The Only Way Is Onwards

We have come to the end of our blogs covering the running of the First World War by the Secret Elites in London and then, as the money-power flexed its muscle, America. The whole expose is recorded in Prolonging the Agony, which is now available through Amazon and can be ordered by quality bookshops.

Though this is by no means the end of the line, we will take a break from the weekly blogs but hope to release occasional pieces as evidence is slowly unmasked across the world.

Thanks to everyone who contributed in any way, to our regular readers whose encouragement and contributions we greatly appreciated. You guys care was we do. Where circumstances allow point doubters to our blogs or either of the major works, Hidden History, The Secret Origins of the First World War and, just released, Prolonging the Agony, How the Anglo-American Establishment Deliberately Extended WW1 by Three-and-a-Half Years.

Take care in a world where we are still lied to by governments, as was the case one hundred years ago.

Gerry Docherty and Jim Macgregor

Prolonging the Agony 2: The Full Hidden History Exposed

This is the second blog about the recently published Prolonging The Agony.

In a single volume, the real History of how the First World War was deliberately prolonged to the benefit of the charlatans, profiteers, and the Secret Elite can be fully understood.

It is impossible to pick any single scandal above the others, but one which has been studiously ignored by the history boys is the Herbert Hoover and the Commission for Relief in Belgium. This one time American mining engineer and future President of the United States, previously criticised for rampant dishonesty by the courts in London, was chosen by the Secret Elite to head an international fraud which was paid for by the Allies and underwritten by the U.S.government. It claimed to provide food for the exclusive use of the population of Belgium and Northern France which were occupied by the German army.

What we have uncovered is an enormous double-deal whereby not only did food go to Belgium, food that was often sold for profit, but supplies also went to Germany directly down the River Rhine. We know that Edith Cavell saw what was happening. As an avid letter writer whose letters were printed in the Times, she threatened to expose the scandal. This is a story of money, bankers and producers colluding to reap millions from the desperation of a hungry Europe, and in so doing prolonged the bloody war.

Yet another scandal was the complete farce of the Gallipoli campaign. Because the Russians had suffered such vast losses on the Eastern Front, the Czar demanded evidence that war was worthwhile. The promise of Constantinople was the prize which animated him most, and the Gallipoli campaign was concocted by the Secret Elite to make it appear that a serious effort was underway to attack Turkey and win Constantinople for Russia. It was set up to fail. You may think this impossible, but Prolonging the Agony provides detailed evidence that the campaign was an orchestrated farce from start to finish. But it convinced the Russians and kept them in the war. The Secret Elite had no intention of ever giving the strategically vital port of Constantinople to Russia. Ever. The story and the needless sacrifice is a disgrace. Indeed Gallipoli was an outrageous and deliberate failure, but it prolonged the war, as was required. Your reaction to this statement may well be……it can’t be true. Please read the chapters on this crucial event. They will make you uncomfortable.

And there could have been peace, several times over. But peace was not on the Secret Elite agenda. When, by 1916, the military failures were so costly and embarrassing some key players in the British government were willing to talk about peace and discuss what that might mean. This could not be tolerated. The potential peacemakers had to be ditched. Lloyd George was promoted to prime minister in Britain and Georges Clemenceau made prime minister in France. The unelected European leaders had one common bond. They would fight Germany until she was crushed. Prolonging the Agony details how the secret cabal organised the change of government without a single vote being cast. A new government, an inner-elite war cabinet thrust the Secret Elite leader, Alfred Milner into power at the very inner-core of the decision-makers in British politics. Democracy? They had no truck with democracy. The voting public had no say. The men entrusted with the task would keep going till the end and their place-men were backed by the media and the money-power, in Britain, France and America. The only end they had in mind was Germany destroyed.

The entry of America into the war changed everything. The money men were covered by the Federal Reserve System. They could print dollars and finance their war in safety. Loans were guaranteed by governments. The American economy was literally underpinned by the war spending, and all on the back of the ordinary citizens and taxpayers. Millionaires blossomed. Poverty for the many grew. Even the election of Woodrow Wilson in 1916 was tainted by doubt. The manner of his re-election is ignored in mainstream accounts. It all hinged on California and the recount was itself tainted with corruption.

We examine the emergence of Zionism as a factor in the political world. From the first years of the twentieth century we have unmasked the close relationship between Zionism and the British and French Rothschilds. The background to the Balfour Declaration shows how far the British cabinet was willing to support the Zionist ambitions for Palestine. This was NOT, as it is portrayed, a simple message from the British Foreign Secretary to the head of the Rothschild family in Britain. It was the product of years of scheming and political pressure that eventually won there backing of the Secret Elite. And prolonging the war here was also important. Before the Zionist claim over Palestine could have any pertinence, they had to buy time to establish institutions and boost investment. The immense duplicity the British government and the connivance of the American administration is explained in full. And it raised serious questions about loyalties.

While the Russian Revolution might appear to have little to do with prolonging the war, it did. Did you know that the last foreign politician to meet the Car before he abdicated was Secret Elite leader Alfred Milner? Co-incidence? What transpired between the two? Milner’s behaviour and report when he returned to London was so strange that one has to conclude that he had much to hide.What promises were whispered to Czar Nicolas before he abdicated? Worse was to follow. The raping of Russia by the money-men who financed the Bolsheviks, links Wall Street to the Kremlin… and of course, since Russia had decided to end the war with Germany, the promise of Constantinople was revoked. For ever. How convenient.

When Germany surprisingly sought an Armistice to find grounds for Peace in 1918, it was on the basis of President Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points. The myth history here is deplorable. Historians and journalist continue to this day to claim that the First World War ended on 11 November, 1918. It did not. Germany was undefeated on the field of battle. Beaten but not crushed. In a move which has been airbrushed from official history, the Allies, mainly Britain, continued to apply a full and complete blockade of Germany so that for the next eight months hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of their women and children were starved to death. The rise of Bolshevism in Germany became so dangerous that even war hawks like Lloyd George realised that Germany had to be allowed to survive in a much reduced state. Finally the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, never ratified by the American Congress, were so damaging that the causes of the Second World War were literally sewn into the fabric.

Prolonging the Agony is unique. It details the lies and malpractice through which an evil war was prolonged. The old order in Europe was swept aside and it shows how the new order emerged from a joint Anglo-American Establishment. It merged the Secret Elite in Britain with the Morgan-Wall street powers through joint policy making by a self-appointed group of ‘right-thinking’ men. We name them. We also acknowledge the impressive work of Professor Carroll Quigley in initially exposing the machinations of the evil men who aimed to take over the new world order.

And then they stole our history. Literally. All of the evidence of the gross malpractice, the profiteering, the lies and the propaganda about the cause of the war and about the running of the war was swept up and taken away from its European roots. All of the pre-war papers and documents which would have shown how far the Kaiser went to try to avoid war, disappeared. The vast quantity of international permits and papers about the running of the American Relief in Belgium, high-jacked. The key Russian diplomatic  evidence sold for a pittance was removed to America. Taken under instruction by the organisation set up by Herbert Hoover, it was removed to Stanford University and there what remains of the evidence lies under lock and key. Our history. Our truth. To be fair, our governments also burned, redacted, removed, shredded and otherwise abused the historical fact by destroying evidence of their malpractice and lies. Prolonging the Agony details as much of this destruction of history as we currently know. Breve and persistent journalists continue to push for sight of all documents. Historians do not.

You have to give time to this frank exposure. You will have questions to ask. You will be angered at the waste of life and the selfishness of the rich and the powerful dynasties. You will want to ask again and again how they managed to sweep such a litany of wrong-doing under the proverbial carpet. You will be alarmed at the manner in which we have been lied to; at the stolen history; at the way in which you have been misled. After ten years of constant research and inquiry, we still are.

Prolonging the Agony puts into your hands the awful truth behind a war which could have been brought to a reasonable conclusion in 1915. The cost in human terms of all that transpired from 1915-1919 is so horrendous, that it has been studiously kept from us. Even 100 years later, the lies persist. Read this book. There is much more to it than has been outlined here. Consider the implications. Be angry.

Now available from Trineday Publications in the USA and though Amazon across the world. We are delighted to announce that our German publishers, Kopp Verlag will undertake a translation in German, and our French publishers, Editions Nouvelle Terre, are currently considering a similar decision.

Prolonging The Agony 1

We are lied to. We know that more than ever today, but the lies and misrepresentations about the first World War have been accepted as truth. Arm yourself with the awful facts.

Part Two in the Hidden History series by Gerry Docherty and Jim Macgregor.

At last, having spent ten years working together on the origins and management of the First World War, our second book, Prolonging the Agony, How the Anglo-American Establishment Deliberately Extended WW1 by Three-and-a Half Years, has been published, and is available to our readers from TrineDay in the U.S. and Amazon and other book sellers across the world.

It had never been our intention to divide the history into two parts, but our original publisher, Mainstream of Edinburgh, convinced us that it was the best way forward. Mainstream was sold to Random House shortly after Hidden History, The Secret Origins of the First World War was published, and this proved problematic for us. Random House declined to either promote the book or take up the option for our second book. However sales remained strong and Hidden History was translated and published in both German and French. A Swedish edition is also currently being considered. To our delight TrineDay in Oregon offered to publish Prolonging the Agony and we are indebted to Kris Milligan and his team for encouraging and supporting us. It is heartening that within weeks of the book’s release, both the German and French publishers have indicated that they will also be publishing it.

So what is it about?

Prolonging the Agony lays before the reader a vast amount of evidence which reveals how enormously rich and powerful men in Britain and the U.S. deliberately prolonged WW1 while reaping even greater fortunes from it. It retraces the major lies and malevolent propaganda generated in Britain and America to justify war against Germany, and the reason it was prolonged beyond the spring of 1915 in order to crush her. The Secret Elite, the cabal which worked endlessly to bring war to Europe with a view to creating a new world order, was responsible. To cover their tracks, the elites and their agents ensured that a false history was created to justify all that happened. Prolonging the Agony deconstructs that false history page by page.

It examines in detail how the British government borrowed on an unprecedented scale from Wall Street bankers to fund the munitions of death. The links between leading players – such as the Rothschild banking family and their JP Morgan banking associates on Wall Street – were formalised to a point where the British economy was literally handed to this money-power cabal. We demonstrate the extent of the anti-German lies and propaganda emanating from Oxford University, the academic home of the Secret Elite in Britain, and how it lead to millions of young British men enlisting to fight under totally false pretences . Winning the hearts and minds of the American public, so that they aligned with the financiers, proved a more difficult task, but the fact that the United States would enter the war was guaranteed from the outset by their place-man in the White House, President Woodrow Wilson and his minder, Edward Mandel House.

Lies concocted in 1914 to blacken Germany in every way are still circulated today as fact. This False History lives on through the British Court Historians who repeat the nonsense. We prove absolutely that while Nurse Edith Cavell – the great British heroine of the war who was executed by a German firing squad in Belgium in 1915 – was indeed a brave patriot, she was secretly and intimately associated with a Belgian spy ring linked to the British Secret Service. Edith Cavell and her Belgian associates helped repatriate hundreds of British and French soldiers who were stranded behind enemy lines in the first months of the war. They also passed vital information about German deployment to the  War Office in London. But Edith threatened to endanger the secret agreements about food supply by revealing the scandal through he connections with the Times. For generations that fact was buried so that her execution would look like an act of brutality by the German commanders against an innocent, humanitarian nurse. The truth is otherwise.

In a similar vein, lies and propaganda were circulated about the sinking in 1915 of the ocean liner Lusitania by a German U-boat. Received history turned this act into German malevolence in order to cause outrage in America and swing public opinion there towards the Allies. 1,195 lives were lost including 140 Americans. Only now, after sustained detective work by Mitch Peeke and his Liverpool team in tracking down the cargo manifest of the Lusitania, are the authorities in both Britain and the U.S. obliged to admit their complicity in creating and maintaining false accounts of the sinking. The recently uncovered manifest proves that the ‘passenger liner’ was secretly carrying many thousands of rounds of ammunition and tons of U.S. explosives to Britain. It also proves that the German authorities were right. Britain and America were flouting the clear-cut regulations about neutrality. Their well-publicised advice to passengers to avoid the Lusitania was both justified and ignored. Shockingly, elements within the British Admiralty knew full well that the German U-boat was waiting in the exact path of the Lusitania as she passed the southern coast of Ireland, yet withdrew her naval escorts and failed to warn her captain. Why? We believe they were complicit in the sinking for their own purposes.

Bad as this was, our sustained research through documents, records, and published books and texts which were dismissed in the post-war years, turned our dismay to utter disgust. Again and again we found secret agreements, understandings, practices and deliberate actions taken in order to prolong the war and prolong the agony. And it is this fact, which was repeatedly stated from many quarters during the conflict, which hit us hardest.

We have amassed proof of the unprecedented scale on which the war was unnecessarily prolonged. It could have been drawn to a conclusion by December 1915 and millions of victims would have been spared the misery of mutilation or horrendous death. But the war was prolonged mercilessly so that profits would surpass the dreams of Midas and Germany crushed as a rival.

Amongst many disturbing examples, Prolonging the Agony examines the scandal of the French Briey Basin iron and steel mines and forges which the French army could either have occupied on the first day of the war or destroyed, in order to stop them falling into German hands. Despite repeated calls for the French army to destroy the forges, the French authorities would not allow it. An expedition to bomb the forges was slapped down by the French High Command. Who gave the orders? Who made the profits? To whose instructions was the French government answerable? It was a scandal which has been swept under the carpet to avoid accountability. Had Briey been destroyed, Germany would not have had the raw materials and munitions to fight beyond 1915.

What is the truth of the so-called blockade of the North Sea passages which allegedly starved Germany of its resources? A truly brave and remarkable small fleet comprising very old vessels, none of which was built for the high seas task, sat out in the unforgiving Atlantic and North Sea to stop all contraband getting into Germany from August 1914 onwards. What happened? Virtually every ship they brought into port under escort was allowed to continue its journey by order of the Admiralty in London. Yet the public and parliament believed that Germany was being starved of its war necessities. They believed the lie because Winston Churchill said a full blockade was in place and that Germany would surrender in nine months.

The inner-elite of the British cabinet had no intention of ending the war until Germany was crushed … not just beaten. The facts presented are drawn from archived evidence and Admiralty papers. Our thesis endorses and builds on the outrage expressed by the Admiralty’s representative in Scandinavia during WW1, Naval Attaché Rear-Admiral Consett. He detailed how  the Allies were secretly supplying Germany through Scandinavian ports and prolonging the conflict. Had a blockade been properly undertaken the war would have ended by 1915. What was a going on? Prolonging the Agony explains precisely that.

We also raise the issue which is omitted from mainstream analysis: where was Germany procuring her vital oil supplies? She had no natural reserves herself, and her access to oil could easily have been stopped. Our book investigates the multiple abuses in oil provision and traces the ownership of these oil fields. The compliance of the owners and shareholders, British and American, demonstrated the importance of war profits at any cost.

To hell with your countrymen who had to be sacrificed.

In our next blog we will outline the impact of other major influences and agencies who had a vested interest in Prolonging the Agony

Concluding Thoughts And A Challenge

So many questions remain unanswered. You will have your own. Do not give up on them. An issue which needs considerable examination is Woodrow Wilson’s “Fourteen Points.” With hindsight it ranks as one of the greatest mirage’s of all time, for it never was anything more than a clever deception, the lure which the Kaiser and his advisors swallowed. They made the devastating mistake of trusting the American government. What were they thinking? The Germans knew about Britain and France’s dependence on America, of the blatant lies which sank the Lusitania, and every other scandal, yet they were apparently willing to put their faith in Woodrow Wilson. Certainly the Americans had kept them fed through the abuses of the Belgian Relief program, and the Rockefeller/Rothschild axis ensured that their oil supply was not interrupted, but once the United States joined the war against Germany, surely the blinkers should have fallen?

But desperate times demanded desperate action. The promise of a just peace was too powerful for the Kaiser’s government to ignore. The German offensive from March to June 1918 is said to have pushed the allied armies on the Western Front closer to disaster than at any time since the first battle of the Marne in 1914 [1] but this last throw of Ludendorff’s dice was frustrated by “the enormous acceleration of the arrival of American troops.” [2] Like exhausted prize fighters who had fought to a standstill, the Allies and Germany stood in their corners feigning a readiness for the next round. But while Britain and France had almost limitless reserves on hand from America, Germany was truly spent. Wilson’s Fourteen Points appeared as the basis for a just and honourable settlement. It was a triumph of deceit over justice.

Truth is that Germany had sought a just peace many times since December 1914. The Allies simply did not want to know in 1915, 1916 and 1917. In fact, they did not want to know in 1918. There is ample evidence that preparations for war on the Western Front in 1919 and 1920 was discussed and anticipated by the British War Cabinet. The American presence changed every dynamic. Time was on the Allied side.

The failure of Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points to gain international support sucked the last breath of hope from the German leaders. Wilson had no power to stop his proposals being picked apart at Versailles, and returned to America a sick and disillusioned man. He had fulfilled his mission for the Elites by revoking his election stance of 1916 and bring- ing America into the war. He had confused the German leadership with his “idealism” and upset his political enemies in America by proposing a League of Nations [3] which was nominally adopted in the eventual Treaty of Versailles. Though the troubled, one might say dysfunctional, history of the League of Nations extends beyond our timescale, its very proposal caused the U.S. Congress to twice reject the Versailles Peace Treaty. [4] A cross section of American Senators were so determined to have no truck with Wilson’s League of Nations that they declared the Treaty ‘dead to stay dead’. [5] These words might well have served as an epitaph for Wilson’s political career. Having surrendered a devastating stroke in October 1919, his candidacy for a third term in office was rejected by the Democratic Party.

What too of Russia? When one considers the sacrifices made by the Russian people in their war against Germany, their absence at Versailles ought to have caused some embarrassment. For three long years Russia had battled the German and Austrians, inflicting great losses but absorbing even more. Undoubtedly the Russian front was critical. Without it Paris would have fallen in August 1914. [6] The long-standing promise that Russia would annex Constantinople and the Straits once Germany was destroyed was effectively and conveniently annulled when the Bolshevik government made peace with Germany in 1918. Lloyd George raised the hitherto unasked question of Russian involvement in the peace process in January 1919, [7] but there was no coherent or consistent agreement from a divided Supreme Council. Alarming tales circulating in Paris of the barbaric Red Terror unleashed by the Bolsheviks, were dismissed as exaggeration by Lloyd George. [8] Indeed. The British prime minister was a master at dissembling. Basically he lied as and when necessary and his Memoirs are a masterclass in self-promotion. The all-embracing role of the British and American bankers was another factor which was not to be mentioned. What mattered in the end was that Constantinople remained outside Russian control and Russia no longer threatened Persia, India or a redrawn map of the Middle East.

History is not a just series of eras or neatly constructed timelines with-in which commentators try to explain events or construct their own given narrative. History lives and breathes and never stands still. It is our past and determines much of our future. Events, decisions and consequences ensure that it will always remain a fascinating basis through which we better understand where we currently are and how we got here. But the historical record is incomplete. It has been tampered with, remastered and abused by those with much to hide. Where there are gaps, suspect the motivation.

Do not fall prey to the subtle weasel words of those who throw their hands in the air and claim that our narrative cannot be entirely proved because the evidence is no longer available. We know how these people work. Their operative DNA is now so transparent that any knowledgeable person will dismiss their protestations on the volume of circumstantial evidence alone. But they hide behind the pejorative cry of “conspiracy theory,” a convenience which protects the guilty. Year by year, even as we worked on this book, acknowledgements have been quietly conceded about Edith Cavell’s spy ring, on the RMS Lusitania’s real cargo manifest, of the gross over-exaggerations of the Bryce Committee. Yet the great lies persist and are regurgitated in the mainstream media.

Our books cover a period between 1890-1919 because within that timescale a group of elite politicians, influential power-brokers, rich financiers, determined opinion-moulders and their academic entourage made a concerted move to create a new world order under their control. In 1890 it was driven by upper-class English values and British domination of world trade, politics and influence. By 1919 clearer bonds between the Anglo-American Establishment, and the exhausting, deliberately pro-longed war, had moved the new world order towards an Atlantic Alliance and the enduring ‘special relationship’ between Britain and the United States.

And we do not accept that 1918 should be recognised as the year in which the war ended. We have clearly demonstrated in previous blogs that the fighting stopped but the economic war continued. It is essential that everyone understands that even 1919 was not an end-point. There was no sense of “job done.” Indeed not. What happened in 1919 was just another stepping stone, a building block towards a new order in the world. National boundaries changed in many parts of Europe.

New territorial responsibilities (the talk was of Mandates) were allocated to the victors. New countries were shaped. Economic interests were, as ever, to the fore. Old disputes re-emerged around lucrative parts of the dismembered Ottoman Empire. Germany had been defeated, humiliated and abused, but Germany survived. The politicians who disgraced humanity by claiming that the world war had saved civilisation escaped the scrutiny of justice. They wrote their memoirs, accepted their rewards, and lived well on the profits that ensued. Above them, the controllers of real power did not break step. They simply marched unchallenged along their chosen route.

If you feel that you now have a keener sense of who these people were and are, engage in Quigley’s challenge. He stated that ‘the evidence of their existence is not hard to find, if one knows where to look.’ [9] They remain behind the scenes, influencing politicians and policy, buying public opinion, rewarding their own, falsifying media reports and protecting themselves from public scrutiny. History will continue to be controlled by them for as long as criticism can be ignored. You can shake this comfortable establishment set-up by continuing to question official versions and never allowing yourself to be easily satisfied with so-called truth.

Everything that we have described is a series of building blocks. The Secret Elite has metamorphosed into a much more modern phenomenon with the same objective – to be that new world order. The evidence of their existence is not hard to find.

1. Report of the Committee of Prime Ministers. Preliminary Draft. appended to the minutes for the Imperial War Cabinet 32B, 16 August 1918. p. 167.
2. Ibid.
3. The League of Nations was an international organization, created in 1920 as part of the Treaty of Versailles. Though first proposed by President Woodrow Wilson as part of his Fourteen Points for a just peace in Europe, Congress refused to endorse the proposal.
4. Firstly on 19 November 1919, then again on 19 March 1920.
5. New York Times, 20 March 1920.
6. Margaret Macmillan, Peacemakers, Six Months That Changed the World, p. 71.
7. FRUS, vol. 3 pp. 581-4.
8. National Archives, CAB 29/ 28.
9. Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment, pp ix-x.

War Without End 8: The Old Order Changeth

The Treaty of Versailles, signed eventually on 28 June 1919, was uncompromising. Its legacy reaped a bitter harvest. Germany lost nearly one seventh of its territory and one tenth of its population. Half the iron ore and one quarter of the coal production as well as one seventh of agricultural production were taken from her. German colonies and all foreign possessions of the Reich were lost. Most of her commercial fleet had to be handed over and long-term economic discrimination endured. But on a deeper level, Germany lost more than just her wealth and her possessions. She lost a confidence in herself which created a political vacuum; a space for opportunism to grow like a cancerous tumour.

The army and navy were considerably reduced. The Rhineland was de-militarised, split in three zones and occupied by Allied forces for five to fifteen years. The Saarland was put under the mandate of the League of Nations. The coal mines went to France. Gdansk and its surrounding area was turned into a Free City of Poland with special rights. The independence of Austria, whose National Assembly had voted to accept the connection to the German Reich, was to be guaranteed in perpetuity. The amount of reparations was to be determined at a later time. That the sum to be compiled would be very high, was beyond doubt. The murdered Kitchener must have spun in his watery grave. This was not a just peace.

Before the signing of the treaty, President Wilson said that if he were a German, he would not sign it. His Foreign Minister Lansing considered the conditions imposed on Germany as unutterably hard and abasing, many of which could not possibly be met. His adviser, Mandell House wrote in his diary on 29 June that the treaty was bad and should never have been concluded; its execution would bring no end of difficulties over Europe. [1] As an understatement, Houses’s prediction stands absolutely proven.The real victors would not be swayed. The final Treaty stands testament to how little real influence Woodrow Wilson wielded in Europe.

The Versailles Peace Settlement was a stepping stone in itself to future wars. Diplomat-historian George F Kenan later wrote that the peace treaty ‘had the tragedies of the future written into it as if by the devil’s own hand.’  [2] As we have pointed out, by accepting Article 231, Germany was obliged to bear the burden of guilt for causing the war. Old Empires were dismantled and choice pickings reallocated. Gone was the German Empire and Queen Victoria’s grandson, the Kaiser. The Imperial Russian Empire was no more, its Czar Nicholas II, cousin of Britain’s King George V, executed by the very Bolsheviks whom American and British bankers had financed. The Ottoman Empire, ripped apart by the victors, offered the opportunity to redraw the Middle East with the lure of oil and prime strategic locations. The British Empire survived, but at a cost. Britain had sold off at least a quarter of its dollar investments and borrowed over £1,027,000,000 from the United States. [3] Consequently, the flow of capital from America to Europe reversed the pattern which had dominated the previous century. These immense changes represented a long-term financial realignment in favour of Wall Street.

The conclusion to First World War was not the beginning of the end but a building block towards disasters that were to come. A new Elite intended to control the peace and exert its influence through organisations which it created specifically to determine how that would be done. During the Peace Conference in Paris, Alfred Milner’s chief acolyte, Lionel Curtis, organised a joint conference of British and American ‘experts’ on foreign affairs at the Hotel Majestic. [4] The British contingent came almost exclusively from men and women identified by Professor Carroll Quigley as members of what we have termed The Secret Elite. [5] The American ‘experts’ came from banks, universities and institutions dominated by J.P. Morgan and members of the Carnegie Trust. [6] This alliance of international financial capitalism and political thinkers and manipulators began a new phase in the life of the secret cabal as they continued their drive to establish a new world order.

They took the successful Round Table Group and remodelled it into The Institute of International Affairs. Smothered in words which when decoded meant that they would work together to determine the future direction of a fast-changing world, Lionel Curtis advocated that ‘National Policy ought to be shaped by a conception of the interests of society at large.’ [7] By that he meant the interests of the Anglo-American Establishment. He talked of the settlements which had been made in Paris as a result of public opinion in various countries, and spelled out the need to differentiate between ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ public opinion. With chilling certainty he announced that ‘Right public opinion was mainly produced by a small number of people in real contact with the facts who had thought out the issues involved.’139 He talked of the need to ‘to cultivate a public opinion in the various countries of the world’ and proposed the creation of a ‘strictly limited’ high-level think-tank comprising the like minded ‘experts’ from the British and American Delegations. A committee of selection, dominated entirely by Secret Elite agents was organised [8] to avoid ‘a great mass of incompetent members.’ What quintessentially British ruling-class thinking. A new Anglo-American Elite of approved membership was self-selected.

Thus the Institute of International Affairs, also known as Chatham House, was formally established in July 1920 and was granted a Royal charter in 1926. [9] Its first decision was to write a history of the Peace Conference. A committee to supervise these writings, in other words, ensure that the official history recorded only their version of events, was funded by a gift of £2,000 from Thomas Lamont of J.P. Morgan. Follow the money you will always trace the power behind the politicians. At the same time Institute’s sister organization, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), was created with J.P. Morgan money. Acting in close cooperation and funded by similar sources, the CFR and Chatham House ensured that the Britain and the United States followed similar foreign policies.

It is important to bear in mind that Curtis and his new updated organisation invited speakers to discuss and develop the ‘right’ opinion. That would have been why the first fully recorded meeting which was published in The Round Table Journal 142 in 1921 was given by D.G. Hogarth who served on the Arab Bureau during the war. He was a friend of T.E. Lawrence and Sir Mark Sykes, the men who betrayed the Arabs. Hogarth spoke on the Arab States an indication that this was one specific area for which the ‘right’ opinion had to be endorsed. [10] In 1922, Chaim Weizmann gave an address on Zionism. [11] His must have been the ‘right’ opinion too.

1. Professor Hans Fenske, A Peace to End All Peace https://firstworldwarhiddenhistory.wordpress.com//?s=Fenske&search=Go
2. Adam Hochschild, To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, p. 357.
3. David S. Landes, The Unbound Prometheus, pp. 362-3.
4. The inaugural meeting to establish the Institute took place on 30 May 1919.
5. Gerry Docherty and Jim Macgregor, Hidden History, p.18.
6. Carroll Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment, pp. 182-183.
7. M.L. Dockrill, The Foreign Office and the ‘Proposed Institute of International Affairs 1919’ International Affairs (Royal Institute of International Affairs 1944-), Vol. 56, No. 4 (Autumn, 1980), pp. 667.
8. Ibid., p. 666.
9. All of the senior organisers have been identified as members of the Secret Elite many times over; Lord Robert Cecil, Valentine Chirol, foreign editor of The Times, Geoffrey Dawson, G. W. Prothero etc.
10. Dockrill, The Foreign Office and the ‘Proposed Institute of International Affairs 1919’ International Affairs (Royal Institute of International Affairs 1944-), Vol. 56, No. 4 (Autumn, 1980), pp. 671.
11. Docherty and Macgregor, Hidden History, chapter 11, pp. 153-160.
12. Both Hogarth and T.E. Lawrence were largely responsible for The Bulletin, a secret magazine of Middle East politics. Lawrence edited the first number on 6 June 1916 and thereafter sent numerous reports to it, enabling readers to follow, week by week, the Arab Revolt, which ended Ottoman domination in the Arabian peninsula. The British Foreign Office described it as: ‘A remarkable intelligence journal so strictly secret in its matter that only some thirty copies of each issue were struck off… Nor might the journal be quoted from, even in secret communications. http://www.archiveeditions.co.uk/titledetails.asp?tid=7
13. Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment, p. 185.

War Without End 6 : Fixing The Blame

Lloyd George knew all about the deteriorating situation in Germany from War Cabinet meetings he had chaired throughout February 1919. [1] Hoover’s outburst [2], even if it was true, was not news to the British prime minister, but dislodging the French from their obstinate position proved difficult. On 8 March, at a joint meeting of the Allied leaders, discussions were heading towards the accustomed stalemate when, with a theatrical flourish which suggested a stage-managed prearrangement, [3] a sealed message was delivered to the British prime minister from the afore-mentioned General Plumer. In fact the telegram had been sent at the prime minister’s request. [4] Lloyd George read it aloud; despair had plummeted to such depths in Germany that ‘people feel that an end by bullets is preferable to death by starvation … I request that a definite date be fixed for the arrival of the first supplies …’ [5] The French finance minister, Klotz, attempted to ignore the message, but Lloyd George turned on him with unrestrained venom, pouring contempt on his miserly attitude while women and children were starving. [6] The dam broke. The French conceded that Germany’s gold could be used for food, but relief was not instant. Some further headway was made on 14 March when an agreement was reached in Brussels allowing Germany to import 370,000 tons of food and 70,000 tons of fat per month. In April all blockade restrictions were removed on European neutrals, which was expected to facilitate an increased flow of food into Germany. [7] In theory that should have happened, but in practice, every nation affected by the blockade had endured great hardship and either consumed the produce themselves or offered them for export at exorbitant prices which Germany could no longer pay. [8]

But the cruelty did not end there. For the remainder of the Armistice period the bickering between the Americans, led by Hoover, and the Allied decision-makers, continued to thwart the lifting of the entire blockade on Germany. Even when it was perfectly clear that the Weimar government would sign the Versailles treaty, the die-hards refused to move. And though the Allies agreed to lift the remainder of the blockade on European neutrals on 25 June, they remained stubbornly obtuse until they had proof that the Germans had fully ratified the Versailles Treaty on 12 July 1919. [9] It was as miserable as it was petty.

The formal process of agreeing a peace treaty, predicated on the bitter Armistice, began in the Hall of Mirrors in the Palace of Versailles on 18 January 1919. From January to June, 1919, Paris was the capital of the world. [10] Complex discussions on how to punish the defeated nations involved diplomats from more than 32 countries and nationalities, but behind the scenes the true manipulators of power influenced the key decisions which determined a chain of events which go well beyond our time-scale.

History records the major outcomes from Versailles as the creation of the League of Nations; the five peace treaties with the defeated states, [11] the awarding of German and Ottoman overseas possessions as ‘mandates’, chiefly to Britain and France; reparations imposed on Germany, and the drawing of new national boundaries. Critically, section 231 of the Versailles Treaty, stated that the first world War had been caused ‘by the aggression of Germany and her allies.’ [12] Blaming Germany and Austria was a political necessity; an absolute requirement for the Secret Elite and the establishment in Britain and America in particular. If the blame had not be squarely laid at the door of the Kaiser and his associates, the populous would have quickly turned on the politicians close to home who had lied so vehemently, had insisted that the war would save civilisation, had repeated the lie that the inhuman sacrifice was both worthy and necessary. Evidence had to be manufactured.

A Commission on the Responsibility of the Authors of War was tasked with the official investigation on behalf of the victors and its conclusions were exactly as required by the allied governments. [13] Essentially its findings declared that war had been premeditated by the Central Powers, Germany and Austria-Hungary, and their allies, Turkey and Bulgaria, and was the result of actions deliberately committed to make war unavoidable. There is now a large body of evidence to the contrary, championed firstly by Harry Elmer Barnes, the renowned Professor of Historical Sociology at Smith College and teacher of history at Columbia University from 1918-29. The Commission of course, ignored the multitude of false claims and dates made by French President, Poincare, of complete misrepresentations made to the British parliament by foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey and the lies reported to Czar Nicholas by his equivalent counsellor, Sazonov. But why should you be surprised. Did you imagine that false news is a twenty-first century phenomenon?

Perhaps the most disgraceful falsification was made by the American duo who nominally headed the Commission, Secretary of State, Robert Lansing and U.S. Lawyer J.B. Scott. Secretary Lansing’s impartiality ought to have been absolute, but he and J.B. Scott stand accused of concocting a claim that the Austrians knew of Serbia’s ‘utter innocence’ of the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in July 1914. They chose to focus on an early brief telegram to the Austrian foreign minister which was quickly corrected by its author, the Austrian investigator, Dr. von Wiesner as more evidence became available. As Professor Barnes put it, the brief passage from the Wiesner report ‘was torn from the context by James Brown Scott and Robert Lansing and gives the impression that Wiesner believed Serbia utterly innocent in 1914.’ [14] It was an atrocious lie. We know this now, but it was used to great effect to damn Germany and Austria, by the very people who ought to have been the guardians of truth and impartiality.

Some historians and commentators have simply accepted that Germany caused the war, and the proof was self-evident. The German government accepted Article 231 of the Versailles Treaty. Think hard. What else could Germany have done under the circumstances? Barnes famously described it in the following terms:

Germany occupied the situation of a prisoner at the bar, where the prosecuting attorney was given full leeway as to the time and presentation of evidence, while the defendant was denied counsel or the opportunity to produce either evidence or witnesses. Germany was confronted with the alternative of signing the confession at once or having her territory invaded and occupied, with every probability that such an admission would ultimately be extorted in any event. [15]

By the time they imposed Article 231, Germany was no longer in any position to resist. Her weapons and navy had been surrendered as per the Peace Treaty conditions. Do not forget that the blockade continued until the Germans signed the document which blamed them for causing the world war. Starve or sign a false testament. That was a the option Germany faced. It was a travesty of truth; a cancerous lie which would reap an awful vengeance within twenty years.

The ‘Big Four’ politicians who strutted this stage were the Georges Clemenceau, prime minister of France; David Lloyd George, the British prime minister; the President of the United States, Woodrow Wilson, and the prime minister of Italy, Vittorio Emanuele Orlando. They met together informally 145 times, fought for their own agendas and agreed all the major decisions which Germany had to accept in 1919. Paris became the corporate headquarters of international decision-makers, the wheelers and dealers who acted as judge and jury in a kangaroo court through which new countries were created and a new order established.

The British economist John Maynard Keynes, himself present at the Versailles Peace Conference, watched the malevolent manipulators with angry contempt. The blame-shapers who knew that both the neutral countries and the German people had been shamefully damaged, pointed damning accusations at the French, at Marshal Foch for his hard-line armistice conditions, at President Clemenceau for demanding unmanageable German reparations, at finance minister Klotz for his insistence that German gold reserves could not be used to buy food, at their delaying tactics, their constant referrals to dubious committees and their unwillingness to end the hunger. Keynes was not fooled. He moved in circles whose prime motivation was to crush Germany; crush the German economy; restore British predominance in trade and industry and promote the Rhodes/Milner ideals. Unaware of the depth of their complicity, he personally blamed the intransigence of the admiralty in Whitehall, sarcastically implying that since they had just perfected the blockade system which had taken four years to create, they did not want to dismantle it. [16] Keynes called the British admiralty representative, Admiral Browning, ‘an ignorant sea-dog … with no idea in his head but the extirpation and further humiliation of a despised and defeated enemy.’ [17]

Keynes had considerable sympathy for the Germans. His intimate friendship during the peace talks [18] with the German financial advisor, Carl Melchior, helped find solutions to the many obstacles which blocked food for Germany. Melchior had since 1900, been senior counsel to, and later a partner in, the Warburg Bank in Hamburg. He became Germany’s representative on the Reparations Committee as was described as the country’s financial director. [19] Carl Melchior was the only non-Parliamentary member of the main German Peace Delegation. His role in the Bank of International Settlements and his later chairmanship of the Financial Committee on the League of Nations is highly significant. [20] Keynes dined with Melchior and Paul Warburg, whom he described as ‘a German-American Jew, but one of the leading financiers of the United States, and formerly chief spirit of the Federal Reserve Board.’ [21] Given the bond between Melchior, the Warburgs and the Kuhn Loeb bank in New York, we need hardly ask why he was in Paris. Indeed, why were so many important bankers from the United States who were intimately linked to the Rothschilds and the Secret Elite, hovering like vultures above a stricken Europe?

1. http://filestore.nationalarchives.gov.uk/pdfs/large/cab-23-9.pdf
2. See previous blog
3. C. Paul Vincent, Politics of Hunger, p. 122, note 121.
4. John Maynard Keynes, Dr. Melchior, Two Memoirs, p. 59.
5. Bane and Lutz, Blockade of Germany After the Armistice, p. 214.
6. Keynes, Dr. Melchior, Two Memoirs, pp. 60-61.
7. Eric W. Osborne, Britain’s Economic Blockade of Germany, 1914-1919, p.188.
8. Bane and Lutz, The Blockade of Germany after the Armistice, pp. 549-50.
9. Ibid., pp. 558-9.
10. Margaret Macmillan, Peacemakers, Six Months That Changed The World, p. 1
11. These were:  the Treaty of Versailles, 28 June 1919 with Germany; the Treaty of Saint-Germain, 10 September 1919 with Austria; the Treaty of Neuilly, 27 November 1919 with Bulgaria; the Treaty of Trianon, 4 June 1920 with Hungary; the Treaty of Sèvres, 10 August 1920, later revised by the Treaty of Lausanne, 24 July 1923 with Turkey.
12. http://net.lib.byu.edu/~rdh7/wwi/versa/versa7.html
13. Commission on the Responsibility of the Authors of the War and on Enforcement of Penalties Source: The American Journal of International Law, Vol. 14, No. 1/2 (Jan. – Apr., 1920), pp. 95-154.
14. Current History, July 1928, p. 622. Article by Harry Elmer Barnes. 15. Harry Elmer Barnes, The Genesis of the World War, pp. 34-35.
16. Keynes, Dr. Melchior, p. 24.
17. Ibid., p. 13.
18. Ibid., pp. 49-50.
19. A.N. Field, The Truth About the Slump, p.35.
20. Ibid., p. 57.
21. Keynes, Dr. Melchior, p. 70.

War Without End 5: Remorseless Mysery

 

The acute mystery which had been deliberately visited on Germany, Austria and Hungary was remorseless. British, French and Italian obstruction to all U.S. proposals which would have alleviated the crises in Berlin and Vienna appeared to be absolute. A breakthrough was apparently agreed on Christmas Eve, 1918, when the Americans thought that they had persuaded their Allies to relax the food blockade on the neutral and liberated countries. Furthermore the Inter-Allied Trade Council proposed to allow neutral countries to trade food to Germany in exchange for commodities which did not compete with Allied exports. On Christmas Day, Hoover announced to the world press that ‘it is our first move towards feeding Germany.’ He notified all of the nations involved and announced that the British blockade authorities had confirmed the decision. [1]  Unbeknown to him, or any of the American delegation in Europe, his breakthrough was blown apart by a consortium of Allied councils and executives which met in London some six days later on December 31. They reversed the original decision and re-imposed the full blockade. Hoover described it sarcastically as ‘a sudden joint meeting … to which no Americans were invited’. In fact they had not even been notified.

It was a stinging slap on the face for Hoover and another body-blow for the starving Germans. Not only had the London conspirators undermined his strategy, they had not even sufficient courage to tell him in person. Hoover’s first concern was the financial impact this would have. Money always was his first interest. The British were leading an economic revolt which would have caused an disastrous crash in the U.S. farming industries. The Grain Corporation alone had borrowed over $300,000,000 in the expectation of vast profits from sales to Europe. Hoover estimated that he had 700,000 tons of food en route to famine areas in Europe. Cold storage for perishable foodstuffs was already at bursting point.

At every opportunity Herbert Hoover used President Wilson to add covering letters to his dispatches, appeals and veiled threats to the allied food agencies. [2] The Americans were justifiably aggrieved. They had taken steps to increase agricultural production on a large scale, with guaranteed prices for their farmers in order to make vast post-war profits from all and sundry, including Germany. Such guarantees extended to the 1919 crop, which meant that the U.S. producers had to be protected from deliberate price-undercuts from the southern hemisphere. At one point over 1.2 billion pounds of fats and 100 million bushels of wheat were locked down in European storage. [3] Of even greater concern were perishable foods like dairy products and pork, and the tragic fact was that vast quantities of these foodstuffs were held up in Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Rotterdam and Antwerp while millions of Germans starved. [4]

Yet the British press were relentless in their denial of starvation in Germany. On 3 January 1919, a leading article in The Times dismissed the ‘German Hunger Bogy’ as spurious. What were people to think when the trusted Times reported, ‘You don’t see so many people with rolls of fat on them as you did five years ago, but you also see a healthier, harder and generally more fit population’. Such twisted, pathetic logic.

Even when, by mid-January 1919, it appeared that ‘the Big Four’ (Britain, France the United States and Italy) had agreed that Germany should be supplied with food and ‘if nothing else could be done’ pay in gold and export a limited amount of commodities,[5] the blockade remained in place. The Allied Blockade Committee refused to issue the necessary orders and the British navy stubbornly resisted any attempt by Hoover’s ships to enter German waters. The role of the admiralty in maintaining and enforcing the vicious throttling of a defeated Germany has been clearly understated. It wasn’t just that a watertight blockade was maintained; it was extended and remorselessly enforced. The admiralty ordered the cessation of all German fishing rights in the Baltic … an act of war, clothed in the name of the armistice. The German people were forbidden to even fish for their own food. The Berliner Tageblatt could not fathom why there were steamers from Scandinavia intended for Germany loaded with fish which perished in their holds ‘because the English had extended their hunger blockade’. [6] As we have shown time and again, had such a blockade been enforced in 1915 the war would have been over three years earlier.

Bitter voices were raised in the House of Commons demanding retribution at all costs. Commander Sir Edward Nicholl M.P., threw vastly inflated data into the equation, claiming that 23,737,080 tons of shipping had been sunk by German submarines, [7] and seventeen thousand men of the Mercantile Marine murdered ‘by order of Count Luxembourg’, with instructions to leave no trace behind! Nicholl claimed that the Merchant Seamen’s League had sworn that they would not trade with Germany or … sail with a German until reparation is made and compensation paid to those who have been left behind. [8] Exaggerations apart (Harold Temperley then a British official, estimated the total tonnage sunk at over 15,000,000 tons. Lloyd’s Register put the number at 13,233,672 tons), the hurt of war-loss reduced sensitivity towards the losers. While that is understandable, it is no reason to deny that the starving of Germany was deliberately maintained for ulterior motives.

The notion that the Armistice was signed and sealed in November 1918 is misleading. There were a number of armistice extensions because the process of prolonging the misery for Germany required an extensive period of implementation. The first armistice of 11 November was renewed on 13 December 1918, 16 January 1919 and on 16 February 1919, with Article 26 on the blockade of Germany still in force, it was renewed indefinitely. There was in fact no agreed peace, though the fighting had ended and Germany had surrendered her naval power.

While the blockade allowed the navy to distance itself from its consequences, the British army had to deal with the reality of hunger, starvation, poverty and misery on the streets of major German cities. The war office in London received reports from officers in Hamburg and Hanover [9] which described the physical deterioration of the population with alarming clarity. Shamefully, milk supplies around Hanover had dried up for children over six. [10] War continued to be waged against the innocent.

Even with his landslide election victory behind him, Lloyd George took no action to intervene until five months of misery had reduced the immune system of the German people to desperately low levels. Economic despair brought about political unrest, riots, protests and the rise of a new threat, Bolshevism. [11] Hunger and malnutrition were indeed breeding revolt. The risks to European stability merited a change of policy. The warnings sent to the war office began to underline a growing concern about the worth of the blockade. A report from fourteen ranking army officers, mainly captains with legal, business or financial backgrounds, detailed their conclusions on the critical state of Berlin, Munich, Hamburg, Hannover, Leipzig, Dresden, Magdeburg and Cassel. They stated that a disaster was imminent and ‘the policy of starvation (note the terminology … the policy of starvation) was not only senseless but harmful to ourselves…. and it would be folly to suppose that the ensuing disaster would be confined to Germany.’ [12]  Never mind the emaciated children, the fear of hunger, the sick and the dying … starvation had become a threat to stability across Europe. It was spreading disease and a new threat called Bolshevism had begun to seep out of a dysfunctional Russia. They had no notion that Bolshevism was being funded by the great international banks in Wall Street.

The War Cabinet was issued with a memorandum on these findings in February 1919 [13] by the recently appointed secretary of state for war, Winston Churchill. [14] The picture it painted was stark. Unemployment in Germany was rising at alarming rates, the cost of living had grown to dangerous levels and industry could not find a foothold because it was starved of raw materials. Malnutrition caused physical and mental inertia, with disease adding to the misery of the people. The concluding message could not have been clearer, ‘Revictualling Germany is really urgent because either famine or Bolshevism, or both will ensue before the next harvest.’ [15]

Though Britain had been struggling to import sufficient food for its population earlier in the year, by late 1918 Hoover’s fleet provided a steady inflow from America to Britain. Yet the onward distribution remained completely blocked. The War Cabinet meeting of 12 February 1919 noted that British ports were stocked ‘to their utmost capacity’, storage facilities taxed to their limit and meat supplies so strong that the civilian ration should be increased’. [16] Although consideration was given to British exports to neutral countries, the government was advised that the blockade be maintained. There was to be no swift relaxation…until, well, Herbert Hoover, the super-hero of his own legend, burst the bubble. Safe in the knowledge that he could not be contradicted, Herbert Hoover later awarded himself the pivotal role in ending the food blockade. The following story was penned by Hoover in his autobiographic American Epic 2 written in 1959.

On the evening of 7 March 1919, Herbert Hoover was summoned into Lloyd George’s presence in Paris where he found a distraught General Plumer, Commander of the British Army of Occupation in Germany. Plumer insisted that the rank and file of his men could no longer cope with the sight ‘of skinny and bloated children pawing over the offal from British cantonments’. He claimed that his soldiers were actually depriving themselves to feed these children and wanted to go home, adding that the country ‘was going Bolshevist.’ When asked by Lloyd George why he had not sent food to Germany, Hoover, in his own words, exploded in anger and detailed the obstructions put in his way. He ranted about ‘the three hundred million pounds of perishables, which would spoil in a few weeks, in continental ports or Belgium. He pointed to the vicious and senseless admiralty policy which prevented the Germans fishing in the Baltic, and the inhumane tactic of starving women and children after Germany had surrendered. Hoover apparently closed this rant with the warning that ‘the Allies would be reduced to nothing better with which to make peace with Germany than the Germans had had with Communist Russia.’ [17] Truth or romanticised self-indulgence? Who can say?

1. Hoover, American Epic 2, pp. 303-4.
2. FRUS vol 2. Papers Relating etc pp. 695-7.
3. Hoover, Memoirs, Vol 1. pp. 332.
4. Ibid., p. 333.
5. Ibid., p. 339.
6. Berliner Tageblatt, 13 December 1918, p. 2.
7. House of Commons Debate 02 April 1919 vol 114 cc1304-49.
8. Ibid., cc1311.
9. Reports by British Officers on the Economic Conditions Prevailing in Germany, December 1918-March 1919 , Cmd.52, HMSO 1919. ( Period 12 January-12 February 1919, in CAB/ 24/ 76)
10. Ibid., pp. 57-8.
11. Hoover, Memoirs, Vol. 1, pp. 340-1.
12. Reports by British Officers, Cmd.52, HMSO 1919. p. 84.
13. CAB/ 24/76/22
14. Winston Churchill was returned to high office on 9 January 1919 as Secretary of State for War.
15. CAB/ 24/76/22.
16. War Cabinet 531, p. 2. War Cabinet Minutes 12 February 1919. CAB /23/ 9/18.
17. Herbert Hoover, American Epic 2, pp. 337-8.

War Without End 4: The Vindictive Struggle

Herbert Hoover realised that vindictive human nature played into the hands of his Secret Elite masters in Europe [1] but dared not cross the line of open criticism. To assure his  backers that matters in Germany were critical, he requested a detailed breakdown of food production and health statistics from the Ebert government in Berlin. As head of the Belgian Relief Fund, he had previously had reason to doubt the veracity of official German statements. Indeed he had frequently used them to his own advantage. Who better than Hoover could manipulate exaggerated crises to force governments to rush to action which suited his intentions? Who better to frame stories for the press so that funds flowed into his so-called relief administration? The narrative of his behaviour in Belgium has already been covered by previous blogs. [2] Sufficient to relate here that Herbert Hoover understood how to manipulate governments, but he had to be certain of the facts when dealing with the agents of the Secret Elite in Britain; men whose agenda was at that time, at odds with Woodrow Wilson. Consequently, in December 1918, Hoover sent his own experienced officials to check the impact of the strict blockade on the German public. According to their findings, which were subsequently relayed to Washington, the truth was appalling. Absolutely shocking.

Vernon Kellogg [3] reported that whereas Germany’s grain production in 1913-1914 was 30,200,000 tons, in 1917-18 it had fallen to 16,600,000 tons. Bread rationing had been cut to less than 1,800 calories per day; meat and fats had fallen from 3,300,000 tons to less than 1,000,000. The health statistics described a nation in crisis. The birth rate in Berlin had decreased from 6.1 per thousand of the population to less than 1.0, while the death rate had risen from 13.5 per thousand to 19.6. Child mortality had increased by 30 per cent, whereas in Britain it actually decreased, [4] and in adults over 70 the rise was 33 per cent. One third of all children suffered from malnutrition, crime was rampant, demoralised soldiers were reported to be plundering farms, industry was virtually at a standstill and unemployment was enormous. [5] Kellogg’s report stated that starvation had beset the lower-income groups in the major cities; that there were 800 deaths each day from starvation or disease caused by starvation. Food shortage was reportedly worse than before the armistice had been signed. Hoover concluded that the continuation of the food blockade was a crime against women and children and a blot on Western civilisation. It suited him to do so. How ironic, given that Britain and the Allies had apparently gone to war to save civilisation.

Hoover’s conclusion may appear to demonstrate his supposed humanitarian instincts, but records from the United States [6] exemplify his grossly unlikeable qualities, his dishonesty, his conceit and, as in Belgium, his preoccupation with money. Hoover wanted overall control in his business dealings and spent November and December 1918 corresponding with President Wilson, his minder, Colonel Edward Mandell House and secretary of state Robert Lansing on that very issue. The British were particularly sensitive to any move which allowed America to take the lead in bringing relief to the civilian population in Europe, [7] and Hoover was frustrated in his bid to be the sole arbiter for food supply. He penned a memo for the President, which Wilson sent to the Supreme War Council, advocating that a Director General of Relief be created [8] to purchase and sell food to ‘enemy populations’. On one point Wilson was insistent. Given the political necessity of American control of American resources, the Director General had to be an American. [9] He had but one American in mind.

Herbert Hoover had alerted Washington to the need for a source of working capital and temporary advances to start initial purchases in Belgium, Poland, Serbia, Yugoslavia and Bohemia. He desperately wanted to get his hands on cash. On 1 December, Hoover telegrammed Wilson from Paris suggesting that $5,000,000 of working capital could be sourced from Wilson’s Presidential Fund and ‘I could later supplement this by dividends to you from the Sugar Equalisation Board and might avoid appropriations and consequent discussions [in Congress] altogether’. He wanted to operate a secret slush fund. Hoover’s impertinence was underlined by a final request: ‘would it be possible to settle this before your departure [to Europe]?’ [10] In response, the president, ‘very much regretted that the terms of appropriation for National Security and Defence would not justify’ such action. [11] Incredible. Hoover presumed himself so secure in his appointment that he could suggest a secret and financially inappropriate action to the President of the United States, who, in turn, merely regretted that he could not break the rules. Which was the master and which the servant?

On December 10, 1918 a Conference on European Relief was held in London. Hoover led the U.S. delegation. He spelled out the American position in a manner which brooked no dissent. Given that the world food surplus was predicated on the American peoples’ voluntary acceptance of continued rationing, they would not countenance either price control or the distribution of American foodstuffs organised by anyone other than their own government. He warned that any attempt by Allied buying agencies to interfere with direct trading between the United States and neutral governments would bring an end to co-operation. He proposed to construct a system similar to that which had been devised for Belgian Relief with separate departments for purchase, transportation, finance, statistics and other aid. [12]

What remains unacceptable is the fact that the world in general was starved of the truth about conditions in Germany. The map above which was printed by the US Food Administration in December 1918, specifically for American children, refused to identify the real food crisis in Germany. [13] Hoover and the American government knew the facts of the matter, as did the Secret Elite in London, but with a General Election pending in Britain, and Germany by no means yet crushed, the situation there was deemed ‘unclassified’. How convenient.

Behind the apparent Allied unity, old suspicions, jealousies and fears bristled with self-interest. Comrades in arms found themselves following subtly different agendas as politicians in Britain, France and the United States sought to assert their primacy on the world stage. [14] Wilson’s Fourteen Points, like the fabled siren, had attracted the Germans to the belief that the final settlement of the disastrous war would be based on the concept of a better, fairer world. What naivety. The British, French and Italian representatives, appointed to translate the armistice into a peace settlement, were preoccupied with selfish and vindictive priorities, with imperial designs which would enfeeble their once dangerous foe with revenge-laden economic burdens and financial ruin.[15]

Nor had they accepted Wilson’s Fourteen Points. Britain would never accept the second point on ‘Freedom of the Seas’. This was an outright denial of the Royal Navy’s God-given right to stop and board ships anywhere in the world. Point three called for the removal of trade barriers, an idea which would have ruined the imperial preference championed by many in Lloyd George’s coalition government. In addition, no less than seven of the Fourteen Points dealt with ‘self-determination’ and ‘autonomous development’ which flew in the face of the carve-up which was about to unfold at Versailles. Did Wilson imagine that his European allies would stand aside and deny themselves the spoils of war which they considered theirs by right of victory?

The French, on whose land the most ferocious battles had been fought, focused on redrawing the boundaries of Germany without regard to nationality or historic allegiance. So much for the fabled Fourteen Points. They were also fixated on reparations, financial compensation for the physical damage which had ruined more than a quarter of France’s productive capacity and 40,000 square miles of devastated cities, towns, villages and farmland. [16] It was presented as justified payback, even though it was the Allies who had forced Germany into war. Time and again, the French minister of finance, Louis-Lucien Klotz, refused to contemplate an end to the blockade until the money, credits and gold which remained inside the German treasury were handed over to the Allies. They would not allow the Germans to spend their money on food. Klotz repeatedly justified his stance by asking why Germany should be allowed to use her gold and assets to pay for food in preference to other debts. [17] Keynes described Klotz in particularly cruel terms as ‘a short, plump, heavy-moustached Jew…with unsteady roving eye …who tried to hold up food shipments to a starving Germany’. [18] He was the butt of many a deprecating joke. Woodrow Wilson wrote of ‘Klotz on the brain’. [19] For as long as it suited, the Secret Elite cast France, its president Clemenceau and Klotz, the minister of finance, as villains of the piece. The impression given was that the French were to blame for starving Germany, not Britain.

The U.S. State Department knew otherwise. Even before the details of the armistice were made public, Secretary Lansing was in possession of an assessment of the Allied objectives which showed considerable prescience. The Americans anticipated that the U.S. and Britain would become ‘logical and vigorous’ competitors for the world’s colonial and Far Eastern trades [20] while France would remain comparatively dependent on American imports. They correctly forecast that the blockade would continue for an indefinite period because the Allies wanted to be in a position to limit German supplies to the minimum of self-sufficiency, and crucially, to delay for as long as possible the re-establishment of Germany’s export trade. Their assessment was that peace negotiations would also be prolonged so that the British could re-establish their domestic and foreign trade well in advance of Germany and neutral countries alike. [21] They were correct on all counts.

Here, in a nutshell, was one of the Secret Elite’s other objectives. Domination of world trade. They were prepared to buy the time for the recovery of their dislocated industries and reassert their pre-war primacy in international trade at the cost of the prolonged agony of the German people. Every move made to provide food to Europe had to wait until one committee or another granted its approval. What mattered was the agenda set by the Secret Elite and the old world order still considered itself superior to the brash, overbearing Americans whose colossal power had been demonstrated to the whole world. But change was in the air.

[1] Herbert Hoover, An American Epic 2, p. 318.
[2] Commission for Relief in Belgium, in particular, blogs posted from 18 September, 2015 to 25 November, 2015.
[3] Kellogg spent two years (1915 -1916) in Brussels as director of Hoover’s Commission for the Relief of Belgium. He was a loyal servant to Herbert Hoover.
[4] http://www.bclm.co.uk/ww1/childhood-in-ww1/49.htm
[5] Herbert Hoover, An American Epic 2, p. 320.
[6] FRUS vol. 2. Papers relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States, The Paris Peace Conference 1919.
[7] Ibid., pp. 636-7, House to Lansing, 27 November 1918.
[8] Ibid., House to Wilson, 28 Nov. 1918.
[9] Ibid., p.639.
[10] Ibid., Hoover to Wilson, 1 December 1918, p. 645.
[11] Ibid., Wilson to Hoover, 5 December 1918, p. 648
[12] FRUS vol. 2. Papers relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States, The Paris Peace Conference 1919, pp. 649-653.
[13] Map taken from the digital ecology collection, University of Wisconsin Digital collection. see, http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_vault/2014/07/31/history_of_famine_in_europe_after_wwi_a_hunger_map_of_europe_for_american_kids.html
[14] Vincent, The Politics of Hunger, pp. 60-61.
[15] Roy Hattersley, David Lloyd George, The Great Outsider, p. 490.
[16] Ibid., pp. 492-3.
[17] Hoover, An American Epic vol.2. pp. 323-4.
[18] J.M. Keynes, Dr. Melchior, Two Memoirs, p. 61.
[19] FRUS, vol 13, p. 205.
[20] FRUS, U.S. Department of State/Papers relating to the foreign relations of the United States, 1919, Paris Peace Conference – The Blockade and regulation of Trade, p. 729.
[21] Ibid., p. 731.

War Without End 3: Let Germany Starve

Words like hunger and starvation found no place in the vocabulary of the British press when Lloyd George decided to cut and run for re-election in December 1918. The supreme political predator wasted no time in calling a general election to offer the British people a ‘democratic’ choice between his coalition partners who had latterly run the war, and either the rump of the old Liberals led by Herbert Asquith or the emerging Labour Party under Ramsay MacDonald. After all he was the man who had won the war, was he not? Lloyd George was determined to pre-empt his loss of personal power which would inevitably be threatened by the social and economic problems attendant on demobilisation and the difficult reversion of British industry from war to peace. There was also the possibility of very awkward questions being asked about the war’s causes, prolongation and mismanagement. True to Lloyd George, this was an act of political immorality totally devoid of justice. His prime interest was himself.

Very few in Britain knew the true origins of the war or of Germany’s innocence, and bitterness towards the Germans knew no bounds. George Barnes, the Labour member of the War Cabinet shouted from a political platform, ‘I am for hanging the Kaiser’. [1] Conservative Sir Eric Geddes promised to squeeze Germany ‘until you can hear the pips squeak’. [2] The Secret Elite had always demanded that Germany be crushed. That, after all, was the raison d’etre of the war. The three week election campaign fuelled by greed, prejudice and deception ended with the prime minister declaring Britain’s absolute right to an indemnity which covered the whole cost of the war. His supporters claimed that a vote for a Coalition candidate meant the crucifixion of the new Antichrist [3] (the Kaiser’s Germany) at the ultimate behest of the real Antichrist … the Secret Elite. Do not underestimate their capacity to ensure their priorities held sway.

The General election was held on Saturday 14 December 1918 and resulted in a landslide victory for the coalition of David Lloyd George’s Liberal supporters and the Conservatives who propped up his government. There were others whose election victory in 1918 had not been anticipated by the Secret Elite. The Labour Party emerged with 57 MPs, and in Ireland, the traditional Irish Parliamentary Party was virtually wiped out by the Sinn Féin Republicans.

Ironically, Sinn Féin had no connection with the Easter Rising in Dublin in 1916, but the consequent executions, murders and imprisonment of Republican Irishmen changed the political landscape. In treating Ireland with contempt, linking the long promised Home Rule Act to conscription to the British Army, and repeatedly delaying the political change which the vast majority in the south of Ireland sought, a ‘great disillusionment’, as the Irish historian Dr. Pat Walsh termed it, set in. Sinn Féin won 73 seats but every elected member refused to take their place in Westminster. The ‘civilisation’ and ‘self-determination’ for which thousands of Irishmen died in the war, remained an illusion whose realisation the Secret Elite resisted. When the votes across Britain were counted, Lloyd George reigned supreme, and Germany was to be starved.

Lack of food was indeed the weapon of war which had ultimately brought Germany to her knees. The naval blockade, which had latterly been applied with ruthless efficiency, destroyed any prospect of a dignified recovery. But Britain could hardly provide sufficient food for her own people in 1918. All Europe faced a range of hardships from bare sufficiency to utter desperation. The controller-general was America; American surpluses; American largesse. The old world powers were wounded, but not yet prepared to give way to the new power across the Atlantic. They were hyper-sensitive to, as they saw it, the American presumption that they could dictate Europe’s economic survival without consultation and joint decision-making. [4] But America had food and food was power.

With the authority granted to him by Congress on August 10, 1917, President Woodrow Wilson had created the U.S. Food Administration. [5] He also established two subsidiaries, the U.S. Grain Corporation and the U.S. Sugar Equalization Board. The man placed in control was the same trusted agent whom the Secret Elite had charged with running the Belgian Relief scandal. [6] Herbert Hoover lobbied for, and was given, the job of head of the U.S. Food Administration. His candidature was backed by the bankers and financiers, the J.P. Morgan Empire and the British political elite who had facilitated the sham Belgian Relief organisation in order to feed the German army. According to the Congressional Archives, Hoover made it clear that a single, authoritative administrator should head the organisation, not a board of directors. Just as in Belgium, he demanded and was given full control.

As head of the U.S. Food Administration, Hoover became the food dictator. [7] The presidential powers which Wilson had been given by Congress to regulate the distribution, export, import, purchase, and storage of food were vested in Herbert Hoover. He oversaw federal corporations and national trade associations; he demanded the cooperation of local buyers and sellers. He called for patriotism and sacrifices across every state that would increase production and decrease food consumption. Above all he controlled the prices, the supply, and for as long as he could, tried to moderate the demand for food in America. Hoover was, de facto, chief-executive of the world’s first multi-national food corporation.

Herbert Hoover was an astute communicator, able to call on his many friends and colleagues in the American press. Under his direction, the Food Administration, in league with the Council of Defence in the United States, urged all homeowners to sign pledge cards that testified to their efforts to conserve food. Coercion plus voluntary self-discipline produced results. By 1918 the United States was exporting three times as much breadstuff, meat, and sugar as it had prior to the war. And Herbert Hoover controlled it all.

Before he left America to take charge of the food programme in war-strewn Europe, Hoover announced to the press that the watertight blockade had to be abandoned and Germany stabilised, otherwise he reckoned that there would be no-one left with whom to make peace. He ended with the warning; ‘Famine is the mother of Anarchy.’ [8] Arriving in London on November 21, 1918 to supervise and control the food provision in Europe, Hoover was given instructions from his British counter-part, Sir John Beale. As director of the Midland Bank, with wide political, financial and manufacturing connections, Beale had been put in charge of Britain’s Food Ministry. [9] Hoover’s version of events claimed: ‘Sir John Beale of the British Food Ministry called on me the day after I arrived and urged that I did not discuss the food blockade on Germany publicly any more as they were opposed to relaxing it “until” the Germans learn a few things.’ [10] Hoover may have thought he would be in charge, but the agents of the Secret Elite asserted their authority. The food blockade would continue until Germany had been suitably punished. The chosen instrument of ‘correction’ was starvation. That would crush Germany. Starvation.

Having conjured the monster they called ‘the Hun’, falsely blamed its leaders for causing the war, sacrificed an entire generation for an absurd lie, accrued vast debts to enrich themselves and continued to embellish their own propaganda into received history, sympathy for a starving people was not part of the Secret Elite agenda. Old friends played their part.

Arthur Winnington-Ingram, the war-mongering Bishop of London, reminded his congregation at Westminster Abbey on December 1, 1918 that it was essential that the Germans be punished. He invoked the propaganda surrounding Edith Cavell’s execution, [11] the tragic memory of the 10,000 gallant men of the merchant marine lost at sea, of hospital ships sunk, of women and children drowned and prisoners of war who had survived in half-starving conditions. His message was far from subtle. Punishment, he ranted, was warranted ‘for the greatest crime committed for a 1,000 years’. Indeed. His bitter logic warned that should the German culprits be let off, the moral standard of the world would sink. In triumphant conclusion the good Bishop pronounced, ‘God expects us to exact punishment’. [12] His blatant, vulgar lies were unchristian, but at least consistent with the bitter sermons he had preached since the war began. [13]

And the poisonous propaganda of the war years hardened hearts and made the final act of malice much easier for the agents of the Secret Elite. After the Daily News carried a report from a Swedish correspondent in late November which showed that as many as 95 per cent of the population in some parts of Germany had been living in approximate starvation for a least two years, [14] the cry of ‘Hun-trickery’ found popular voice. [15] Take, for example, Millicent Fawcett, trade union leader, suffragette and outspoken feminist.

She made public an appeal she received from the President of German Women’s Suffrage Society imploring her to use her influence to stop the blockade ‘because millions of German women and children will starve.’ Unmoved, she dismissed the request as typical of German propaganda, blaming the shortages on German submarines whose ‘dastardly actions had never been criticised by any German, man or woman’. Fawcett quoted a claim by Herbert Hoover, ‘the American food expert’, that ‘Germany still had a large proportion of this year’s harvest available’, and consequently, there was no likelihood of starvation for any part of the population for many months to come.[16]

Such stories abounded. It was claimed that Berlin’s bread ration had been increased and ‘is better than in Holland.’ [17] The Northcliffe press railed against ‘impenitent’ Germany and in an attempt to damn the country to further deprivations, The Times correspondent in Cologne described his view of the German mentality so perfectly that he unwittingly captured the truth. According to his report the Germans believed: Germany is beaten, but so would England have been beaten if the whole world had combined against her. The German nation from the first had been fighting in self defence, otherwise it could never have held out so long. Both France and England would have given in long ago if they had such privations to bear as the Germans have endured. We firmly believe this war has been a war of aggression against us by Russia, a force to whom England joined herself seeking an opportunity to destroy a formidable rival. [18]

Pause for a second, please. This short paragraph encapsulated the central truth. Germany had been fighting for its survival in self defence; Britain had been fighting to crush ‘a formidable rival’; it had been a ‘war of aggression’ against Germany.[19] The British journalist was annoyed that he did not find ‘intelligent, influential Germans’ disillusioned or repentant. His message was unequivocal. The German spirit remained untamed. The Northcliffe press spun the lie that that the German people expected the Allies to forgive-and-forget and would ‘wipe the slate clean’ of all that happened during the war. This rival, they contended, had to be crushed by fair means or foul … and all is fair to the victors of war. Let Germany starve.

1. The Times, 2 December 1918, p. 9.
2. Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, p. 68.
3. Ibid., p. 69.
4. C Paul Vincent, The Politics of Hunger, pp. 77-8.
5. Woodrow Wilson, Executive Order 2679-A http://www.conservativeusa.net/eo/wilson.htm
6. See Chapter 15.
7. Lawrence E Gelfand, Herbert Hoover, The Great War and its Aftermath, 1914-1923, p. 48.
8. Christian Science Monitor, November 18, 1918.
9. Kathleen Burk, War and the State, p. 139.
10. Herbert Hoover, American Epic 2, p. 319.
11. See blogs Edith Cavell 1-7, posted between 23/9/2015 and 28/10/ 2015. The myth of Edith’s innocence was routinely abused by the British propagandists.
12. The Times, 2 December 1918, p. 5.
13. Hailed by the military and the war office, Arthur Winnington-Ingram, the war-mongering Bishop of London, was a jingoists xenophobic who was influential in recruitment drives. Awarded as a Knight of the Royal Victorian Order by King George VI and the Grand Cross of the Order of the Redeemer (Greece) and the Order of St. Sava, 1st Class (Serbia).
14. The Daily News, 22 November 1918.
15. Vincent, The Politics of Hunger, p. 79.
16. The Times, 2 December 1918, p. 9.
17. The Times, 10 December 1918, p. 7.
18. The Times, 30 December 1918, p. 7.
19. Indeed this quotation could sit at the heart of Hidden History, The Secret Origins of the First World War.

War Without End 1: The Illusion Of An Equitable Peace

Like magicians, Secret Elite historians created the illusion of war’s end in November 1918. It was over, that war to end all wars. Or so they would have us believe. Consequently, one hundred years later we have been successfully drawn into the myth that the First World War was fought between August 1914 and November 1918. Students are still taught that the First World War came to an end when an Armistice was signed in Marshal Foch’s railway carriage in the forest of Compiegne in Northern France on 11 November, 1918. Though the guns fell silent at 11 a.m. that day, and the historical strap-line that the First World War raged between 1914-1918 remains carved in stone, war against Germany continued well beyond that date. The brutal war to destroy her absolutely had been deliberately started in 1914 and unnecessarily prolonged beyond 1915 by the hidden powers in Britain backed by their American allies. Consequently, they had no moral qualms about continuing the disintegration of German society after the armistice had been signed. The instrument through which they acted was, ironically, the continuation of the tightly controlled blockade on German imports of food and other supplies essential to the civilian population. The very act that would have ended the war in 1915 was ruthlessly applied after the armistice had been signed and caused widespread starvation and death in Germany and Austria throughout 1919 and beyond. It might be some consolation if the establishment’s denial of this historical fact embraced a sense of guilt or embarrassment which clashed with the myth that the Allies continued the war to save civilisation. Not so. Such sentiments never found sway with Imperial Britain’s ruling class. Their tactic is not to apologise, but to ignore.

In Britain, 11 November 1918 is still celebrated as if it brought closure to the horrors of world war. The theatre of commemoration has marked the Armistice for its annual service of remembrance for those sacrificed in the First World War. In the summer of 1919, Prime Minister, Lloyd George, gave Sir Edwin Lutyens, who was already working with the Imperial War Graves Commission, two weeks to design a temporary memorial to serve as a ‘saluting base’ for the Peace Day Parade in London on 19 July. Lutyens’ simple design of an empty coffin on a high column surmounted by a laurel wreath was constructed in timber and plaster. But ordinary people grasped the appropriateness of the monument and on that day its base was covered in flowers brought by the mourning general public. For weeks after, there were enormous queues waiting to place their wreaths alongside all of the others, in salute to the men whose lives had been forfeited and would never come home. [1]

If the people grasped the appropriateness, politicians like Lloyd George grasped the opportunity to focus public attention on a memorial and deflect scrutiny from the truth about the war. On 11^th November 1920, King George V unveiled a permanent  stone memorial in Whitehall. Lutyens called it a “Cenotaph”, which broadly translated from ancient Greek as an “empty tomb”, built at the centre of government administration to honour those buried elsewhere. It was a masterstroke of lasting propaganda.

Remembrance Day services continue to be observed annually at war memorials in every village, town and city in Britain on the Sunday closest to that date. Remembrance is more than important. It is vital. But we must clarify what should be remembered. The great lie of November 11 is matched by the lies on those war memorials that Britain and her Empire fought in a bitter struggle to save the world from evil Germans; by the lies that millions of young men willingly laid down their lives or were horribly maimed for the greater ‘Glory of God’ and to secure and protect ‘freedom’ and ‘civilisation’. In reality, they were sacrificed; they were the unwitting victims who died for the benefit of the bankers and financiers, the secret cabals and power-mongers on both sides of the Atlantic. Remembrance is sullied by the triumphant militarism which attends these services led still by royalty, religious leaders and the political class. The subliminal message mocks Wilfred Owen’s anti-war poem, ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’. [2] The great lie is perpetuated; violence is seen as a means of resolving disputes while the horrors, realities and true causes of war remain buried deep.

Be assured, no matter the hypocrisy that surrounds Remembrance Day, war did not end with the Armistice. That is merely one of the many lies about WW1 which are still peddled as fact. Though fighting on the Western Front came to a standstill, the assault on German men, women and children continued unabated. Indeed, it became ever more extreme through a ruthless and cynical continuation of the blockade on all food supplies to Germany.

Hostilities on the Eastern Front between Germany and Bolshevik Russia had terminated unofficially in October 1917, and officially in March 1918 with the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. By the latter months of 1918, the Allies had made some gains but the underlying stalemate on the Western Front continued its weary, debilitating waste. The Imperial War Cabinet in London, [3] critical of the recent performance of senior British commanders like General Haig, was still planning advances in 1919 and 1920. [4] They saw no immediate end to the struggle. Some thought a seven year war possible, but Germany had no reserves with which to continue. In the light of a growing number of exhausted and disgruntled troops and the fear of revolution in Germany, perhaps even the spread of Bolshevism, the Kaiser instructed Field Marshal Von Hindenburg to withdraw to a defensible line between Antwerp and the river Meuse. [5] Indeed, being fully aware of Woodrow Wilson’s address to Congress on 8 January 1918, [6] the German government believed that the American president would guarantee an honourable outcome. Wilson had stated: ‘It is our wish and purpose that the processes of peace, when they are begun, shall be absolutely open and they shall involve and permit henceforth no secret understandings of any kind. The day of conquest and aggrandisement is gone by … What we demand in this war … is that the world be made fit and safe … for every peace-loving nation which, like our own, wishes to live its own life, determine its own institutions, be assured of justice and fair dealing by the other peoples of the world as against force and selfish aggression.’ [7]

What followed were the famous Fourteen Points by which President Wilson defined the new world into which all would be peacefully transformed. These included an end to secret treaties, the absolute freedom of navigation on the high seas, free trade and the removal of economic barriers and absolute guarantees that nations would reduce their armaments to the bare necessities of self defence. The sovereignty of small nations and subservient colonies was to be determined through a balance of rightful claims and self-determination. Sympathy and support for Russia’s political development was expressed in a plea that she be welcomed into the ‘society of free nations’ and that Russia be given every assistance in determining her own future.

Belgium merited special consideration. Her sovereignty as a free nation was to be clearly asserted and Germany had to withdraw from Belgian territory to restore confidence in justice and international law. Alsace and Lorraine, former provinces of France which had been ceded to Germany after the Franco-Prussian war in 1871, were to be ‘freed’ and the invaded portions restored to France. Detailed readjustments to Italy’s borders, safeguards for the peoples of Austria-Hungary, territorial agreements for the Balkan states and the ‘Turkish portion of the Ottoman Empire’ and an independent Poland were all included in Wilson’s grand statement. Words like assurance, integrity, guarantees, autonomous development and rightful claims gave the Fourteen Points an implied sense of natural justice as did the final ambition of a ‘general association’ of nations for the purpose of affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike’. [8] The President appeared to have conjured a solution to the world’s problems. It was a mirage, not a miracle.

Based on the apparent altruism of Wilson’s statement to Congress nine months earlier, the recently appointed German chancellor, Prince Max von Baden sought an armistice. Baden had been selected by the Kaiser on September 30, 1918 in anticipation of agreeing an equitable peace. He had previously spoken out against the unrestricted use of submarine warfare and had a reputation for moderation, [9] which lent hope to the view that his appeal to President Wilson would carry some weight. Von Baden wrote directly to Woodrow Wilson accepting the programme set forth ‘in his message to Congress of January 8th as a basis for peace negotiations’, and requested an immediate armistice. [10]

Max von Baden’s telegraphed message was forwarded to the U.S. President on 5 October 1918, [11] as was a similar peace overture from Austria-Hungary, [12] but Wilson said he would not negotiate as long as the German army remained on foreign soil. [13] He stated that the good faith of any discussions would depend on the willingness of the Central Powers (Germany and Austria) to withdraw their forces everywhere from invaded territory, though the President did not stipulate a deadline. [14] What followed was totally devoid of good faith.

1. Ellen Leslie MA GradDipCons (AA) in blog: BUILDING STOREYS, posted on Sunday 11 November 2012.
2. Wilfred Owen, Dulce Et Decorum Est, is the best known English anti-war poem from the First World War. It essentially attacks the old lie that it is a great and glorious thing to die for one’s country. http://www.warpoetry.co.uk/owen1.html
3. The Imperial War Cabinet comprised the prime ministers of Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Newfoundland and South Africa, represented by Jan Smutts.
4. Minutes of the Imperial War Cabinet, 32B, August 16 1918, CAB 23/44A/13.
5. Ex-Kaiser William II, My Memoirs: 1878-1918, pp. 268-9.
6. President Wilson’s Message to Congress, January 8, 1918; Records of the United States Senate; Record Group 46; Records of the United States Senate; National Archives.
7. https://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?doc=62&page=transcript
8. There are many sources for the exact wording. The Yale Law School site at http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/wilson14.asp can be accessed at this address.
9. http://www.firstworldwar.com/bio/maxvonbaden.htm
10. Erste deutsche Note an Wilson – Friedensersuchen (The First German Note to Wilson – Request for Peace), in Erich Ludendorff, ed., Urkunden der Obersten Herresleitung über ihre Tätigkeit 1916/8 (Records of the Supreme Army Command on its Activities, 1916/18). Berlin: E.S. Mittler und Sohn, 1920, p. 535.)
11. C. Paul Vincent, The Politics of Hunger, p. 61.
12. David Lloyd George, War Memoirs, vol. 2, p. 1934.
13. The Times, 10 October 1918, p. 7.
14. Robert Lansing to Swiss Charge d’Affaires at Washington 8 October 1918.