Tag Archives: CRB

Commission for Relief in Belgium, Part II

09 Thursday Feb 2023

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In Lonely Are the Brave, my novel due out in April, a war hero warmly recalls parading through Brussels in December 1918 to celebrate the city’s liberation from four years of German occupation.

Belgians had a soft spot for Americans too. The Commission for Relief in Belgium, which fed the country throughout the war, placed American delegates in major towns and cities, mostly collegians on leave of absence.

This CRB poster, 1917-19, requested donations of clothing for Belgium and northern France, by that time also receiving relief (courtesy National Archives, College Par, via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

CRB delegates were essentially glorified accountants who pored over cargo manifests and inventory sheets while having to fight their way through red tape and withstand hazing by German soldiers convinced they were spies. Berlin tolerated the CRB as a means to keep Belgium placid and for public-relations value. But in Belgium, that tolerance wore thin.

The CRB never violated its neutrality pledge, but that didn’t matter. CRB vehicles drew cheers from Belgians, which annoyed the occupiers, as did the Americans’ casual confidence. As one delegate wrote, “The German stalks about Belgium as if he owned the country and the American as if he did not care who owned it.”

I can just see those twenty-somethings excited by the power to act for a humanitarian project the like of which history had never seen—and bearing witness to a military occupation the outside world knew only by rumor.

As far as I know, the CRB story has never been told in fiction—I’m working on that now—but I’ve also got a book coming out in a couple months. It’ll be a while!

The Commission for Relief in Belgium

12 Thursday Jan 2023

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In Lonely Are the Brave, my novel due out in April, a war hero warmly recalls his most meaningful moment of service, parading through Brussels in December 1918 to celebrate the city’s liberation from four years of German occupation.

Why the Belgians chose an American regiment that had spent mere weeks fighting on their soil rather than French or British units that had fought for years, speaks to political loyalties. I suspect that Herbert Hoover’s gift had much to do with the decision.

In autumn 1914, after German forces had overrun nearly all Belgium and the British had blockaded the North Sea, Belgium was sealed off from the outside world. Famine threatened.

The young mining engineer in Perth, Western Australia, 1898, photographer unknown (courtesy State Library of Western Australia, via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

Hoover, a wealthy mining engineer who happened to be in London, vowed to act–and by telling Britain and German leaders that public opinion would blame them if Belgium starved, he convinced them to let him attempt to feed a nation under military occupation. His Commission for Relief in Belgium, paid for by private charity and administered in-country by young Americans as neutral citizens, captured imaginations around the world.

The CRB saw seven million Belgians through the war and, in 1916, added three million French people in German-occupied territory to the program. To feed them all, day in, day out, the CRB brought in millions of tons of wheat, corn, dried peas and beans, powdered milk, and other basics. These were rations, calories for survival, bare sustenance.

But to Belgium, the Americans’ presence brought another precious commodity: hope of liberation.

More to come.