The Japanese throughout their empire adopted draconian policies to provide food for their own people, which caused millions to starve in South-East Asia. China also suffered appallingly, its peasants despoiled by both the Japanese and Nationalist armies. In Henan province in 1942, when unseasonable frost and hail were followed by a plague of locusts, millions left their land and many perished, to the horror of Western eyewitnesses: ‘As they died the government continued to wring from them the last possible ounce of tax … Peasants who were eating elm bark and dried leaves had to haul their last sack of grain to the tax collector’s office.’
Though the Allies were not responsible for anything like the human toll exacted by the Axis, their policies displayed a harsh nationalistic selfishness. The United States insisted that both its people at home and its armed forces abroad should receive fantastically generous allocations of food, even when shipping space was at a premium. For every pound of supplies the Japanese transported to their island garrisons, many of whom – at Rabaul, for instance – spent the second half of the war engaged in subsistence vegetable gardening rather than combat operations, the US shipped two tons to its own forces. American reluctance to feed their men on local supplies was increased by the shortcomings of some nations’ canning processes: eight US airmen died in an outbreak of botulism after eating Australian tinned beetroot. American specialists were thereupon dispatched to raise local standards. Major Belford Seabrook, of the famous New Jersey agribusiness, introduced its principles to Australia. Coca-Cola established forty-four bottling plants in theatres of war, which produced 95 per cent of all soft drinks sold in camp PXs. The United States reduced agreed allocations of meat to Britain to maintain supplies to its own civilians and soldiers; Gen. Brehon Somervell, a notorious anglophobe, supported his transportation chief’s 1943 assertion that the British people ‘were still living “soft” and could easily stand further reductions’.
For Italians, hunger was a persistent reality from the moment the country became a battlefield in 1943. ‘My father had no steady income,’ recalled the daughter of a once-rich Rome publisher. ‘Our savings were spent, we were many in the house, including two brothers in hiding. I went with my father to the [public] soup kitchen because my mother was ashamed to do so. We made our own soup from broad-bean skins. We had no olive oil … A flask of oil cost 2,000 lire when our entire house had cost only 70,000. We bought whatever was available on the black market, bartering with silver, sheets, embroidered linen. Silver was worth less than flour; even our daughters’ dowries were exchanged for meat or eggs. Then in November with the cold weather we had to exchange goods for coal: the longest queues formed at the coal merchants. We carried the sacks back on our own, because it was better that no man showed his face [lest he should be conscripted for forced labour].’
‘Hunger governed all,’ Australian correspondent Alan Moorehead wrote from Italy. ‘We were witnessing the moral collapse of a people. They had no pride any more, or dignity. The animal struggle for existence governed everything. Food. That was the only thing that mattered. Food for the children. Food for yourself. Food at the cost of any debasement or depravity.’ Prostitution alone enabled some mothers to feed their families, as British Sergeant Norman Lewis witnessed in 1944. At a municipal building in the outskirts of Naples, he encountered a crowd of soldiers surrounding a group of women who were dressed in their street clothes,
and had the ordinary well-washed, respectable shopping and gossiping faces of working-class housewives. By the side of each woman stood a small pile of tins, and it soon became clear that it was possible to make love to any one of them in this very public place by adding another tin to the pile. The women kept absolutely still, they said nothing and their faces were as empty of expression as graven images. They might have been selling fish, except that this place lacked the excitement of a fish market. There was no solicitation, no suggestion, no enticement, not even the discreetest and most accidental display of flesh … One soldier, a little tipsy, and egged on constantly by his friends, finally put down his tin of rations at a woman’s side, unbuttoned and lowered himself onto her. A perfunctory jogging of the haunches began and came quickly to an end. A moment later he was on his feet and buttoning up again. It had been something to get over as soon as possible. He might have been submitting to field punishment rather than the act of love.
In December 1944, when there was hunger verging upon starvation in Italy and indeed all Europe, a British Embassy official in Washington visited assistant secretary of war John J. McCloy to protest against the policy of shipping extravagant quantities of supplies to US forces overseas, while liberated civilians were in desperate straits: ‘“In order to win the war,”’ he demanded of McCloy, ‘“were we not imperilling the political and social fabric of European civilization on which the future peace of the world depended?”’ This drew from Mr McCloy the immediate rejoinder ‘that it was a British interest to remember that, as a result of the complete change in the economic and financial position of the British Commonwealth which the war had brought about, we, in the U.K., depended at least as much upon the U.S. as we did upon Europe. Was it wise to risk losing the support of the U.S. in seeking the support of Western Europe? This was what was involved.’ The shocked British official persisted in pressing the case for feeding Europe’s civilians. McCloy stuck to his guns, asserting that it would be fatal for Britain ‘to argue that the war in the Pacific should be retarded in order that the civilian population of Europe should be fed’.
The Foreign Office in London professed acute dismay on receiving the minute of this meeting, but British impotence in the face of US dominance remained a towering reality. That only a relatively small number of Italians died of starvation between 1943 and 1945 was due first to the illicit diversion of vast quantities of American rations to the black market, and thereafter to the people – much to the private enrichment of some US service personnel; and second to the political influence of Italian-Americans, which belatedly persuaded Washington of the case for averting mass starvation.
The British government, in its turn, imposed extreme privation on some of the peoples of its empire, to maintain the much higher standard of nourishment it deemed appropriate at home. In 1943, allocations of shipping to Indian Ocean destinations were slashed, for good strategic reasons but at deplorable humanitarian cost. Mauritius suffered shocking hardships, as did some East African countries where white settlers made fortunes from wartime agricultural production, exploiting conscripted native labour paid derisory wages.
The 1943–44 Bengal famine, of which more will be said below, prompted a brutally callous response from Britain’s prime minister. When Wavell, then Viceroy, heard of the massive British 1945 airlift to Holland, where people had been reduced to eating tulip bulbs, he noted bitterly: ‘A very different attitude [exists] towards feeding a starving population when the starvation is in Europe.’ Greeks also suffered from the British blockade of Hitler’s empire – at least half a million died of hunger. Churchill was assuredly right, that concessions to allow food imports into Greece and other occupied nations would have served the Wehrmacht. But a fundamental reality persists: the Allied powers provided for their own peoples levels of nourishment which they denied to others, including societies notionally under their protection.
3 A WOMAN’S PLACE
The mobilisation of women was a critical social phenomenon of the war, most comprehensive in the Soviet Union and Britain, though Adam Tooze has shown that Germany also used female workers more widely than formerly supposed. The Japanese social ethos precluded the elevation of women to positions of responsibility, but they played a critical role in factories, and by 1944 provided half of Japan’s agricultural labour force. Pre-war Britain used women workers much less than the Soviet Union, but quickly conscripted them under the pressures of siege. Some thus found a fulfilment they had not known in peacetime: Peter Baxter’s fifty-five-year-old mother worked as a clerk in the British Ministry of Supply, ‘and i
s, I suspect, enjoying herself more than she has done for years’, her son wrote. ‘She has a quick brain, and it is stimulating for her to be using her wits instead of toiling through a load of housework … I can’t help thinking that, much as my mother has loved her children, she might perhaps have been happier all these years if she could have kept on with a business career as women do in Russia.’
Many girls suffered, however, when thrust into a male-dominated, shamelessly chauvinistic factory world, as was Rosemary Moonen: ‘My initiation into factory life was shattering. Being a hairdresser in a high-class salon situated in a select area of the town, I was a somewhat genteel, reserved type of girl. To be plunged abruptly into a world of coarse, ill-bred men and women, where language was foul and bluer than the bluest sky, was an experience … harsh and unreal.’ The foreman to whom Moonen was first introduced tossed her a broom contemptuously, saying: ‘Here! Take this! And sod around!’
I was stung to humiliation before the rest of the girls … He returned thirty minutes later to find me sitting on a box doing nothing. Furiously he demanded ‘What the blankety blank I thought I was doing?’ Summoning all my courage I retorted that until he had the decency to show me the job I had to do, presuming it was to help the war effort, I intended staying where I was. Somewhat taken aback he treated me to a stream of foul language, calling me some of the filthiest names imaginable. I was so angry and disgusted by this time, that I brought up my hand and slapped him hard across the cheek … He apologised grudgingly, and took me to a machine, and demonstrated the pedals, handbrakes and rollers for me to operate … At the end of that shift I went home and wept bitterly. How was I ever going to stand the atmosphere?
Sarah Baring was a peer’s daughter whose sole pre-war occupation had been that of a dancing debutante. Now she found herself drilling alloy sheets in an aircraft parts factory, which she hated: ‘The airless workplace, the indescribable food, the damp floors which even soaked through the wooden clogs we wore on our feet, the twit of a shop steward who hadn’t the courage of a flea … the bullying and oppressive attitude of the manager … I had to take the odd day off and lie in bed fighting constant fatigue.’ Baring was fortunate enough to be able to exploit her fluency in German eventually to gain a transfer to Bletchley Park.
Every nation sought to elevate and glamorise the role of women war workers, as a stimulus to recruitment. In America in 1942, Redd Evans and John Jacob Loeb composed a popular ditty:
All the day long,
Whether rain or shine
She’s a part of the assembly line.
She’s making history,
Working for victory,
Rosie the Riveter.
The original of Rosie the Riveter, who became an American feminist icon, was twenty-two-year-old Rose Will Monroe from Pulaski County, Kentucky. Like millions of Americans, she relocated to war work – in her case on the Willow Run B-24 and B-29 assembly lines at Ypsilanti, Michigan. She was made the star of a propaganda movie, and in May 1943 Norman Rockwell produced a famous painting of Rosie the Riveter, published as a Saturday Evening Post cover, though his physical model was an Arlington, Virginia, telephonist. By 1944, twenty million American women were working, a 57 per cent increase on the 1940 figure. The progress of black civil rights in the US, though extremely sluggish, was importantly enhanced by the recruitment into factories of African-American women, often working alongside whites. All female workers, however, remained severely disadvantaged by lower pay, earning an average $31.50 a week against the male average of $54.65. Many were employed in shipyards, which briefly spawned a ‘Wendy the Welder’ propaganda character, based on Janet Doyle of the Kaiser Richmond Liberty yard in California. Another much-publicised ‘Rosie’ was Shirley Karp Dick, who was paid $6 to model for photos, of which the most famous showed her treading on Hitler’s Mein Kampf. Canada followed suit by promoting ‘Ronnie the Bren Gun Girl’.
It would be mistaken to romanticise the role of Rosie: the US industrial workforce remained overwhelmingly male-dominated, and the lifestyle of that early generation of working women was often wretched. A vast, squalid trailer park grew up beside Ford’s Willow Run plant. Some workers commuted as much as sixty miles daily rather than endure life there. Wages were high, but there was social concern about ‘eight-hour orphans’ – the children of working wives simply abandoned at home through the day. A few such hapless offspring, it was discovered, were left in cars at factory parking lots. Moreover, many of the new workers took time to acquire appropriate skills. Some ‘Rosies’, like their male counterparts, were less than competent, a reality reflected in the structural limitations of some of the ships they built. Likewise, the intense agricultural effort on both sides of the Atlantic was sometimes blighted by ill-judged production decisions and inadequate skills. In April 1942 Muriel Green, working in a market garden in southern England, reflected glumly on the waste of much of her effort growing vegetables: ‘I suppose in everything there is waste: that is what is the matter with this country. There seems so little full effort and so little result – so far.’
In Russia, the plight of both women military conscripts and civilians was vastly worse. Pravda correspondent Lazar Brontman recorded in his diary the desperate efforts of Moscow housewives to escape factory service. Those with children under eight were exempted until the summer of 1942, but thereafter this age limit was lowered to four. Women begged office jobs of any kind, to avoid labour in the ZIS vehicle works. Brontman recorded the droll assignment of some privileged women who became ‘hooves’ – avoiding more demanding duties by working in a Moscow theatre imitating the sound of galloping horses during a play about Soviet cavalry. More than 800,000 Russian women served with Stalin’s armies. For some, including ninety-two who became Heroes of the Soviet Union, the experience may have been uplifting. The female ‘rabbit units’ of the Red Air Force, named in self-mockery for an incident early in the war when desperately hungry girl flight trainees ate ‘like rabbits’ raw cabbages which they found on a station, became famous. A handful of women served as snipers at Sevastopol and Leningrad, and in 1943 large numbers of female graduates began to emerge from sniping schools. Their superior breathing control was found to promote marksmanship, and they played a useful role in the latter war years – though not, contrary to myth, at Stalingrad.
Some women, however, recoiled from the experience of battle. Nikolai Nikulin witnessed an incident on the Leningrad front, during shelling which left a sentry writhing in agony on the ground. A girl nurse sat sobbing beside him, ‘tears running down her filthy face that has not seen water for many days, her hands shaking in panic’. The wounded man himself eventually pulled down his trousers and bandaged a shocking thigh wound, while seeking to calm the girl. ‘Daughter, please don’t be scared! Don’t cry.’ Nikulin observed dryly, ‘War is not a place for girls.’
Many women in uniform were ruthlessly sexually exploited. Captain Pavel Kovalenko wrote one day: ‘I went to visit the tank regiment. The unit commander had got drunk celebrating his new rank of lieutenant-colonel and was snoring away. I was struck by the spectacle of the prostrate figure curled up beside him – his “campaign wife”, as it turned out.’ ‘Campaign wives’ became a phenomenon of Russia’s war, and only a fortunate minority gained wedding rings from the experience. ‘The PPZh is our great sin,’ sighed Vasily Grossman, using the Red Army’s slang phase for commanders’ sexual abuse of its women. Thousands were evacuated when they became pregnant, deliberately or otherwise. Almost the only concession to their sex was that they were eventually granted a tiny extra ration of soap.
Meanwhile, women labouring in fields and factories in the absence of their menfolk suffered chronic hunger, and were often required to perform tasks beyond their physical strength. Hernias became commonplace among those who struggled daily with heavy loads, or were harnessed to the plough in lieu of dead oxen. Grossman reflected in the dark days of August 1942: ‘Villages have become the kingdoms of women. They drive tractors, guard ware
houses, queue for vodka. Tipsy girls are out singing – they are seeing a girlfriend off to the army. Women are carrying on their shoulders the great burden of work. Women dominate. They feed and arm us now. We do the fighting. And we don’t fight well. Women look and say nothing. There’s no reproach [in their eyes], not a bitter word. Are they nursing a grievance? Or do they understand what a terrible burden a war is, even an unsuccessful one?’
Housewife Valentina Bekbulatov wrote to her son at the front, describing the family’s desperate circumstances: ‘Dear Vova! I received the money that you sent, but you didn’t need to bother, it’s not enough anyway to help us in our poverty, and you deprive yourself even of this meagre support. I earned only twenty-six roubles this month, so you can imagine what our situation is like – there is no chance to buy anything at the market. We are waiting for milk. Uncle Pazyuk came over recently, he brought some household stuff to exchange for flour. Aunt saw her three sons off to the army – Aleksei, Egor and Aleksandr. Aleksei has already been in a battle, Egor is in the Far East, and from Aleksandr there aren’t any letters …’
Evdokiya Kalinichenko was wounded in the leg as an army nurse, discharged and sent back to the university she had previously attended, which was evacuated to Kazakhstan. From there, she wrote to her family, painting a picture which captures a fragment of the vast collective tragedy of her people:
It sometimes seems to me that our university is a refuge for all the miserable refugeless and homeless (oh, I won’t be able to post this letter!) [she feared the wrath of the censors, but posted it anyway]. Shura was at the front. Whether or not she was married there, she returned with a child. Ah, Mayusha, you can’t imagine how people look at such girls, and what a hard time they have. She is a little older than I, completing her second year when the war began. She has neither friends nor acquaintances, only the university. She was allowed to start in the third year and given a place in the hostel. The baby is four months old, a girl who cries day and night. She needs dry nappies, yet Shura possesses only the clothes on her back. She needs to be washed, but the water freezes in her room. We drag home every piece of wood we can find. Yesterday, I spotted a huge board by the wall on my way home. It was a theatre advertisement, in red letters on black background: ‘Othello’. [They used it for firewood.] This means that for a couple of days Shura will be able to unwrap the little girl’s blankets, dry her nappies … Dusya, my namesake, helps Shura in everything. She is also a student, although she must be nearing forty … If it wasn’t for her, the little girl would have been long dead from cold and hunger. Aunt Dusya works as a loader at the bakery, and secretly brings some flour in her pockets. Shura makes soup from it, eats herself and feeds the little girl. People say that Dusya’s own children were killed by bombs. She talks to no one, is very thin, dark, dresses like a man and smokes makhorka [shag tobacco].
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