Ruth and Bill were on their honeymoon during the last part of July and early August, and each day the newspapers told of such dire things as Austria-Hungary’s declaration of war on Serbia on July 28, the Russian mobilization of July 30, and the German declaration of war on Russia August 1 and on France August 3. All of this was scarcely conducive to a happy honeymoon. No doubt Ruth acquiesced with a sigh when her husband suggested that they break off their stay on the lakeshore and return to Buffalo.
Back in Buffalo, Donovan drilled Troop I in rifle and dismounted maneuvers. He studied the military and economic strengths of each of the warring European powers. Most people in Buffalo believed that the war in Europe would be over soon and would end in an overwhelming Allied victory. Donovan was far less sanguine, and he felt certain that if the war went on long enough, the United States would be drawn into it. If his country did indeed go to war, Donovan was determined that Troop I would be ready.
Near Derby, on the Lake Erie shore southwest of Buffalo, Lieutenant Stryker of the National Guard had a farm that in future years was to become the Lake Shore Hunt Club. Since the State of New York failed to authorize a camp for Troop I that summer, the men volunteered to pay their own expenses to camp on Stryker’s farm. By then Troop I had more than 50 horses and was as well equipped a force as the state could mobilize. At camp Donovan made sure that the men had plenty of rifle practice. He saw to it later that fall and winter that the cavalrymen practiced on the outdoor Kenilworth Range when weather permitted or at the indoor range in the 65th Regiment Armory. All this rifle training paid off in 1914, when Troop I, the youngest National Guard organization in the state, placed third in marksmanship.
Having failed to muster its National Guard for training in the summer of 1914, the State of New York decided to hold an important camp at Fishkill Plains in the Hudson Valley the following July. For the first time Troop I would be thrown together with the rest of the cavalry regiment, which would include men from Manhattan, Brooklyn, Syracuse, and Rochester. This was the first time since the Civil War that the state would bring together a cavalry regiment for maneuvers. Donovan was resolved that his men would look good in comparison with other units, and winter and spring he drilled them in mounted work.
At Fishkill, Donovan’s Troop I was complimented highly by cavalry officers from the Regular Army who attended maneuvers. The troop compared favorably in all respects with the old troops of the First Regiment. Donovan had a feeling of contentment that lasted all the long rail miles back to Buffalo, but once home, he became dissatisfied again. It was one thing to lead a troop of men in maneuvers in the Hudson Valley. It would be another if necessity forced him to lead Troop I against the formidable German cavalry in France.
After the early return from their honeymoon, Bill and Ruth Donovan had moved into the Rumsey mansion, where they lived happily with Mrs. Rumsey. Just about a year after their marriage, Ruth gave birth to their first baby, a boy, whom they named David. The young couple’s happiness in their son was chilled because Bill’s father was very ill. It was hard to say exactly what was the matter with him; he simply wasted away. He had shown little interest in living since the death of his wife.
About a week before his father’s death, Bill Donovan went to tell him about the birth of his grandson, David. It seemed only yesterday that a small boy had sat on the stool next to his father in a First Ward saloon and listened to the political wrangling or joined in the Irish songs. Now the son stood tall and confident, and the father was a weak old man lying forlorn in his sickbed. But when he heard about his grandson, the old man brightened. He looked wistfully at his son, who had already accomplished so much.
“I hope you’ll be as proud of him as I’ve always been of you,” he said.
3
Relief Mission to Europe
AS 1915 DREW TO A CLOSE, the war in Europe was a stalemate. The successes of the Allies and Central Powers alike had turned to disaster. Beginning in December, the British withdrew from their dismal Gallipoli expedition. The German generals August von Mackensen and Paul von Hindenburg had driven the Russians out of Galicia and most of Russian Poland the previous summer and autumn, inflicting upward of 2 million casualties on the czar’s ill-equipped and poorly led troops and taking 750,000 prisoners. Bulgaria, which had joined the Central Powers in October with a declaration of war on Serbia, had assisted Germany and Austria in the conquest not only of Serbia but also of Montenegro and Albania. The Central Powers also defeated Romania.
Superior Central Powers tactics and leadership, combined with their central position, had darkened the outlook for an Allied victory in Europe. Even in France, the British and French were hard put to hold their positions. On the other hand, British command of the seas made it possible for the Allies to bring additional forces, principally from the British Empire, to France, and at the same time to deny supplies from abroad to their enemies. German submarine warfare might harass Allied shipping, but Britain and France were still able to transport vital foodstuffs and other imports from around the world.
As the British North Sea blockade of the Central Powers grew increasingly effective, Germany and her allies suffered. The civilians of German-occupied Belgium, Poland, Serbia, Albania, and Montenegro suffered far more. The fighting had devastated many cities and towns and destroyed a good part of the autumn harvest. Already Herbert Hoover and other Americans were at work in Belgium providing food for the Belgian people.
The Rockefeller Foundation, in New York City, had been endowed by John D. Rockefeller with $101 million for the relief of human suffering in all parts of the world. Shortly after the outbreak of the war, the foundation trustees had appointed a War Relief Commission. Made up of men drawn from business and professional life, who served without pay, the commission undertook to advise the foundation on how the suffering of noncombatants might be alleviated. The commission would also supervise and carry out any measures of relief that might be decided upon by the foundation and approved by the appropriate Allied and Central Powers authorities.
On February 23, 1916, William Donovan received a telegram at his office in the Iroquois Building in Buffalo:
“Could you arrange come here conference Saturday morning, February twenty-sixth. After conference, if mutually agreed between you and foundation that you go abroad in its service, could you arrange your affairs, leave Rotterdam sailing New York March seventh. Warwick Greene.”
Only four days earlier, Greene had been appointed director of the War Relief Commission. He had heard about the Buffalo attorney, now 33, who was as personable as he was brilliant. The next day he received a return wire:
“Will be in New York Friday on business. Will phone you and if convenient would like to meet you. W. J. Donovan.”
On Friday afternoon Bill Donovan walked into Warwick Greene’s office at the Rockefeller Foundation. The two men got along well from the start. Both were oarsmen; both were patriots and keenly aware of the significance to Americans of the events in Europe. As soon as he left Greene, Donovan put in his application for a passport. On March 7, the original date set for departure, the foundation received a telegram from Robert Lansing, President Woodrow Wilson’s secretary of state:
“Department has rec’d application of Wm J Donovan for passport for nearly all European countries including all belligerent countries. States he is going in service of Relief Commission, Rockefeller Foundation. Department desires avoid issuance passports belligerent countries on both sides. Please state which countries Relief Commission desires Donovan visit. He sails eleventh.”
Greene wired back the next day:
“Replying your telegram March seventh. Contemplated sphere of war relief activity of William J. Donovan is area controlled by Teutonic countries, especially Poland. Probably no occasion for him to visit Allied countries except in transit.”
The department issued a passport to Donovan, and at last, on March 14, Greene, Donovan, and two more War Relief Commission aides, R. C. Foster and H. D. Topping, sai
led aboard the liner St. Paul. Ruth and their baby were to stay with Mrs. Rumsey in the big house on Delaware Avenue until Donovan could make arrangements for her to join him in Europe. The Greene party sailed not for Rotterdam as originally planned but for Southampton, England.
Southampton, the busiest port in the British Isles, was crowded with great ships bringing supplies and recruits from all over the English-speaking world. The St. Paul docked there on March 18, and the War Relief Commission members boarded a train that took them 70 miles to London’s Waterloo Station. They hurried to the American Embassy at number 14 Grosvenor Gardens. Greene was anxious to get his relief team into the field, and his aides were equally impatient.
While the St. Paul was still a day out of Southampton, Greene had written to William Phillips, under secretary of state in Washington, about his plans for the War Relief Commission:
“I am strongly impressed with the necessity of maintaining the spirit of neutrality on the part of the men to whom the State Department has granted these general passports. I feel that our usefulness will depend on the maintenance of an impartial attitude that would carry conviction to all with whom we come in contact, so I shall see to it that they feel in honor bound to conduct themselves in such manner that no Government will ever regret having given permission to any member of our party to cross their boundaries.”
In June Bill Donovan, by then in Berlin, explained the operations of the commission in more detail in a letter to the German humanitarian Professor Dr. Ludwig Stein, also in Berlin:
“Members of the Commission who are sent to countries at war or to neighboring countries are required to devote themselves exclusively to the objects of their mission. They are obliged to observe strict neutrality in word and act, to refrain from expressions of opinion on the issues of the war and to preserve in the strictest confidence any knowledge as to facts of actual or potential military significance of which the correct performance of their purely neutral functions may make them cognizant.”
Walter Hines Page, ambassador to the Court of St. James, and his first secretary, Irwin Loughlin, did their best to be of assistance, although at the very time the War Relief Commission was in London, the embassy was involved in a diplomatic crisis. Page, acting under directions from President Wilson, had been doing his best to preserve some semblance of neutrality in the face of Germany’s unrestricted submarine warfare on North Atlantic shipping. On March 24 a German U-boat sank the unarmed French channel steamer Sussex, and 80 persons, including American citizens, were killed or injured. Wilson, soon to be campaigning for reelection, did not want to lose German-American and neutralist votes by adopting too harsh a policy toward Germany. With the sinking of the Sussex, however, he felt he had no choice but to threaten to sever diplomatic relations with Germany if the government of Kaiser Wilhelm II did not “immediately declare and effect an abandonment of its present methods of warfare against passenger and freight carrying vessels.”
The diplomatic crosscurrents in London were intriguing to a young man who was having his first close look at an international crisis, but Bill Donovan was anxious to cross the Channel to Europe. First, however, Greene had to establish a fund of £200 at the London office of Herbert Hoover’s Commission for Relief in Belgium. Donovan would be able to draw upon this sum for his expenses. Soon after their arrival in London, Donovan and Greene went to Hoover’s office in the London Wall buildings. They not only made necessary financial arrangements but accepted Hoover’s invitation for Donovan to visit Commission for Relief operations in Belgium before he undertook his own mission in Poland.
“On the 9th of April, 1916, I left London under instructions to proceed to Holland, arrange there for the purchase of milk for shipment to Warsaw,” Bill Donovan noted in a report to Warwick Greene. Once in the Netherlands, Donovan lost no time. On April 12 he drove an auto to the plant of the Nutricia Company, a few miles outside The Hague. “This plant is owned by a Hollander named Chris Hodjes,” he reported. “He is a man who dislikes the Germans and whose custom is almost solely with England and her colonies. He has a neat-appearing and seemingly well-organized plant. With him I arranged for the purchase of 100 metric tons of milk powder per month, contingent upon approval of the German Government for its importation.”
Donovan was elated at his apparent initial success. On the same day that he drove to the Nutricia Company, the German authorities gave him permission to enter Belgium, and he prepared to leave immediately. Then he learned that the Germans had regulations that limited his chances to ship supplies to the hungry Poles. There were more than 200 German agents at work in the Netherlands purchasing supplies for the use of the German people and armed forces. The Imperial Government refused to give Donovan a permit to export any foodstuffs for occupied nations if this meant denying provisions to the Germans.
Next, he hurried to see Dr. Richard Kuhlmann, the German minister at The Hague. Surely the German nation would not block the shipment of milk powder to hungry Poland, he argued; it would be a callous act. Donovan also pointed out that the pro-British Nutricia Company had refused to ship milk powder to Germany anyway, and it would not cut into German supplies if the company sent milk powder to Poland. The minister gravely nodded his head and promised to advise his government.
Donovan also called upon Dr. Henry Van Dyke, American minister to the Netherlands and Luxembourg, to enlist his assistance in persuading the Dutch government not to place any obstacles in the way of the delivery of milk powder. Van Dyke had early taken an interest in war relief and had made the arrangements to ship the first two cargoes of supplies to Belgium for Herbert Hoover’s commission. He had the confidence of the German minister to the Netherlands, and he was determined to keep the door open for relief shipments.
When Donovan reached the American Legation, he was ushered directly into the library to see Van Dyke, who immediately agreed to do everything he could to expedite German permission for the export to Poland. Later in the day Donovan called upon C. A. Young, director in Holland for the Commission for Relief in Belgium, who promised that he would take care of the actual shipping of the milk powder. The War Relief Commission could pay for the milk through the existing offices of the Commission for Relief in Belgium.
The same day that he called on Van Dyke and Young, Donovan also met with Caspar Whitney. Whitney had traveled and explored in North and South America, Mexico, Siam, Malaya, and India for ten years. He had been a war correspondent in Cuba in 1898, and now he was working for Herbert Hoover’s group in the Netherlands. Whitney, at 51 a veteran of many intrigues, was taken with young Donovan and agreed to carry messages for him to Warwick Greene in London. On the next day, April 13, he crossed the North Sea to England, a trip that German submarines and airplanes had made hazardous.
As Donovan waited for word from the Rockefeller Foundation as to how he should proceed in Europe, he spent the next five weeks observing food and health conditions in Belgium, as well as the way in which the Belgian Commission for Relief operated. He studied the detailed reports of the negotiations, conferences, and agreements between the commission and the German government, and he went down to the Brussels waterfront to spend several days, as he reported to Greene at the American Embassy in London, “viewing the unloading of lighters, the storing of supplies and more particularly the office system of the shipping department.”
He was impressed with the work, which was directed by a Mr. Boltens, a Belgian who before the German invasion had been a banker. “His department, to my mind,” wrote Donovan, “is the real heart of the entire commission because upon its proper functioning depends the successful operation of the entire system of distribution.” He reported that “the next two weeks I devoted to a study of conditions in Brussels. Here the Belgian people had evidenced the best of their tendency to organize committees. The poor were well taken care of in the soup kitchens which were maintained, the food substantial, well-prepared and quickly served.”
Toward the end of May, Donovan received a wire
from Greene directing him to continue his efforts for shipments to Poland in Berlin, where he arrived on May 26. He checked into the elegant Hotel Esplanade on the Bellevuestrasse, which was favored by diplomats, and immediately went to see James W. Gerard, the American ambassador, in his grand house on the Wilhelm Platz, directly opposite the Chancellor’s Palace and the Foreign Office. Donovan found that long tables had been set up in the ballroom for the use of relief workers. He soon learned that the Polish people were suffering even more than the Belgians.
The Rockefeller Foundation had agreed to fund the relief work and to send representatives to carry it out. When General von Hindenburg approved of the plans, Dr. Oscar F. T. Lewald of the Department of the Interior signed for the German government. Donovan learned from Ambassador Gerard through American diplomatic channels that the British government was concerned that the shipments actually reach the Poles and not be diverted to the German military. Gerard had already submitted certain British prerequisites to the Foreign Office and arranged for conferences with both Prince Franz Xavier von Drucki-Lubecki and Dr. Lewald.
On May 28, Donovan met with Prince Lubecki to discuss the British position. Prince Lubecki, a German nobleman with Polish blood and sympathies, hoped to establish a Polish kingdom between Germany and Russia when the war was over. He was anxious to cooperate fully with Donovan to prevent starvation in Poland.
Donovan then met first with Lubecki and Lewald at the Department of the Interior. His first significant conference on a matter of international interest lasted two hours.
Lewald was of the opinion that no reply should be sent to England’s demands, since he thought they were “unreasonable and meant not to be accepted,” reported Donovan. “I, however, stated to him that it seemed to me very foolish on the part of the German Government to let this answer go by default; that if it were true that this British document were political, it would carry great weight with the neutral world and it was incumbent upon the German Government to make some answer.”
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