Read Online World War One: A Short History by Norman Stone - Free Book Online
Authors: Norman Stone
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the land fighting. In time, they themselves could mount a considerable military force in the furthest-flung part of Napoleon’s empire, Spain – 80,000 men, by the standards of the time a large force, supplied by sea whereas the French had to supply their own response up hill and down dale over the most barren and difficult part of Europe, beset by bandits of great determination and savagery. Our word guerrilla – ‘little war’ – comes from this time. It was not in reality so ‘little’. The British and the Spaniards and the Portuguese mounted an effort that was veryconsiderable, but it was five years before the French were cleared from Spain. Napoleon called it ‘the Spanish ulcer’, draining his strength, but it was more than an ulcer: it was two Atlantic empires, even three if you include Portugal, against him.
Now, with enormous British naval superiority, was there not some way round the stalemate in the west? Bright sparks wondered, especially Winston Churchill, with his extraordinary quickness and imagination, his wit, his old-fashioned grand accent, his sense of English history. The navy, under his direction as First Lord of the Admiralty – a singularity of British history was that civilians controlled the armed forces, whereas in Germany they took their orders from the military – had mobilized early. Eighteen miles of grey battleships resulted, bow to stern, a sign to the Germans that, if this went on, they would collapse. In fact the first shots fired in the Anglo-German war were in Sydney Harbour Bay, in Australia, when, on 4 August, a German trader tried to leave and was warned off. A blockade of Germany was declared. However, Churchill’s historical sense was deceptive in this case.
The chief aim was to stop German exports. Maurice Hankey – Kurt Riezler’s equivalent in the British machine before 1914, a formidable man, a linguist interested in everything, manager of government business at the highest level, and also responsible like Riezler for the nuclear bomb twenty years later (German Jewish exiles delivered the secret to him in 1940, and he passed it on to the Americans) – said that Germany would be destroyed if her exports were stopped. Here he was, like many other clever people, quite wrong. Nine hundred German merchantmen were picked up, and the Royal Navy (not without trouble) picked up various enemy warships around the world, including the Falkland Islands. However, if Germany were prevented from exporting, the spare machinery and labour simply went into war work. There were no riots in Hamburg – on the contrary, the great trusts which ran German industrywent over to the production of war goods, the banks which were their own creatures financed this, and the Prussian War Ministry knew how to maintain quality control without getting in the way, as its British counterpart did. The effect of the British block on German exports was therefore that the German war economy did better than all others in 1915. The Russians took a year to catch up.
There was another paradox to the blockade: it became a wonderful alibi for bad management of food supplies in Germany. The British were greatly hated, blamed for scarcities that were not truly of their making. Stopping German imports was not easy because they could go through neutral ports, and in any case international law (the Declaration of London in 1909) did not allow for stoppages of food imports (even barbed wire counted only as ‘conditional contraband’ because it had agricultural uses). Under the British rules, neutral ships were supposed to be open for inspection, and sometimes their cargo was confiscated, which, again and again, made for problems with the USA – problems uneasily resolved by offers of postwar compensation. But there was no real way of stopping food imports through (especially) Holland.
It was true that, as the war went on, German food supplies declined, in the winter of 1916–17 quite drastically. The blockade
Now, with enormous British naval superiority, was there not some way round the stalemate in the west? Bright sparks wondered, especially Winston Churchill, with his extraordinary quickness and imagination, his wit, his old-fashioned grand accent, his sense of English history. The navy, under his direction as First Lord of the Admiralty – a singularity of British history was that civilians controlled the armed forces, whereas in Germany they took their orders from the military – had mobilized early. Eighteen miles of grey battleships resulted, bow to stern, a sign to the Germans that, if this went on, they would collapse. In fact the first shots fired in the Anglo-German war were in Sydney Harbour Bay, in Australia, when, on 4 August, a German trader tried to leave and was warned off. A blockade of Germany was declared. However, Churchill’s historical sense was deceptive in this case.
The chief aim was to stop German exports. Maurice Hankey – Kurt Riezler’s equivalent in the British machine before 1914, a formidable man, a linguist interested in everything, manager of government business at the highest level, and also responsible like Riezler for the nuclear bomb twenty years later (German Jewish exiles delivered the secret to him in 1940, and he passed it on to the Americans) – said that Germany would be destroyed if her exports were stopped. Here he was, like many other clever people, quite wrong. Nine hundred German merchantmen were picked up, and the Royal Navy (not without trouble) picked up various enemy warships around the world, including the Falkland Islands. However, if Germany were prevented from exporting, the spare machinery and labour simply went into war work. There were no riots in Hamburg – on the contrary, the great trusts which ran German industrywent over to the production of war goods, the banks which were their own creatures financed this, and the Prussian War Ministry knew how to maintain quality control without getting in the way, as its British counterpart did. The effect of the British block on German exports was therefore that the German war economy did better than all others in 1915. The Russians took a year to catch up.
There was another paradox to the blockade: it became a wonderful alibi for bad management of food supplies in Germany. The British were greatly hated, blamed for scarcities that were not truly of their making. Stopping German imports was not easy because they could go through neutral ports, and in any case international law (the Declaration of London in 1909) did not allow for stoppages of food imports (even barbed wire counted only as ‘conditional contraband’ because it had agricultural uses). Under the British rules, neutral ships were supposed to be open for inspection, and sometimes their cargo was confiscated, which, again and again, made for problems with the USA – problems uneasily resolved by offers of postwar compensation. But there was no real way of stopping food imports through (especially) Holland.
It was true that, as the war went on, German food supplies declined, in the winter of 1916–17 quite drastically. The blockade
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