Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food (3 page)

The deliberate extermination by starvation of targeted groups became a defining feature of the National Socialist food system. It was the agronomist Herbert Backe who hatched the most radical plan to secure Germany’s food supply. He argued that the Wehrmacht (the German armed services) could be fed by diverting Ukrainian grain from Soviet cities. This would solve the problem of feeding a vast army while conveniently eliminating the Soviet urban population, who would starve to death. Once the east was conquered and its former inhabitants had been forcibly eradicated, German agronomists intended to create an agricultural empire on the land. Altogether the regime’s agrarian vision for the east generated plans to murder up to 100 million people. The siege of Leningrad, where 1 million died of starvation, the blockades of the Ukrainian cities of Kiev and Kharkov, which accounted for at least another 200,000 deaths from famine, were just the first steps towards the implementation of this murderous scheme.
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The National Socialists used the weapon of starvation against an array of other groups of people, who were allocated so little food that their eventual death was guaranteed. The daily ration for Polish Jews amounted to a derisory 184 calories. The majority of the 100,000 Jews who died in the Warsaw ghetto succumbed to starvation.
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Even the 845 calories allocated to the Polish urban population condemned the recipients to death if they were unable to find alternative sources of food.
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A proportion of the 200,000 mentally ill victims of Germany’s euthanasia programme and 2.35 million Soviet prisoners of war were all given so little food that they were slowly but systematically starved to death.
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In German concentration camps the number of calories in the food frequently fell below the minimum 1,200 which the World Health Organization recommends that everyone should eat daily, even clinically obese people trying to lose weight. A diet with fewer calories than this forces the body to begin to consume itself simply to perform normal bodily functions such as breathing, let alone hard physical
labour. Primo Levi at a sub-camp of Auschwitz described how ‘the Lager [camp]
is
hunger: we ourselves are hunger, living hunger’. At night the prisoners were tortured by dreams of food: ‘many lick their lips and move their jaws. They are dreaming of eating.’
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Victims of starvation die of nutritional dystrophy, a process whereby, once the body has used up all its fat reserves, the muscles are broken down in order to obtain energy. The small intestine atrophies and it becomes increasingly difficult for the victim to absorb nutrients from what little food he or she is able to obtain. As a defence mechanism the body reduces the activity of the vital organs such as the heart and liver and the victim suffers not only from muscular debility but from a more general and overpowering fatigue. The Leningrader Anna Ivanovna Likhacheva, who ‘survived all the stages of emaciation’, recalled that ‘it began simply with wasting, shortness of breath, slowed thought … And then everything went downhill. The darkness, the deadly cold, the hunger, the lack of strength.’
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Others were afflicted by a painfully acute over-excitement. The water content of the body reduces at a slower rate than the wasting of the muscles and tissues and the flaccidity of the body increases. Some victims of starvation develop hunger oedema and swell up with excess water. The swelling begins in the abdomen and legs and spreads throughout the body. The skin becomes stretched, shiny and hypersensitive. Blood pressure drops and the victim is plagued by keratitis (redness and soreness of the cornea), sore gums, headaches, pains in the legs, neuralgic pains, tremors and ataxia (a loss of control over the limbs). These symptoms are accompanied by an intense craving for carbohydrates and salt, and uncontrollable diarrhoea. Just before death the victim veers wildly from depression to intense irritation and then a profound torpor.
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Eventually, the body has no alternative but to sustain itself by taking protein from the vital organs. Those who died in Leningrad were found to have livers that had reduced from a normal 1,800 grams to 860 grams (without blood) and spleens reduced from 180 grams to between 80 and 55 grams. Most importantly, the heart atrophies. Some victims in Leningrad had hearts that weighed as little as 90 grams, compared to an average adult heart which weighs 330 grams.
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Organ failure is the final cause of death.

Starvation is a slow and excruciating process and the National
Socialists discovered that starving unwanted groups to death was far slower and less efficient than they had expected. When the east failed to deliver the hoped-for quantities of food, panic over the need for ration cuts for German civilians provoked a further radicalization of the regime. The decision was taken to eliminate as many ‘useless eaters’ as possible from the eastern area, with the result that the murder of Soviet and Polish Jews was given new impetus. Thus, food is implicated in the decision to speed up the Holocaust.

Even in cases where no deliberate plan existed to actively starve people to death, starvation and hunger were an inevitable by-product of National Socialist food policies. Although the National Socialists were at their most ruthless in exporting hunger to the Soviet Union and Poland, the plunder of foodstuffs from other occupied countries resulted in a famine which killed 500,000 in Greece, increased death and infant mortality rates and spread malnutrition, particularly among children, in Czechoslovakia, Poland, France, Belgium and Holland. During the Hunger Winter of 1944–45, 22,000 Dutch succumbed to starvation when the Germans cut off supplies to those parts of Holland which the Allies had failed to liberate.
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While Nazi Germany was unique in formulating plans for the systematic eradication of entire peoples, it was not the only combatant to inflict famine, hunger and malnutrition on its own inhabitants and those of occupied territories. In the gulags of the Soviet Union the death rate increased dramatically during the war as the prisoners struggled to perform hard physical labour on a starvation diet.
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Among the 1 million German prisoners who died in Soviet hands, the 23,284 Allied prisoners and civilian internees who died in Japanese camps, and the 290,000 Asians who died while working as forced labourers for the Japanese, a substantial number will have lost their lives to hunger, malnutrition and diseases against which their starved bodies no longer had any resistance.
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The Japanese made no overt plans systematically to eliminate the Chinese but in the 1930s thousands of farmers were evicted from their homes and left to starve in order to make way for Japanese settlers in Manchuria. The relentless extraction of food from China in order to feed the Japanese homeland caused chronic hunger and malnutrition among the Chinese population, while callous food requisitioning policies were directly responsible for a famine which
killed at least 2 million Vietnamese in the district of Tonkin. Chinese military captives were annihilated by their captors. In 1945 only fifty-six Chinese prisoners of war were released by the Japanese.
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While the Axis powers ruthlessly exploited the food resources of the occupied territories, both the Axis and the Allies invested resources in denying their enemies access to food. The Japanese imposed a blockade on Nationalist China, while the United States in turn gradually tightened a net of submarines and mines around Japan; the British blockade of occupied Europe was matched by the German U-boat war on Allied shipping. The pre-war global food economy was thrown into disarray as the demand for imports of bulky foods such as fruits dried up, to be replaced by a growing clamour from Britain for concentrated foods such as meat and cheese. Canada, the United States, Australia, New Zealand and Argentina reorganized their agricultural economies to meet these new demands, while food-processing techniques were driven forward by the search for methods for condensing foodstuffs. Meanwhile, the colonies, whose agricultural economies were structured to supply cash crops in return for food imports, were suddenly forced to make themselves as self-sufficient in food as possible.

Indeed, securing a food supply became a central preoccupation for the governments of all the countries drawn into the conflict. Growing, transporting and distributing food took up resources such as manpower, raw materials and fuel which, particularly in the context of total war, were potentially valuable in other areas of the war effort. However, the human need for a relatively fixed minimum number of calories and nutrients in order to function meant that every sector of the war economy relied on the food sector. If the food supply failed this would impact not only on the army but also on the war industries and more diffusely on civilian morale.
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Food was the fundamental basis for every wartime economy.

Levels of physical activity increased significantly. Men were drafted into the armed forces; women were recruited from the home to make up the deficit in the workforce. A larger section of the total workforce moved into heavy industry. The working day was lengthened, overtime hours increased, shift and night-work (which is more physically demanding) became increasingly common. Not only was the wartime working day more arduous, but so also was everyday life. After a long
shift at the Sheffield steel works where he was employed, my grandfather, Harry Collingham, put in a stint digging his vegetable garden and then stayed up several nights a week doing his duties as an air raid warden. In the Soviet Union just keeping warm in unheated apartments used up many calories. Victor Kravchenko recalled that he and his wife would sit in their Moscow flat in ‘heavy coats, woollen shawls and even gloves’.
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His wife lost weight. Firewood for cooking had to be carried home by hand or pulled on a sledge. Water had to be collected from a communal tap in the yard and lugged up several flights of stairs, clothes had to be washed by hand, and the walk to work was often long, as the tram systems in many towns and cities broke down and became unreliable. This dramatic increase in overall physical activity in turn increased the number of calories required by each person. A moderately active young man needs somewhere in the region of 2,800 to 3,000 calories a day, but a soldier in training needs about 3,429 calories a day; on active service in cold conditions, he needs 4,238 calories; and fighting in tropical conditions, 4,738 calories.
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A comparable increase in calorie requirements is observable in workers in heavy industry. The impact of too little food on the physical capacity of workers was demonstrated by under-nourished foreign workers in a factory in Essen who were 15–43 per cent less productive than their German counterparts.
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Each country therefore needed to supply its population with substantially more food, and this required the agricultural sector to increase, rather than simply maintain, production levels. As agricultural labour was recruited into the army, factories stopped producing agricultural machinery, and fertilizers competed with the explosives industry for raw materials, food production in itself became a battle. America possessed sufficient resources to rise to the challenge and devised and implemented new agricultural techniques, the impact of which are still felt long after the war. But for most combatant countries total war placed an immense strain on the food system. Luxury foods fell by the wayside, and farmers switched to cultivating bread grains and potatoes rather than raising livestock for meat and milk. In the Soviet Union the inability of the agricultural sector to produce enough food created a serious and continual crisis which posed a real threat to the war effort.

The Soviet government, however, in common with other non-democratic governments, exhibited a strong tendency to treat soldiers and civilians as expendable units in the service of the government. Thus, they were expected to fight valiantly and labour tirelessly despite inadequate food supplies. Conversely, the ability of a population to bear high levels of deprivation was often a reflection of low expectations of the government. The most extreme example of this is to be found among Japan’s military commanders who believed that
bushido
(fighting spirit) was all that a Japanese soldier needed in order to fight. This resulted in a cavalier attitude towards food supplies for troops in the field and many Japanese soldiers found themselves fighting on the front line on a diet of wild grasses. This attitude, as well as the failure to protect supply lines properly, contributed greatly to the fact that 60 per cent of the 1.74 million Japanese military losses were due to starvation, not combat.
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All combatant nations were eager to harness the new science of nutrition in order to maximize the efficiency of food distribution and in order to squeeze as much physical labour as possible from soldiers and civilians. Obscure nutritionists suddenly found themselves in positions of power within government and the military and were able to exert varying levels of influence on food policies. Within the Japanese, British, Commonwealth and United States militaries a minor revolution occurred in the understanding of food as a tool for maintaining the health and fighting capacity of soldiers, which triggered significant changes in the way soldiers were fed. This, in turn, impacted on various food technologies and significant progress was made, particularly in the United States, in the processing, fortification, packaging and transportation of food. Most significantly, the democratic governments acknowledged that in return for the sacrifices soldiers and civilians made in order to win the war it was the responsibility of the government to safeguard the food supply and provide an adequate diet for the whole population. This resulted in food policies in Britain and America which were designed to benefit the welfare of the entire nation, not simply those directly contributing to the war effort.