World Wars of the Twentieth Century 341years of the war, especially when strikes and the Reichstag “Peace
resolution” of 1917 showed that at least some civilians were not
supporting the war effort as the army leaders thought they should.
When collapse finally came in November 1918, events reinforced this
frame of mind all too aptly. The German army was still on French soil
and its leaders could claim with enough plausibility to be convincing to
those who wished to believe it, that German soldiers had never been
defeated in battle but lost the war because they had been betrayed by
treasonous Social Democrats and other revolutionaries in the rear.
The Nazi movement founded itself on this myth, and a deep distrust
of civilian steadfastness, based on Hitler’s memories of 1918, gov
erned Germany’s domestic policy during the first phases of World
War II.
The manifold success resulting from the intensification of the Ger
man war effort after August 1916 created critical problems for the
Allies. In particular, unrestricted submarine warfare, launched in Feb
ruary 1917, came close to crippling Great Britain. Antisubmarine
weapons, notably depth charges, were invented or improved, but by
far the most important means the Allies found for reducing sinkings
was to convoy merchant ships with a screen of destroyers and other
warships. Yet despite all that the Allied navies could do, for more than
a year the stock of shipping diminished faster than new tonnage could
be built. This in turn meant that supplies coming from overseas to
supplement British, French, and Italian resources dwindled steadily.
Careful calculation became necessary; and as available shipping shrank,
controls over the uses to which imports were put had to be intensified.
For France this meant that the Ministry of Commerce, headed by
Etienne Clémentel, took over the primary role in coordinating war
production from the Ministry of Munitions. Clémentel entertained
novel ideas about how to institutionalize the wartime economic col
laboration of France, Italy, and Britain so as to restrict and restrain
German industrial preponderance in peacetime. He soon managed to
arouse American suspicions, for such an economic bloc would, in
deed, have been directed as much against American as against German
industry. As a result, after the United States became an active belli
gerent, Clémentel’s plans and hopes for permanent economic collab
oration with Great Britain and Italy had to be shelved, and Wilsonian
rhetoric about national self-determination crowded all transnational
ideals from the scene.^60
- On Clémentel’s ideas and the influence of the Ministry of Commerce on the
French war effort see Godfrey, "Bureaucracy, Industry and Politics in France during the
First World War,” pp. 95–215. Clémentel’s own book, La France et la politique économique