THE LAST BLOCKADE
Sitt,—" Janus' " denial that the Allies acted harshly and vindictively in maintaining the blockade against Germany after the Armistice in 1918 and his assertion that it is " not true for a moment that Germany was starved" appear to require some correction. I was seven years of age at the time of the Armistice, and the elder son of a well-to-do German middle-class family. Even now I cannot look back to the spring of 1919 without feeling the horror of those days, the endless quest for food, the death of schoolmates, the sombre, endless demonstrations of hollow- eyed men and women crying "hunger, hunger," the fear for the life of my younger brother. And why should Lord Plumer, British C.-in-C. in the Rhineland, have telegraphed to the Peace Conference that unless supplies were forthcoming for the starving German civilians he could not be responsible for the effect on the discipline of the Army?
Whilst on active service in the present war I served for a time in a specialist unit of the RA.S.C., most of whose senior N.C.O.s had been with the Army of Occupation. What they told me of the humanity of the ordinary British soldier in those days will be to his eternal honour. So many men came up on charges for sharing their rations with the local population that whole units were doing C.B.
Finally, there is the plain language of statistics. The late Professor Starling giving the result of an official inquiry made by the British Government as to food and health conditions in Germany in the spring of 1919, showed that more than three-quarters of a million civilians had died from starvation between 1915 and 1918. And in the first half of 1919 the death rate from starvation was higher than during the same period of 1918. In support of his statements " Janus" mentions that Germany received something like a million tons of foodstuffs under the Allied relief schemes between November, 1918, and August, 1919. I am sure he would have been less impressed by this figure if he had known that it represented less than one per cent. of Germany's annual food consumption, to say nothing of the often unspeakably bad quality of this food. Some of it was not fit for human consumption. "Janus " then blames the shipping shortage and the fact that "Germany boggled at the financial arrangements to provide payment for food" for the continuation of the blockade. Shortage of space forbids me to say more than this: In the first instance Germany could have bought all the food she needed on her own account and imported it on her own ships if she had not been deprived of her entire merchant fleet. Secondly, the
Reichsbank during the first half of 1919 ....tided over more than ,C5o,000,0oo in gold to the Allies for foodstuffs, a sum that greatly exceeded the value of the food received.—I am, Sir, Sm.., [" Janus " writes: This is a long case to argue, but I never, of course, suggested that there was not acute hunger in Germany after the Armis- tice. To say that she was not starved, i.e., deliberately starved by Allied policy, is a different thing, as the context plainly showed, from saying she was not starving—whether or not that is too strong a word to use. That Germany, having sunk millions of tons of Allied merchant shipping while her own was safe in port, should be allowed in the hour of defeat to retain the latter to do what she liked with would have been an intolerable arrangement.]
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