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CONTENTS
Page Editor's Note xv Foreword xvii PART I: THE PRE-WAR PLANS CHAPTER I: The Problem of Planning for War in the Nineteen-Thirties i. Shipping 1 ii. United Kingdom Ports 10 Appendices I-VII 17 CHAPTER II: The Pre-War assumptions and Preparations i. The United Kingdom Ports 24 ii. Shipping 24 PART II: FROM THE OUTBREAK OF WAR TO THE FALL OF FRANCE CHAPTER III: From the Outbreak of War to the German Invasion of the West: The Task of Supplying the United Kingdom 43 Appendices VIII-X 69 CHAPTER IV: From the German Invasion of the West to the Fall of France i. The French Demands 72 ii. The Threat to the Ports 80 Appendices XI-XIII 85 PART III: FROM THE FALL OF FRANCE TO PEARL HARBOUR CHAPTER V: The Calm Before the Storm i. The Ships of the Conquered Nations 91 ii. The Shape of Things to Come 104 Appendices XIV-XVIII 112 CHAPTER VI: The Battle of the Ports < i. The Ships with Cargo 126 ii. The Ships in Need of Repair 142 Appendices XIX-XXV 146 CHAPTER VII: The Crews 154 Appendices XXVI-XXX 178 CHAPTER VIII: The Fall in United Kingdom Imports and the Appeals for American Help 188 Appendix XXXI 201 CHAPTER IX: 'The Indian Ocean Area' i. The Problems 202 ii. The Ports 206 iii. The Troopships and the W.S. Convoys [United Kingdom to Middle East to India] 216 iv. The Civil Demands and the Cross Trades 225 Appendices XXXII-XL 241 CHAPTER X: The Shipping Situation Before and After Pearl Harbour 250 Appendices XLI-XLII 264 PART IV: FROM PEARL HARBOUR TO THE DEFEAT OF THE SUBMARINES CHAPTER XI: The Troopships, January to June 1942 269 Appendices XLIII-XLVI 277 CHAPTER XII: The Beginnings of the Anglo-American Alliance 284 Appendices XLVII-L 293 CHAPTER XIII: The Cargo Ships and the Military Demands, From Pearl Harbour to the North African Campaign 297 Appendix LI 309 CHAPTER XIV: The Effects of the North African Campaign and the Beginnings of the World Shipping Crisis 312 Appendices LII-LV 323 CHAPTER XV: 'The Shortage of Shipping a Stranglehold on all Offensive Operations' 328 Appendix LVI 336 CHAPTER XVI: The Shortage of Shipping a Stranglehold on Essential Civilian Services 340 Appendices LVII-LIX 354 PART V: FROM THE DEFEAT OF THE SUBMARINES TO THE END OF THE WAR CHAPTER XVII: Planning for Victory: The World Shipping Budgets i. The Problem 359 ii. The United Kingdom Import Programme 362 iii. Combined Strategy 366 iv. The Future Prospects and the Demands of the Overseas Territories 373 Appendices LX-LXII 378 CHAPTER XVIII: The Progress to Victory in the West i. The 'Not Unmanageable Deficits' and the Search for Economies, May to August 1943 386 ii. The 'Surpluses' and the Invasion of the West 392 Appendix LXIII CHAPTER XIX: The 'Unmanageable Deficits' and the Crisis of the Anglo-American Alliance, September 1944 to February 1945 i. From the Quebec ('OCTAGON') Conference to the Completion of the Washington Survey, September 1944 to January 1945 409 ii. The ARGONAUT Conference 416 Appendices LXIV-LXIX 419 CHAPTER XX: The End of the Crisis and the Achievements of the Anglo-American Shipping Alliance 431 Appendix LXX 452 Glossary of Technical Terms 465 Index 469
APPENDICES
MAPS AND DIAGRAMS
Most of the following photographs are Crown Copyright and are reproduced by courtesy of the Imperial War Museum and the Ministries concerned. For permission to reproduce No. 1 the author is grateful to the Mersey Docks and Harbour Board; for No. 2 to the Port of London Authority; for No. 3, which is from the painting by A.J.W. Burgess, R.I., R.O.I., to Messrs, Scruttons Ltd., and for the fourth photograph of No. 7 to the Keystone Press Agency. ILLUSTRATIONS
Between pages 1. Transit sheds 14-15 2. Merchant ships discharging overside in the Port of London 14-15 3. Merchant ships discharging overside in the emergency port in the Clyde Estuary 154-155 4. Ships in convoy 154-155 5. British and Allied masters at a convoy conference 154-155 6. British merchant navy ratings 158-159 7. Atlantic toll 166-167 8. Types of British masters 174-175 9. Invasion of Europe: 'MULBERRY' harbour 394-395 10. Invasion of Europe: Merchant ships discharging cargo 394-395
AS WAS EXPLAINED in the Preface to British War Economy, the histories in this series deal with subjects rather than departments. The present history by no means covers all the activities of the Ministry of War Transport, nor indeed the relevant activities of some other Ministries which were much concerned with merchant shipping. It does not, for example, discuss merchant shipbuilding, which is dealt with in the war production volumes of this series. Nor does it discuss naval matters, except here and there in sketching the background, for these are dealt with in a companion series of war histories. Nor dies it discuss tankers nor coastwise shipping. These last omissions may seem particularly strange, for both the tanker story and the coastwise shipping story belong most intimately to the war-time experience of the Ministry of War Transport. Nevertheless, from the standpoint of economic functions, coastwise shipping can best be considered alongside the railways, roads and canals of this country; it belongs to the History of Inland Transport which Mr. C.I. Savage is preparing. Similarly, it has seemed to the editor logical, and on balance convenient, to absorb the tanker story into the History of Oil, for which Mr. D.J. Payton-Smith is responsible. Editor's Note
These various exclusions take away a great deal. Nevertheless, they have left for Miss Behrens a large and very complicated theme, as she will explain in her own Foreword.
The history is published in a form somewhat different from that of the other books in the series; it contains many more appendices than do the others, and the appendices have been placed after the chapters to which they relate instead of being collected together at the end of the book. The nature of the theme seemed to make this procedure necessary. For the theme is the 'shipping situation', that is, the relationship between the supply of shipping and the large number of demands on it, and this relationship could only be established after long and detailed study of the statistics. The statistics often provided the only objective guide to the magnitude of the various problems, and in many cases they were the only test of success or failure. Without them the more conventional kinds of historical evidence would have been meaningless or unmanageable. This does not mean that the history is a study in statistics, for the statistics were only one among many different sources of evidence. Moreover, they themselves would have been meaningless without the aid of the people who compiled them and by themselves they would be quite unintelligible to future generations. They were raw material for the historian to work upon; it seems proper, therefore, to include in the published text the tables that Miss Behrens compiled and the calculations that she based on them.
W.K. HANCOCK
IT MUST BE explained what this book is about. It is called 'Merchant Shipping and the Demands of War.' This means that the book is only concerned with one set of problems: with the tasks which the British-controlled fleet of merchant ships had to fulfill, with the extent to which it did in fact fulfil them, and with the principal problems to which the attempt to fulfil them gave rise. Foreword
This book is therefore something more than a history of merchant shipping, but it is also something much less. It is something more because it considers, although inly in a broad and superficial way the nature of the demands that had to be met, the measures that had continually to be taken to cut them down and adjust them to the supply of shipping, and the effects that cutting them down had on the course of the war. These questions have often taken the author to fields that must seem a long way removed form the sea and ships. But they are not in fact so far removed as might appear at first sight. For merchant ships exist to provide services for many different customers, and the only way of discovering how far they fulfilled their functions in war is to discover how their various customers fared.
Nevertheless the ships and those who serve in them have in interest in their own right. The men who serve in them are human beings and not merely means to ends; the ships themselves to those who know them do not seem merely means to ends; even the various organisations concerned with them during the war all had their own personalities and are interesting subjects of study from many different points of view--from the point of view of the lawyer, the statistician, the economist, the students of business or national administration, of government, and even, since many of the ships in the British-controlled fleet were foreign ships, of diplomacy and international relations indeed, during the war the British-controlled fleet of merchant ships touched the lives of so many nations at so many points that even that Jack-of-all-trades, the historian, can rarely have been faced with a subject that raises so many different kinds of problems.
But all these problems could not form the subject matter of one book. If all were to be given their due they would need many books, and indeed the files of the Ministry of War Transport provide the material from which many interesting books could be written if the skill to write them were forthcoming.
This book is therefore something much less than a history of merchant shipping because it is only one book and has only taken one set of problems into account, and because, moreover, editorial
policy, as the Editor has explained in his note, has required the author, when considering even these problems, to omit several that are relevant.Moreover, the author is aware that, besides these omissions which were deliberate, many readers may find others that were inadvertent. The Director-General of the Ministry of War Transport once described the activities of his department as 'a great adventure and achievement'. But the adventure was of a complicated kind and the achievement, too, cannot be explained in simple terms. There is always a risk in such circumstances that if justice is done to the actors in the drama in one sense it will not be done in another; and that the grandeur of the adventure may be obscured in the endeavour to describe what it involved. Since the theme of this book is what used to be known during the war as 'the shipping situation' and, since the situation was always the result of a large number of other situations that were of different kinds at different times, the author has been forced constantly to bring new groups of people on to the stage and then to remove the as soon as their particular stories ceased to form a part of the central story. In such circumstances there is always a risk that the various individual achievements may find too small a place because of the need to make clear the magnitude of the great achievement that was the sum of them all. The author has always been aware of thee risks, and of her own inadequacies when faced with a task that needed a great writer to do it justice.
The author would like to express the deep debt of gratitude she owes to the Statistical Adviser to the Minister, Sir William Elderton, and to his deputy, Mr. John H. Gunlake. The book would never have got started and taken shape without the constant help and encouragement which Sir William provided, and without his wise judgment on many matters besides statistical ones. Mr. Gunlake, at a very great expenditure of time and labour, read the whole book through in draft form and checked all the calculations, though he is not responsible for the original data nor for any mistakes that may have crept into the final version when, as a result of his advice the calculations were redone.
The author has many debts to acknowledge besides these. The work would never have been possible without the help not only of Sir William Elderton and Mr. Gunlake, who left the Civil Service shortly after she arrived, but of the officials who remained in the Ministry and, particularly, of the Permanent Secretary, Sir Gilmour Jenkins, whose constant encouragement, kindness and forbearance were principally responsible for the fact that the formidable task was finally achieved. The author also wishes to thank many people in the shipping and port industries for their help and instruction.
Among her research assistants she is indebted to Miss P. Bower, now Mrs. Mars, for much of the information relating to foreign ships that appears in Chapter III, and to Mr. John Williams who helped, among other things, to collect the facts relating to the D-Day operations. She is greatly indebted to Mr. R.J. Lawrence for his help in collecting some of the facts about the civil demands of the overseas territories which appear in Section iv of Chapter IX; this help was given at a crucial moment, and made it possible to complete within a reasonable time the scheme for the history as a whole. She acknowledges a particular debt to Mrs. Garrard, without whose unfailing competence, accuracy and reliability the mass of material would have proved unmanageable, and to her clerk, Miss Madeleine Ingham, who did all the typing, and much of the arithmetic and compiling of the tables, and who developed a skill in these various crafts that proved absolutely indispensable.B. BEHRENS
Newnham College,
Cambridge.
December 1954.