Allied Blockade Committee

On 20 March 1918 Louis P. Sheldon, the representative of the American War Trade Board in London, informed Washington that representatives of Great Britain, France, Italy and the United States had met at the Foreign Office to facilitate the exchange of views on matters of blockade. They had decided to meet regularly once a week and to constitute themselves as the Allied Blockade Committee under the chairmanship of Leverton Harris, parliamentary secretary of the British Ministry of Blockade. The British chronology of the war records the setting up of the committee under 20 March, the date of this report. According to the committee’s minutes, cited by the editors of the American collection of diplomatic documents Foreign Relations of the United States, the first meeting had, however, already taken place on 15 March.

One blockade instead of two

After entering the war the United States imposed an embargo on exports to the neutral countries bordering Germany, and from the autumn of 1917 foreign trade was controlled by the War Trade Board. For three years, however, the blockade had been run by the British. Their Contraband Committee decided which cargoes could sail to the Netherlands and the Scandinavian countries, and British legations in the neutral capitals watched over the agreements with local merchants’ associations that guaranteed goods would not reach Germany. Two centres of decision, in London and in Washington, led to friction. American merchants did not want to apply to the British for so-called navicerts, that is certificates that a cargo raised no objection, and the British complained of exports from America of goods that they themselves were refusing.

In January 1918 Sheldon argued to Washington that the only sensible solution was a joint committee of the Allies which would take final decisions on exports to the neutrals, and that no country should any longer have the kind of advantage Great Britain had over the Netherlands Overseas Trust. At the beginning of February he reported that Lord Robert Cecil, the Minister of Blockade, and Leverton Harris supported the idea. In mid-February the Americans and the British agreed in principle to abolish navicerts. Export applications were henceforth to go to an inter-Allied committee in London, and the trade representatives of the two countries in the neutral capitals were to form local joint committees.

The committee’s powers

The committee was given no authority of its own. According to Sheldon, it was to decide only those questions on which its members had received specific instructions from their governments. The British Contraband Committee, which representatives of the Allies now joined, carried on unchanged, but in difficult cases it could turn to the new committee for advice, and it was to refer major questions of principle to it. Sheldon considered that the local committees in the neutral capitals should not go beyond the limits set by the London committee. The latter was to occupy, with regard to the Netherlands and the Scandinavian countries, the same position that the inter-Allied committee in Paris already occupied with regard to Switzerland.

The War Trade Board approved the setting up of the committee on 26 March. At the beginning of April the Foreign Office informed the Allied legations at The Hague, Copenhagen, Stockholm and Christiania that the committee had already held two meetings and that the local committees were to be advisory, not executive. The British historian of the blockade Archibald Bell observed that in agreeing to the committee the Americans knew well that in practice they were handing the direction of the blockade to London. For him this was proof that the United States government had not subordinated its war policy to the interests of its merchants. The committee worked until the end of the war and after it. It was the committee that supervised the execution of the armistice provisions that maintained the blockade of Germany.