The Boundless Sea

by David Abulafia

  When the Luftwaffe began to attack British shipping in December 1939, the Admiralty stepped up its efforts to provide merchant shipping with anti-aircraft guns; and, again, there had been advance thinking – but the really useful guns had been ordered from Switzerland, and after the fall of France they were unobtainable. That meant Britain had to make its own, or buy them from the United States, but the situation was so bad that some ships were only supplied with fireworks, manufactured by the well-established firm of Brock’s, in the not entirely vain hope that German planes, never very good at identifying what was floating on the sea, would take them more seriously than they deserved. A further problem was that the Royal Air Force did not seem to be keen to co-ordinate its activities with the Admiralty; traditional service rivalries came into play here. This meant that British planes were not available to provide cover for ships beyond Britain’s shores. On the other hand, advance thinking about the Merchant Navy ensured that there were sufficient ships to ferry the British Expeditionary Force across the Channel to France from 9 September onwards. Moreover, Britain enjoyed some success in hunting down and destroying U-boats, even if they were being replaced over and over again, with almost Satanic fury, in German shipyards.27 And then part of the Royal Navy had to be redeployed into the Mediterranean to face Mussolini, who had taken opportunistic advantage of the defeat of France to join Hitler.28 That is just to mention the difficult conditions at the start of the war; the fortitude of the Merchant Navy in the face of what must often have seemed overwhelmingly strong opposition is a story of endurance without parallel in the maritime history of the world.

  The experience of four shipping companies, three fully British and one of Norwegian origin, illustrates the difficulties shipping companies now faced. It has been seen that the British government requisitioned the two Queens as troop carriers; in fact, the government had already requisitioned ten smaller Cunard ships before war even broke out; the problem with the Queen Mary was that she was stuck in New York, while the Queen Elizabeth was still in the builder’s yard outside Glasgow, awaiting plenty of work on her cabins and public spaces. Her maiden voyage was an extraordinary event: she was sent to New York to be fitted out, and then on to Sydney, joining the Queen Mary. Both ships transported hundreds of thousands of troops, beginning with Australians bound for the Middle East, and continuing, from 1942 onwards, with American GIs en route to Europe – what the historian of Cunard has called ‘an achievement in transportation without parallel in the history of trooping’. By the time they were working the Atlantic crossing each ship had space for 15,000 men, half an infantry division, so it is no surprise that U-boat commanders competed to catch these mighty ships, and enemy agents plotted to sabotage them.29

  P&O was also obliged to hand over shipping which was adorned with eight or so six-inch guns from the days before the Boer War – not much use against German submarines. By the end of the year one of the first P&O ships to be requisitioned, the Rawalpindi, had bravely attempted to sink the powerful German cruiser Scharnhorst in a hopeless encounter between Iceland and the Faroes – hopeless but not futile, as the Prime Minister rose in the House of Commons to praise the sailors on board as ‘an inspiration to those who will come after them’, of whom, alas, there were a great many from the P&O fleet alone. P&O troopships were heavily involved in the north African landings which took place in November 1942, ‘Operation Torch’. But clearly the company’s Far Eastern business had come to standstill.30 This was even truer of those companies that operated from British bases in the Far East.

  The Wallem shipping company, operating in Hong Kong and Shanghai, was forced to hand over six ships to the Japanese, although others escaped to India or Australia; its Norwegian origins, and its partly Norwegian staff, proved an advantage, as the Norwegians were at first left free to go about their business – but of course there was now much less business. The Wallem office in Hong Kong closed, and several of its staff were captured by the Japanese. The chief accountant, Kenneth Nelson, was a lucky survivor: he was placed on board a ship carrying more than 1,800 prisoners, but the Japanese had not painted Red Cross markings on the boat, and it was torpedoed by the Allies. Nelson broke out of the sinking ship through the gash left by the torpedo, swimming ashore only to find that he was in Japanese-occupied territory. He was sent back to Hong Kong, escaped from prison there, was shot by a Japanese patrol, but still managed to find his way to his favourite bar, where he ordered his favourite drink with the extra request: ‘Make it a double!’31

  Blue Funnel ships were scattered across the globe in Allied service; the fleet of eighty-seven ships managed by Alfred Holt & Co. of Liverpool in 1939 was whittled down to a fleet of thirty-six by war’s end. Losses occurred in all three oceans – one ship was torpedoed off Brisbane, Australia, while German torpedoes finished off one Blue Funnel ship after another off west Africa or in the north Atlantic. For all the advantages of sailing in convoy, the first of Alfred Holt & Co.’s losses at sea occurred when a convoy broke up in strong winds in February 1940, leading to the sinking of the Pyrrhus by a U-boat lurking in high seas off Galicia.32 However, as suspicions grew (more among the British than among the Americans) that Japan was about to attack Pearl Harbor, the company began to move its ships out of Hong Kong, presciently realizing that the threat was not just to the United States but to Germany’s existing enemies. The speed at which the Japanese advanced across the Pacific left some Blue Funnel ships in the firing line. The Tantalus, which had been laid up in Hong Kong harbour for refitting, was spirited away, but its captain wrongly assumed that the Philippines, then under American rule, would offer a safe haven. The Japanese were in fact mercilessly bombarding Manila, and the ship was blasted to pieces, though fortunately the crew was by then on shore – however, the sailors were arrested by the conquering army and sent to a prison camp.33

  The damage to shipping is only part of the story. Ports suffered immensely as well. Air raids on the Port of London and on Liverpool in autumn 1940 were directly aimed at the shipping industry, as were attacks on Bristol, Southampton and the great shipbuilding centres on the River Clyde: the Blitz was about much more than demoralization. Winston Churchill saw the attacks on the Mersey and the Clyde as the most significant moments of 1940. After London was knocked out, Great Britain became more dependent on Liverpool, so the fury unleashed against the city knew no bounds: the attacks in 1940 were only the beginning. Liverpool had lost 70 per cent of its port capacity by summer of the next year, by which time the German attacks ceased. The headquarters of Blue Funnel, which had only been in use for nine years, went up in smoke in May 1941. Once the docks were gone, it must have seemed an impossible task to keep the port open, but the Liverpudlians managed to do so; by the end of the war the tonnage passing through Liverpool had returned to the level of 1939. As the balance in the conflict shifted towards Britain, massive destruction occurred on the other side of the North Sea: Hamburg was bombed into near oblivion, while Rotterdam was wiped out following repeated attacks, first from invading Germans and then from the Allies. By the end of the war, HAPAG possessed one insignificant boat.34

  The years that followed would, therefore, have to see massive reconstruction if maritime links across the globe were to be restored – ships had to be built, ports had to be repaired, finances had to be arranged. It was a moot point whether Britannia could continue to rule the waves in the new political and economic climate of the 1940s and 1950s.

  51

  The Oceans in a Box

  I

  By the end of the war, not just many ships but many ports had turned into wreckage – the Port of London, Liverpool, Rotterdam, Hamburg, but also Singapore, Hong Kong, Yokohama. Lifting world trade out of this trough was a challenge that was indeed met. As new tensions began to preoccupy the world, questions about the continuing supply of vital raw materials such as rubber acted as a stimulus to recovery. The Far East is a good place to look for evidence that the road to recovery was strewn with obstacles. British-owne
d firms were mapping out the sources of Malayan rubber within four months of the defeat of Japan. The board of the Sarawak Steamship Company, with no ships left out of its tiny pre-war fleet, began its meeting on 13 December 1945 by solemnly confirming the minutes of its session on 4 December 1941, as if all the misery in between had never occurred. P&O discovered that their Singapore office had been obliterated but their Hong Kong office had actually been smartened up by the Japanese.1 The situation in the Far East was complicated by the withdrawal of the Dutch from Indonesia, a major evacuation involving tens of thousands of Europeans who had been stranded in Japanese-held territory for years; ships were summoned from all over the world, and somehow these survivors were transported up the Red Sea, where the Dutch government created a mock-up of a department store that even offered Dutch delicacies to the often emaciated migrants.2 In the longer term, though, as the countries of south-east Asia gained their independence, the European producers tended to pull out. It was obvious that Malayan rubber would become a concern of the Malaysian government, which was not expected to be especially well disposed to the European companies.

  The situation in China was a further serious complication, leaving Hong Kong in a parlous position, although both the People’s Republic of China, founded in 1949, and the rival Republic of China, now based in Taiwan, appreciated the value of the colony as a listening post in their conflict with one another. From the British perspective, Hong Kong was also a valuable bulwark against Communist Chinese expansion towards Malaya; the plain-speaking Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, said he wanted the colony to serve as ‘the Berlin of the Middle East’, though (oddly for someone so involved in the affairs of Palestine) he seems to have confused the Middle East with the Far East. The recovery of Hong Kong was held back by two factors. One was the massive number of refugees flowing into the colony from revolutionary China. The authorities could not cope with the influx. The other factor was a downturn in trade through Hong Kong during and after the Korean War, partly led by the United States, which attempted to impose a total trade embargo on the People’s Republic, while the United Nations banned the import into China of strategic goods. If anything, Hong Kong had stood to gain from the closing down of the European offices in Shanghai and other trading bases along the Chinese coast, so that trade out of China had been funnelled through Hong Kong. But this did not last in the new political conditions of the early 1950s. American embargo officers arrived in the colony. They went to work with unstoppable zeal. Shrimps found their way on to the list of banned goods, because it was not clear that they had originated in the colony; maybe they had lived their lives in the Chinese-controlled waters of the Pearl River.3

  The other trading base of the British, Singapore, was not expected to stay under colonial rule for very long. There was plenty of sympathy in London for the independence movement in Malaya, but the emergence of guerrilla forces within Malaya, among whom were many ethnic Chinese who were also Communist, complicated the picture greatly. Moreover, the population of Singapore shot up, soon reaching a million (double the pre-war figure), for this colony, like Hong Kong, acted as a magnet to poverty-striken mainlanders. As in Hong Kong, the result was that impoverished, disease-ravaged and crime-ridden shanty towns grew up around the handsome colonial core. Economic recovery was hindered by the lack of adequate port facilities: a great floating dock had been sunk. The colony pulled itself up by its bootstraps over the next few years, seizing the opportunity to become the world’s biggest market for rubber, and drawing its rubber not just from Malay but from Indonesian trees. It was, then, well able to take advantage of its superb position between the Asian mainland and the former East Indies, and between the Indian Ocean and the Pacific, even if it took a much longer time to convert the squalor of post-war years into a prospering and peaceful powerhouse. When the Federation of Malaya came into existence, the rival Indonesian Republic tried to place an embargo on the export of rubber to Singapore, in the hope that this would strangle the trade of the city’s still precarious economy; but exporters rapidly learned that all one needed to do was to set out from Indonesia bound for Hong Kong, and then change direction once far enough out in the South China Sea. Smuggling therefore became good business.4

  Still, Singapore could not survive on what was in effect a pirate economy; real doubts were expressed about the possibility of making Singapore work. In 1960 the United Nations, seriously worried about the future of Singapore, sent a team to the island, led by a Dutch economist with plenty of experience of the shipping world, Albert Winsemius. He was very gloomy, expressing the view that ‘Singapore was going down the drain’. He was unimpressed by the port facilities. But he was just as much the saviour of Singapore as its charismatic leader, Lee Kuan Yew: he saw that Singapore could seize the initiative if it learned to handle a new type of cargo, the container. Much more will need to be said about containers; but Winsemius was clearly a man of great vision. Another route to success was ship repair, taking advantage of the prime position of Singapore between the oceans; and this made it a favourite port of Japanese, Norwegian and Greek shipowners, who were exactly the sort of people the port needed to attract if it was to become a major centre of maritime trade.5 Independence in 1965, following Singapore’s expulsion from the Malaysian Federation (in which, as a Chinese-majority territory, it had not sat comfortably), created frightening new challenges. Attempts to develop local industries were now hampered by greater difficulty of access to raw materials on the mainland. The answer was to build on the ideas put forward by Winsemius and to turn the city into a commercial and financial middleman – one of Asia’s greatest success stories.6

  II

  A full account of the recovery that took place in Europe would examine a great many factors, also present in the Far East, that sometimes slowed the recovery: massive damage to infrastructure, notably in the Port of London; external competition, as Japan in particular became a major centre of shipbuilding and re-created its merchant fleet on an ever larger scale; accompanying that, the decline of the shipbuilding industry in Great Britain. Poor labour relations, particularly the pay of seamen and the role of dockworkers in an increasingly mechanized world, were another factor, becoming more important as ports became less reliant on human labour (more of this shortly); in 1955, 1960 and 1966 seamen’s strikes, each more damaging than its predecessor, seriously disrupted Britain’s trade. P&O lost £1,250,000 as a result of the 1966 strike, which left five of its ships stranded.7

  Events such as the closure of the Suez Canal in November 1956, following the disastrous Anglo-French attempt to restore European control over the canal following its nationalization by the Egyptian government, threw British shipping firms off balance; and the experience was repeated when the army of Israel roundly defeated the Egyptian army and occupied Sinai again in 1967.8 However, not just the low-paid suffered. New ways of doing business no longer favoured the merchant middlemen who had played a key role in earlier decades. Middlemen in shipping agencies were being squeezed out as foreign clients tended increasingly to conduct business directly with producers within the United Kingdom; in part this refected the increasing technological sophistication of industrial goods (such as heavy machinery) that middlemen were not best placed to understand and explain.9 British companies too might prefer to go straight to the tea estate, or wherever, from which they acquired their raw materials, making for proud boasts in the television advertisements of the 1950s and 1960s. Still, looked at globally, the post-war years saw a remarkable bounce back to prosperity. During the war P&O had lost just over half of its pre-war fleet of 371 ships, of 2,200,000 tons, but by 1949 it was already operating as many cargo ships as in 1939; as for passenger ships, it owned fewer, but they were larger. Moreover, P&O recognized that the future also lay in oil tankers, and in 1955 orders for this type of ship, which it had not operated before, were placed in British shipyards.10 Within twenty years London had restored its own maritime business to a level one and a half times that of 1939; the 1950s saw
the Liverpool shipping companies recover reasonably well too, after a slow start, though these successes were punctuated by the seamen’s strikes, and contraction gradually began; unemployment grew as container ships headed for other ports, much better adapted to their needs. This, as will be seen, was one of the truly great transformations of the late twentieth-century maritime world.11

  The most impressive European success story was Rotterdam, whose almost total obliteration was the spur to ever more ambitious rebuilding and expansion. Rotterdam proper lies a good fifty kilometres inland and upriver, but the port, including the massive new ‘Europoort’, now extends as far as the North Sea – indeed, with typical Dutch enterprise, it includes the multiple basins of Maasvlakte, built well out into the sea, and capable of handling the vast oil tankers that have been part of Rotterdam’s success story. As a container port it has achieved within Europe what Singapore has achieved within south-east Asia; another secret of success has been its pivotal role in the oil industry. In the 1960s its business was dominated by the oil that was delivered to and refined in Rotterdam and by the pipelines carrying oil deep into Europe, on behalf of Royal Dutch Shell and other companies.12 The story is not so different from that of Singapore, in the sense that Rotterdam is able to play a vital role as a well-situated entrepôt: its port is perfectly situated at the mouth of the long and complex river system of the Rhine, the Meuse and the Scheldt that reaches deep into Germany, France and Switzerland. The Europoort is not just part of the largest port in Europe (and for a time of the world); it is also a truly European port, meeting the needs of European countries within and beyond what has become the European Union.