First meeting of the Allied Maritime Transport Council

On Monday 11 March 1918 the Allied Maritime Transport Council met for the first time at Lancaster House in London and formally constituted itself. It sat until Thursday 14 March. It had been created by a resolution of the Paris conference of December 1917, and its organisation had been settled in February at an informal meeting at the Foreign Office. According to Arthur Salter, the council’s secretary, all its members attended: two ministers each from Britain, France and Italy, and the representative of the United States, Raymond B. Stevens. Italy was represented by Silvio Crespi and Salvatore Orlando (not to be confused with the prime minister, Vittorio Emanuele Orlando). Besides the members, about six other Allied ministers and some thirty senior officials took part in the proceedings. The chair was always to be taken by the senior minister of the country in which the session was held.

The first tonnage balance sheet

The most important document of the session was a balance sheet of the Allies’ import requirements and the carrying capacity of the ships at their disposal. Salter stressed that it was the first formal document of its kind in history, though far from perfect. It lacked data on America, the Italian figures were very incomplete, and the numbers were not comparable. The British had recently cut their import programme drastically, by 4 million tons compared with 1917, while the French and Italians had not yet had time to revise theirs. Nor did it take into account ships that might yet be obtained, such as the Dutch and Swedish vessels held up by embargo or the German ships interned in South American ports. Even so, the result was unambiguous: in the course of a year the Allied ships could carry about 10 million tons less than was required. This corresponded to a shortage of about 2.2 million tons deadweight of ships in constant use.

There was also bad news from the United States. In December the Allies had asked the Americans to transfer 500,000 tons deadweight to them at once, and in time an average of 1.25 million tons. Stevens now declared that the military programme adopted by the Supreme War Council and approved by the American government would probably absorb all the free American tonnage, existing and under construction, as well as all the neutral ships the Americans could take over. The council therefore provisionally accepted that the joint import deficit amounted to 10 million tons, and decided to return to the matter in four or five weeks, once its executive body had examined the programmes of all the states.

Coal for Italy and the Dutch ships

The most urgent matter was coal for Italy. In 1917 imports there had averaged about 400,000 tons a month, less than half the normal amount, and the stocks used to make up the shortfall were almost exhausted. The council approved, with minor changes, a plan prepared earlier by officials. Italy was to receive 600,000 tons a month, regarded as her indispensable minimum, without exposing all the additional ships to danger in the Mediterranean. The provisional programme provided for 360,000 tons of British coal and 240,000 tons of French, but a large part of the deliveries was to consist of coal from the mines of southern France and British coal unloaded in the Bay of Biscay ports and carried on by rail. In return France was to receive additional British coal across the English Channel, as the council held that her strategic reserves must not be touched. To supervise the execution of the plan a committee of representatives of the Italian government and the French Ministry of Public Works was set up, to sit in Paris, follow the shipments of coal to Italy day by day and report them to the council’s secretary.

The council also dealt with the Dutch ships that had been lying idle in American ports for months; according to Salter they amounted to almost 500,000 tons deadweight. It recommended that at least half of them, once taken over, should be allocated to one voyage carrying imports for the European Allies. A few days earlier the Dutch had received an ultimatum over the ships, and according to the British official history the council’s recommendation rested not so much on hopes of an agreement with The Hague as on the decision to requisition the ships if the negotiations failed.

The council’s machinery

The council also approved the employment of a permanent staff and the building of an executive machinery according to the plans submitted to it. At its head stood a main executive committee, known as the Allied Maritime Transport Executive, made up of the heads of the four national divisions, with three international sub-committees for tonnage, imports and statistics, and with a secretariat whose members were to shed their national point of view. The American division and the secretariat worked at Lancaster House from the start. Salter wrote that by the middle of March the new organisation, though still incomplete, was already in the thick of the problems it was to deal with over the following critical months. The plans were soon upset by the German offensive in France, which began a week after the session ended and hampered the transport of coal by rail to Italy. The council met again in April.