The Boundless Sea

by David Abulafia

  Naval historians might argue about which side gained the upper hand in the Battle of Jutland at the end of May 1916, but the crucial consideration is the outcome: Germany proved unable to break British ascendancy at sea. It could neither gain a stranglehold on the British Isles nor open up Atlantic waters to its own imperial fleet and merchant navy. Where the Germans needed to think carefully was the threat they posed not just to British but to American shipping. Attacks on its ships would surely bring the United States into the conflict, however reluctant Woodrow Wilson was to commit his country to what might too easily be classed as a European war. The sinking of the Lusitania off Ireland in May 1915, with the loss of over 1,000 lives, many of them American, hardened opinion in the United States; the German counterargument was that the Reich had declared most of the open Atlantic a war zone and that it had warned American citizens that their safety could not be guaranteed. Even so, it took another two years for the USA to join the fray. And American fears were realized: merchant ships had never in human history been subjected to such relentless attacks. In February to May 1917, 2,500,000 tons of shipping were sent to the bottom of the sea, while P&O lost forty-four ships that year. The Atlantic was the most dangerous ocean, plagued by German U-boats, and British companies that operated in the Indian Ocean and Pacific waters stood to make respectable profits during the war.11 Meanwhile the Germans suffered from the lack of vital metals such as tungsten and nickel, forcing them to leave machinery idle; and the food intake of ordinary Germans, though just about sufficient, was balanced more towards turnips and less towards Wurst, which, if nothing else, demoralized the population.

  The First World War demonstrated that a global economy, of which Imperial Britain was the example par excellence, was also a fragile one in time of war. It demonstrated too that heavy steelclad battleships were still very vulnerable, once the art of building submarines had been mastered. And for Germany the maritime disaster was catastrophic. Having lost half its merchant navy during the war, it lost much of the rest under the draconian terms of the Treaty of Versailles. A few years after the war ended not even 1 per cent of the world fleet flew the flag of the Weimar Republic. Yet these figures also served as a reminder to Great Britain that its own losses had been devastating: 37 per cent of the merchant fleet, a gross tonnage of at least 7,000,000, maybe 9,000,000 units.12 From this perspective, it is no surprise that economic historians have argued that the post-war period was less ‘globalized’ than the period leading right up to the outbreak of war. In 1920 the total volume of maritime trade around the world had fallen to a level one fifth below the pre-war level.13

  III

  The post-war picture is not all bleak. Slow recovery did take place, even though it was badly punctured by the Great Depression. One country that benefited was Japan: an ally of Great Britain during the war, it had even sent warships to the Mediterranean, but the importance of the First World War for Japan also lay in the experience it brought to the Meiji Empire: its fleet not just of warships but of merchant vessels continued to grow, rising from 1,700,000 tons on the eve of the war to almost 3,000,000 tons at war’s end. Over the next twenty years the scale of the Japanese merchant marine grew exponentially; by 1939 Japan accounted for 13 per cent of world tonnage.14 Others fared much less well: around a third of the German and Dutch merchant fleets was immobile in 1932. One or two places even boomed during the Depression: Hong Kong received ships totalling 20,000,000 tons when the Depression was at rock bottom, and Singapore also prospered, helped by the continued expansion of the Malay rubber industry. Those involved in the shipping industry, including governments as well as companies, strained every nerve to invest in new port structures and even, as will be seen, to stimulate the shipping industry by ordering and building new ships for cargoes and passengers.15

  From the perspective of the British shipping companies, there were some significant changes. Shipping companies merged and the new enterprises operated gigantic fleets: Kylsant Royal Mail had more than 700 ships afloat in 1929, adding up to more than 2,500,000 tons – in the process the company had overextended itself. Kylsant Royal Mail collapsed the next year amid scandal: Lord Kylsant was accused of fixing the books to make the company appear a much better investment than it was, and after a sensational trial he became an involuntary guest of His Majesty the King in a British prison. He was as much the victim of the worldwide slump in business as a misguided chairman with exaggerated ambitions. For the storm clouds were gathering, and the enormous overcapacity of the world’s merchant marine made the shipping industry particularly vulnerable. Problems were accentuated by the slump in business that heralded the Great Depression. In November 1931 Lord Inchcape, chairman of P&O, wrote: ‘I have never known such a period of depression as that through which we have passed in the last 18 months. It has been heart-rending to see the steamers leaving London, week after week … with thousands of tons of unoccupied space – so different from the old days.’16

  One positive development concerned shipping technology. Oil-fired diesel engines were introduced, which used less fuel, even though the fuel was more expensive. Still, this reduced reliance on the scattered coal bunkers found all around the globe. There was no rush to oil: the Danish East India Company had introduced motor ships before the First World War, but the temptation to carry on using coal was particularly strong in Britain, given the ready availability of cheap Welsh coal. In 1926 the management of Cunard wondered whether it would have to convert some of the company’s ships back to coal, if oil prices continued to rise. One way to reduce costs on oil-fired ships was to employ Chinese or other Far Eastern labour in the engine room, since one could pay these workers about half what European hands would be paid – a situation that still prevails aboard cruise liners.17 Another possibility was to load oil in places where it was especially cheap, such as Aden.

  Then there were sectors of the shipping industry that were hit by political changes in the post-war world. One of the most serious developments that Cunard faced was the increasing restrictiveness of United States policy towards immigrants. This nation whose very foundation lay in the fact that all its citizens (excluding the much-ignored native Americans) were of immigrant descent became mired in what can only be described as racist, and in their fullest form anti-Semitic, policies: in 1921 Congress decreed that immigration would be limited to 3 per cent of the number of each national group living in the USA at the time of the census of 1910. This had the effect of restricting immigration from parts of eastern Europe from which the flow to the tenements of the East Side, New York, had become increasingly strong. In 1923 Congress enacted a new law according to which the criteria would be set not by the census of 1910 but by that of 1890, which had the effect of further restricting numbers from eastern Europe. The result for the shipping companies was that passenger traffic, long dominated by the migrants in steerage, plummeted: in 1921 Cunard had the satisfaction of carrying nearly 50,000 passengers in third class from the British Isles to the United States; the next year there were not even 35,000 steerage passengers, and it was reported that ‘third class space on many of our voyages went comparatively empty’. Needless to say, the shipping companies pressed the British government to argue in Washington for less restrictive measures, and in fact the reversion to the 1890 census meant that a slightly larger number of British and Irish immigrants could be admitted. Then, in 1929, Congress thought again; this time the 1920 census was to be the measuring rod, which greatly favoured migrants from the United Kingdom but slashed the numbers allowed to arrive from the newly constituted Irish Free State and from Germany. Still, Cunard had always carried not just migrants from the British Isles but a great many others who had arrived from continental Europe and Scandinavia in transit to America. The company therefore had to think of ways to diversify – as, indeed, did rival companies in other countries, notably German HAPAG, which developed a tourism department. Earnest German tourists could sail out to the USA, Cuba or Mexico on adventure and study tours, while the Fre
nch company CGT began to invest in hotels in the vast swathe of the Maghrib that lay under French rule.18

  Cunard looked over its shoulder and understood that its rivals had a clear advantage in another form of passenger traffic across the Atlantic: the express liner services that specialized more in first- and second-class accommodation and services. So the decision was made to start building, which also meant that there was an opportunity to adopt oil-fired engines in place of coal. This building programme was already well under way in 1922, and within three years the company was running ten routes, linking Southampton, Liverpool, London and Bristol to the United States, and even services from Hamburg and the Dutch ports to America. Old Cunard ships, including the former German Imperator (a great hulk now known as the Berengaria), had their first-class accommodation refitted, so that passengers could enjoy private baths and as much running hot water as they wanted; but competition on the Atlantic routes remained tough. Nor did the company neglect the less affluent passengers who traditionally had endured steerage class accommodation in dormitories deep in the hull of these liners. A new version of third class, ‘tourist class’, came into being, aimed in part at the increasing number of people visiting the United States for pleasure. This was intended to provide better accommodation, in cabins, than was offered in third class; the equivalent on a modern aeroplane would be premium economy.19

  Cunard was still sailing in choppy waters after the Great Depression drew to an end. It was saved by what had seemed at first a potential disaster of the first magnitude, the building of the RMS Queen Mary, which began its career in 1936, though construction of what was then known as ‘Hull no. 534’ had begun at the end of 1930. The plan was to launch a ship unlike any other: it would be larger, faster, more luxurious and more powerful than any of its competitors, and it would, in conjunction with a sister ship, make possible a weekly service between Southampton, Cherbourg and New York (the second ship, the Queen Elizabeth, was still unfinished at the outbreak of the Second World War). Using one large ship rather than a couple of smaller ones could, in the long run, be economical, and the French shipping company CGT had the same idea when it launched its own mega-liner, the Normandie. Work on the Queen Mary was halted during the Great Depression, and it was only resumed thanks to a loan of up to £4,500,000 from the British government, which saw this as a prestige product that would enable Cunard to outclass its German and French rivals on the transatlantic passenger route. However, there was one important condition: Cunard was to merge with the White Star Line, its old rival, and operator of the doomed Titanic. White Star was in financial trouble, and work on its own rival to Hull no. 534 had also been suspended. The merger took place in 1934, the year that the Queen Mary was launched on the Clyde.20 This degree of government intervention was not unique: Dutch and German shipping companies were also shored up by the state, and in Germany government interference went a stage further, as Jews were forced out of their positions in the HAPAG company: ‘Jewish identity was purged from the collective memory of the firm, although the firm would have had no meaningful history without it.’21

  Sir Percy Bates, chairman of Cunard White Star, looked back on the performance of the Queen Mary in 1941, when it and the Queen Elizabeth had been converted into troop ships, with proud nostalgia for its brief but brilliant pre-war career:

  I think the time has come for me to be more particular on the financial performance of Queen Mary. She is widely known as a masterpiece of British construction; it may not be equally appreciated that financially she has been very successful from the start, as the progress made in marine engineering has focused in Queen Mary a new economy in transportation across the Atlantic. Since 1922, when the full effect of the U.S. Immigration Quota Law first made itself felt, no steamer has ever made so much money in successive twelve months, as Queen Mary has done since being commissioned.22

  It was not, though, simply a matter of profits. The Queen Mary displayed the prestige of the maritime nation that had built it and that sailed it. This too was what had prompted the British government to sink so much money into its construction – not to mention the stimulus that the building of the two Queens gave to the economy of western Scotland. Not just in Great Britain but in France, Germany and elsewhere, sterling efforts were made to climb out of the pit of economic depression, and by the eve of the Second World War they were having some effect. Liverpool, it is true, was slowly losing its pre-eminence as a British port, but that meant business was being dispersed elsewhere around Great Britain, for instance to Southampton and Bristol.23 How the outbreak of another world war, one that really did encompass almost the entire globe, would affect this now needs to be examined.

  IV

  The Second World War presents a paradox in maritime history, compared to the First. Even if the earlier conflict grew out of events deep within the Balkans, sea power had been a major concern of the Germans on the eve of the First World War, as Tirpitz’s statement about the British threat makes plain. And yet the conflict at sea was largely limited to the Atlantic, despite the heavy losses of merchant marine. The Second World War originated in Germany’s ambitions on land, in eastern Europe, and in 1939 British Appeasers were arguing that Great Britain should seize the opportunity to leave Hitler to his designs within Europe, in which case he would not interfere with British control of the seas. When war with Germany did break out, and when Japan joined the conflict on Germany’s side, the conflict became a truly global one that embraced the three great oceans, and saw the fall of several of Britain’s most precious bases in the Far East, notably Hong Kong (on Christmas Day 1941) and Singapore (on 15 February 1942). Whereas the trading networks of the British shipping companies that operated in the Far East had often prospered during the First World War, they were completely shattered during the Second World War, when even Australia came under Japanese attack. The Blue Funnel Line lost its Far Eastern bases, the longstanding sources of its success.24

  The conflict at sea was also even more vicious than it had been in the days of the first U-boats: not merely had submarine technology advanced in leaps and bounds, but the addition of effective air power meant that attacks on ships were no longer being launched solely by other ships, above or below the waterline. The merchant marine not just of the Allied Powers but of neutral nations, including, until its belated entry into the war, the United States, was massively exposed to German and Japanese firepower. This also meant that the threat to Britain’s supply of food and essential industrial goods was constant and serious, to a far higher degree than between 1914 and 1918. Some well-established supply routes were not accessible: sending troops to Egypt involved a massive circumnavigation of Africa.25

  After the fall of France the Germans commandeered most of the French merchant navy. The fate of merchant navies in other lands conquered by the Germans was complicated. Much of the Norwegian merchant navy moved over to Britain after Hitler invaded Norway, as did many Dutch ships; after all, sailors had the advantage of mobility. To some extent, Allied losses at sea were compensated by the United States, first in helping to keep the supply lines to Britain open and then, after Pearl Harbor, in the loan of shipping which was being furiously constructed in American shipyards. This did not prevent the destruction of 21,000,000 tons of Allied merchant shipping during the Second World War, with about 15,000,000 tons the victim of U-boat attacks – nearly 4,800 ships. Showing exceptional bravery, merchant sailors were fully aware of the enormous risks as they zig-zagged around the oceans, trying to avoid German submarines.26 In the Pacific, the struggle for control of the sea lanes took on a different character. Here the US fleet was determined to block Japanese trade within the forcibly created ‘Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere’ that, by the time of Pearl Harbor, included vast swathes of the coasts of China and south-east Asia under Meiji rule. The Americans, using submarines and air power, destroyed Japanese ships carrying iron, coal and oil from China to Japan, or rubber from occupied Malaya, and they also attacked long-distance shipping
sent all the way to Japan from Germany loaded with machinery and chemicals.

  The British shipping companies played an important role in the war, even if their ships were now under the operational control of the government, following orders issued on 26 August 1939, more than a week before war actually broke out, that permitted the Admiralty ‘to adopt compulsory control of movements of merchant shipping’, initially in the North Sea, Baltic, Mediterranean and Atlantic. The Germans were also prepared; they had already sent the pocket-battleships Graf Spee and Deutschland to the Atlantic, and had positioned thirty-nine U-Boats out of a submarine fleet of fifty-seven around the coasts of the United Kingdom. A lethal U-boat attack on a British liner on the very first day of the war made the British government realize that the Germans were not planning to abide by any rules of war protecting non-combatants. This led to the immediate organization of armed convoys, but Britain lacked sufficient resources to accompany ships deep into the Atlantic, a problem compounded by the abandonment of two British naval bases on the coast of the Irish Free State the year before, which meant that ships were sailing unprotected through a dangerous stretch of Irish waters. German mines, some of them magnetic ones that clamped themselves to the hulls of ships, were an even greater danger than the submarines; in 1939 alone seventy-eight ships were blown apart by German mines, adding up to more than 250,000 tons.