"The earliest new-year batch of US-supplied wooden steamships, led by the S.S. Accomac, arrived in British ports. These January deliveries served as a show of strength and resolve, as Anglo-American forces continued to fight the Great War without France.
It was a long and winding road from the German Spring Offensive of 1918, which had captured Paris and convinced France to stand down her exhausted forces and accept a position of strict neutrality for the remainder of the war. In truth, France had been suffering more and more mutinies by front-line troops who saw the lives of their fellow soldiers being thrown away in wasteful assaults on the front lines. German troops remained in control of Paris to convince the government to comply with its neutrality ceasefire agreement.
In this case, the German offensive had struck just to the south of the American section of the front lines, and, as they widened their breakthrough advance the American and British forces, had withdrawn north and west. Over the following three weeks, the lines had stabilized with the English-speaking forces holding the former Duchy of Normandy and the westernmost sliver of Belgium. Also, the retention of this coastal strip enabled the US-reinforced Royal Navy to maintain complete control of the North Sea. France studiously followed the ceasefire and neutrality agreement and formally requested the Americans and British to vacate Normandy; however, the remaining allies refused to do so as it would have left just the sliver of Belgium in their hands, and that was too small a foothold to be worth keeping.
In the USA, the Emergency Fleet Corporation had placed an order shortly after the declaration of war with a score of shipyards to build an emergency cargo fleet to counteract the effects of unrestricted submarine warfare in the North Atlantic. The first step had been to nationalize the 431 cargo vessels of under 5,500 tons already under construction or on order from US building yards. The next step was to face the fact that USA steel industry simply lacked the capacity to build both the navy ships, mostly destroyers, refit the 431 already seized cargo ships, and construct the additional 1,000 ships planned for the war cargo fleet expansion program…"
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Armand
