I did not expect to be as interested in the economic effects of a simple blockade during World War I as I was when I read chapter seven of Hew Strachan's The First World War. After some description of unbalanced naval battles, Strachan lays out the geopolitical, yet not always moral, strategies of Germany and Britain, who are clearly the dominating powers during the war. As long as the naval blockade was intact, there would be cataclysmic human suffering. The blockade remained intact. Economic warfare rather than battle was the means of exercising maritime supremacy, particularly against a Continental coalition...By 1914 almost 60 per cent of the food consumed in Britain was imported from overseas. Germany, its agriculture (unlike Britain's) protected from foreign competition by tariffs, claimed to be self-sufficient in foodstuffs, although in fact about 25 per cent was imported... |
If Britain were neutral, the Declaration of London served the country's interests as a trading nation. If it were a belligerent, it did not. Britain refused to ratify the Declaration of London, but the divisions in its counsels revealed the practical...objection to blockade. Germany would be able to circumvent it by importing through the neutral powers on its borders.
The problems of assessment were compounded because, of all the enemy's assets, his armed forces suffered least from the blockade's effects. The focus of economic warfare lay not simply where pre-war German calculations had located it - in the denial of raw materials vital for munitions production - but also in food supplies. Because in time of war the state fave priority to feeding its direct defenders, the soldier and the factory worker, those most likely to suffer from shortages were the militarily useless, the old and the weak...The British official history attributed 772,736 deaths in Germany during the war to the blockade, a figure comparable with the death rate for the British armed forces, and by 1918 the civilian death rate was running 37 per cent higher than it had been in 1913. Indirectly, at least, the blockade breached the principle of non-combatant immunity...
Still, Britain spoke English and had direct communication with the U.S. They had cut off overseas communication channels for Germany, making it next to impossible for Germany to do anything to win over the United States as an ally.