The Triumph of Unarmed Forces (1914-1918) : an Account of The

4 * H ) I /.if' :^/ * , filiH THE TRIUMPH OF UNARMED FORCES 1914-1918 A Friend in Need ' ' ? Germany. Who said God punish England ! God hless England, who lets us have the sinews of War. " [From Punch." THE TRIUMPH OF UNARMED FORCES (1914-1918) An account of the transactions by which Germafiy during the Great War was able to obtain supplies prior to her collapse under the pressure of economic forces BY Rear-Admiral M. W. W. P. CONSETT, C.M.G. NAVAL ATTACHE IN SCANDINAVIA IQIS-igig NAVAL ADVISER TO THE SUPREME COUNCIL I92O ASSISTED BY Captain O. H. DANIEL, R.N. ^7 '<'^^- LONDON WILLIAMS AND NORGATE 14 HENRIETTA STREET, COVENT GARDEN, W.C. 2 1923 Printed in Great Britain. THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED TO THOSE WHO FOUGHT AND FELL UNDER THE BRITISH FLAG DURING THE GREAT WAR PREFACE With the causes that led to the outbreak of the Great War (1914-1918) this book is not concerned. That our statesmen did everything possible to avert the catastrophe is accepted as historical fact. Nor could this country honourably have held aloof. The war, however, was prolonged far beyond the limits of necessity. It is the causes that led to the undue protraction of this struggle that are made the subject of examination and comment in this book : for the exhaustion of war destroyed the fruits of victory by bringing economic defeat alike to victor and vanquished in the battle of arms. When Germany drew the sword in August, 1914, it is beyond all reasonable doubt that its work was to and and that it be short, sharp decisive;— — was to be returned to its scabbard for a time pending pre- paration for a future task. It is certain that Germany was neither prepared nor equipped for a struggle of four years' duration. " If we don't get to Paris in thirty days, we are beaten," Wangenheim had told me in August, and, though his attitude changed somewhat after the battle of the Marne, he made no attempt to conceal the fact that the great rush campaign had collapsed, that all the Germans could now look forward to was a tedious, exhausting war, and that all which they could obtain from the existing vii viii PREFACE " situation would be a drawn battle, We have made a mistake this time," Wangenheim said, " in not laying in supplies for a protracted struggle; it was an error, however, that we shall ^ not repeat. ." England's entry and the battle of the Marne had placed all hope of an early decision for Germany out of the the with question ; and problem which Germany was faced from the very beginning was an economic one : she was not self-supporting, and the supplies upon which she depended for feeding, clothing and munitioning her armies, and for supporting her civil population, had to come from oversea. The four years' Great War was a struggle for the mastery of these supplies. The essence of war, it is generally held, lies in the application of force, and in the acts of unbridled violence to which licence is given. But in 1914-1918 the clash of arms, the destruction of cities and even the passing subjugation of smaller nations were not the sole determining factors of an issue in which one half of the more highly organised nations of the earth sought to impose its will upon the other half. In a war of lesser magnitude and shorter duration, and with the seas open, they might have been. The real struggle itself was un- accompanied by any single act of violence; yet it was more deadly in its passive relentlessness than the military forces and engines of war, on which the whole attention of the world was exclusively riveted. For more than two years Germany maintained an unequal economic struggle with us : she suffered famine, but she won through. In 1917 she sealed " 1 Secrets of the Bosphorus," by H. Morgenthau, American Ambassador at Constantinople. Hutchinson. PREFACE ix her own doom by declaring war upon all merchant vessels in the waters round the British Islands; for by this act trade with the outside world overseas was virtually stopped. British trade with Germany's neutral neighbours, which had continued throughout the war, ceased. America entered the arena and Germany was reduced to starvation : her troops left the fighting line in search of food. It is the story of this unseen economic struggle that is here told. The story is as yet an unrecorded chapter in the history of the war. The very existence of the struggle is probably unsuspected by the majority of Englishmen. The oversea supplies that reached Germany came ^ mainly through Scandinavia and Holland, passing through two stages in their journey : one by sea and one by land. Taking these stages in order; over a certain part of neutral trade we possessed belligerent rights, sanctioned by international law, treaty and con- vention. The rules of naval warfare under which we had fought in the past gave us great power over but at our own neutral trade with the enemy ; sug- gestion they had been made to suffer fundamental alteration in the long period of peace following on the Napoleonic wars, which ended in the early part of the nineteenth century : much of our belligerent 1 For convenience' sake, when speaking of Scandinavia the author includes Holland in addition to Norway, Sweden and Denmark. The remarks on oversea supplies to Scandinavia apply generally the in principle to suppHes to European countries bordering on Mediterranean littoral. Neither these countries nor Holland, whose economic conditions resemble those of Denmark, have therefore been treated separately. The supplies through the Mediterranean were of far less importance than those through the North Sea. X PREFACE power had been voluntarily surrendered; and the Navy, on the strength of which the power to enforce these rights depended, had therefore been rendered partially impotent. During the war, and while the enemy was receiving the benefit of our surrendered rights, a series of efforts was made to retrieve them and to bring into use the rules of the past for the conduct of our naval warfare. This policy brought us into conflict with America. The new rules, of our own making, are chiefly contained in the Declaration of Paris (1856) and the Declaration of London (1909). Having passed the scrutiny of the British fleet and found sanctuary in Scandinavia, merchandise, in its second stage, was free from further belligerent inter- ference. Nevertheless there were at our command very powerful and effective coercive measures by which it could be controlled, and which could not be disregarded with impunity. Oversea supplies came not only from neutrals, but from Great Britain and her Allies, including, it is to be remembered, Japan. Scandinavia was herself dependent upon oversea supplies for her industrial and economic existence. But she was dependent largely upon certain products of the British Empire and especially upon British coal. With our own goods we were free to do as we wished. Had there been certainty that our supplies would neither reach nor indirectly benefit Germany, there was every reason that trade with Scandinavia should have been encouraged. But from the very beginning goods poured into Germany from Scandi- navia, and for over two years Scandinavia received from the British Empire and the Allied countries stocks which, together with those from neutral countries, exceeded all previous quantities and literally saved Germany from starvation. PREFACE xi Our trade with Scandinavia was conducted and justified on the accepted security of guarantees that Germany should not benefit by it : here it is sufficient to say that this security was worthless. A two-fold form of economic pressure could thus be brought to bear upon Germany : that by belligerent right, to which recent custom applies, in a generic " " control sense, the term blockade ; and that by the of goods from the British Empire and Allied countries. It had been the author's wish to avoid meddling with subjects whose discussion is recognised to be the exclusive of the course monopoly lawyers ; but during of a three years' struggle by correspondence on the subject of the supplies that reached Germany he was given to understand that there stood insuperable difficulties in the way of taking preventive measures for their restriction; and, of these difficulties, that the chief lay in the attitude of America towards the subject of maritime rights. It must be pointed out that maritime rights are slippery and elusive affairs and not very amenable to amateur treatment. They rest upon an international legal basis and lend themselves, from their ambiguity, to the most extravagant form of quibbling. They are admirably adapted to contradictory interpretation : and it was thus that they were interpreted by American and English lawyers according to their interests. If the American conception of maritime rights was alleged by H.M. Government to constitute an obstacle in the way of their conducting the blockade of Germany with greater vigour, and of preventing excessive supplies from reaching her, it would have been a bold man that would have ventured to challenge this assertion. It is partly for these reasons that the chapters xii PREFACE dealing with the correspondence that took place between H.M. Government and the Government of the United States have been included. The author has confined himself to a few cursory comments on the rival claims of the combatants during the course of the struggle. Unfortunately, before the climax has been reached, both combatants disappear from the paper, leaving it to the choice of fancy to pronounce upon the issue. But during the course of this battle over our right to interfere with American trade—for that was the casus belli—^the dispute assumed an unexpected and significant phase.

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