The Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food

by Lizzie Collingham

  Then, as Germany stormed across western Europe in the spring and summer of 1940, the weakness of the European colonial powers encouraged the Japanese chiefs of staff to think that they could take over the entire south-east Asian treasure house of resources.75 Occupation of the French, British and Dutch colonies in south-east Asia would enable Japan to achieve decisive victory in the Chinese war by cutting off supplies of Indo-Chinese rice to Nationalist China.76 They also set their sights on the oil supplies in the Dutch East Indies. Expansion into south-east Asia was a gamble but the potential rewards made it seem worth the risk. The Japanese military command felt that this was their only chance to end western dominance and establish their own claim as a great power in east Asia. In September 1940 Japan signed the Tripartite Pact, and became an official ally of Germany and Italy. Nevertheless, the military still hoped to secure Indo-China and the Dutch East Indies without drawing the United States into the conflict. However, the army began to follow a circular course of reasoning, which argued that they must prepare for war with America. This meant that they must take over the oil resources in the Dutch East Indies. But if they invaded the Dutch East Indies, this would inevitably lead to war with America. The navy was under no illusions that it could win a protracted war of attrition with the United States. Victory would have to be achieved quickly and in a decisive battle. But having justified their funding with arguments that they were preparing for war with the US they were not in a position to admit this to the army.77

  Provoked by Japan’s continued aggression in China in June 1940 the Americans had placed an embargo on exports of scrap metal. A year later, prompted by the German attack on the Soviet Union, the Japanese occupied French Indo-China and the United States cut off their oil supplies. The Japanese political and military leadership overestimated the abilities of their German ally and placed their faith in Germany managing to neutralize both Britain and the Soviet Union. The only way to avoid war with the United States was to capitulate in China, but the military were inexorable in their refusal to back down. The Japanese government had manoeuvred itself into a position where it felt that war with the United States was the only possible course of action. Japan’s military commanders judged correctly that the United States possessed immense resources and could defeat Japan in a long war of attrition. However, unlike the National Socialists who hoped to defeat their enemies, Japan hoped to bring America to the negotiating table. They calculated that the Americans would be unwilling to sacrifice the lives of thousands of young men in the Pacific. When they authorized the attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941 Japan’s leaders knew they were entering a war they could not really hope to win. Unfortunately, they woefully overestimated the willingness of the United States to enter peace negotiations once a war had begun.78 And it was this utterly unrealistic determination to force America into a negotiated peace which provided the rationale for the refusal of the military leadership to surrender, even in the summer of 1945 when Japan’s war effort lay in ruins.

  The National Socialist solution to the problems associated with the global market in food, combined with a backward farming community in need of reform, pushed Germany into war in Europe. Rather than engaging with capitalist world markets, the National Socialists chose the alternative path of autarky and an aggressive search for land. Across the globe, Japan was placed in a similarly difficult position with regard to the international economic system. A weak and failing agricultural sector which was tipped into crisis by the Depression added to Japanese woes. In a parallel process, the agrarian problem propelled Japan’s politicians into ever more conservative solutions, resulting in the decision to seek the same solution: autarky and expansion. Both Germany and Japan looked to their military to appropriate enough land not only to reverse the decline of agriculture but to recreate a ‘flourishing farm economy [which] could hold its own against the pressures of industry and commerce’. Empire was seen by both regimes as a means of making ‘peace with modernity’.79 Unfortunately, it also guaranteed that they would be unable to make peace with their neighbours.

  Part II

  The Battle for Food

  When Hitler took the world to war by invading Poland on 1 September 1939, many governments were caught off guard by the insatiable wartime appetite for food. The expansion of military forces created armies of voraciously hungry men. The corresponding growth of war industries created a second pool of men and women whose arduous physical labour meant that they too needed to eat an extra 500–1,000 calories a day. Employment and rising wages meant that even ordinary civilian demand for food (especially for meat and milk products) rose far more than most governments had expected. With the virtual disappearance of consumer goods, there was, after all, virtually nothing else on which people could spend their money.

  The Allied governments had to switch quickly from the Depression mentality of trying to persuade farmers to grow less in order to reduce food surpluses, to encouraging farmers to cultivate every available inch of their land and to grow crops with the highest ratio of nutritional return for the effort expended. The need to increase agricultural yields was all the more urgent given that for many countries food imports disappeared, or were drastically reduced, because the war had thrown the global food trade into disarray. In August 1940 continental Europe was cut off from the world food market by the British blockade of Germany and all of occupied Europe. In June 1941 the German invasion effectively removed the Soviet Union from the market. By the end of 1942 Japan had imposed a blockade on Nationalist China and taken control of south-east Asia and large parts of the western Pacific. German U-boats patrolled the oceans, posing a threat to Allied shipping and this, combined with a shortage of ships, meant that every cubic inch of shipping space was hotly contested. Civilian food supplies had to compete for space on ships with coal and fuel, steel, phosphates for explosives, military supplies and troops.

  In peacetime the British Isles sat at the centre of a complex web spun by its 3,000-strong merchant shipping fleet. Britain itself relied on ten to fifteen ships arriving in its ports each day, bringing in 68 million tons of imports a year, 22 million tons of which were food.1 An intensive network of ‘cross-trade’ carried tea from India to Australia, beef cattle from Madagascar to sugar-producing Mauritius, cocoa beans from West Africa to America. Britain was now denied valuable imports of Danish and Dutch bacon, cheese and butter. Onions, which before the war were imported from Spain, France and the Channel Islands, disappeared from British greengrocers. Japanese successes in China, south-east Asia and the Pacific meant that the Allies lost access to a variety of essential raw materials such as Malayan rubber and tin and Dutch East Indian oil. One sign of the shortages was the disappearance of tinfoil wrappings on candy bars in America.2 The Americans were denied Sumatran palm oil to manufacture margarine, Filipino coconut flesh and Chinese soya bean and peanut meal, which they used as fodder for livestock. The loss of Burma to the Japanese in May 1942 opened a gaping hole in the British empire’s food network. Burmese rice was a staple food in India and Ceylon, the Gambia, Kenya, South Africa and Zanzibar, and in far-flung islands such as Mauritius and Fiji.

  While the Allies were cut off from supplies of some foods, they faced the additional problem that vast quantities of other types of food were stranded in the wrong place. In Britain oranges and lemons became treasured objects. Doreen Laven recalled that her neighbour kept a lemon on her dresser. ‘I was allowed to hold it. It was very hard and almost black.’ Oranges were available ‘once or perhaps twice a year’, and the anxiety was acute when one Saturday Doreen’s family came across a queue for oranges in the High Street, Bishops Stortford, and their father had to dash home for their ration books while the rest of the family waited anxiously in the queue, worried that the grocers would have sold out before he returned.3 Cyprus, meanwhile, was afflicted with a glut of oranges. Britain could not afford to waste shipping space importing bulky fruits, and every effort was made to persuade the Cypriots to eat more oranges until they we
re undoubtedly sick of the sight of them. In Palestine the citrus fruit industry channelled its oranges into marmalade production. The marmalade was then fed to Allied troops in North Africa, who would have much preferred strawberry jam.4 Western Australia and Tasmania suffered from a glut of apples and pears and much of the crop had to be left to rot on the trees. While the United States tried to boost the production of maize, the Argentinians burnt their excess maize crop as fuel.5

  Latin American coffee farmers, cut off from continental Europe, lost 40 per cent of their market. While Europeans had to make do with an ‘unholy concoction’ made from ground chicory mixed with roasted acorns or barley, the coffee growers tried to off-load their surplus stock in the United States.6 Anxious to keep Latin America out of the sphere of Axis influence, America eventually agreed to buy Latin American coffee at guaranteed prices. The arrangement turned out to be overly generous, and American civilians were forced to subsidize Latin American coffee farmers by paying artificially high prices for coffee throughout the war.7 The cocoa farmers of the West African Gold Coast were just harvesting their beans when war was declared. Given the luxury nature of chocolate, it was clear that shipping space for their beans would not be a priority. Caribbean banana farmers and West Indian and Mauritian sugar planters faced the same problem.

  The Allies responded to the disruption of the international food trade by fighting the U-boats in the Atlantic and trying to protect their merchant shipping. But, most vitally, the free market was abandoned in order to achieve maximum efficiency in reorganizing trade. The Arcadia conference between Churchill and Roosevelt in Washington in December 1941 gave rise to a number of boards charged with co-ordinating Allied efforts and pooling their resources as effectively as possible. The Combined Food Board co-ordinated the production and distribution of food throughout the Allied world. Responsible for food for more than half of the world’s population, and covering agricultural production over two-thirds of the earth’s land mass, it negotiated and co-ordinated agricultural output and trade within and between the United States, Great Britain, its empire and the Commonwealth, the Belgian and French colonies, the Soviet Union, Latin America, the Caribbean and the Middle East.8 Its decisions were, however, always contingent on the availability of shipping. The Combined Shipping Adjustments Board presided over the Ministry of War Transport in Britain, and the War Shipping Administration in the United States. It was in the committee rooms of the Shipping Board that the war, waged at sea between U-boats and convoy escorts, was mirrored by British and American officials who battled for access to shipping space. In this struggle, the competing claims of American and British civilians for food jostled with those of Allied troops and Britain’s colonial subjects. ‘International shipping control thus became international food control.’9 This was to prove particularly disadvantageous for Britain’s colonial subjects, the survival of many of whom was threatened by the disruption of the international food trade. Those in charge of shipping allocations often made decisions as to who would go hungry and, in some cases, who would starve.

  Germany had been preparing for exclusion from the world food market since the National Socialists came to power in 1933. The campaign to increase agricultural self-sufficiency was combined with a gradual shift in food dependency towards the east. The percentage of all food imports from Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and Yugoslavia rose from 10 to 30 per cent between 1932 and 1939.10 In August 1939, under the terms of the non-aggression treaty, the Soviet Union agreed to supply Germany with grain and a variety of oilseeds, soya beans, and vegetable, fish and whale oils, all of which went some way towards compensating for Germany’s failure to achieve self-sufficiency in fodder and fat production.11 Fresh citrus and other fruits and vegetables were obtained from Italy. Nothing could be done to replace shipments of more exotic goods such as cocoa beans, cane sugar, coffee and tea. For the duration of the war Germany would have to find substitutes for these foods, eke out its stores or do without.

  Germany and Japan intended to export wartime hunger. The Third Reich viewed the whole of occupied Europe, not just the Soviet Union, as a source of food for the Germans. While they did not plan to starve the inhabitants of occupied western Europe to death, the National Socialists had every intention of allowing them to suffer before they imposed food shortages on their own civilians. Japan dressed its expansion into south-east Asia in the language of pan-Asian nationalism. The Japanese would be liberating their east Asian brothers from the oppression of western colonial powers and bringing a ‘New Order’ to the outer area of the east Asian sphere.12 This was empty rhetoric. The Japanese planned to mercilessly exploit south-east Asian raw materials and cheap labour. The hope was that while they would suffer from initial shortages, by 1943 the production of oil, rubber, tungsten and rice would be fully recovered. If south-east Asians went hungry while this was achieved, this caused the Japanese few qualms.

  Faced with a decline in food imports it made sense for every wartime government to follow Germany’s agricultural example and strive for self-sufficiency in food. Even where this was impossible to achieve, the most sensible solution to the difficulties of farming in wartime was to reduce the loss of energy inherent in converting edible crops into meat and cut down livestock numbers. Grassland could then be ploughed up in order to expand the area under crops which went straight into human food, such as wheat, rice or potatoes. Potatoes became the food of the Second World War, not only grown by governments but in private gardens throughout the world. A reduction in animals brought with it a lack of animal fats in the form of butter and lard, so it was essential to grow more oilseed crops. The loss of sugar cane imports also meant that the area under sugar beet needed to be extended. These seemingly simple measures were a lot more complicated and difficult to implement in practice, and in 1939 worldwide agriculture did not appear to be in good enough shape to withstand the impact of total war.13

  The Depression had left many agricultural communities across the world in a state of acute poverty. In the 1930s Japanese children in the northern prefecture of Fukushima were too ashamed of the boiled barley mixed with a little rice inside their lunch boxes to open them and show the food to their teachers.14 A district nurse in Suffolk ‘knew of quite a few children who came to school without any breakfast and who walked home to a dinner of just potatoes’.15 In the American south, migrant agricultural labourers lived in dwellings constructed out of ‘old tents, gunny sacks, dry-goods boxes and scrap tin’ with absolutely no sanitary arrangements.16 Under-nourishment left them listless and vulnerable to pellagra, malaria and hookworm. There were few rural doctors, virtually no rural hospitals and infant mortality, a good indicator of levels of health and nutrition, was, even in 1942, running at the shockingly high rate of 43 per 1,000.17

  The conveniences of the modern world had yet to reach even the more prosperous farming households. Approximately 60 per cent of American farmhouses were without electricity. The vast majority were in a dilapidated state and needed repairs or complete rebuilding. Most had no central heating or running water, and outside privies were the norm.18 Two-thirds of German farms had neither sewage nor water connections, and their isolation from the modern world was reinforced by the fact that clocks and radios were rare luxuries in farming households.19 During the war, when lower-middle-class British land girls from urban backgrounds and German evacuees from the bombed-out towns found themselves living with farmers, they were shocked to discover that the farmhouses had ‘no gas, electricity or water, no bathroom, no indoor sanitation … neither wash basin nor kitchen sink’.20 Land girl Anne Hall described the living conditions of the family she lodged with in a row of farm workers’ cottages near Bournemouth. ‘Water was drawn up out of the well … and it was hard work turning the handle to haul up the pail. The washing up was done in a basin on the kitchen table, the used water thrown into the garden. There was a garden hut down the side path in the back garden which housed an Elsan bucket loo.’ Its contents had to be emptied daily into a hole
dug in the garden.21

  If the living standard on farms was low, the state of farmland itself was often equally poor. In the Great Plains of America, drought had reduced the farms to a dust bowl of wind-eroded soil. In Britain, demoralized farmers had reduced their costs by spreading less fertilizing lime on their land, and leaving ditches and hedges in a state of disrepair. Rather than improving their grassland they fed their animals with cheap imported fodder.22 Similarly, Japanese farmers had cut back on repairs and improvements.23 Mechanization of farming was only just beginning and draught animals and humans were the main sources of strength on most farms. Pesticides, weedkillers and artificial fertilizers were in their infancy. John Cherrington, on his farm in Hampshire, fought a losing battle against docks, ragwort, thistles, couch grass and charlock, wireworms, leatherjackets, slugs, rooks and rabbits, with ploughs, hoes and guns the only weapons at his disposal.24 In many countries the productivity and efficiency of agriculture lagged far behind industry. In parts of Germany farmers wasted hours of each day walking between their widely dispersed fields.25