Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food (4 page)

Rationing systems were one of the most prominent faultlines exposing the weaknesses of the different ideologies – communism, capitalism, paternalism, National Socialism, ultranationalism – that operated
within the combatant nations. Thus, the paradox developed within Germany of feeding starvation rations to Jews, forced labourers and concentration camp inmates, despite the fact that they were potentially valuable workers within a war economy desperately short of labour. In contrast, the communists in the Soviet Union showed a surprising willingness to jettison the ideological principle of centralized food collection and distribution and even re-introduced a free market in food. Meanwhile, Great Britain went in the opposite direction, centralizing the economy and adopting a form of war socialism which went against the grain for the Conservatives in the cabinet. The United States was the only country that possessed sufficient resources to preserve its ideology of laissez-faire in virtually all areas of the economy, and it was therefore able to keep food controls to a minimum. It was also the only country to emerge from the war with an agricultural sector strengthened by rationalization and innovation, and thus be in a position of power with regard to food.

In theory, rationing systems were designed to prevent hoarding and to ensure the fair and equal distribution of food, in other words, to protect the entitlement to food of all sections of the population. In practice, even where active policies of extermination were absent, a more passive process of exclusion and denial can be observed at work. The US rationing system was much less vigorous in its application of price controls in stores where black Americans bought their food. In the Soviet Union the absolute food shortage meant that routine decisions made by food officials about who would receive food marked out others at the same time who would not be supplied with food and who would most probably die of hunger. There are no accurate figures for the number of Soviet civilians who died of starvation but it seems safe to estimate that somewhere between 2 and 3 million died of hunger and malnutrition. In Nationalist China the food shortage was a result of the Japanese occupation and blockade but it was the Nationalist government’s decision to prioritize the food needs of the army and the bureaucracy over those of the peasantry which made rural famine inevitable, with 2–3 million deaths in the province of Henan alone.
³¹
The British rationing system is often celebrated for having done a remarkably good job, with limited resources, of feeding the British people. But the British government was also responsible for the food
security of its colonial subjects, and it was here that it often failed, most spectacularly in Bengal, where 3 million Indians died of a preventable man-made famine.
³²
Thus, the Allied powers made their own substantial contribution to wartime hunger, malnutrition and starvation.

Food became a central and often all-consuming preoccupation for most of the world’s population. A Ukrainian engineer who studied at a Siberian military institute during the war recalled the food served in the canteen. The students were given two sorts of soup: one was made by pouring flour into boiling water, the other the students referred to as ‘green borscht’ (green soup) because it was made with nettles. They also received 50 grams of fish and 50 grams of meat a week. Some idea of how tiny these quantities were is conveyed by the fact that a boneless pork chop weighs about 100 grams. ‘You could live on this food for about a month,’ he told his interviewer, ‘but if you had to eat it for more than a month, you got so hungry that you didn’t care anything more about your studies, you just tried to figure out how to get something to eat … Sometimes we would go down to the market and buy snails and boil them in our rooms with a few potatoes. It takes a long time for them to cook … as the water began to boil, the snails began to rattle in the pot and it made quite a noise. Even the table on which we had the hotplate began to shake. The commander of our company lived in the room below ours, and one day he came up to see what was making all the noise. He threw open the door and shouted, “What have you got in here – an airplane?” So from then on we called this dish “airplane”. It was not too good, but it was quick and cheap.’
³³

The Ukrainian and his classmates also ran a scam forging blood donor certificates, which entitled them to more food: 200 grams of blood earned half a kilogram of rice, a kilogram of sausage and two kilograms of black bread. ‘Many students sold their blood in order to eat. But … you cannot give 200 grams of blood every day.’ Instead he and his friends forged the certificates. ‘Practically our whole class ate this way … Once a professor noticed that our class seemed to be eating far better than the others and asked us about it, but we said, quite proudly, “We are giving blood to the Soviet regime.” And he could not say anything more. Some men “gave” thirty litres of blood in a year this way!’
³⁴

Even in comparatively well-supplied countries, such as Britain and Germany, lack of fat meant that the diet became unpalatable. The British were used to a pre-war nutritional balance where fat made up 38 per cent of calorie intake.
³⁵
Although this only dropped by a small percentage during the war, combined with a shift from meat to wholemeal bread and potatoes as the basis of the diet, the less fatty meals became so monotonous, and tasted so insipid, that Jean Legas recalled, ‘we ate the same menu every week for nearly five years … we just ate without thinking about it’.
³⁶
The Germans suffered from a similar fat problem. During the first half of the twentieth century animal fat became a central element in the food of the working classes, giving the food flavour and helping to induce a feeling of fullness. But the 48 grams of fat per week provided by the basic German ration meant that the fat content of many non-industrial workers’ meals fell below the 20 per cent fat-content mark which most western Europeans regarded as essential for taste.
³⁷

There are no deficiency diseases associated with a lack of fat (as long as the diet has alternative sources of vitamins A and D) but a low-fat diet means that it is necessary to consume a greater quantity of food in order to obtain sufficient calories. In fact, it is quite difficult for a person to force himself to eat enough potato to maintain necessary calorie intake if this is the main source of energy. Contemporary workers engaged in hard physical labour, who need around 4,000 calories a day, would have to spend almost their entire day eating if they were to obtain sufficient energy from bulky carbohydrate foods alone. It is for this reason that such workers eat a high proportion of their food as fat.
³⁸
But for the Soviet, German and Japanese workers, fat simply was not available in sufficient quantities. Fat and meat also stave off hunger pangs for longer. The lack of fat, combined with the very limited quantity of animal protein in the form of meat, eggs or cheese in virtually all wartime diets resulted in a nagging sensation of hunger, even if the food contained sufficient calories.
³⁹
A lack of sugar and sweetness in the diet also provoked sometimes unbearable cravings. Mathilde Wolff-Mönckeberg longed for good things to eat. In a letter she wrote in 1944 she described how ‘I often get myself a spoonful of sugar even though we are very short of it and we don’t have any left over.’
⁴⁰

In all the countries drawn into the Second World War, civilians spent their days queuing for rations, wondering how they were going to scrape together enough food to make the next meal. Digging for Victory became a global activity. In every spare scrap of land people planted potatoes, which became the food of war. Comparatively easy to grow, potatoes were also nutritious, providing protein and vitamins as well as carbohydrate.
⁴¹
Levels of deprivation varied greatly but virtually everywhere the quality of food declined. Roy Lee Grover, an American B-25 pilot on New Guinea, was appalled by the Australian army rations he was given. ‘Bully beef … gummey gooey rice, dried onions and not much else. The bully beef was boiled, baked and fried for the three meals each day.’ In desperation while on a trip to Townsville he bought ‘a case of twenty-four quart cans of sliced peaches in a sweet syrup’. But he was soon equally sick of peaches and ‘on my return to the States, it was many months before I could include rice or peaches in any meal’.
⁴²
Bully beef, ‘mutton stew thick … like cold glue’, rubbery powdered egg, Spam, gritty black bread, and potatoes – ‘boiled potatoes, fried potatoes, roasted potatoes … potato cakes, potato soup, potato fritters’ – endless potatoes, these were the tastes of war.
⁴³

Part I

Food – An Engine of War

Food was at the heart of many of the policies which set Germany, Italy and Japan on the path to war in the 1930s. The rise of fascism, the humiliation and resentment felt by the Germans as a result of the Treaty of Versailles and the economic and social instability which developed in the wake of the Great Depression more commonly spring to mind as factors which contributed towards conflict. However, changes in eating habits were equally powerful in their effect and the need to secure the food to satisfy new appetites played into the aggressive, expansionist policies of the dictatorial regimes of the Axis powers.

The story of food’s role as one of the causes of international conflict in the twentieth century begins in the last quarter of the previous century when the urban population in Europe shifted from a grain-to a meat-based diet. This development went hand in hand with the emergence of a new global food economy. Germany felt disadvantaged by the terms of the international food trade, dominated as it was by the United States and Great Britain and its empire. Indeed, Germany went to war in 1914 hoping to establish for itself a stronger position in the balance of international powers. After 1918 nationalists within Germany, Italy and Japan continued to see international trade and politics as the stumbling block which prevented their respective nations from realizing their potential as great powers. In Japan concerns about the poverty and inefficiency of the agrarian sector and the security of the urban food supply allowed right-wing militarist groups to gain power and influence within the government. In ultranationalist Japan, fascist Italy and National Socialist Germany these anxieties fuelled the desire for empire which would not only provide the resources to wage war but transform these nations into great players on the world stage.

If dreams of agrarian empires drove Germany, Italy and Japan into waging war, the plans Germany and Japan hatched for transforming these empires resulted in some of the most murderous criminal actions of the war. The implementation of the German General Plan for the East in Poland and the Japanese Settlement of One Million Households in Manchuria demonstrate that food was an engine not only of war but also of German and Japanese atrocities.

2

Germany’s Quest for Empire

What India was for England, the territories of Russia will be for us. If only I could make the German people understand what this space means for our future!

(Adolf Hitler, August 1941)
¹

FROM WHEAT TO MEAT

The standard meal of an eighteenth-century German rural labourer was ‘gruel and mush’, a soupy combination of grains and lentils. This was typical fare for the rural population throughout Europe. In 1796 Richard Walker, a farm labourer, bell ringer, grave digger and barber, living in the Northamptonshire parish of Roade with his wife, a lace maker, and their five children, spent half the family’s annual income of £26 8
s
. on bread. The bread was sometimes supplemented by a little bacon, the occasional potato, a small amount of cheese, and washed down with beer, sugared tea and tiny quantities of milk. In the eighteenth century three-quarters of all European foods were derived from plants, and even the fat in the diet was drawn predominantly from plant oils.
²

Throughout the nineteenth century, but with a marked increase in the 1870s, the amount of meat in the European diet steadily rose from 16 kilograms per person per year to 50 kilograms by 1914.
³
The diet of Ben Turner, his father and brother, all mill workers in Huddersfield in 1876, illustrates the change: ‘On Monday a bit of cold meat, on Tuesday a hash, on Wednesday a potato pie, on Thursday some fry [liver] and onions, on Friday a bit of potted meat, on Saturday a bit of
sausage, and on Sunday the usual joint, always providing the funds ran to it.’ For breakfast and tea they ate bread and dripping, ‘sometimes a Spanish onion or some “craps” (pork fat made crisp), and on Sunday teatime, a bit of special home-made cake to make the distinction from the other days. At the worst times our cut of beef was brisket, because it went the farthest, and made the most “drip”, besides being the cheapest cut.’
⁴
Bread still featured largely in working-class meals but they now revolved around meat dishes and were much richer in animal proteins and fats. The Germans ate more pork, the British more mutton and beef.

These changes in the European diet were made possible by the development of a new, global food economy. The globalization of food systems began in the last quarter of the nineteenth century when the growth of railways and the introduction of ocean-going steamships dramatically reduced the cost of transporting food. Whereas in the 1860s it had cost 4
s
. 7½
d
. to ship a quarter
^*
of wheat from New York to Liverpool, by 1902 it cost a mere 11½
d
. Subsequently there was a corresponding fall in the price. Wheat production in America doubled, in Russia it trebled, and a global economy of specialized agriculture began to emerge.
⁵
North America, Argentina, Australia, New Zealand and Russia grew the wheat that made the European working man’s loaf and fattened the cattle, sheep and pigs that were shipped as frozen meat for his table. European meat production also benefited, as cheap maize, barley, oilseeds and soya beans, grown in Australia and the Americas, were shipped in for animal feed. The slaughter weight of European livestock increased, the time it took to fatten animals was reduced, and milk yields rose. This made food cheaper and more plentiful for the expanding urban working classes.
⁶