had a coherent plan for dealing with the other.

Britain was principally a sea power, Germany a land power. At one level, therefore, this lack of preparedness was not surprising. At another it was: for a decade before the war, the building programmes of the two navies had been shaped principally by the arms race between the two sides. But that rivalry had not precipitated the conflict. Furthermore, once the war was declared, the Royal Navy had no strategic interest in fighting a major action against the German navy. As the world’s greatest sea power, Britain already enjoyed maritime supremacy. Its task was to defend what it had. ‘Tomorrow is Trafalgar Day’, Vice-Admiral Sir David Beatty wrote to his wife on 20 October 1914. ‘The powers that be have forgotten it. Ye shades of Nelson that we should be in the hands of such is past enduring but one is powerless to do anything but wait day after day.’1

Beatty was the embodiment of the fighting sailor. In 1898 he had won a DSO commanding gunboats on the River Nile in Kitchener’s reconquest of the Sudan, and in 1900 he had been seriously wounded in the Boxer Rising. Still only forty-three, he now led the Battle Cruiser Squadron based at Rosyth. He owed his rapid promotion in part to another combative veteran of the Sudan campaign, the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill. Beatty had been Churchill’s naval secretary before the war, and in 1912 had spelt out for his political master the geographical realities that were to shape Britain’s conduct of the war at sea: ‘The British Isles form a great breakwater across German waters thereby limiting the passage of vessels to the outer seas to two exits, the one on the South, narrow, easily blocked and contained, and the other on the North of such a width (155 miles) that with the forces at our disposal it could be easily commanded so as to preclude the possibility of the passing of any hostile force without our knowledge and without being brought to action by a superior force.’2

The 3rd Battle Squadron of the German High Seas Fleet at sea. 31 May 1916, from aboard Scheer’s flagship, Friedrich der Grosse Her main armament, of 12-inch guns, was inferior to the 13 5-inch guns on Jellicoe’s flagship, The Iron Duke


Britain would bottle up the German navy in the North Sea. The legacy of Trafalgar encouraged British naval officers to hope that the Germans would seek a battle to break the blockade - that the latter would be the means to an end, not an end in itself. Their expectations were reasonable in so far as Germany had to attack if it was to change the balance of power at sea. But that was not the Kaiser’s intention at the war’s outset. Tirpitz had created the fleet to be a deterrent - to support the idea of Weltpolitik, and to persuade the British that Germany was to be taken seriously, either as an ally or as a potential enemy. The logic that underpinned that view did not change during the war itself. For the Kaiser, the ultimate purpose of the fleet’s capital ships was to give Germany leverage at the peace negotiations. In August 1914 Germany had eighteen battleships and battle cruisers to Britain’s twenty-nine. If its High Seas Fleet responded to the challenge to break the blockade by taking on Britain’s Grand Fleet in a major battle, it would lose.

But doing nothing was as frustrating for German naval officers as it was for Beatty. Indeed, it might prove as prejudicial to the long-term survival of the fleet as sailing into the teeth of the British guns. As the junior service, the German navy still had to prove its value to the new nation in a way that the army did not. Tirpitz had spent the best part of two decades battling in the Reichstag for funds to ensure the fleet’s steady expansion. If those ships spent the war safely in the harbours of Wilhelmshaven and Kiel, apparently doing nothing, while the army overran much of Continental Europe, continued high spending on the fleet after the war would be hard to justify. The answer was Kleinkrieg, small operations to erode the Royal Navy’s superiority through the use of mines, coastal batteries and submarines. When the Grand Fleet had lost a few battleships, the strengths of the two sides would be more equal and the High Seas Fleet would be able to risk a battle.

The trouble with this strategy was that its weapons were those of coastal waters. It depended on the British positioning their ships off the German mainland, mounting what was called a ‘close’ blockade. As Beatty’s memorandum for Churchill made clear, the Royal Navy did not need to do this to achieve its objectives. Closing the exits from the North Sea, a ’distant’ blockade, was just as effective in denying Germany access to the world’s oceans and trading routes, and obviated the risk of losses caused by Germany’s maritime defences. Distant blockade, which Britain adopted at the outbreak of the war, closed down one German option; however, it opened up another. The Grand Fleet itself was based at Scapa Flow in the Orkney islands, so shutting the northern exit from the North Sea to the Atlantic. Although smaller units were stationed elsewhere, much of the east coast of England was comparatively undefended. German attacks on the British coast, as opposed to British attacks on the German coast, might sting the British into a response and so enable the German navy to take on fractions of the Royal Navy and gradually whittle away its strength.

At 8 a.m. on 16 December German battle cruisers of Franz von Hipper’s Scouting Squadron bombarded Hartlepool and Scarborough, killing over a hundred civilians. The British press made much of another instance of the Huns’ brutality, but the sufferings of non-combatants were not the prime purpose of the raid. The Germans hoped to tempt British forces into pursuing them over freshly laid minefields. Moreover, the battleships of the High Seas Fleet lay offshore to give support to the Scouting Squadron. Beatty’s own battle cruisers had been reduced in number by the despatch of Invincible and In-flexible to the South Atlantic to deal with Spee, and the decision was taken to keep the bulk of the Grand Fleet in harbour. As a result ten British capital ships set out in search of twenty-four German. The latter had succeeded better than the fleet commander, Admiral Friedrich von Ingenohl, realised: he had in his grasp what proved to be the only opportunity for a major naval victory vouchsafed the Germans in the entire war. But he did not know that the Grand Fleet was confined to Scapa Flow. Alarmed by the volume of British wireless traffic, he turned for home.

The German navy attacked the British mainland from the air as well as by sea On 8 September 1915 a Zeppelin commanded by Heinrich Mathy, the greatest airship commander of the war, killed twenty-two people and caused £500,000 worth of damage to Aldersgate in London

Flag signalling preserved radio silence but could not depend on the perfect conditions enjoyed by the yeoman on the battleship, Kmg George V


In this there was a double irony. First, the British were as a general rule far more observant of radio silence than the Germans, preferring to use flags for tactical communications, even when the weather or smoke obscured visibility and made the flags hard to read. Second, the fact that the encounter had taken place at all was the product of German wireless transmissions, intercepted by British signals intelligence.

Within four months of the war’s outbreak the British were in possession of all three German naval codes. The Australians laid their hands on the code book for merchant shipping; the imperial naval code book was taken by the Russians from a cruiser which went aground in the Baltic; and the traffic signals book from a sunk destroyer was picked up in the nets of a British trawler. Listening stations were set up along the east coast, so that cross-bearings could enable the position of the vessel sending the message to be fixed, and the intercepted signals were analysed in a newly created department within the Admiralty Old Building, Room 40. Staffed by academics, not professional sailors, its operational effectiveness was principally the achievement of the director of naval intelligence, Reginald ‘Blinker’ Hall, so called from his constant blinking, a habit his daughter somewhat improbably attributed to the terrible food at his preparatory school. But there was much that was unlikely about Hall, a fearsome interrogator of prisoners and a devious runner of agents and spies: ’all other secret service men are amateurs by comparison‘, the American ambassador in London told President Wilson.3 Room 40’s work was aided by the Germans’ belief that wireless might offset their numerical inferiority: it enabled real-time communication and so facilitated the concentration of forces in space and time. The effect was that their chatter, which continued between ships even when in harbour, conferred exactly those advantages on their enemy.

Not that the British got it right all the time, as the missed opportunity of 16 December 1914 showed. British naval intelligence’s ongoing achievements were negative. It prevented the German navy from appreciating that its codes were compromised, although the captain of the Königsberg in East Africa in 1915 did realise as much, and its ability to give the fleet warning of a German sally enabled the British east coast to be defended despite the Royal Navy’s abandonment of the North Sea. What the Royal Navy found much more difficult was the integration of intelligence with operations, and doing so without compromising long-term security. Commanders at sea were told no more than the naval intelligence directorate felt they needed to know. In particular, they were refused permission to decode intercepts at sea. The evidence of their own eyes might be at odds with the incomplete and progressively obsolescent information fed them from the Admiralty. Intelligence created opportunities for the budding Nelsons of the Great War but then curbed their initiative.

On 23 January 1915 Room 40 warned Beatty and his battle cruisers that Hipper’s Scouting Squadron was once again putting to sea. But the Admiralty assumed that the Germans planned to raid the east coast as before, and therefore put the weight on the defence of the British mainland and not on cutting Hipper off from his base. In fact, Hipper was instructed to reconnoitre the Dogger Bank, with a view to attacking fishing boats and to laying mines off the Firth of Forth. Consequently the battle which ensued took the form of a pursuit rather than an envelopment. At 7.05 a.m. one of Beatty’s destroyers reported contact with the enemy. At 8.34 Beatty ordered his battle cruisers to raise their speed to 27 knots, four knots faster than the maximum speed Hipper could maintain. Twenty-six minutes later his flagship, HMS Lion, opened fire at a range in excess of 20,000 yards. The wind was north-easterly, with the result, according to her captain, that ‘the smoke of the enemy coming almost straight towards us, combined with the gloom, made spotting very difficult. Flashes of the enemy’s guns were extraordinarily vivid, so that it could not be seen whether we were hitting the enemy or not.’4 They were: the leading German ship, Seydlitz, caught fire. However, she was saved by the deliberate flooding of her magazines. Ultimately, of four German ships, only the weakest and oldest, the Blücher, a so-called ‘five-minute’ ship in reference to her likely survival time in battle, was sunk. The restrictions of flag signals created ambiguity in Beatty’s orders. Greater use of wireless would not only have ensured the more effective distribution of his ships’ firepower, but also have prevented him breaking off the action prematurely. At 10.54, Beatty persuaded himself that he saw the wash of a periscope. Fearing that Hipper might be luring his battle cruisers over a submarine screen, he turned away rather than risk being torpedoed. There were no submarines in the vicinity, a fact known to Room 40 but not relayed to Beatty.

Beatty blamed his disappointment on the problems of communication. But by focusing attention here he prevented a more thorough discussion of the design problems of the battle cruiser itself. The First Sea Lord, Jackie Fisher, is most often remembered as the mastermind behind the Dreadnought, the all-big-gun battleship, adopted in 1905. However, Fisher’s favourite project was not the battleship but the battle cruiser. He recognised as clearly as did the Germans that Dreadnoughts were vulnerable to torpedoes, launched from destroyers or more particularly submarines, weapons which might prove especially effective in confined waters like those between Britain and mainland Europe. His belief that lighter - and cheaper - vessels might be sufficient to protect Britain from invasion did not mean that he saw the capital ship as redundant. Its role, like Britain‘s, was global, and its task to dominate the world’s oceans. The Dreadnought was an evolutionary design, a staging post to the battle cruiser, a vessel which would have the speed of the cruiser but the punch of the battleship. The first Dreadnought mounted 12-inch guns and could maintain a speed of 21 knots; in December 1914 Fisher secured approval for battle cruisers with 15-inch guns and a speed of 30 knots. The victory at the Falklands seemed to vindicate Fisher’s designs. But in the pursuit of speed he had shed armour, particularly on the deck, which was rendered vulnerable to the plunging fire that long-range gunnery encouraged. The ship’s survivability depended on her speed and on the range at which she fought, but the pursuit of both these attributes militated in turn against effective gunnery. Gunnery was the most venerated specialisation of the Royal Navy, but it was not very good at it. At the Falklands Invincible and Inflexible achieved one hit per gun every seventy-five minutes, and took five hours and 1,174 shells to sink two inferior vessels. At the Dogger Bank, when confronted with more equal opposition (if the Blücher is discounted) only six heavy shells out of 1,150 had found their targets.5 The response was to stress the rate of fire over its accuracy, and therefore cordite charges, ready for use, were stored in the gun turrets themselves, and doors to magazines were left open. The safety of a ship was deemed to rest more on quick firing than on her formal protection.

The loss of the Blucher convinced the Germans that quality was essential to survival in battle at sea After Dogger Bank, they would not put to sea for over a year, an interval they used to improve their armament and fire control arrangements


The Germans concluded from the battle of Dogger Bank that relative technological advantage was more important than numbers. They did not come out again for over a year, but when they did - on 31 May 1916 - they deployed ships whose key characteristic was survivability. Armour was thickened, anti-flash precautions improved, and the quantity of ammunition ready for use in each gun turret was restricted. But in another sense the gap between the German navy and the Royal Navy only widened. The numerical difference in capital ships, having closed in the winter of 1914-15, increased again. The Grand Fleet contained thirty-seven capital ships to the High Seas Fleet’s twenty-seven, and its guns mounted a broadside that was twice as great. The German army’s needs for men and material eroded the navy’s ability to command resources, and the debate about the best use of the latter became even more heated. Those committed to the offensive were encouraged by the army’s success in the east to call for operations in the Baltic against the Russians, and others said that the submarine, not the capital ship, should be the principal weapon against the British.

Reinhard Scheer, who succeeded to the command of the High Seas Fleet in February 1916, was a decisive, even impetuous, man, in stark contrast to his predecessors. He won the Kaiser over to a more aggressive use of the fleet, its guiding principle being that, as before, Hipper’s Scouting Squadron should lure Beatty’s battle cruisers out to sea. This time, however, both submarines and the battleships of the High Seas Fleet would be waiting. The Germans were the last of the major powers to develop submarines and in 1914 had only twenty-eight, compared with fifty-five in the Royal Navy and seventy-seven in the French navy. But their late entry to underwater warfare meant that they profited from the trials and errors of the pioneers, and they were therefore building better vessels at a faster rate. In September 1914 German U-boats sank four British cruisers, including three in a single action. The shock effect was considerable, but the long-term lesson misleading. If warships exercised basic precautions, above all those of steering a zig-zag course and of maintaining a reasonable speed, they were safe. The submarine had to submerge to attack but in doing so she restricted her speed to about 10 knots, half that of a warship. She therefore could not act in conjunction with surface warships unless she was already in position. Moreover, she had to reckon on engaging an enemy warship head on, and therefore from the angle at which the latter presented the smallest target. By the end of the war not a single Dreadnought had been sunk by a submarine. But Scheer did not know that in 1916, of course, and nor did his counterpart, Sir John Jellicoe, commanding the Grand Fleet. The latter was a worrier, a centraliser and a hypochondriac, only too well aware of the awesome responsibility he carried as the protector of British maritime supremacy. For him, the German U-boat was a potent threat: ‘It is quite within the bounds of possibility’, he told the Admiralty on 30 October 1914, ‘that half our battle-fleet might be disabled by under-water attack before the guns opened fire at all, if a false move is made’.6

To avoid that danger Jellicoe proposed to refuse action in waters of the Germans’ own choosing, however ‘repugnant to the feelings of all British Naval Officers and men’. On 17 May 1916 Scheer ordered nineteen U-boats to positions off the Firth of Forth. He planned to raid Sunderland, hoping that the Battle Cruiser Fleet would put to sea from Rosyth and using airships to warn him if the Grand Fleet left Scapa Flow. But bad weather prevented the airships from taking any part in the action, and he therefore concluded it would be too risky to approach the British coast. Instead, he ordered a sortie to the north, to the Skagerrak, the waters between Norway and northern Denmark, off the Jutland peninsula. Here his line of retreat would be more secure, but now the principal submarine danger, in contradistinction to Jellicoe’s fears, would be mines, not U-boats.

Room 40 gave Jellicoe warning of Scheer’s intentions from 28 May, and late on the night of 30 May, over two hours before the Germans left their base in the Jade, the Grand Fleet and the Battle Cruiser Fleet both got up steam with a view to reaching positions off the Skagerrak. But on the following morning, at 11.10 Greenwich Mean Time, misreading of the German call-signs, and poor liaison between Room 40 and the operations division of the Admiralty, placed Scheer, and therefore the High Seas Fleet itself, still in Wilhelmshaven. The result was that the Grand Fleet advanced slowly, so conserving fuel but losing daylight. At 2.20 Beatty signalled that Hipper’s Scouting Squadron was in sight. He manoeuvred on a south-south-easterly course in order to cut the Germans off from their base, while Hipper also turned south, aiming to draw Beatty on to the approaching guns of the High Seas Fleet. In this ‘run to the south’, German gunnery proved more accurate than British. Beatty’s principal armament was the 15-inch guns of the latest Dreadnoughts of the 5th Battle Squadron, which had been detached from the Grand Fleet to support the Battle Cruiser Fleet in February. However, the yeoman on the battleship Barham could not read the flags signalling Beatty’s decision to turn south-south-east, and initially the 5th Battle Squadron drew away from the Battle Cruiser Fleet, assuming that the intention was to sail north-west to rendezvous with the Grand Fleet. The battleships were marginally slower than the battle cruisers, and fell behind. At about 4.00 they still had not opened fire, when a midshipman on one of them, Malaya, suddenly said to Sub-Lieutenant Caslon, “‘Look at that!”’ Caslon ‘thought for an instant that the last ship in the line had fired all her guns at once, as there was a much bigger flame, but the flame grew and grew till it was about three hundred feet high, and the whole ship was hidden in a dense cloud of yellow brown smoke. This cloud hung in the air for some minutes, and when it finally dispersed there was no sign of the ship.’7

The battle cruiser Indefatigable had blown up within thirty seconds of being hit. All but two of her complement of 1,019 were killed. Lion, Beatty’s flagship, had dropped out of the line: she had already received a direct hit on one of her turrets, which set the cordite charges ablaze, and the ship herself had been saved only by the timely closing of the magazine doors. Now two German battle cruisers, Seydlitz and Derfflinger, were able to concentrate their fire on a third British battle cruiser Queen Mary. Following a hit on her centre turret, the explosives throughout the ship were detonated, and she sank in two minutes. ‘There seems to be something wrong with our bloody ships today’, Beatty famously remarked.

Jutland the last moments of the British battle cruiser Indefatigable A German shell penetrated a gun turret. and the flash passed down the hoist to the magazine British gun crews, determined to maintain high rates of fire, stored ammunition ready to use in the turrets


It was 4.24. Six minutes later light cruisers began reporting that they could see the High Seas Fleet. At 4.40, when within 20,000 yards of the German battleships, Beatty ordered the Battle Cruiser Fleet to turn about. His task was no longer to defeat Hipper but to draw the High Seas Fleet northwards, towards the Grand Fleet. The 5th Battle Squadron now brought up the rear, and for over half an hour bore the brunt of the German battleships’ attack. Its tactics were, according to Georg von Hase, the gunnery officer on Derfflinger, to keep ‘as much as possible out of our range, but ... within reach of their own long-range guns’. Declining visibility also militated against accuracy, but ‘when a heavy shell hit the armour of our ship, the terrific crash of the explosion was followed by a vibration of the whole ship, affecting even the conning tower’.8 Aboard his flagship, Friedrich der Grosse, Scheer could see even less. He had begun to consider breaking off the pursuit for fear of a night action, in which his battleships would be vulnerable to British light forces, when at 6.26 (7.26 German time) he received a signal that captured survivors from an enemy destroyer reported that there were over sixty large enemy warships in the area, and that twenty of them were new battleships. Minutes later the horizon over a six-mile arc erupted in a line of gun flashes.

Beatty’s reporting to Jellicoe had been inadequate and misleading. As their two forces converged on but could not see each other, the commander-in-chief had to decide when to deploy the Grand Fleet into line, so that it could ‘cross the T’. This manoeuvre would set the British battleships at right angles to the High Seas Fleet, still in line ahead, and enable them to bring all their guns to bear. If he mistimed it, Scheer would be able to cross the T of the Grand Fleet. Jellicoe’s responsibilities at sea were very different from those of a commander on land. Here there was no arbitrary division between tactics and strategy: Jellicoe could see as much or as little of the battle as any other participant, and yet knew only too well that one moment of tactical miscalculation might result in the loss of British maritime supremacy for the remainder of the war.

One of the signals intercepted and decrypted by Room 40 in the course of the night of 31 May-1 June 1916, but not passed on to Jellicoe at sea. The order to open the barrier suggested the German fleet was breaking off the action to return to harbour


At 6.15 he began the deployment of the fleet to port, so putting the Germans to his south-west, and silhouetting them against the evening light. Each Dreadnought opened fire as she was free to do so, but because of the poor visibility could see only three or four enemy capital ships at a time. At 6.35 a third battle cruiser, Invincible, also struck in the turret, blew up and split in two. But the position of the High Seas Fleet was desperate: ranges were down to 12,000 yards, and the British could concentrate all their fire against portions of the German line. Scheer turned away to the south-west. But in so doing he was moving further from his base. Jellicoe could see less and less in the fading light, but he had the consolation of knowing that he lay between the Germans and their line of escape. This consideration was presumably what prompted Scheer to turn about and strike Jellicoe’s line once more. For twenty minutes, from 7.15, the whole of the Grand Fleet was engaged. Then again Scheer withdrew, and to cover his retreat ordered his destroyers to unleash their torpedoes. Fearful of further loss, Jellicoe turned the Grand Fleet away to port, and therefore to the east. In so doing he broke contact with the German fleet. His aim now was to avoid the dangers of night fighting, but to keep the High Seas Fleet to the west, so that it would have to seek a fleet action on the following day.

At 11.30 Jellicoe received a signal from the Admiralty relaying an intercepted German signal, giving the course and speed of the High Seas Fleet two hours previously, at 9.14, when it was ordered home. But Jellicoe’s faith in the Operations Department of the Admiralty had been undermined: twice already that day, in the morning and again at 9.58 p.m., it had managed to place Scheer in the wrong place. Only three of the sixteen decrypts passed over by Room 40 between 9.55 p.m. on 31 May and 3.00 a.m. on 1 June were relayed to Jellicoe, and therefore he had no context into which to set the intelligence he did receive. But it was not only the Operations Division which was guilty of inadequate communication. Jellicoe knew that his greater speed would prevent Scheer cutting across his bow. Therefore the Germans’ most obvious escape route lay astern, via the Horns Reef. This was screened by destroyers. They duly found themselves in confused and sustained fighting throughout the night, but they failed to report to Jellicoe. By the morning Scheer was safely through.

The High Seas Fleet claimed that the battle of the Skagerrak was a German victory. At first the British press tended to agree. At Scapa Flow the mood was despondent, a mixture of combat exhaustion and disappointed expectation. The battle of Jutland (as the British called it) engaged 100,000 men in 250 ships over 72 hours. It dwarfed Trafalgar in scale but not - it seemed - in outcome. The Royal Navy had lost fourteen ships, including three battle cruisers, and had sustained 6,784 casualties. The Germans had lost eleven ships, including one battleship and one battle cruiser, and had suffered 3,058 casualties. But ten of Scheer’s ships had suffered heavy damage, and only ten were ready for sea on 2 June. Jellicoe, with eight ships undergoing repairs, could have put twenty-four capital ships to sea. On 4 July 1916 Scheer renounced fleet action as an option. Jutland left the Royal Navy’s supremacy unimpaired and Britain’s strategy intact. ‘It is absolutely necessary’, Captain Herbert Richmond reminded himself, ‘to look at the war as a whole; to avoid keeping our eyes only on the German Fleet. What we have to do is to starve and cripple Germany.’9

ECONOMIC WARFARE

The blockade remained intact. Economic warfare rather than battle was the means of exercising maritime supremacy, particularly against a Continental coalition. But in the years immediately preceding the outbreak of war even its strongest advocates had been forced to doubt its efficacy. Three obstacles presented themselves. The first was the fear that Britain was more vulnerable to economic pressure than Germany. By 1914 almost 60 per cent of the food consumed in Britain was imported from overseas. Germany, its agriculture (unlike Britain’s) protected from foreign competition by tariffs, claimed to be self-sufficient in foodstuffs, although in fact about 25 per cent was imported. The second was legal. In 1909 the Declaration of London had defended the rights of neutrals by defining contraband, the goods that a blockading power in time of war might legitimately sequester, in narrow terms. Foodstuffs for the civilian population most certainly were not contraband. If Britain were neutral, the Declaration of London served the country’s interests as a trading nation. If it were a belligerent, it did not. Britain refused to ratify the Declaration of London, but the divisions in its counsels revealed the practical - and third - objection to blockade. Germany would be able to circumvent it by importing through the neutral powers on its borders.

The most forceful spokesman of economic warfare in government was the secretary of the Committee of Imperial Defence, Maurice Hankey. He bolstered Britain’s pre-war policy, in 1911 establishing the general principle that trading with the enemy would cease when war broke out, and in 1912 preparing the ‘war book’, which spelt out the legal steps and the financial initiatives to put economic warfare in place. He sustained that commitment once the war had begun. In June 1915, now secretary to the war committee, Hankey told the prime minister that the effects of blockade were cumulative ‘and the process inevitably slow. It may be that years must elapse before its effect is decisive. But when the psychological moment arrives and the cumulative effects reach their maximum and are perhaps combined with crushing defeats of the enemy, the results may be not merely material but decisive.’10

The long-term nature of the blockade frustrated Britain’s soldiers and their allies, confronted with desperate fighting in the present, and sometimes uncertain whether they had a future. And the slowness also created a difficulty in assessing the blockade’s effectiveness after the war. The economic pressure on Germany did not reach its maximum effect until 1917-18, and by then other factors, including the sustained nature of land warfare and the demands it made on German resources, also contributed to shortages in German production and to the deprivations suffered by the populations of the Central Powers.

The problems of assessment were compounded because, of all the enemy’s assets, his armed forces suffered least from the blockade’s effects. The focus of economic warfare lay not simply where pre-war German calculations had located it - in the denial of raw materials vital for munitions production - but also in food supplies. Because in time of war the state gave priority to feeding its direct defenders, the soldier and the factory worker, those most likely to suffer from shortages were the militarily useless, the old and the weak. Death rates among epileptics in Bethel, near Bielefeld, rose from 3.9 per cent in 1914 to 16.3 per cent in 1917, and in all Prussian sanatoriums from 9.9 per cent to 28.1 per cent.11 The British official history attributed 772,736 deaths in Germany during the war to the blockade, a figure comparable with the death rate for the British armed forces, and by 1918 the civilian death rate was running 37 per cent higher than it had been in 1913.12 Indirectly, at least, the blockade breached the principle of non-combatant immunity. Its naval aspects were the simplest and most immediate part of the undertaking. The deliberation of diplomacy was crucial to its international acceptance and to the cooperation of neutrals in its implementation.

The United States, in particular, with its large German population in the Midwest and a vociferous Irish immigrant community, had good reasons to take exception to a British policy designed to close off overseas markets. Britain did of course also have immense advantages in its courting of American opinion, the English language and a common constitutional inheritance among them. The News Department of the Foreign Office distributed the publications of the War Propaganda Bureau through its embassies and consulates to opinion-formers - newspaper editors and politicians. Books and pamphlets, written by famous authors like John Buchan and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and produced by private publishing houses, eschewed bombast for subtlety. Moreover, the British navy had taken control of the world’s underwater cable networks at the outbreak of the war, so all German communications to destinations outside Europe had to be transmitted by wireless and were therefore vulnerable to interception. Room 40 acquired the German diplomatic code in 1915, and also began reading neutral mail. In due course ‘Blinker’ Hall was enmeshed in counter-intelligence in the United States, exposing German sabotage and pre-empting Germany’s own propaganda.

In this battle for the ideological high ground, Britain had a clinching if less idealistic argument. America’s protests about the obstacles created to free trade were silenced by the profits that allied orders generated. In January 1914 US exports by value totalled $204 million. In July the economy was in depression and exports had fallen to $154 million. By December they had climbed back to $245 million. A year later, in December 1915, they reached $359 million, and in December 1916 $523 million. American shares soared: the Dow Jones index showed an 80 per cent gain between December 1914 and December 1915.13

The Central Powers were just as ready as the Entente to pay high prices for goods, and could - as the pre-war British pessimists had recognised - channel imports, especially those which were not contraband, via private businesses in neutral states. The opportunity for profit not just in the United States but also in Holland, Switzerland and Scandinavia was immense. Therefore, in addition to propaganda, the Foreign Office had a second task, that of industrial espionage. Britain took on responsibility for the blockade at sea and France that for the control of land routes. Each had to establish from scratch an enormous database on European trade. Bills of lading and ships’ manifests were scrutinised. Consuls paced quaysides checking the transhipment of goods. Captain M. Consett, the British naval attaché in Scandinavia throughout the war, reported from Copenhagen that ‘consignments of oil from New York consigned to — are reaching Germany through the intermediation of Mr. — residing in this town. The oil, which is in barrels, is marked “in transit at the buyer’s expense,” and addressed Nykjebing, Gottenberg and other ports. The barrels are brought down to the wharf ostensibly for shipment on vessels sailing for neutral ports, but on the other side of these are moored vessels bound for Lubeck and other German ports. The barrels are merely passed across the decks of the vessels which are supposed to receive them, and placed on board the vessels bound for Germany.’14

With information like this, the British were able to use commercial pressures to persuade businesses to collude in the blockade, regardless of the political sympathies of their parent governments. Naval control meant they could disrupt normal maritime trade by stopping ships, checking their cargoes and directing vessels to port, where they might be detained for three to four weeks. Neutral firms therefore had an incentive to form cartels to which goods could be consigned. The cartels guaranteed that the imports for their member firms were destined for domestic consumption and not for re-export to the Central Powers. The Netherlands Overseas Trust, set up in December 1914, was the first. In July 1915, 135 out of 186 vessels arriving in Holland were not detained; about three-quarters of those bound for Denmark, Norway and Sweden were.15 The Netherlands Overseas Trust therefore became a model for other trades. During the course of 1915 coercion gave teeth to the pressures for cooperation. Britain followed France in restricting the imports of the neutral states bordering Germany to their pre-war levels. Sweden found its rubber imports curtailed and the King complained that he could not play tennis. But such a policy only checked the escalation in transhipments; it did nothing to prevent the neutrals selling their own domestic produce. By 1915 Dutch cheese exports to Germany had tripled since 1913, and those of pork had risen five times. Sweden shipped four times the quantity of herring. In 1916, therefore, the Entente began the practice of pre-emptively purchasing the neutrals’ produce: this was particularly important in the one sea it did not control, the Baltic.

The growth of the blockade’s bureaucracy resulted in the creation in Britain in 1916 of a Ministry of Blockade, an offshoot of the Foreign Office. Both Britain and more especially France now saw the blockade as a means by which not only to defeat Germany but also to exclude it from markets after the war. In June 1916 an allied economic conference in Paris, following an agenda set largely by Etienne Clementel, the French minister of commerce, responded to the hot blast of pre-war German competition by proposing to protect key national industries after the war and to reserve allied raw materials for the use of the Entente partners. Thus far Britain had maintained the fiction of free trade by doing deals with business interests in neutral states. But its commitment to the principle of the open market had never been doctrinaire. At home, the slogan of ‘business as usual’ exemplified the idea not that the political economy of the state was unchanged by the outbreak of war, but that business must carry on because it was a key component in Britain’s war effort. Abroad, obeisance to the idea of free trade reflected that same principle: trade with the United States was crucial not simply to Britain’s own war effort but even more to those of its allies. While Washington remained neutral, market forces, not government policy, had to determine the pattern both of allied purchasing and of the allied blockade.

German imports during the war fell by 60 per cent. But exports also fell - rather more, and for reasons which were not exclusively the consequence of the blockade.16 The war demanded that resources be channelled to sustain the military effort rather than the balance of trade. The blockade therefore made a virtue of autarchy, and nowhere was this principle more deeply etched than among German farmers and food-processors. Germany produced enough food to feed itself in the war. On the basis that an average daily intake of 2,240 calories was the norm, the German population experienced real hardship only in the months immediately after the failed harvest of 1916. In February 1917 daily rations dropped to 1,000 calories per person. This so-called ‘turnip winter’ - when turnips replaced potatoes - makes the point. Germans saw the turnip as animal feed. Their hunger, genuinely felt, arose from expectations derived from pre-war diets - varied, rich in fats and meat, and at least 15 per cent greater than the population’s physiological needs. Those were the norms to which they aspired. The fact that after the winter of 1916-17 the average calorie intake did not again fall below 95 per cent of the norm did not offset the monotony of what was available.17 Coffee was a case in point. It served a psychological function more than a physical one. The War Food Office, created in 1916 under the auspices of the Prussian Ministry of War, recognised ’the meaningful influence that coffee and quasi-coffee drinks had on the general morale of the population‘, and deemed it a ’most important food‘.18 Wartime coffee, however, was no longer made even of chicory or beet, but of bark. Bread was another example. In January 1915 K-Brot was introduced: the ’K’ stood for Kartoffeln, or potatoes, whose flour was used in its baking, but for propaganda reasons it was dubbed Kriegsbrot or ‘war bread’. Nutritionally K-Brot was perfectly adequate, but it did not taste as Germans felt bread should taste. Sausages inspired particular inventiveness and comparable contempt. They contained 5 per cent fat, most of the rest being water, although cooking salt and vegetable leaf provided some flavour. Over 800 types of substitute sausage were recognised by the war’s end, and over 10,000 other Ersatz foods.19 Indeed Ersatz itself ceased to mean substitute and came to mean fake. Nor was it much compensation to be told that, as the body shed weight, it needed less food to sustain itself. In October 1916 Ethel Cooper, an Australian living in Leipzig, noticing that three of her German friends had each lost 2 stone, realised that she too was ‘down to 6 stone 10 ... There is so little nourishment in the present food, that one always has an empty feeling an hour after a meal.’20

Averages were not the same as each individual’s daily food consumption. This varied according to age, sex, occupation, class and region of residence; it depended on the time of year and the year of the war. Many Germans did not have enough food and what there was was unfairly distributed. Food shortages were not exclusively the product of the blockade; the allies’ efforts interacted with difficulties of the Germans’ own making. Between 1890 and 1913 imports of fertiliser to Germany had risen fourfold and as a result yields of cereals had increased by between 50 and 60 per cent per hectare. The blockade cut off imports of saltpetre from Chile, and the quantity of nitrates used in agriculture halved. Fritz Haber had developed the synthetic production of nitrogen, but in 1914 the process’s value to Germany lay particularly in the production of explosives. Mobilisation took horses, as well as over 3 million agricultural workers, from farming, and therefore reduced the supply of both manure and labour. Between 1913 and 1918 the area of Germany under cultivation fell by 15 per cent and yields of cereals by a minimum of 30 per cent.21

Communal feeding was one German response to the British blockade The Mittelstand, white-collar workers often on fixed incomes, were particularly affected by rising food prices, and their corollary - falling real wages For them the war meant loss of status


The German government realised very early in the war that food would be a problem: it introduced its first food controls in 1914, four years before Britain. But it responded to rising food prices and their consequent pressure on real wages by fixing prices at the point of production, not at the point of sale. The result was that producers withdrew from the market. Milk was deemed a staple, vital to children, to nursing mothers and the weak, but in 1915 the price of milk rose from 12 pfennigs per litre to as much as 3 3 pfennigs, an increase which in percentage terms workers’ wages had still not matched by the war’s end in 1918. In Berlin in November 1915 the price was set at 30 pfennigs, but that did nothing to promote city deliveries, which continued to decline.22 Price control prompted farmers to switch to the production of butter and cheese, which were not regulated. The most notorious consequence of this fragmented approach was the so-called ‘pig massacre’. By early 1915 potato shortages were attributed to the fodder requirements of pigs, which were consequently deemed to be getting priority over people. Pigs were slaughtered, resulting first in a glut of pork and then in a shortage. Thereafter it was not only the price of pork which rose, but also that of other livestock, to which both farmers and consumers now turned. At the same time the government held down the prices of bread and potatoes, and therefore paid relatively more to farmers to bring what the latter judged to be animal fodder to the human market ‘at a loss’.23

A German U-boat observes at least one rule of cruiser war by surfacing to fire its torpedo Given the limited number of torpedoes that each submanne could carry, accuracy was vital


Price controls were largely fictional, in any case. Inflation fed by an increase of the note issue meant that an excessive supply of money was chasing too few goods. In the autumn of 1917 rye was being sold for 380 per cent more than the official price, beans for 200 per cent and butter 90 per cent. The black market was so pervasive that for most of those directly involved in Germany’s war effort rations were no more than notional. Even the army colluded in the black market to feed its soldiers, and perhaps one-third of Germany’s food was sold this way by 1918. Money not need therefore determined who got food, so it became a source of class division. All were encouraged to buck the authority of the state and descend into petty criminality. ‘Everybody who can afford it bribes his trades people,’ Ethel Cooper reported in December 1917. ‘Those who will not, or cannot bribe, are told that the meat is sold out, and the others get four times the proper amount.’24 The farmers became convinced that the city-dwellers were profiteers, and the latter were persuaded that the farmers were well-fed hoarders. Townspeople went into the country, evading inspectors at the stations, on so-called hamster trips, ‘to see if the farmers and peasants can be persuaded to sell us something to eat’.25 Failing that, they simply stole. Thus the town was set against the country. Regional imbalances were also the product of local administration, and so deepened the political divisions within the federation of Germany. The blockade worked not in isolation but through its interaction with the fault lines in German society and in the structure of the German polity.

U-BOAT WAR

It was of course easier to blame food shortages on the allied blockade than on maladministration. As a result the demand for retaliation in kind was genuinely popular. With the elimination of the German cruiser threat by the end of 1914, these hopes came to be pinned on the U-boat. Before the war Jackie Fisher had scandalised his associates in the British Admiralty with the suggestion that the submarine might be used for commerce raiding, but in October 1914 Hermann Bauer, the leader of the German submarine service, made exactly that proposal to Admiral Ingenohl. The constraints were technical, numerical and legal. The submarine was designed above all for use in coastal waters, not for long voyages. Moreover, the Germans possessed so few that there were unlikely to be sufficient to overwhelm the volume of incoming British trade. Their effects would be achieved less through damage than through terror, and through scaring off neutral tonnage in particular. But this was where the legal requirements of cruiser warfare impinged. The laws of war at sea expected the submarine to behave in the same way as a conventional warship. In other words, she had to surface, give notice of her intention to sink a vessel and allow time for the crew to abandon ship. In the process the safety of the submarine herself was compromised.

None the less, support for Bauer’s idea gathered after 2 November 1914, when as part of the blockade the British declared the North Sea a military area. From the outset Bethmann Hollweg and the Foreign Ministry were concerned about the possible reactions of neutrals, but the combination of press agitation and naval frustration overbore both of them, and on 4 February 1915 the Kaiser announced that the North Sea was a war zone and that all merchantmen, including neutral vessels, were liable to be sunk without warning. The US government immediately protested in the strongest terms, and in so doing opened a fault line between Germany’s politicians, anxious to avoid incurring American wrath, and its sailors, determined to prosecute the U-boat campaign as vigorously as possible. Orders regarding the treatment of neutral vessels became ambiguous and the accusations directed by one belligerent against the other increasingly heated - and on the whole justified. The British flew neutral flags, and they armed merchant ships. If the U-boat captain obeyed international law he was liable to have his submarine attacked, particularly if he had fallen for one of the British decoys, the heavily armed but equally heavily disguised Q ships. In July 1916 the Germans court-martialled Charles Fryatt, master of the Brussels, a British merchant vessel, on the grounds that on 28 March 1915 he had attempted to ram a U-boat although not himself a member of a combatant service. Fryatt was executed.

In terms of propaganda and diplomatic effect, Fryatt’s ‘deliberate murder’, as the New York Times called it, worked in Britain’s favour.26 But even more powerful ammunition was the sinking of the Lusitania off the Irish coast on 7 May 1915. She was indubitably a British-owned vessel, and as it happened she was carrying munitions. But she was principally a passenger ship, and among the 1,201 who died were many women and children, including 128 American citizens. Colonel Edward House, plenipotentiary of Woodrow Wilson, the American president, had crossed the Atlantic in the Cunard liner only weeks before and was about to sit down to a dinner in London organised by the American ambassador when the news came. House telegrammed the president to say that ‘America has come to the parting of the ways, when she must determine whether she stands for civilized or uncivilized warfare. We can no longer remain neutral spectators. Our action in this crisis will determine the part we will play when peace is made, and how far we may influence a settlement for the lasting good of humanity. We are being weighed in the balance, and our position among nations is being assessed by mankind.’27

On 10 May 1915 Queenstown in Ireland came to a halt, as 130 victims of the sinking of the Lusitania were buried in a mass grave


Such sentiments were calculated to appeal to Wilson’s idealism, but so, too, did his own argument that ‘there is such a thing as a nation being so right that it does not need to convince others by force that it is right’.28 Wilson, an academic and a Democrat, whose high principles reflected his Presbyterian upbringing, had been president since 1913. For the moment he held back from war. In doing so he reflected the views of most of his fellow citizens, but he still went further than his pacifist secretary of state, William Jennings Bryan, was prepared to accept. Bryan resigned when Wilson sent Germany a strong note demanding that it cease submarine warfare against unarmed merchantmen. It was a significant step: the sinking of the Lusitania had convinced his successor, Robert Lansing, that ultimately the United States would have to enter the war against Germany.

In Germany itself, the incident inclined both Bethmann Hollweg and the Kaiser’s circle in favour of operating under cruiser rules once more. In the short term the quantity of tonnage sunk actually rose rather than fell, as surfacing enabled the U-boats to use their guns and so economise on torpedoes. But on 19 August 1915 the crew of the British Q ship, Baralong, sailing under the American flag until she opened fire, sank the U 27 and then killed out of hand the boarding party the Germans had put on a captured merchant vessel. British attempts to justify the Baralong’s action by reference to the fate of the Arabic, a passenger liner sunk without warning the same day, were somewhat specious but worked in the United States, because three Americans had been aboard her. By September the constraints on the U-boat commanders imposed by the Kaiser, as well as the internal friction they were generating within the navy itself, were sufficient to persuade the naval staff to suspend U-boat warfare.

In the early hours of 30 June 1916 dynamite and munitions, loaded in rail cars and barges on Black Tom, a promontory ir New Jersey, caught fire The explosions shook the Brooklyn Bridge and blew out windows in Manhattan Believed at the time to be an accident, this was in fact the work of German saboteurs.


Scheer was not prepared to accept such passivity, and after Jutland his assertion that the submarine was the most obvious weapon with which to strike Britain gained in stridency. He now had powerful support from the army. Falkenhayn had proposed a U-boat campaign against Britain to accompany his attack on France at Verdun, and when Hindenburg and Ludendorff replaced him they, too, accepted that economic warfare, not direct confrontation on the battlefields of France and Flanders, was the way to tackle Britain. However, they wanted to wait until they had sufficient forces available to deal with Holland and Denmark, should an unrestricted campaign drive the neutral states into the arms of the Entente. At the end of August 1916 Romania had finally been persuaded by the success of Brusilov’s offensive in Galicia to declare war on the Central Powers, and therefore a new front had just opened for Germany. By December Mackensen and the recently demoted Falkenhayn had overrun most of Romania. The army supreme command planned to remain on the defensive in the west in 1917, and endorsed a memorandum written on 22 December by the chief of the naval staff, Henning von Holtzendorff, arguing that unrestricted U-boat warfare could win the war by autumn 1917. Once again German strategy was out of step. At the beginning of 1916, military action had not been accompanied by naval; at the beginning of 1917, naval action was seen as partial compensation for the renunciation of military.

Bethmann Hollweg remained very worried about the likely American response. At one level this seemed irrational. In the autumn of 1916 Wilson fought his campaign for re-election as president with the slogan ‘He kept us out of the war’. But his success reflected other factors - his record in domestic policy, above all. Moreover, although he had not done as much to prepare the United States for intervention in Europe as Theodore Roosevelt and other Republicans demanded, he had secured the passage of the National Defense Act in May 1916, doubling the regular army and expanding the National Guard, and of the Naval Appropriations Act in June, setting out to create a US navy equal to the most powerful in the world by 1925. Wilson’s policy was one of internationalism, but he recognised that its fulfilment might require the United States to take up arms. A German move to unrestricted submarine warfare was likely to he the precipitant to such a step. The chancellor resolved to appease potential American wrath by himself proposing peace.

For Hindenburg and Ludendorff peace could only be a ‘German peace’, the product of an overwhelming German victory. The conquest of Romania enabled Bethmann Hollweg to persuade the army that, if Germany took the initiative in suggesting peace negotiations, it could not be interpreted as doing so out of weakness. But the chancellor was so constrained by the army’s shopping list of war aims that his offer. when it was published on 12 December, was meaningless. It failed to specify terms, and it was accompanied by an order to the armed forces stating that the peace offer rested on a German victory. Realising that the Entente was likely to reject the German initiative, Wilson stepped in with one of his own. On 18 December he invited the belligerents to state their terms. But the Entente did not want a peace set by America, and the Germans did not want a public debate on war aims, which was likely to divide the country internally. The failure of the December 1916 peace initiatives was not simply the consequence of diplomatic manoeuvres and the great powers’ amours propres. There were irreconcilable issues here, which, if exposed in negotiation, would have deepened and explained the war’s continuation, not ended it. France could not agree terms without securing the return of Alsace-Lorraine. and Germany could not accept that the provinces were not German. Britain had gone to war to restore Belgian sovereignty, hut the German navy was now clear that access to the Channel ports would be vital for Germany’s future security, especially in the event of what many in Germany were already billing as the ‘Second Punic War’. December 1916 was a caesura in the war’s course, but not one which opened up a real possibility of ending it. Instead it confirmed its rationale.

The Entente side-stepped Wilson by declaring that it could not agree to talks on the basis of the German initiative. At 7 p.m. on 8 January 1917 the navy and army presented a united front in an audience with the Kaiser, ‘who has suddenly come round to the idea that unrestricted U-boat warfare is now called for, and is definitely in favour of it even if the Chancellor is opposed to it. He voiced the very curious viewpoint’, Georg von Müller, head of the naval cabinet, noted in his diary, ‘that the U-boat war was a purely naval affair which did not concern the Chancellor in any way.’29 Bethmman Hollweg was not even at the meeting, and when he was informed of the Kaiser’s decision he simply accepted it. He had run out of options, hemmed in between the armed forces on the one hand and public opinion on the other. When at the end of the month he rose in the Reichstag to announce the decision to begin unrestricted U-boat warfare on 1 February 1917, ‘his voice was hoarse and rough. It was evidently very painful for him to plead for a policy which formerly he had passionately opposed.’30

THE UNITED STATES ENTERS THE WAR

Wilson too had failed. It was now clear that the United States could not participate in the creation of a liberal international world order by staying out of the conflict. On 3 February America broke off diplomatic relations with Germany. Its reason for doing so was the danger to American shipping, but within sixteen days its ambassador in London knew of a possible German threat to the United States itself. In 1916 John J. Pershing had led an American military expedition into Mexico to capture Pancho Villa, a bandit backed by the Germans. Mexico’s resentment at this intervention encouraged Arthur Zimmermann, the German foreign minister, to think that the Mexicans might relish the opportunity to invade Texas. He therefore signalled Germany’s ambassador in Washington, telling him to broach the idea of an alliance with Mexico in the event of war between Germany and the United States. He used three different routes to send the message and Room 40 intercepted all three. By 17 January ‘Blinker’ Hall had an incomplete version and on 19 February he was able to brief the US ambassador in London. Wilson published the Zimmermann telegram as though the Americans had deciphered it themselves, so protecting Room 40’s secrecy.

The revelation, and Zimmermann’s own acceptance of its truth, persuaded those of the American people who remained to be convinced that America should intervene in the war. However, despite the appearances that it and the German declaration of unrestricted submarine warfare created, Wilson’s decision for war was neither reactive nor defensive. On 2 April 1917 he addressed the American nation, telling it of the cabinet’s unanimous resolve: ‘the right is more precious than peace, and we shall fight for the things which we have always carried nearest our hearts - for democracy, for the right of those who submit to authority to have a voice in their own governments, for the rights and liberties of small nations, for a universal dominion of right by such a concert of free peoples as shall bring peace and safety to all nations and make the world itself at last free.’31

He meant what he said, and in saying it he revalidated and reformulated the big ideas which Britain and France had espoused in 1914, but which had lost their lustre in the mud and blood of the intervening years. But he had little to offer in terms of immediate contribution, despite his measures to improve America’s military preparedness in 1916. The army mustered 100,000 men, a third of whom were in the cavalry or coastal artillery. Pershing’s expedition against Pancho Villa marked the limits of its capability. Wilson immediately adopted conscription, on the grounds that it was the most democratic form of military enlistment, but the creation of a mass army had two short-term consequences likely to work against the rapid despatch of the American Expeditionary Force overseas: first, it required the existing army to become the cadre for the new, and second, the latter was likely to commandeer the war production of American factories carefully nurtured by Britain and France. When Ludendorff dismissed the military implications of America’s entry, he was not just resorting to bravado. He reckoned that the United States could not put a major army on the continent of Europe until 1919, an assessment which exactly reflected America’s own assumptions, and he knew that Germany would have to have won the war by then.

What Ludendorff’s calculations failed to take into account was the consequences of America’s entry for the conduct of economic warfare. They were much more immediate, and paradoxically it was they which were in large part responsible for his conclusion that the war would have to be over by 1919.

On 28 November 1916 the Federal Reserve Board, the nearest agency the United States had to a central bank, had published a warning to its member banks, advising against the purchase of foreign treasury bills. By this stage of the war Britain was spending about $250 million per month in the United States, both on its own behalf and on that of its allies. Much of it was devoted to supporting the sterling-dollar exchange rate, in order to control the price of American goods. It reflected a dependence on American industry and on the American stock market which in German minds both justified the submarine campaign and undermined the United States’s claim to be neutral. Britain and France had calculated on spending $1,500 million in the United States in the six-month period between October 1916 and April 1917, and they anticipated funding five-sixths of it by borrowing in New York - in other words, by selling treasury bills. On 28 November the Federal Reserve Board had been swayed by the views of one of its members in particular, Paul Warburg, a German by birth, who argued that the average American investor was too deeply dependent on an Entente victory. He believed that this over-exposure should be wound down. What followed was better described as a crash: $1,000 million was wiped off the stock market in a week. By 1 April 1917 Britain had an overdraft in the United States of $358 million and was spending $75 million a week.32 The American entry to the war saved the Entente - and possibly some American speculators - from bankruptcy.

Allied borrowing in the war after the United States’s entry became the goad with which the United States could drive forward allied economic cooperation. The US Treasury refused to see the Entente’s funding needs in isola-tion. It aimed to reduce wastefulness in their orders and above all to eliminate price inflation caused by the rivalries of competitive tendering. A joint committee on war purchases and finance was established in August 1917. The committee’s remit extended to purchases from neutrals. The Entente had created a wheat executive in 1916; after America’s entry, the model spread to other commodities. By 1917-18 the alliance was the most powerful economic bloc in the world’s commodity markets, and its ordering created what were virtually global monopolies in the purchasing of major foodstuffs.

The United States enters the war, April 1917 the Stars and Stripes, borne in a British tank, are paraded past the Flatiron in New York.


What underpinned this was the blockade, which gave the allies the power of coercion. Moreover, the entry of the most powerful remaining neutral to the war removed any final constraint on the enforcement of blockade. America showed few of the reservations in dealing with the neutrals bordering on Germany displayed by Britain. Holtzendorff had hoped that the submarine would scare neutral shipping away; in reality, it had the effect of cutting the flow of imports to Germany’s border neutrals and so reduced the quantities available for onward transhipment. Shipping losses, as much as shortage of foreign exchange, forced the allies to coordinate their controls on purchasing, thus squeezing the Central Powers even more out of world markets. Both indirectly and directly, the German decision to adopt unrestricted U-boat war tightened the economic stranglehold in which it was gripped.

And that was where the United States’s military contribution was first felt. Pershing, appointed to command the American army in Europe, did not arrive in France until 14 June. Rear-Admiral W S. Sims, commanding the American naval forces in European waters, reached Britain on 9 April, three days after the formal declaration of war. In London, the US ambassador and he drafted a cable to the president: ‘Whatever help the United States may render at any time in the future, or in any theatre of the war, our help is now more seriously needed in this submarine area for the sake of all the Allies than it can ever be needed again, or anywhere else.’33