Allied naval conference in London

On 23 and 24 January 1917 an Allied naval conference of Britain, France and Italy met in London. It had been called because German submarines were sinking more and more ships and the Allies were increasingly short of tonnage. A few days earlier, on 16 January, the Japanese steamer Hudson Maru had put in at Pernambuco in Brazil with 287 seamen from six ships sunk by the raider Möwe between the Azores and the coast of Brazil. The British official history of seaborne trade (Fayle, Seaborne Trade) notes, however, that the Admiralty’s attention was focused above all on submarines. In the Mediterranean, as the British Prime Minister David Lloyd George had already pointed out at the Rome conference, the Allies had lost 256 ships in the second half of 1916.

Ten zones

Defending shipping in the Mediterranean was difficult also because the sea had been divided into ten zones, for which the British, French and Italian fleets were separately responsible. All three admiralties agreed that in the western part of the sea ships should as far as possible keep to coastal routes. The eastern part was disputed. The French wanted patrolled routes, frequently changed. The British preferred to disperse ships over the whole area and to station in the individual zones armed trawlers sailing in twos or threes. It ended in a compromise: the French system was adopted for traffic to and from Salonika and in the Aegean Sea, while the British one was to be tried on the route from Cape Bon in Tunisia to Port Said. Better protection was also agreed for the British net barrage laid by drifters in the Strait of Otranto, which was meant to hinder submarines leaving the Adriatic.

Outside the Mediterranean the Admiralty promised a dozen armed trawlers to strengthen the French patrols off the island of Ushant (PL). They protected the coastal route the French had laid out from Belle-Île to Cherbourg.

France and Italy ask for ships

Fayle writes that the conference devoted most of its time to matters going beyond the purely naval. The French presented a dramatic picture. Four-fifths of their ships were already under state control, and most of the rest carried government purchases. One-fifth of all tonnage served the army at Salonika, and links with the colonies had been so reduced that France was almost cut off from its more distant possessions. Restrictions had been introduced on imports, consumption, lighting and heating. Even so, in the last four months 1.4 million tons less coal had arrived from Britain than expected. Factories were stopping, the PLM railways (Paris–Lyon–Marseille) had coal for a week, and the munitions works were short of steel, iron and copper. In the United States 230,000 tons of pig iron were waiting to be loaded.

The Italians painted an even blacker picture. The lack of coal, they said, threatened to paralyse military operations, as munitions and transport were already short. Despite a ban on importing luxury goods, they could not meet their minimum needs for grain, meat and sugar. There were two meatless days a week, the making of sweets had been banned, and people were eating black bread. Italy asked for about 50 ships of 5,000 tons each to carry grain and 90 for coal, as well as 35 colliers for eight months to make up the arrears that already existed. It also proposed reviewing the use of all Allied tonnage and allocating it according to need, so as to ensure “to all the nations waging war an equal capacity for resistance”. Any shortage of ships was to be shared equally, if necessary through immediate rationing.

Two resolutions

The French and British delegates decided that the Italian proposals went beyond the competence of a naval conference, and promised only to put them to their governments. Two resolutions, however, were adopted unanimously. The first stressed that all the Allies must restrict imports of goods they could do without. The second called for the creation of a permanent Inter-Allied Shipping Committee, which was to exchange information on the use of the ships controlled by the individual states and agree with the governments joint programmes for saving tonnage. The British Admiralty also promised to supply France and Italy with steel to complete several merchant ships being built there, and to do what it could to ease the Italian coal crisis.

The Shipping Committee, unlike the Chartering Committee that had been working since the beginning of January, did not live up to hopes. Arthur Salter, later one of the architects of inter-Allied shipping control, wrote that it proved completely ineffective. It included neither ministers able to speak for their governments nor the officials who allocated ships day to day, and the states themselves did not yet know their own needs well. According to Salter the committee was useful chiefly because its failure showed how an effective Allied organisation should be built. Such a body, the Allied Maritime Transport Council, was set up only at the end of 1917. The protection of shipping in the Mediterranean was also soon to change: in February Japan agreed to send its destroyers there, and a week after the conference Germany declared unrestricted submarine warfare.