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

by Lizzie Collingham

  The most important supplier of food to Britain (apart from the United States) was its empire in the form of the Commonwealth. What is most striking is the willingness of these governments to restructure their own agricultural sectors so that they could meet Britain’s new import requirements. Perhaps the most extreme example of this is the case of the five Australian mutton dehydration factories which were set up in response to the British government’s concern about its meat stocks. The dehydrated mutton was intended as an emergency food reserve which would take up very little shipping space. The experiment proved extremely expensive. It took nearly seven pounds of mutton at 2 s. 2 ½ d. per pound to produce one pound of dehydrated meat. When reconstituted, one pound made up three and a half pounds of an extremely unpleasant lumpy grey mince. The revolting reconstituted mutton was a perfect example of how to take poor-quality food and make it almost inedible. As it turned out the British never needed to resort to dehydrated mutton as a component of their meat ration. Once the 1942–43 shipping crisis was over, the Australians closed down their mutton dehydration plants and shouldered the financial loss.50

  At the beginning and at the end of the war Australia supplied Britain with much of its frozen meat, but the United States and Canada were the main suppliers in 1943, when Australian meat was diverted to feed the United States army in the Pacific. Canadian agriculture mirrored Britain’s restructuring process in reverse as the farmers switched from arable to livestock farming. On the western plains farmers were encouraged to decrease their wheat production and to start growing coarse feed grains, which were then used to fatten the country’s growing herds of pigs and cattle. Canada replaced Denmark as Britain’s chief supplier of bacon, providing the island with four-fifths of its bacon by the end of the war.51 Canada’s agricultural story is very similar to that of the United States. The war brought its farming sector out of depression and solved the problem of rural unemployment by siphoning surplus labour into industry. The number of farms declined, while their size increased, and farmers earned enough to buy expensive capital inputs such as machines and chemicals which greatly improved productivity.52

  New Zealand in its turn restructured its dairy industry in order to accommodate Britain’s new demands. Before the war New Zealand had supplied Britain with large quantities of butter, but butter was almost purely an energy food, providing plenty of calories but only traces of protein and minerals. Cheese, in contrast, provided protein, calcium and phosphorus as well as energy. In terms of shipping space it was more economic than meat as it contained more than twice the energy and protein per cubic foot of shipping space of frozen lamb.53 The British government put in a request to the New Zealand Ministry of Agriculture to switch dairy production from butter to cheese. The New Zealanders obliged and reorganized their dairy factories so that by 1942 New Zealand was exporting 132,000 tons of cheese to Britain, compared to 80,000 tons in 1938–39. But then in 1942 the British changed their minds. The American supply of cheese was surprisingly good but Japanese successes in south-east Asia had cut the British off from a large proportion of their supply of vegetable oil for margarine. The co-operative New Zealanders reorganized yet again and refitted their factories so that they could once again make butter.54 However, the poor farming season of 1942–43 meant that butter rationing had to be introduced for the first time and New Zealanders cut their annual butter consumption from 48 pounds a head to 36 pounds in 1945 in order to make butter available for the British.55

  By 1942 the number of ships arriving at New Zealand’s ports had decreased considerably but they were able to maintain their meat exports by de-boning and telescoping their beef, lamb and mutton. De-boning beef was an ingenious space-saving technique invented by the United States army. All the bones, fat and least nutritious cuts were removed from the carcasses, which were then compressed into fifty-pound boxes. It took about 60 per cent less space than meat carcasses, which had to be hung, and thus made better use of the space in the refrigerated ships, which were extremely scarce. Dehydration and canning also reduced the bulk of meat exports and the New Zealanders stepped up these industries as well. Overall, New Zealand’s meat production increased by 14 per cent, but it was still necessary to introduce meat rationing in March 1944 in order to ensure a sufficient surplus to meet Britain’s order.56

  Britain’s most important South American trading partner, Argentina, faced an appalling 70 per cent reduction in the amount of shipping (in tonnage) arriving at its ports. The Argentinians showed great resourcefulness in coping with the shipping shortage. Even though the volume of Argentinian exports had to be greatly reduced, they still managed to maintain the value of their food exports. The solution was to process every foodstuff before it was shipped. This not only reduced the bulk of food exports but added to their value. With the massive decline in global demand for animal feed, Argentina doubled the size of its own hog herds and processed the maize – which they would normally have exported – into canned pork. Oilseeds were pressed into vegetable oil, beef was de-boned or canned.57 Indeed, Argentinian corned beef filled British warehouses, as it made up the bulk of the British meat reserve. Argentina eventually supplied Britain with 40 per cent of all its wartime meat requirements.58

  The processing of meat by means of de-boning, telescoping and canning meant that Britain was able to maintain its meat imports at their pre-war level.59 Given that half of Britain’s meat was imported before the war and that domestic livestock farming was cut back during the war, these techniques played a vital role in maintaining the meat ration. If the processing of food in order to save shipping space was essential it also led to the creation of some of the most unsavoury of wartime foods. Perhaps the most detested was dried egg. The British Ministry of Food’s Department of Scientific and Industrial Research developed the technique for spray-drying eggs to create a powder which took up only 20 per cent of the shipping space required for fresh eggs. The United States over-produced eggs, and there was never any shortage of the powder.60 Every four weeks each British household was entitled to a grey packet of dried egg which was supposedly equivalent to a dozen fresh eggs.61 But egg powder was no substitute for the real thing. No matter how much it was whipped into a froth it failed to aerate cake mixtures. The British stubbornly continued to use egg powder to make omelettes and scrambled eggs.62 ‘The two words which still make my blood run cold, are DRIED EGG,’ wrote Jill Beattie, who was at a boarding school during the war. ‘The very worst breakfast … was a two inch block of hard scrambled egg oozing with water which saturated the half slice of so-called toast beneath it – and the TASTE – ugh!’63 Processed cheese was no better. Ernst van Someren, a chemist living in Hertfordshire, flavoured his family’s omelettes (made with eggs from their own chickens) with processed ‘cheese’ from a tube, ‘a soapy wartime product with no consistency and poor keeping quality, unfit to eat raw’.64

  A variety of other unspeakable powders and pastes was manufactured. Doreen Laven recalled that, ‘towards the end of the war dried banana powder appeared but we all thought it disgusting. It became a joke that if we children were naughty we’d be made to eat a spoonful of it.’ Doreen had never tasted a banana and was bothered by the model bunches of the fruit which still hung in greengrocers’ displays. She often pestered adults to describe the taste, ‘an impossible question, bananas aren’t like anything except bananas’.65 The one product which processing rendered more desirable, at least in children’s eyes, was milk. As a wartime child my mother would sneak into her neighbour’s pantry to steal a spoonful of condensed milk from any tins that were already opened. Tins of condensed milk also became a useful commodity for barter between soldiers and civilians.

  The reorganization of British agriculture was an essential element in securing the island’s food supply but it was Britain’s continued reliance on imports which was the real strength of the food policy. Britain’s pivotal place in the world trade in commodities meant that it was able to draw on the food resources of a wide variety of countr
ies with more productive agricultural systems, from the United States to Argentina, the Commonwealth and the colonies (which will be discussed in another chapter) to the tiny neighbouring island of Iceland.66 Britain reduced its imports by weight but still managed to import 56 per cent of the calories consumed on the island. Thus condensing food was the key to keeping Britain fed. However, if the British did not sacrifice the energy content of their food they did sacrifice taste. The one weakness of the strategy was, of course, the fact that the ships which brought in these foodstuffs had to run the gauntlet of the German U-boats in the Atlantic. The next chapter asks whether the Battle of the Atlantic ever posed a real threat to Britain’s food supplies.

  6

  The Battle of the Atlantic

  The stability of [food] supplies … depended [on] a kind of specialist diplomacy in food matters, of which the most skilled exponents were the British Food Mission in Washington.

  (R. J. Hammond, historian of the British wartime food administration)1

  x

  On New Year’s Day 1940 the stationery salesman Christopher Tomlin noted in his Mass Observation diary that he had heard the nutritionist John Boyd Orr on the radio recommending porridge rather than bacon for breakfast and extolling the virtues of potatoes. ‘His propaganda point is to avoid imported foods and to grow as much as we can. Me to Mother and Father: “I don’t like to suggest it, but it looks as if the Government’s scared.” “How do you mean?” “They think we won’t be able to get enough food across with all these boats sunk”.’2 Churchill later recalled that ‘the Battle of the Atlantic was the dominating factor all through the war. Never for one moment could we forget that everything happening elsewhere, on land, at sea or in the air, depended ultimately on its outcome.’3 The Battle of the Atlantic evokes images of brave merchant seamen defying the U-boats and often paying with their lives, doughty Britons withstanding the hardship of life under siege and brilliant code-breakers at Bletchley Park cracking the German navy’s Enigma code, which enabled them to pinpoint where the U-boats were lying in wait for the merchant marine. But the battle was not only about German submarines, ominous menace though they were. More decisive in the struggle to supply Britain with all its wartime needs was the lack of shipping. It was this, combined with mismanagement at the ports, a creaking internal British rail network, and the U-boats, which led to a drastic fall in total imports arriving in Britain from 68 million tons before the war to 26 million tons in 1941.4

  The Battle of the Atlantic was also waged between the Allies themselves, in a struggle over shipping allocations. The British food supply was heavily dependent on the diplomatic skills of the men of the British Food Mission in Washington who represented Britain’s food needs at the Combined Food Board and worked hard to persuade the Americans and Britain’s other allies that British food requests were reasonable and that they should take priority over competing raw-material and military requirements.5 The success of the British Food Mission meant that although the Battle of the Atlantic hampered the Allies’ ability to conduct military operations, at no point in the war did it threaten the British people with hunger, let alone starvation.

  THE WORST WINTER OF THE WAR

  As German troops marched into Poland, Hitler ordered all submarines patrolling the ocean trade routes to attack hostile ships without warning.6 The Germans used submarines, planes and mines to sink the British merchant marine. Throughout 1940 Admiral Karl Dönitz, head of the U-boat arm of the German navy, was able to inflict severe damage on British merchant shipping with the fifty-seven submarines under his command.7 Without radar or sophisticated anti-submarine technology, the British navy were unable to provide ships with adequate protection from this invisible enemy. Among the U-boat crews the autumn of 1940 was known as the ‘happy time’. After sinking a record number of vessels the German sailors would arrive triumphant at their French bases to flower garlands and champagne. British sailors returned to their blacked-out ports with scenes in their heads of oil tankers instantan-eously bursting into flames, drowning men coated in oil and dead bodies floating in the jetsam of torpedoed ships. Nearly 6,000 British, Indian and African seamen died in 1940.8 By February 1941 Britain was losing ships three times as fast as the shipyards could build them. Meanwhile, the Luftwaffe was bombarding Britain from the air, damaging docks, transport links and food storage warehouses.9

  Despite the air of triumph which surrounded the submarine campaign against British merchant shipping, Germany did not direct more resources into U-boat production, which in 1940 only kept pace with losses. Neither Dönitz nor Admiral Erich Raeder, Commander-in-Chief of the German navy, could interest Hitler in their plans for naval economic warfare. Hitler still cherished unrealistic hopes of persuading Britain to ally with him, and, like the German Admiralty during the First World War, he was reluctant to provoke the United States by unleashing a ruthless campaign on its merchant marine. His priorities lay elsewhere, first with the invasion of France, and then with the attack on the Soviet Union. This meant that U-boat production was starved of the steel and labour needed to build a fleet of 300 submarines, which Döntiz argued would be necessary to have a decisive impact on Britain’s imports.10

  This was fortunate for Britain, as in the first year of the war the government discovered that it had badly miscalculated the negative impact war would have on shipping. During the First World War Britain had learned that fewer ships were sunk if they travelled together in convoys and the convoy system was introduced as soon as war broke out, but as all ships had to sail at the speed of the slowest vessel in the convoy this lengthened the journey time and meant that ships were often inconveniently re-routed. Chaos in the British ports made matters worse. The U-boats’ control over the North Sea meant that all shipping activity from the eastern ports had to be diverted to the Clyde, the Mersey and the Bristol Channel. Lack of storage space meant that goods piled up on the quays.11 Before the introduction of lend-lease Britain’s shortage of foreign exchange meant that as many export goods as possible needed to be loaded on to the ships to pay for the imports Britain needed. Relations between the dock workers and their employers were poor, and disaffected workers loading and unloading the ships in a desultory fashion, with inadequate equipment, delayed the entire process. The unnecessarily long ship turn-around in British ports reduced imports by 10 per cent.12

  This caused the first wartime food crisis. In 1939 the arrival of imports of bulk foodstuffs had already fallen far below expected levels and the government rapidly began to use up its stocks of wheat and flour. Wheat storage had been moved to the west of the country, as far out of reach of aerial bombardment as possible, but the transfer of shipping from the eastern to the western ports meant that Britain’s poor east–west rail links could not cope with the volume of traffic. The Ministry of Food struggled to convey sufficient supplies to the eastern flour mills, some of which ran out of grist. This did not affect supplies of bread to the population but it made the government extremely sensitive to falling stock levels, which it blamed, wrongly, for the problem. In December 1939 the cabinet affirmed that a minimum of thirteen weeks’ stock of flour was essential to ensure that the distribution of wheat did not break down. This figure failed to take into account that it was the way in which stocks were distributed around the country which had caused the problem, and was unnecessarily high. This early mistake reinforced a tendency to overestimate the necessary level of stocks and this was to be the cause of much bad feeling in the future between British and American food officials.13

  Britain’s war effort was entirely dependent on the continued arrival of imports for all of its oil, most raw materials for industry and more than half its food (in calories).14 The sudden cut in shipping led to industrial shortages in the first year of the war, and in response planners allocated loads of steel to ships which normally carried wheat across the Atlantic. The heavy cargoes damaged many of these ships as they crossed the seas in stormy winter weather and this intensified the shipping crisis by
taking ships out of action while they waited for repairs. The British shipbuilding industry had gone into decline in the 1930s and had not recovered by 1939. Lack of skilled workers, appalling relations between employers and their workers and run-down shipyards left Britain completely unable to repair these ships speedily and replace those which were sunk.15 Thus, the German U-boats were only one factor among many which caused the shipping crisis. At the beginning of the war the disorganization at the ports, longer journeys and delays, and the inadequacy of the shipbuilding industry were far more significant in causing the shipping shortage.16

  The crisis was compounded by military competition for shipping space. On 10 June 1940 Italy entered the Second World War and launched attacks from its colonies in Libya and Ethiopia on the British in North and East Africa. Churchill was determined to achieve victory in these campaigns and in order to do so he was prepared to compromise the quantity of civilian imports arriving in Britain. German U-boats had closed the Mediterranean to Allied shipping and all men and military supplies for the campaign had to make a 20,000-kilometre journey around the African Cape and up the Red Sea. In order to carry troops and their arms as quickly as possible, the fastest ships in the merchant fleet, the refrigerated ships, which normally carried frozen meat and dairy products, were withdrawn from carrying civilian cargoes and converted into troop carriers. Forty to fifty escort ships were also diverted from the protection of merchant shipping in the North Atlantic in order to escort them on their journey. Refrigerated ships were in extremely short supply and their diversion to military duties (combined with losses to enemy attack) resulted in a one-fifth reduction of the merchant marine’s refrigerated capacity. This cut refrigerated goods coming into Britain by 30 per cent. At the end of the year dairy and fruit imports had reached only half of their target level and frozen meat imports had fallen drastically.17 In addition, German bombing raids had ‘made serious inroads into our refrigerated stocks of meat’ and by January 1941 only two weeks’ worth of reserve stocks of frozen meat were left in Britain’s warehouses.18 The meat allowance, which had risen in September 1940 following the slaughter of livestock as feed-grain imports were reduced, was cut back to one shilling’s worth in March 1941. This amounted to about a pound of meat a week, although it could be stretched to a little more if choice cuts were avoided in favour of poorer cuts and offal.19