Dutch sand and gravel agreement

At the beginning of May 1918 the governments of the Netherlands and Germany reached agreement in a dispute that for a few days in April had threatened the neutral state with war. The Dutch agreed to resume the transit of German sand and gravel across their territory to occupied Belgium and the export of their own gravel to Belgium, and the Germans accepted Dutch terms on other matters. The British chronology of the war records the conclusion of the agreement under 2 May. According to diplomatic documents published in the American collection Foreign Relations of the United States, negotiations went on from the end of April: on 3 May the Dutch foreign minister, John Loudon, told the American minister that the agreement was almost ready, the next day he presented it to the States General, and he expected the final exchange of notes in Berlin on 16 May.

Concrete for Flanders

The dispute had dragged on since 1916. The Germans shipped sand and gravel by barge down the Rhine and then by Dutch waterways and rail to Belgium. Officially it was for building and repairing Belgian roads. The British were convinced that it went into the concrete from which the Germans built shelters and bunkers in Flanders. The Dutch government admitted that carrying materials for military purposes would be incompatible with neutrality, but contented itself with German certificates of the peaceful purpose of each cargo. By British calculations about 3 million tons passed this way between 1 January and 15 August 1917. In October 1917 London, tired of waiting for a satisfactory answer from The Hague, cut the Dutch off from sending commercial telegrams over British cables. The Dutch had earlier announced that they would let through another 370,000 tons by 15 November, which was as much as the Germans needed until spring, and on that day the transit did indeed stop. The American minister in The Hague, John Garrett, observed in December, however, that British pressure through the cables had failed, and expected the shipments to resume in mid-March.

The April crisis

In April 1918, while the German offensive was under way on the Western Front and Dutch relations with the Allies were strained after the requisition of Dutch ships, the Germans presented a series of demands in The Hague. They demanded, among other things, free and uncontrolled transit of sand and gravel, passage of civilian goods on the railway line through Limburg, and permission for German and Austrian ships interned in Antwerp to leave through Dutch waters. According to information that the British War Cabinet passed to the Allied military representatives at Versailles, the German minister, Friedrich Rosen, had been instructed to announce that in the event of refusal Germany was ready to use force, but he conveyed this only orally and in general terms, because he feared that such an ultimatum would mean war. On 25 April Loudon asked the ministers of France, Britain and the United States whether it was in the Allies’ interest for the Netherlands to resist Germany to the point of a breach of relations. The military men at Versailles replied that the Netherlands could not defend itself alone and the Allies could not help it now, so for the time being it was better for it to remain neutral. On 29 April the British and French ministers handed Loudon a statement that allowed him to accept some of the German demands. The American was present, but without instructions he did not formally join in. Loudon, as the American minister noted, breathed a visible sigh of relief.

Terms of the agreement

The Germans themselves limited the transit to 1.6 million tons a year and undertook that the material would not be used for military purposes. The Dutch presented this as their victory: according to Loudon it was less than the quantity the Dutch government considered necessary for the ordinary upkeep of Belgian roads. The Netherlands also agreed to the export to Belgium of up to 250,000 tons of its own gravel a month, which in its view neutrality did not forbid. Goods traffic resumed on the railway through Roermond, but without weapons, ammunition, aircraft or military supplies, and the ships in Antwerp were not allowed to leave. The Dutch government promised only to simplify the burdensome customs inspections of Rhine vessels. On 4 May Loudon announced in parliament that the tension in relations with Germany had passed.

The Allies did not regard the matter as closed. The American embargo still in principle applied to the Netherlands, and the British official historian of seaborne trade, Ernest Fayle, wrote that after the requisition of the ships and the failure of the sand and gravel negotiations an economic agreement with The Hague was for the time being out of the question. In mid-July the British government lodged a formal protest against the “sand and gravel agreement”.