“We are badly in need of Americans to take charge of our work in various Relief Stations in Belgium. We want people with some experience of roughing it, who speak French, have tact, and can get on with the Germans.”
By Jeffrey B. Miller
FOR NEARLY 100 years, when civilians anywhere in the world have been impacted by conflict or disaster, the response has been universal: “America will help.”
That was not the case before the First World War.
Although little remembered today, one U.S. civilian-led wartime relief agency saved millions of lives and helped redefine how the world saw America while shaping the United States’ perception of its own global role in the 20th Century.
It was the nongovernmental Commission for Relief in Belgium (CRB), along with its Brussels-based counterpart, the Comité National de Secours et d’Alimentation (CN), that was responsible for what was then the largest food relief program the world had ever seen. Together, the two operations collectively fed nearly 10 million civilians trapped behind the German lines in Belgium and northern France from the opening months of the war through to the Armistice.
It was a feat that had never been attempted and, at the time it began, was thought to be impossible—private citizens of a neutral country feeding an entire nation caught in the middle of a world war. The challenges were immense and included both logistical obstacles and international intrigues, not to mention political infighting between the two aid agencies themselves.
Yet despite all the hurdles, getting relief into the occupied territories was vital. Following Imperial Germany’s Aug. 4, 1914 invasion of Belgium, the Kaiser’s army steadfastly refused to feed civilians in its conquered territories. Prior to the conflict, Belgium had been among the most industrialized countries in Europe; it had imported more than 75 per cent of its daily food. With those links with the rest of the continent severed, mass starvation loomed within weeks.
And among those at risk in Belgium were an estimated 100,000 American tourists who in the summer of 1914 suddenly found themselves stranded in a war zone. As German troops poured into the country, all transportation, communications and banking operations suddenly ground to a halt. American citizens living elsewhere in Europe at the time did what they could to help the stranded travellers, but it was clear that more aid would be needed, and quickly.
Spearheading the most ambitious effort to get aid to U.S. citizens cut off in Belgium was an obscure 40-year-old mining engineer from Iowa living in London at the time. His name was Herbert C. Hoover. By October, news arrived of the impending starvation of millions of ordinary Belgians. A life-long Quaker with an ethos of public service, he told a friend: “Let the fortune go to hell” and instantly agreed to take on the impossible task of feeding an entire nation.
On Oct. 22, 1914, Hoover and a small team of U.S. expats founded the CRB. By the end of the war, he’d be known as the Great Humanitarian. In fact, his efforts to feed Belgium would gain Hoover the notoriety needed to propel him into the White House 15 years later as the 31st president of the United States.
Like Hoover’s presidency, the CRB was dogged from the beginning by complications. One of the most challenging of which was his fraught relationship with his opposite number in the CN, Belgian financial giant Émile Francqui. Interestingly enough, the two had crossed paths 15 years earlier during a legal dispute over the construction of a railroad in China. To say they disliked each other is an understatement. While publicly the estranged philanthropists projected the image of partners, behind the scenes they were fierce competitors whose battles sometimes jeopardized the entire food relief program.
Ironically, among the many early challenges the relief efforts faced came not from the Germans, but the Allies. The British, ever fearful that the aid might end up feeding enemy troops, banned food donations from passing through its North Sea naval blockade into Belgium unless neutral American supervisors could somehow be on-hand inside the occupied territory to guarantee the food went only to civilians.
As a result, Hoover needed to immediately find American volunteers who would be prepared to drop everything, travel into the war zone without pay to do a job no one had ever attempted before. What’s more, candidates would need to already be in Europe – there was no time to ship volunteers across the Atlantic from the United States.
The British press reported the CRB’s need for men and in late-November of 1914, a letter arrived from an American student at Oxford University. He wrote that he and his fellow Rhodes scholars were about to start six weeks of winter break; could they help?
“We are badly in need of Americans to take charge of our work in various Relief Stations in Belgium,” Hoover replied. “We want people with some experience of roughing it, who speak French, have tact, and can get on with the Germans.”
On Friday, Dec. 4, 1914, the first 10 Oxford students reported to the CRB office in London. They would leave the next day for neutral Rotterdam and then cross the border into war-ravaged Belgium.
Hoover took a moment from his other CRB tasks—buying tons of food, finding ships to haul it, getting all international parties to agree on conditions and securing financing for the millions he was spending every month—to speak with the young 20-something Americans.
“When this war is over,” he told them solemnly, “the thing that will stand out will not be the number of dead and wounded, but the record of those efforts which went to save life… You must forget that the greatest war in history is being waged. You have no interest in it other than the feeding of the Belgian people, and you must school yourselves to a realization that you have to us and to your country a sacred obligation of absolute neutrality in every word and every deed.”
In the end, the CRB and CN would distribute nearly $1 billion in 1914 dollars (the equivalent of nearly $24 billion today) worth of aid to save nearly 10 million civilians from starvation. Conversely, the war would take the lives of 9 million soldiers.
In addition, the CRB’s work would help begin the metamorphosis of America from perceived nation of self-serving shopkeepers to that of world leader in humanitarian aid.
Jeffrey B. Miller has documented for general readers the story of the CRB and CN within the context of German-occupied Belgium in WWI CRUSADERS, which will be released on the 100th anniversary of the end of WWI, November 11, 2018. Pre-orders currently available via Amazon.
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