The War at Sea
Allied Blockade of Germany
After Jutland surface action almost ceased, and the
war at sea became a war against trade that was as much a form of economic
as of naval warfare. A history of World War I must therefore include
not only the struggles on land and at sea but also the warfare against
trade, primarily the overseas trade that was so important in the economic
life and war potential of both Great Britain and Germany. This war against
seaborne trade can be divided into (1) the blockade of Germany by the
Allies, including the regulation of trade with neutrals bordering on
that country; and (2) the German submarine campaign and the Allied defense
against it. The Allied blockade of Germany falls into two distinct periods.
The first spans the two and one half years during which the United States
was a neutral. During this time international law still had some force,
but when the United States became a belligerent on the Allied side,
legal aspects were set aside. In the Allied view, this course was justified
by the unrestricted submarine warfare of Germany.
The oceans of the world have been described by the naval
philosopher Alfred Thayer Mahan as a great common, used in war by both
belligerents and neutrals. Because of this, there has grown up a body
of custom, generally called international law, for the conduct of sea
trade in wartime. This law gives a belligerent the right to capture
an enemy's merchant vessels, to stop trade into and from enemy ports,
and to confiscate goods found at sea which are to be used by the enemy
for war purposes. To accomplish these objects, a belligerent war vessel
has the right of visit and search-that is, the right to stop all vessels
to determine their nationality and to learn whether or not they are
breaking a blockade or carrying contraband. Private goods at sea are
not subject to outright confiscation, however, but must be condemned
in an admiralty court, generally known as a prize court.
In the 19th and early 20th centuries efforts were made
to codify this international law by agreements between the maritime
nations. The Declaration of Paris in 1856 abolished privateering, declared
that a blockade to be binding must be effective, and gave protection
to all neutral goods except contraband. The Declaration of London in
1909 attempted to define and specify contraband. Absolute contraband
was to comprise military goods and conditional contraband goods that
could be put to war purposes, while free goods, including such items
as raw cotton, fertilizers, and metallic ores, could not be declared
contraband.
Neither the Declaration of Paris nor that of London
took into account the changes taking place in modern war. Naval weapons
such as the submarine, the torpedo, and the mine had made the old type
of close blockade as well as visit and search at sea impossible. Under
the modern concept of total war, all commodities were considered to
have military value. Finally, Germany had on her land borders several
Continental neutrals whose trade with her a naval force could not interdict.
New methods therefore had to be adopted by the major
maritime power, Great Britain, to cut off the seaborne trade of the
Central Powers, especially Germany, and to prevent the means of war
in the form of goods from reaching these countries from overseas. This
was finally done by a system of trade controls that was to give new
meaning to the term "blockade." In this new form, economic
pressure was brought to bear not so much by naval ships directly as
by a system of trade restrictions which control of the sea made possible.
In 1915 and 1916 these restrictions or blockade in its new form gradually
evolved within the five following categories:
(1) Inspections in port replaced the visit and search
of former days. The dangers of modern weapons and the size and variety
of cargoes carried made the old method of inspection at sea impossible.
Instead, British cruisers directed suspected neutral vessels into ports
for examination. These ports were the Downs, for trade through the English
Channel; and Kirkwall in the Orkney Islands, for the northern route,
where a cruiser squadron was stationed to enforce the new system.
(2) Rationing was a method by which the Continental
neutrals bordering on Germany were allowed supplies sufficient only
for their own use. Based on an elaborate statistical system, it was
given legal sanction after a British prize court condemned the steamer
Kim for carrying an amount of lard to Denmark far in excess of that
country's normal imports.
(3) Written clearances in the form of letters of assurance
or navicerts were given to neutral ships sailing to Europe from the
United States or other neutral nations. A navicert certified the contents
of the cargo, thereby speeding a ship's examination. Most neutral shipping
companies except those of Sweden, which were forbidden to do so by their
government, cooperated with the Allies in both rationing and inspection
and accepted navicerts. Sweden was still linked economically to Germany,
and the Allies could not forget that it lay athwart their own lines
of communication to Russia.
(4) Blacklists were publications of names of firms that
were known, either through Allied intelligence or by postal and telegraphic
censorship, to be trading with the Central Powers. Neutral ships were
forbidden to transport their goods.
(5) Bunker control, or the issue of British coal to
neutral vessels, was the club which made the other controls possible.
Great Britain not only supplied coal to European countries for industrial
and commercial use, but also controlled most coaling stations. (At this
time, American coal offered little competition to the British product.)
By the beginning of 1916 the blockade in its new form
was becoming effective. What had begun as an excellent code without
machinery had become under the Ministry of Blockade an excellent machinery
without a code. Shortages of fibers, oils, fats, lubricants, and fertilizers
began to be felt in the Central Powers. Combined with the crop failure
of 1916, they caused considerable suffering among the civilian populations,
although the armed forces of these nations never experienced shortages
in armaments or supplies.
When the United States entered the war in April 1917,
it placed restrictions on trade that the Allies would never have attempted
while it was still a neutral. Controls could now be effected at the
source, and most of the machinery of the blockade could be abandoned.
By the autumn of 1917 the Central Powers were deprived of all foreign
supplies.
Like the blockade of the Confederacy in the American
Civil War, the contribution of the Allied blockade of Germany to the
final victory is difficult to assess. Victory certainly could never
have been secured solely by economic encirclement, but when the armies
of the Central Powers began to be defeated, the collapse came with the
crumbling of civilian morale brought on by deprivations. In expanding
her industrial economy before the war, Germany had come to depend too
heavily on overseas trade for food and raw materials. The lesson of
World War I was that she must draw these necessities from the Eurasian
continent.
The blockade of Germany was essentially a form of economic
warfare, but it was based on control that the British Navy had maintained
for a century and more. Where the arms of British seapower could not
reach, however, economic warfare broke down, as it did with Sweden in
the Baltic and Rumania on the Black Sea.
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