While the story of the CRB is not told as frequently as others, many are acquainted with the chairman of the movement: future United States President Herbert Hoover.
When the First World War broke out, Herbert Hoover was living abroad in London as a mining engineer and financier. He soon found himself surrounded by American tourists scrambling among the chaos to get back to the U.S. He organized the American Committee responsible for financing the journey home for some 120,000 people.
Hoover’s efforts and abilities to organize and mobilize did not go unnoticed. Specifically, he caught the attention of Walter Hines Page, then the U.S. Ambassador the the United Kingdom. Page and other prominent people sought Hoover’s help with another key mission: shortly after being invaded by Germany, Belgium began undergoing a food shortage. The tiny, mostly urban nation was only able to grow a fraction of its food needed to survive, and the meager harvest was already being taken by the German army.
But the seemingly simple solution of simply buying and importing enough food was made difficult by the economic blockade Great Britain had imposed on Germany and its occupied territories.
At the start of the war, Herbert C. Hoover was a 40-year-old mining engineer who was a no-nonsense, ambitious, roll-up-your-sleeves-and-get-it-done kind of American. He would go on to organize and build the Commission for Relief in Belgium (CRB), which would become the largest food and relief drive the world had ever seen. During four years of war, nearly 10 million Belgians and northern French would be saved from starvation by the efforts of the CRB and its Belgian counterpart, the Comité National (Public domain; Herbert Hoover Presidential Library Archives, West Branch, Iowa).
The ancient university town of Louvain in ruins after the Germans ransacked it on August 25–30, 1914. In the darkened and terrified city, the soldiers broke into the university library and set it ablaze, using gas and other accelerants to do so; they then stopped any who tried to put the fire out. By some account it took nine to ten hours for all 300,000 books to burn. (Public domain; multiple sources).
The October 1914 flight from Antwerp before the three-day bombardment that would pound the city into surrender. In the upper right corner is the Scheldt River a pontoon bridge that was the only way out of Antwerp at the time. When the proclamation was posted that the Germans would begin bombarding Antwerp soon, the city turned from relative calm in a heartbeat. “Hundreds, thousands of terrified fugitives filled the streets,” wrote Antwerp merchant Edouard Bunge. (Public domain; The Track of the War, R. Scotland Liddell, Simpkin, Marshall, 1915.)
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