The First World War

by Hew Strachan

  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 latt
er 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.