Tonnage agreement for the Allies

On 3 November 1917 the governments of Britain, France and Italy concluded an agreement on tonnage, that is, the ships needed to carry food for the countries of the Entente. The text was short. The three governments stated that, because of the poor harvests in France and Italy, the submarine war and other causes, there were not enough ships for all needs. The most important of these was food, which could be treated separately because it was known how much of it had to be imported. The burden of providing ships to carry it should therefore rest jointly on all the Allies, including the United States. Since the matter could not wait, the three governments undertook to provide the necessary tonnage themselves, in proportion to their means of transport, with or without American help. They also announced that they would at once take up the other, “scarcely less important” needs of the Allies.

The bad autumn of 1917

The agreement was born of a crisis. In the summer and autumn German submarines were sinking hundreds of thousands of tons of shipping a month. According to a British memorandum prepared a few weeks later, Britain had lost about 10 million tons deadweight since the start of the war, and more than half of the world’s losses fell in 1917 alone. At the same time France and Italy had gathered very poor harvests and had to import from overseas more than two million tons of grain above the usual amount, which required about 750,000 tons deadweight of additional shipping. Italy’s situation was worsened by the defeat on the Isonzo. After the breakthrough at Caporetto the Italian army was retreating behind the Piave, losing men, equipment and stores, and the country, more than nine-tenths of whose imports came in the form of grain and coal, depended on supplies by sea even more than before.

Joint purchases of wheat had been carried out since November 1916 by the Wheat Executive, a three-country body set up shortly before the Clémentel agreement, and from January 1917 neutral ships were chartered jointly through the Inter-Allied Chartering Executive. In principle, however, each country had to find its own ships to carry grain. At the beginning of November the French Minister of Commerce, Étienne Clémentel, came to London. He argued that France would not survive the winter without greater help and that the most urgent task was to organise the import of food, and above all wheat, jointly. The talks with British ministers and officials lasted several days, and then representatives of Italy joined them.

What the agreement meant

Arthur Salter, a British shipping official who took part in this work, later wrote that the agreement was “not very clear” and could mean much or little depending on its interpretation. It provided for a common pool of ships for food, but not for other goods. The formula of tonnage “in proportion to means of transport” could not mean a simple calculation in which Britain, having several times as many ships, would simply give several times as much regardless of needs. The only reasonable interpretation was that the three countries would jointly examine all their needs and allocate ships accordingly. In Salter’s view the agreement was therefore important despite its vague wording, because in practice it adopted the principle of the common use of tonnage, though not of its common management. In reality it meant that the British would give France and Italy more ships and cut their own imports.

Over the next two weeks officials worked on the details. During that time the American mission of Colonel Edward House arrived in London, and with it a representative of the American Shipping Board. The matter then went to the inter-Allied conference in Paris at the end of November, where it was decided to create the Allied Maritime Transport Council, which from the spring of 1918 allocated ships among the Allies.