10 - Politics and bureaucracy of supply

Summary

Placing command – or, at least, coordination – in the hands of one man was no solution to the problem of manpower in general, nor to the significant logistics problems of supply and transport. Germany's two strategic gambles affected both manpower and supply. The first in 1917 was all-out submarine warfare in an attempt to starve the Entente into accepting defeat. The second was to attack in 1918 on the Western Front with troops released from the east before the AEF could be trained, equipped and transported in great numbers. As Bliss noted after the 1 December 1917 meeting of the SWC, ‘the tonnage must be provided, and provided now … Men, as many as possible, and as soon as possible … Tonnage necessary to transport them’. Or, as Clémentel put it in an early example of franglais, ‘La guerre, c'est le Shipping.’

The cumulative effect of both gambles was profound, both on manpower and on shipping. Lloyd George told his Shipping Controller, Sir Joseph Maclay, on the day that the Hindenburg Line was breached, 29 September 1918: ‘If we are forced to take more men out of the ship yards and coal mines to keep up a long line [i.e. front], you certainly cannot give ships, and therefore these questions hang together.’

They hung together thus. Firstly, men were required to maintain the Royal Navy and the mercantile marine.