The Illusion of Victory (51 page)

Wilson compounded this alienation by suggesting that his new order might well require considerable changes in the British empire. In a talk with Lloyd George, he emphatically insisted that Germany’s colonies should not be handed over to the winners. Instead, they should be placed under the supervision of the League of Nations, as trusteeships or “mandates” destined for eventual independence. He also opposed punitive reparations against Germany, the issue on which Lloyd George had just won a huge election victory. When Lloyd George reported all this to his Tory-packed cabinet, consternation and outrage were the order of the day.

Years later, in his memoirs, David Lloyd George recalled Wilson’s appearance at a royal banquet in his honor at Buckingham Palace. The hosts were wearing “resplendent uniforms of every cut and color.” It was a holdover from the nineteenth century’s love of pageantry. The president walked in, “clad in an ordinary black suit without a medal to adorn his breast.” to Lloyd George and others, it was the second coming of Oliver Cromwell.

At the banquet, the king greeted the president with warm words of friendship. Wilson replied, Lloyd George said,“with the perfect enunciation, measured emphasis and cold tones with which I was to become so familiar in the coming months. There was no glow of friendship or of gladness at meeting men who had been partners in a common enterprise and had so marvelously escaped a common danger.” In his remarks, Wilson did not say a word about the sacrifices the British had made in the four long, bitter years of the Great War.
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In a private talk at Buckingham Palace, Wilson told King George V that Americans were neither cousins nor brothers, and he wished the king would not use these expressions. He also advised His Majesty not to refer to Americans as Anglo-Saxons. The term could “no longer be applied to the people of the United States.” Nor was there any special importance to sharing the same language. There were only two things that could “establish and maintain closer relations” between the two countries:“community of ideals and of interests.”
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Afterward King George told his private secretary,“I could not bear him. An entirely cold academical professor—an odious man.”
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While Wilson was making political waves in England, heavier weather was brewing in France. Premier Georges Clemenceau decided he needed a vote of confidence from the Chamber of Deputies. Were the Radical Socialists and other followers of Joseph Caillaux still interested in a peace of reconciliation with Germany? Caillaux remained in jail, but in August 1918, when Germany’s imminent collapse was far from visible, the French senate had tried his right-hand man, Louis Malvy. Ignoring reams of evidence that Malvy had been collaborating with German agents, the senators let the former interior minister off with a small fine and a sentence of five
years’ exile in Spain. A band of cheering Radical Socialists had escorted him to the railroad station, where they asked him what he planned to do in Spain.“Wait!” Malvy said.

After calling for a debate on France’s posture in the peace conference, Clemenceau did not say a word for five days, while arguments raged around him. He sat at his desk, taking occasional notes, and mostly scowling at the speakers. Finally, after the differences between liberals and conservatives had been thoroughly aired, he rose and gave one of his most ferocious speeches. Calling on the deputies to support the toughest possible terms with Germany, he appealed to their patriotism and hunger for vengeance. He won overwhelming support—almost a 4 to 1 majority.

Especially disturbing was Clemenceau’s declaration that France should rely on the old system of a balance of power to keep a revived Germany at bay. Alliances were far more dependable than the
noble candeur
of President Wilson. In French,
candeur
means both “simplicity” and “naïveté.”

An agitated Colonel House informed his diary that Clemenceau’s victory—and comment—were “about as bad an augury for the success of progressive principles at the Peace Conference as we could have.” He gloomily noted that it came “on the heels of the English elections.” If the congressional elections in the United States were added to the picture,“the situation strategically could not be worse.” House thought Wilson’s only hope was to remind the Allies that they had agreed on the Fourteen Points before they signed the armistice. By now House undoubtedly knew that this acceptance had been mere lip service to pry the guns out of the Germans’ hands. Clinging to it only underscored his growing anxiety.
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On Armistice Day, Wilson had gone before Congress to announce the good news of the war’s cessation and the approach of a peace of “disinterested justice.” He pointed to the way the victorious governments were displaying their “humane temper” by a unanimous resolution in the Supreme War Council to supply the people of Germany and Austria-Hungary with food and fuel to relieve “the distressing want that is in so many places threatening their very lives.”
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In the preliminary talks about the Fourteen Points, House had already pushed the importance of feeding a starved German population. But he
had been unable to alter the British determination to maintain the blockade. House’s solution was an urgent cable to Woodrow Wilson, asking him to send Herbert Hoover, the savior of starving Belgium, to Paris as soon as possible to take charge of the problem.

Few people knew that Hoover had spent as much time arguing with the British as with the Germans about getting food to the Belgians. The “poor little Belgium” of British propaganda meant little to the British admirals and bureaucrats who were sure the Germans would make off with the victuals. First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill, who favored letting the Belgians starve and blaming the Germans, called Hoover “a son of a bitch.” Hoover responded by calling the admiralty “the sanctuary of British militarists.”
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Hoover was proud of his achievement in Belgium and instantly accepted the challenge of feeding the defeated enemy—and the rest of Europe, which was almost as hungry. Before he departed, he arranged for the shipment of 250,000 tons of foodstuffs to various European harbors. On the day he sailed, Hoover issued a statement from shipboard, calling for a relaxation of the “watertight blockade.” He warned that otherwise, anarchy would reign and there would be no government to make peace with and no one to pay for the damage done to Belgium and France.
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The exhortation and Hoover’s unilateral shipment of food had zero impact. When Hoover got to London, one of the top people in the British Food Ministry told him to stop making public statements about the blockade. The British government was opposed to lifting it “until the Germans learn a few things.” Not quite able to believe what he had heard, Hoover watched numbly as Lloyd George waged his “make the Hun pay” election campaign. In London’s newspapers, stories about German hunger were headed “Feeding the Beast” and “Germany Whines—Limits of Endurance Reached.” worsening matters was a British decision to forbid the German Baltic fishing fleet to catch so much as a herring, depriving the enemy of a source of food they had depended on throughout the war. This extension of the blockade began the day the armistice was signed. Heretofore, the British navy had had no access to the Baltic Sea.
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From London, Hoover sent an assistant into Germany to obtain a thorough report of the country’s situation. He brought back a study by the German National Health Office, describing a nation on the brink of mass starvation. To verify this portrait, Hoover sent a three-man team of American experts, who brought back even more dolorous facts. Most Germans were suffering from chronic malnutrition. The grain harvest, normally 30 million tons, had fallen to 16 million because of bad weather and lack of hands to harvest it. In north Germany, eight hundred adults were dying of starvation every day.
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Hoover reported the situation to Wilson, still in Washington, and the president ordered House to present a plan to the Allied governments, making Hoover director general of relief with the authority to lift the blockade and get food into Germany without delay. The Allies’ reaction was coldly negative. With almost incredible meanness, they accused Hoover of shipping food from the United States because American cold-storage warehouses were overcrowded with a surplus of pork and dairy products. They turned thumbs down on a Wilson proposal to put Germany’s merchant marine at Hoover’s disposal to ship more food, because the Allies wanted to seize the ships for their merchant fleets. They also balked at the idea that Hoover should run the emergency food program. At a London meeting between Lloyd George, Clemenceau and Orlando, they announced plans to “investigate” how much food Germany needed—and how much reparations it could pay, a chilling linkage. Significantly, Hoover was not invited to the meeting.

Giving up on the British, Hoover moved his operation to Paris in mid-December. By that time, Wilson had received his tumultuous welcome in the City of Light. But Hoover found the atmosphere “miasmic” when it came to getting food into Germany.“The wolf,” Hoover cried, “is at the door of the world.” Clemenceau’s reply was a vicious wisecrack:“There are twenty million Germans too many.”
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The French, led by their vengeful premier, became even more intransigent than the British. They joined the Belgians in announcing the discovery that Germany had $570 million in gold in its Berlin vaults. When the armistice agreement was renewed on December 13, the gold was the only topic discussed. The commissioners added an amendment prohibiting Germany from disposing of this hard money for food or anything else, to make sure it was available for reparations. As for food, the commissioners simply rubber-stamped Article 26 of the agreement, stating that victuals would be provided “as shall be found necessary” and did nothing.

The day after Wilson reached Paris, House told him of Hoover’s problems. The president contacted Lloyd George, Clemenceau and Orlando,
and all three immediately agreed to approve Hoover as the director of an Allied food program. When Hoover went to British officials with his new authority, they stonewalled and proposed an inter-Allied committee to run things. Nevertheless, Hoover managed to wangle an agreement to permit food to be shipped to neutral countries around Germany, such as Denmark and the Netherlands, where it could be traded for German commodities.

Next Hoover asked Admiral William Benson, the courtly, white-mustached chief of U.S. naval operations, to persuade the British to lift the Baltic blockade against the German fishing fleet. Benson was the Americans’ senior naval adviser at the peace conference. He got nowhere. Surly British Admiral Edward Browning, president of the Allied Naval Armistice Commission, had only one idea in his head: Make the Huns squirm and plead. Then came stunning news from London: Officials of the British, French and Italian governments had revoked permission to ship food to neutral countries. The blockade remained in wartime force.

These same officials canceled orders for 200 million pounds of American bacon, already cured and ready for shipment to England. Also deep-sixed were contracts for 100 million bushels of wheat and hefty orders of beef, pork and dairy products. This was a neat way of saying “Drop dead” to the Americans, who were stuck with the surpluses. It also meant the Allies would be able to claim they had no food to spare for Germany.
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Hoover was a Quaker, but he cast aside meekness when he saw people doing unspeakable things. He paid a visit to Admiral Benson and asked him “if the Allies had any right to stop ships flying the American flag and carrying food to people dying of starvation.”

“Not as long there is a ship left in our fleet,” Benson replied. Like many American navy men, he was thoroughly sick of condescending British admirals and delighted to have an excuse to tell them off.

Benson soon informed Hoover that the British had dropped their objection to shipping food to neutral nations. The director of relief next convened a meeting with diplomats from France and Italy and talked them out of canceling their food contracts. They had done it under British pressure, and their people needed the food. But these victories were all but destroyed by a British-French counterattack. The Allied Blockade Committee forbade any sale of forthcoming American food to Germany from the neutral countries. Hoover stubbornly shipped the food anyway and stored it in Copenhagen and other cities. Soon neutral warehouses
were bulging with $550 million worth of fats, wheat, pork and other products—and Hoover began to worry about a financial disaster that would rebound on American farmers.
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After more wrangling, Hoover became head of a compromise organization, the Supreme Council of Supply and Relief, with representatives from all the Allied governments. At their first meeting on January 11, 1919, the delegates informed Hoover that not a pat of butter or a peck of wheat would go to Germany until it surrendered its merchant fleet. They claimed this was necessary to alleviate a world shipping shortage, caused by the depredations of the U-boats. In fact, there was no shortage. By this time, shipbuilding efforts by the British and Americans had replaced 90 percent of the tonnage the U-boats had sent to Davy Jones’s locker. What the Allies wanted was the German merchant fleet, which had been omitted from the armistice accords.
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Two days later, Wilson, Lloyd George, Clemenceau and Orlando took up the problem of getting food to Germany. The French again insisted Germany could not pay for any food from its gold supply, and Belgium backed them up, once more underscoring its Paris satellite status. The desperate Germans were willing to surrender their merchant marine if they could get a guarantee of some food. But the French ban on paying for it in gold made any and all shipments impossible. The Germans could not raise money by selling goods in foreign markets from their factories. The Armistice Commission had banned German exports. For the next two months, this impasse continued, while tens of thousands of men, women and children succumbed to malnutrition and starvation in Germany and Austria.
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