C B A Behrens - Merchant Shipping and the Demands of War

HISTORY OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR

UNITED KINGDOM CIVIL SERIES

Edited by W. K. HANCOCK

By C.B.A. Behrens

Fellow of Newham College, Cambridge

LONDON: 1955
HER MAJESTY'S STATIONERY OFFICE

The authors of the Civil Histories have been given
free access to official documents. They and the editor
are alone responsible for the statements made
and the views expressed.

First published 1955

Crown Copyright Reserved

HER MAJESTY'S STATIONERY OFFICE

A S 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.

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. H ANCOCK

IT must be explained what this book is about. It is calledMerchant 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 fulfil, 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.

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 only 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 into fields that must seem a long way removed from 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 an 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 viewfrom 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 shipping 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 them 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 these risks, and of her own inadequacies when faced with a task that needed a great writer to do it justice.