Castles of Steel by Robert K. Massie
[During a 1915 debate in the U.S. Senate about the potential harm posed by the British blockade, Senator Williams of Tennessee declared:
Mr. President, we had a war over here between the States not very many years ago . . . and what did your people do to mine? Was it your army that whipped us? You know it was not. If it had not been for the women and children and men whom you starved to death, and the soldiers who could no longer wear a uniform and shoot because they had nothing to eat, I imagine we might be fighting even now. Your navy whipped us. Your sea power strangled us. Your sea power starved our population first and then starved our army afterwards. Now I am not complaining here. My forefathers did not complain; war is war, not a system of caressing, and there never was a confederate from Jeff Davis down to the humblest soldier who ever pleaded because he and his wife and children were starved by your navy.]
Through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the rights of belligerents and neutrals regarding blockade were generally recognized. Nevertheless, before the Great War, when two Hague peace conferences attempted to codify the rules of war, it was decided that the procedures of blockade needed further clarification. Accordingly, in 1908, the British government invited the leading naval powers to a conference in London to work out specific rules of blockade and to agree on definitions of contraband. Ten nations were invited: Germany, Austria, France, Russia, the Netherlands, Italy, Spain, Japan, and the United States. The conference took place between Decem-ber 4, 1908, and February 26, 1909, and resulted in a draft declaration that all parties agreed was “in conformity with generally accepted principles of international law.” Blockading ships, on encountering a commercial vessel approaching or leaving a blockaded port, were first to determine the nationality of the vessel. If it belonged to a hostile nation, it was fair game for seizure, the ship as well as the cargo. If the vessel was a neutral, the ship’s cargo and destination became the determinants. Goods legitimately ripe for seizure were considered contraband, the simplest definition of which was “all materials useful to enemy armed forces.”
[There were subdivisions: “absolute contraband” covered articles unquestionably for military use only—for example, arms, munitions, and military equipment; “conditional contraband” included cargoes that could be used for either civilian or military purposes, such as fuels, railway equipment, clothing suitable for military use, gold, and silver. The “non-contraband free list” included metal ores, fertilizers, paper, copra, raw hides, raw cotton, wool, silk, flax, hemp, and, most important, all foodstuffs consigned to neutrals. Only absolute contraband could always be confiscated by a blockading power; conditional contraband could be seized only if an enemy destination could be proved; and non-contraband could not be seized at all. In the past, no lists of specific materials in these categories had been drawn up and definitions of absolute and conditional contraband had changed with the passage of time and the development of new weapons; in sailing-ship days, for example, absolute contraband included timber for ships, tar, and hemp for ropes.]
The London conference also restated the rights of neutrals. Neutral nations were empowered to prohibit belligerent blockading ships from entering their territorial waters within three miles of the coast; failure to respect this limit justified internment of the encroaching vessel for the duration of the war. Neutral nations and citizens were permitted to trade freely with belligerents, even to sell munitions to one or more belligerents. If a neutral ship was stopped, it must submit to search. If the vessel was found to be carrying munitions or other contraband, these materials would be confiscated. If the cargo consisted of conditional contraband, the ship could be detained and brought into a port of the blockading nation where the matter would be decided by a prize court. When detained cargoes were confiscated, compensation might be paid.
On February 26, 1908, the document known as the Declaration of London was signed and the delegates returned home. The document’s publication, however, stirred a violent reaction in Britain, where advocates of British sea power vehemently argued that the declaration favored a neutral’s right to trade over a belligerent’s right to blockade, thus nullifying a major benefit of naval supremacy. Although the House of Commons supported making the declaration law, the House of Lords voted against ratification by a margin of three to one. The U.S. government, influenced by Alfred Thayer Mahan, an advocate of omnipotent, unfettered sea power, also refused to ratify the declaration.
During his term as First Sea Lord, 1910–12, Sir Arthur Wilson drafted no specific plans for a blockade of German commerce. He simply assumed that it would come about in the old-fashioned way: as a by-product of naval operations to contain an enemy fleet. The British navy would patrol aggressively inside the Heligoland Bight with strong forces of light cruisers and destroyers. No German merchant ships would pass this barrier; thus, a blockade of German merchant shipping would be an automatic, if secondary, effect of an essentially military operation. In May 1912, however, Winston Churchill’s new Admiralty Board considered that if an attempt was made to execute Wilson’s war plan deep inside the Bight, the British fleet would sustain heavy losses from torpedoes and mines. The new board lost no time in canceling Wilson’s plan and substituting another, which called for holding the Grand Fleet on the periphery of the North Sea and snuffing out German oceanic trade by a distant blockade. “A close commercial blockade is unnecessary . . . provided that the entrances to the North Sea . . . are closed,” said the Admiralty staff.
The shift to distant blockade raised legal and practical difficulties. By international law, a blockade is merely a paper or fictitious exercise unless it is rendered effective: every port of the blockaded country must be patrolled and blocked and all vessels must be intercepted, boarded, and their cargoes examined. Even British jurists agreed that no place could be called blockaded unless watched by a force of warships that cut all communication between the blockaded harbor and the outer oceans. In the situation Britain faced in 1914, no true, legal blockade was possible because certain German ports could not be blockaded; the British fleet did not control the Baltic and could not prevent Sweden and Denmark from trading freely with Germany.
Nevertheless, legally or otherwise, Britain had a powerful incentive to isolate a hostile Germany from world suppliers and markets. Before the war, international maritime trade played a paramount part in the German economy. Imports of foodstuffs and raw materials greatly exceeded exports, which largely consisted of manufactured goods. Germany imported about 25 percent of its food, particularly eggs, dairy products, vegetable oils, fish, and meat. One and a half million tons of wheat arrived annually from America, and 3 million tons of barley consumed by farm animals—half of Germany’s annual requirement—came from Russia. Although the German empire produced 40 million tons of potatoes, sufficient for the nation’s needs, German agriculture was notoriously dependent on fertilizers—potash, phosphates, and nitrates—of which 50 percent were imported from the United States, Chile, and North Africa. As for raw materials, the United States supplied all of Germany’s cotton and 60 percent of her copper. Argentina provided wool and hides. Sixty percent of these imports were carried in German vessels belonging to a German merchant marine that totaled 5.5 million tons, approximately 12 percent of the world’s merchant tonnage. But from August 5, 1914, onward, Allied sea power quickly extinguished the international maritime trade of the Central Powers. Six hundred and twenty-three German and 101 Austrian merchant vessels, 1.875 million tons of shipping, took refuge in neutral harbors while Britain and her allies seized another 675,000 tons. In the first five months of war, Allied warships intercepted and captured still another 405,000 tons. Germany was left with less than 2 million tons of merchant vessels, and they were usable only in the Baltic.
Before 1914, Admiral von Tirpitz had warned that in a war with Great Britain the Royal Navy would blockade Germany, but he was confident that this could be compensated for by expanding German trade with nearby neutrals such as Holland, Denmark, Norway, and Swed
The British Cabinet moved quickly to block these channels. An order in council issued on August 20 decreed that neutral trade with Germany in conditional contraband would be regulated by the doctrine of continuous voyage. This meant that the ultimate destination of seaborne cargoes, not their initial stopping point, would become the determining factor. The British argued that if a nation at war had a right to blockade an enemy and to stop contraband from reaching him directly, then it also had a right to enforce these rights against an enemy who was supplying himself through neutral states. Contraband goods consigned to a neutral country, but destined for the blockaded country, were to be regarded as subject to seizure on the ground that the passage through the neutral country was merely part of a continuous voyage into the blockaded country. Thereafter, neither absolute nor conditional contraband intended for use by the enemy state or its armed forces could be shipped freely merely because it was consigned to a neutral receiver. “Finally, to further empower the blockade force,” the order declared that “the destination . . . may be inferred from any sufficient evidence.” In addition, the order in council revised the lists of absolute and conditional contraband established by the Declaration of London. The new, more comprehensive lists included many items formerly on the free list—leather for saddles, rubber for tires, copper, lead, cotton, raw wool, raw textiles, even paper, all now said to be convertible to military use. The practical effect of making conditional contraband subject to capture when it was to be discharged in a neutral port was to transform everything that had been conditional contraband into absolute contraband.
For the moment, the most controversial cargoes—food and foodstuffs—were left unaffected by the order in council. Originally, Britain did not intend to stop food supplies bound for Germany if they were to be consumed by the German civilian population. This policy was spelled out in a telegram from Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey to the British ambassador in Washington, Sir Cecil Spring-Rice, on September 29, 1914: “We have only two objects . . . to restrict supplies for the German army and to restrict the supply to Germany of materials essential for the making of munitions of war. We intend to attain these objectives with the minimum of interference with the United States and other neutral countries.” Subsequently, the Admiralty received information that the German government had taken control of the supply and distribution of all food in the empire. Stretching a point, this could be taken to have turned virtually every German dealer in foodstuffs into a state contractor or government agent and thus, by further extension, to proclaim that all food on its way to Germany by any route was conditional or even absolute contraband. The British government reminded the United States that Article 33 of the Declaration of London had stated that “conditional contraband is liable to capture if it is shown to be destined for the use of the armed forces or of a government department of the enemy State.”
Inevitably, the Allied blockade trespassed on neutral rights. By applying belligerent rights of blockade—stopping and searching ships and confiscating contraband—the Allied navies were insisting on regulating the trade of neutral nations to a degree unparalleled in history. Anticipating that this might happen, the United States on August 6, 1914, formally asked all belligerents to declare their adherence to the Declaration of London as the legal basis for naval operations connected with the blockade. Sir Edward Grey, who had just learned of the destruction of the cruiser Amphion in a freshly laid minefield off the English coast, replied that as the enemy evidently considered themselves at liberty to endanger neutral maritime traffic in international waters, he doubted whether the British government could undertake to observe every article in the declaration. The Admiralty, he said, must decide which rules could be followed and which must give way to “the efficient conduct of naval operations.” When the August 20 order in council appeared, Americans were particularly affronted by the doctrine of continuous voyage; it seemed intolerable that the British navy be permitted to seize merchandise in transit from a neutral American port to a neutral Dutch or Scandinavian port, whatever the ultimate destination of the goods. Subsequently, in response to American complaints regarding enforcement of this doctrine, London replied that the Royal Navy’s hand had been applied only lightly. From August 4, 1914, to January 3, 1915, 773 merchant vessels had sailed from America to Holland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Italy. Of these, the cargoes of only forty-five had been placed in prize court, and ultimately only eight had been permanently confiscated.
Nevertheless, American complaints made Britain uneasy. As a long war seemed more and more likely, the Allies knew that they would have to draw upon the United States for food, arms, and money. To tighten and enforce the blockade of Germany while at the same time maintaining friendship with neutral America became simultaneously necessary and painfully difficult. As every added restraint on neutral shipping raised another protest from Washington, it became apparent to Britain that she might ultimately have to decide which of the two policies was the more important. If the choice had to be made, Sir Edward Grey was never in doubt as to which path he would follow. “The surest way to lose the war would be to antagonize America,” he said. The British government’s effort, he added, would be “to secure the maximum blockade possible that could be enforced without a rupture with the United States.”
The daily work of the blockade was entrusted by the Admiralty to twelve obsolete cruisers, all unfit to fight modern warships. Four of these ships went to the western end of the Channel where, working with a French squadron, they patrolled the entrance from the Atlantic. Eight old cruisers of the Edgar class established watch over the other, wider North Sea exit, the 200-mile gap between the Shetlands and Norway. Rarely were all eight cruisers on patrol together; periodically, each vessel had to go into the Shetlands to coal. Thus, during the first four months of war, the North Sea blockade of the German empire was routinely performed by six rusty old warships, steaming ten, twenty, or thirty miles apart.
In practice, blockade duty meant an always wearying, sometimes dangerous routine. When a cargo ship was halted, a naval boarding party including two officers went across to the neutral vessel. The visitors’ first task was to look at the ship’s papers and establish her identity using a copy of the Lloyds registry. A more difficult task for naval officers, most of whom knew no language other than English, was to discover whether crew members and passengers calling themselves Norwegians, Swedes, Finns, Danes, or other, were, in fact, Germans. Occasionally, people were closely questioned. This examination, says A. C. Bell, the official British historian of the blockade, “was conducted with the assistance of a printed list of unusual words in every European language and with the aid of drawings of familiar objects.” A German or Austrian citizen attempting to deceive the examiners “might have an exceptional knowledge of the language he professed to speak as a native, [but] it was not likely that he would, in rapid succession, [be able to] give the right word for . . . a bicycle pedal, an instep, a cheekbone, a nasturtium, or a frying pan.” Halting or erroneous answers led to close inspection of the person’s luggage. As for the cargo, the boarding officers would read the manifest, then descend into the hold to look about. Discovery of anything suggesting contraband, absolute or conditional, sent the v
The hardships suffered by neutral seamen and shipowners were small, however, compared to those endured by the men of the blockading squadron. In normal weather in these waters, the crews, wrapped in yellow duffel suits, looked out at gray skies and rolling gray waves. When autumn gales brought winds down from the Arctic, piling the sea into short, steep ridges of water, the men on the old cruisers continued the work of the blockade. In tumultuous seas, the engines stopped, a boat was lowered, and a boarding party went down the ladder. Putting off from the tall steel side of their own vessel, the men rowed to the waiting neutral, where another ordeal awaited them. One unexpected flick of the churning sea could hurl their wooden boat against the hull, turning the craft into splinters and the boarders into floundering, drowning men.