(^342) Chapter Nine
The principal agency coordinating French and British economic
planning in the last year of the war was the Allied Maritime Transport
Council, set up in December 1917. National calculations of exactly
how much tonnage was needed for each vital import were funneled
into the council. That body then had to decide on priorities, whenever
available shipping fell short of requirements.^61 The fact that after April
1918 new ships were launched faster than the U-boats were able to
sink existing vessels enormously facilitated the council’s delibera
tions. Nevertheless, by granting and withholding applications for
shipping space, the council was in a position to affect each separate
national economy profoundly.
Resort to overseas markets, which had hitherto cushioned the
Allied war economies against shortages arising from deficient fore
sight, was thus also brought within the scope of deliberate manage
ment. Something of the sort might have become necessary in any case.
For when the United States became an active belligerent, massive
orders for the American armed forces swiftly overloaded the country’s
industrial capacity. Political negotiation then became necessary to
protect French and British access to commodities that were in criti
cally short supply in the United States. This situation might have
compelled the Europeans to resort to some sort of planning for their
overseas purchases anyhow. But shipping shortages made the problem
acute and inescapable, and allocation of shipping by the Maritime
Transport Council constituted a simple and very efficacious way of
compelling each Allied government to control the demand for and
uses made of everything imported from overseas.
As far as France was concerned, this meant that the committees of
industrialists who had enjoyed a very free hand to manage the coun
try’s mobilization in the first years of the war had to conform to
requirements and instructions coming from the Ministry of Com
merce, even when, as sometimes happened, they found the new rules
distasteful or disadvantageous. A far more rigorously étatist and tech
nocratic system than anything the socialist minister of munitions,
Albert Thomas, had been able or even desired to establish in the first
years of the war thus emerged in France under the guidance of the
rightist Etienne Clémentel.
interalliée, was written for the Carnegie Corporation of New York, and is under
standably discrete in describing his unrealized hopes for an anti-German and anti-
American European economic community.
- J. Arthur Salter, Allied Shipping Control: An Experiment in International Adminis
tration (Oxford, 1921) offers a detailed account of how the chairman of the Council
looked back on his accomplishments. For the French side see Jean Monnet, Mémoires
(Paris, 1976), pp. 59–89.