Kramer: Blockade and Economic Warfare

Question 1

When was it impossible for Germans to ignore ‘growing threats to the food supply of the population and the army”?

Answer 1

Quickly: Within a year of the July 1914 crisis. In 1915: (1) March introduced bread rationing, and (2) by June, the costs of feeding a family had gone up by 50%, and (3) by August meet, eggs, and butter were frequently unobtainable.

Question 2

When was German hunger at its worst?

Answer 2

The Winter of 1916-7. A wet autumn ruined the potato crop, and rutabagas were a poor substitute (nutritionally and taste-wise).

Question 3

How many German civilians likely died of hunger (directly, or indirectly because they were weakened and unable to survive other diseases, like tuberculous and influenza)?

Answer 3

Jay Winter’s standard work calculates 478,500, but some German estimates were as high as 800,000.

Question 4

What was traditionally cited as the cause of those hundreds of thousands of deaths?

Answer 4

What has been called “The British hunger blockade”

Question 5

Why is it unfair to call it “The British hunger blockade”?

Answer 5

(1) It was an allied policy, not just a British policy (2) It was aimed not only at the Germans, but the Austro-Hungarians, Turks, and Bulgarians (3) Germany attempted to cut off supplies reaching the Entente as well, mostly with U-Boats.

Question 6

Kramer puts blockades in a larger context. What is his larger context?

Answer 6

Economic Warfare, which also includes trying to deny the enemy access to international credit markets and attempting to seize or at least deny the enemy access to its assets.

Question 7

Until August, 1914, what was Britain’s preferred strategy?

Answer 7

Economic Warfare (including blockades). Britain had always been a naval power, so it fit.

Question 8

Who broadened Britain’s strategy from a focus on Economic Warfare?

Answer 8

Kitchener, who became War Minister in August 1914, persuaded the Cabinet to turn Britain into ‘a nation in arms’, and to raise a mass army to fight in France.

Question 9

What was the internal cost of Britain adopting a policy of total war?

Answer 9

When Loyd George and Winston Churchill adopted state intervention (called ‘New Liberalism’) Britain had to abandon Laissez-faire.

Question 10

A blockade traditionally blocks the enemy’s ports. How was the British blockade different?

Answer 10

Because of the development of naval mines, torpedoes, and more powerful coastal artillery, the British could not patrol close to the coast. Instead they had bock the North Sea at the English channel and between Scotland and Norway. Kramer calls this a “Distant Blockade”.

Question 11

How did the British initially improve the effectiveness of their blockade?

Answer 11

The Royal Navy cut Germany’s telegraph cables with the rest of the world. This made it far more difficult for German merchants and banks to communicate with overseas suppliers.

Question 12

Did the allies restrict their blockade to Axis vessels?

Answer 12

No, they also prevented neutrals from receiving and shipping certain goods. At first (August 1914) they distinguished between ‘Absolute contraband’ of forbidden cargoes, included arms, explosives, warships, aircraft and other items for use in war. ‘Conditional contraband’ included goods such as food and fuel, if they were destined for the armed forces.

Question 13

When did Britain extend the blockade to all goods?

Answer 13

March 1915. After Germany had declared the seas around the British Isles to be a ‘military area’ (the first phase of unrestricted submarine warfare) in February 1915 did Britain announce its Order in Council of 11 March as an act of retaliation, to impose a ban on all goods of German origin or destination. The French Government made a parallel announcement.

Question 14

Why did the British move slowly as they tightened the blockade.

Answer 14

They were aware the trade was flowing through neutrals, like Sweden, and from neutrals, like the USA, and they did not want to turn neutrals into enemies.

Question 15

How did the British and French deal with trade through neutrals?

Answer 15

They allowed neutrals to import similar quantities during the war as they had imported before the war.

Question 16

Was the blockade purely military?

Answer 16

No. What contemporary German experts and generations of historians have repeatedly called ‘blockade’ was not blockade at all: it was the Allies’ refusal to sell their own resources to the enemy. Two examples illustrate the risk of going to war against your food suppliers. (1) Vegetable oils. The main sources for oil-seed plants were the tropics, mainly the British and French African colonies, Argentina, Egypt, India, the Dutch East Indies and China. India alone provided 70 to 80 per cent of rapeseed. (2) Grain for bread and animal fodder. Most of Germany’s grain imports came from Russia.

Question 17

For Kramer, Economic Warfare includes trying to deny the enemy access to its assets. Can you come up with an example?

Answer 17

(1) Ploiești’s oil production made it a target when the Central Powers invaded Romania in 1916, a British Army operation commanded by Colonel John Griffiths destroying production and sabotaging much of the infrastructure of the industry. (2) Incarcerating the German Merchant Fleet.

Question 18

Germany not only went to war with its food suppliers, but it also went to war with three of its four export markets.

Answer 18

(1) Britain (2) Austria-Hungary (3) Russia (4) France. So, Germany was at war with more than half of its export market.

Question 19

Germany also attempted economic warfare

Answer 19

(1) It attempted to buy American munitions companies. (2), as it retreated from France, it transported the most valuable industrial equipment, machines, motors and machine tools from France to Germany, and destroyed what it could not (for example, French coal mines).

Question 20

What was the first naval tactic Germany tried?

Answer 20

Cruiser warfare, primarily against merchantmen, but that ended with Britain’s victory in the Falkland Islands.

Question 21

When was the first round of unrestricted submarine warfare? When and why was it ended?

Answer 21

The decision for the first round of ‘unrestricted submarine
warfare’, in which the enemy’s merchant ships would be destroyed without warning, commencing on 22 February 1915. After the sinking of Lusitania in May with the loss of 1,198 lives including 128 US citizens, the Kaiser prohibited attacks on passenger ships, and in September U-boat warfare in the waters around the British Isles was suspended.

Question 22

When was the first round of unrestricted submarine warfare? Was it successful?

Answer 22

1 February 1917, At first yes. But the convoy system with warship escorts proved highly effective, and the number of sinkings by U-boats dropped. Other measures were import substitution, food rationing, the substitution of wheat by other foodstuffs, a big increase in the area of land cultivated for grain, vegetables and potatoes, and the introduction of a more efficient command economy than in Germany, including a ‘food controller’ who regulated the sale of 85 per cent of the food consumed.

Question 23

Did economic warfare win the war?

Answer 23

I read his analysis as significant, but mostly no. “The food situation in Germany in late 1918 was somewhat better than the previous year, and civilian morale played no part in the decision taken by the German High Command to end the war. The Allies won the war on the battlefield. At the end of the war Allied superiority in logistics was crushing, and German logistical weakness was manifesting itself in crucial areas, as the shortage of lubricants, petrol and rubber was seriously affecting the mobility of the German army. The end of the supply of these imported raw materials was within sight”.