In WWI Crusaders, Jeffrey B. Miller provides an exhaustive and absorbing portrait of a mission to prevent the starvation of the Belgium civilian population during the first four years of World War I.

Miller chronicles the overarching efforts of Herbert Hoover, leading the American organization Committee for Relief in Belgium (CRB), and its Belgium counterpart Comité National (CN), to bring food and other forms of relief to millions of Belgians and Northern French ensnared behind German lines. Miller illuminates the intriguing political ramifications of these efforts through their tenuous collaboration. A particularly fascinating portion of the history chronicles antagonism between Hoover and the leader of CN, Émile Francqui, which could have severely undermined the international relief effort in the critical years 1916-1917. This information relies on previously unpublished reports and is a testament to the impressive level of Miller’s scholarship (as are the extensive Notes and index at book’s end).

Miller also captures the individual efforts of CRB delegates, generally “young, idealistic university students” who operated in the occupied territories and facilitated the day-to-day operations of the relief effort. The poignant stories of these delegates (sourced from a trove of primary material, including diaries and letters) illuminate the unique human achievements behind the statistical enormousness of the operation. Miller himself is the grandchild of Milton M. Brown, a delegate who is featured prominently in the history.

WWI Crusaders also details the ongoing Belgian struggle to publish the underground newspaper La Libre Belgique. The publication’s history, and its related intrigues are thrilling. Interspersed throughout the narrative of the CRB’s operations, the struggle of La Libre Belgique drives the larger history of the relief effort forward, serving as a microcosm of the entire endeavor

The volume of statistical data in WWI Crusaders can be overwhelming and could be tempered by a heavier editorial hand; however, for any student of WWI history, Miller has created an invaluable addition to the scholarship.

Posted Sept. 7, 2018

Miller (Behind the Lines, 2014, etc.) offers the second volume of a tour-de-force history detailing a little-known World War I humanitarian rescue mission, led by a future American president.

During the early years of the First World War, an amazing organization, the Commission for Relief in Belgium, gathered together a group of idealistic young Americans to keep the people in German-occupied Belgium from starving.

Popular historian Miller continues detailing the history of this organization, which was formed and run by none other than Herbert Hoover, who left his own successful business and mining-engineering interests to lead it. He and his intrepid CRB delegates constantly struggled with German military and governmental authorities and with the Belgian relief agency Comité National, but they managed to manipulate, cajole, bluff, and fight their way to providing the most extensive food relief program in modern history. They did so by preserving their absolute political neutrality and winning the respect and support of even the German aggressors.

To succeed, Hoover and his band knew they had to be on the right side of worldwide public opinion: “Hoover’s understanding of this concept, and of the way the world’s news media worked, would serve him and his cause extremely well from the very beginning.”

Miller delivers compelling portraits of young idealists who interrupted their lives to serve the CRB for no pay. He engagingly parallels this tale with the story of La Libre Belgique, a scrappy underground newspaper that continually poked the Germans in the eye; he shows how even though the Germans jailed and executed Belgian patriots associated with the paper, nothing could stop it from getting published.

Miller is an accomplished writer who never gets in the way of his intriguing story, eliminating tiresome footnotes and in-text citations that might have detracted from the gripping historical narrative.

A magnum opus that celebrates the qualities of compassion, honor, and humanitarian virtue.