Anglo-French declaration against German trade

On 1 March 1915 the governments of Britain and France published a jointly agreed declaration in which they announced that, in reprisal for German submarine warfare, they would prevent any goods from reaching or leaving Germany. The British chronology of the war speaks of a joint declaration signed by both states. In practice each government handed the neutral states its own, almost identical text. In Washington the British ambassador, Cecil Spring Rice, and the French ambassador delivered them to the State Department on the same day, and in The Hague the Dutch foreign minister received them from the ministers of both states.

Asquith’s speech

That same afternoon the Prime Minister, Herbert Henry Asquith, read the declaration in the House of Commons. The occasion was a debate on war credits, in which the government asked for £37 million for the last weeks of the financial year and £250 million for the coming months, the largest sum ever requested by a British minister. Asquith spoke very sharply about the submarine threat. He called the German war zone around the British Isles “a campaign of piracy and pillage”, and describing it as a blockade a grotesque perversion of language. A blockade, he reminded the House, consisted in closing the enemy’s ports with a ring of warships, and the German surface fleet did not put to sea.

The declaration began by recalling the principles of maritime law. A warship that stopped a merchant ship should bring it before a prize court, where the legality of the capture could be examined and neutrals could recover their cargoes. Sinking a prize was permitted only in exceptional circumstances and after ensuring the safety of the crew. A submarine met none of these conditions: it did not control the waters in which it operated, had no prize crew, could not take survivors on board, and could not effectively distinguish a neutral ship from an enemy one. Since Germany wished to cut the British Isles and northern France off from all supplies, including food for the civilian population, her opponents considered themselves entitled to cut Germany off from supplies in reprisal.

Detain, but not confiscate

The key sentence of the declaration said that the British and French governments held themselves free to detain and take into port ships carrying goods of presumed enemy destination, ownership or origin. They did not intend, however, to confiscate the ships or cargoes unless these were liable to confiscation on other grounds, for example as contraband. The new rules did not apply to ships that had sailed before 1 March. It was also promised that the reprisals would be carried out without risk to neutral ships or to human life.

Asquith pointed out that the declaration deliberately avoided the words “blockade” and “contraband” and other terms of international law. The British did not intend, he said, to let their efforts be strangled in “a network of juridical niceties”. He announced that against an enemy who had cast off the restraints of law and humanity, Britain considered herself entitled to every form of economic pressure. If neutrals suffered losses as a result, the government would regret it, but he reminded the House that it was not the British who had begun this stage of the war.

The neutrals’ questions

The declaration was an announcement rather than a finished regulation. The neutral states did not know how it would be applied. On 5 March the Secretary of State, William Jennings Bryan, pointed out to London and Paris that stopping all ships bound to and from Germany was in essence a blockade, but without its formal declaration and without the application of its rules. Such a combination was, in his view, unknown to international law, and the neutrals had no standard by which to judge their rights. The detention of goods merely because of their German origin raised particular objections. In the Netherlands chambers of commerce and shipowners began warning foreign senders to suspend shipments of goods from or through Germany.

Britain set out the details of the new policy on 11 March in a special Order in Council, and France two days later in a decree. The reprisals announced on 1 March turned the existing contraband control into a blockade of all of Germany’s seaborne trade, which was to last until the end of the war.