Requisition of Dutch ships

On 21 March 1918 the governments of Great Britain and the United States notified the Netherlands that they were taking into their service the Dutch ships lying in their ports. The deadline of the ultimatum of 7 March had expired on 18 March, and The Hague’s conditional reply, which ruled out among other things the carriage of war supplies, was not regarded in London as an acceptance. On the night of 19–20 March the British Minister of Blockade, Lord Robert Cecil, informed the British embassy in Washington that the British government considered the proposal rejected and was ready to requisition, asking that the two states act simultaneously. The Americans, who for two days had only been waiting for the signal from London, issued a proclamation that same day, 20 March. The note to the Dutch government and the President’s statement were published on 21 March, the same day on which the German offensive began on the Western Front.

The right of angary

The proclamation was signed on 20 March by President Woodrow Wilson and countersigned by Secretary of State Robert Lansing. It invoked the law and practice of nations, which allow a belligerent state, in case of military necessity, to take over and use neutral ships within its jurisdiction, the so-called right of angary, as well as an Act of Congress of June 1917. The Secretary of the Navy was authorised to take possession of Dutch ships in American waters, and the United States Shipping Board was to pay the owners full compensation. The joint note, which the British minister at The Hague, Walter Townley, handed to the Dutch Foreign Minister, John Loudon, explained that the Allies would have preferred an agreement, but that for more than two months the Netherlands had neither ratified the arrangement agreed in January nor carried out the provisional one, because Germany had not allowed it to. The condition that the ships should not sail in the war zone had ceased to be acceptable, and the statement that they would not carry war materials meant, at this stage of the war, that they would carry nothing.

The Allied governments gave assurances that the ships would remain Dutch and would return to their owners after the war. The owners were to receive a fair hire, compensation for ships sunk by the enemy and, for those lost in the war zone, also the possibility of receiving another ship after the war. Ships leaving the Netherlands after the date of the note were not to be requisitioned without their owners’ consent, and the Netherlands was to receive 100,000 tons of grain from North and South America. The requisition did not cover tankers or ships of less than 500 net tons. According to the British official history of seaborne trade, by the end of March almost 680,000 tons deadweight of Dutch shipping had been seized, 553,000 of them in American ports and 124,000 in British ones, more than a third of the neutral state’s merchant fleet. The number of ships varies with the source. In American ports there were, by various counts, from about 80 to almost 90, and together with the British ports about 135 is usually given.

Wilson’s statement

On 21 March Wilson issued a lengthy statement. In it he recalled the history of the negotiations and the fact that the Dutch themselves had proposed a provisional charter in January, which they had then not carried out because Germany threatened to sink their ships, even those sailing with food for Switzerland or for occupied Belgium. As proof that the owners’ fears were not groundless, he pointed to the recent sinking by a German submarine of the Spanish ship Sardinero, which was carrying grain for Switzerland outside the declared war zone. Wilson stressed that the United States was not taking the ships as its property, but only using them temporarily. Lansing instructed the minister at The Hague to assure the Dutch government that the American authorities would assume all war and marine risks, and that the Dutch crews would be maintained at the expense of the United States until their return home.

Indignation in the Netherlands

In the Netherlands the news provoked an outburst of indignation. On 22 March Loudon described the Allied decision in the First Chamber of the States General as arbitrary and contrary to law. Prime Minister Pieter Cort van der Linden assured the Second Chamber that the government had neither acted under German pressure nor departed from neutrality, and delivered a “fiery protest against the injustice and contempt” shown to the Dutch. He said that independence and rights were dearer to them than their daily bread. Part of the press wrote of “ship robbers”, and in the evening students from Delft demonstrated outside the American legation, whistling and singing patriotic songs.

Arthur Salter, a British shipping official, later judged that the right of angary had been a “useful discovery” in international law for the Allies. He also believed that neither the owners, whose idle ships suddenly began to bring in large profits, nor the Dutch government, which could plead force majeure, much regretted that the Allies had taken by force what they could not obtain voluntarily. According to Salter the Americans gained about half a million tons in this way, and the British roughly half that.