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

by Lizzie Collingham

  The autumn and winter of 1940–41 was the worst period for British food during the entire war. At the end of January 1941 Maggie Joy Blunt, a freelance journalist keeping a diary for Mass Observation, summed up the atmosphere of foreboding in Britain. ‘It is as though we are beginning to see at last the slow subsidence of our river of wealth. We are not starving, we are not even underfed but our usually well-stocked food shops have an empty and anxious air. Cheese, eggs, onions, oranges, luxury fruits and vegetables are practically unobtainable … Housewives are having to queue for essential foods. We live on potatoes, carrots, sprouts, swedes, turnips, artichokes and watercress … the meat ration … was cut at the beginning of the month and now includes all the offal we could once buy without coupons … Prices are rising. We are warned by statesmen repeatedly that Hitler intends to invade us … The outlook really seems very grim indeed.’20

  The low point in the food supply was exacerbated by initial problems in the newly created wartime administration. The Ministry of Food had not yet developed a clear strategy of how to feed the British population and in the first year and a half of the war tended to concentrate on one shortage at a time, rather than developing an all-encompassing policy. They responded to the meat shortage by encouraging consumers to stretch out the meat ration with oats. The price of oats was subsidized and an advertising campaign started. However, the Ministry failed to take into account the limited facilities for milling oatmeal and the result was a shortage of oats in the shops.21 People were unable to eke out their protein allowance by turning to fish, as the closure of fishing grounds and military requisitions from the fleet had reduced the catch and made fish very expensive, much to everyone’s dissatisfaction.22 The public also complained vociferously about the disappearance of onions, the supply of which from continental Europe and the Channel Islands had been cut. The Ministry responded by controlling their price but this drove the few onions that were available under shop counters.23 However, even in this difficult period it was only the meat ration which came under real threat and a solution was found. The fast refrigerated ships took the troops as far as South Africa where they transferred to slower vessels to complete their voyage to Egypt. The reefers (as refrigerated vessels were known) then sailed on to Argentina to pick up frozen meat supplies.24 The U-boat threat was to get much worse, but the cut in the meat ration in early 1941 was the only time during the entire war that the Ministry was unable to provide the amount of food which it guaranteed the population through the ration. It was the government’s failure to plan for a sudden and acute shortage of shipping, combined with the problems that surrounded the organization of the ports and transport, and, finally, the demands of the military campaign, which posed the greatest threat to civilian food supplies in the second winter of the war.

  THE AMERICAN LIFELINE

  In March 1941 Churchill took action. He set up the Battle of the Atlantic Committee, which concentrated its efforts on getting the docks running as efficiently as possible and released 40,000 men from the armed forces to work in the shipyards repairing the backlog of 800,000 tons of damaged ships.25 At the same time the Americans introduced the lend-lease programme, which enabled Roosevelt to support the Allied war effort without actually taking the unpopular step of declaring war. One of the positive side-effects of this was that the British no longer needed to pay for their imports with exports and this allowed dock workers to concentrate on channelling imports into the country as quickly as possible before sending the ships on their way to pick up another cargo. Lend-lease also provided for the repair of British ships in American ports, alleviating the pressure on British shipyards.26

  Moreover, lend-lease made plentiful supplies of American food available to the British. It enabled the Ministry to provide British civilians with sufficient quantities of meat to make the ration bearable, it provided tinned and dried foods and it supplied Britain with the cod liver oil and orange juice which allowed the government to transform the ration into an instrument of welfare provision for the needier sections of society.27 In fact, Britain’s reliance on imported foods was to turn out to be one of the strengths of the food-rationing system. Imports could generally be relied upon to arrive in the quantities that the Ministry had requested (the requests made allowance for the fact that a proportion of the imports would be sunk on their way to Britain). In contrast, the domestic food supply was often harder to manage as the yields of various crops, especially potatoes, were far harder to predict.28 However, the reliance on American food was not without its problems. From March 1941 British food officials were caught up in endless wrangling with American officials over the quantities of food which Britain requested.

  Immediately after the introduction of lend-lease the British made a mistake which would sour Anglo-American negotiations over food throughout the rest of the war. After the miserable food situation of the winter of 1940–41 Churchill decided to prioritize the import of foodstuffs over raw materials and acceded to Minister of Food Lord Woolton’s request for a target of 15 million tons of food imports for 1941. This decision was definitely unwise. Churchill was often to prove a liability when he intervened in shipping allocation, and Woolton had failed to pay sufficient attention to actual food availability in America.29

  The United States had not yet joined the war and rationing had not been imposed on the American consumer. In fact the Americans were enjoying a meat-eating bonanza. A juicy steak was the American meal of choice, regarded as perfect sustenance for a hard-working man. But rationing during the First World War, recession and inflation in the 1920s, followed by the Depression of the 1930s, meant that for several decades Americans had been denied the chance to indulge in red meat. Rising employment and wages in the war industries had given Americans the opportunity to satisfy their love of beef. The farmers responded by implementing the largest ever increase in livestock production. There was plenty of meat in the United States but American per capita consumption had risen from 126 pounds to 141 pounds a year and there were no extra supplies available to meet the increased British demands.30

  The only foodstuff available in the United States in sufficient bulk to fill the cabinet orders to import 15 million tons of food was grain for animal feed: 276,000 tons of feed grains were duly shipped to Britain. Cabinet Office economists indignantly pointed out that beef cattle were eating shipping space while the blast furnaces of Britain were idle for lack of raw materials.31 Feed imports were stopped but the food quota was not revised to allow for food to be replaced by raw materials. British officials feared that if they admitted that meat stock requirements had been set too high then American food officials would be discouraged from doing their utmost to find meat supplies to fill the cargo quotas. Meanwhile, those in charge of finding a cargo for the ships ended up loading the only foodstuffs that were available – wheat and sugar, neither of which the British needed in such large quantities. When the imports arrived in Britain the Ministry of Food stockpiled them. Illogically, this did not create a sense of abundance. The Ministry was always fearful that food imports might fall further and they sat on the stocks rather than distributing them, and in the end much of the food went to waste.32 The most damaging consequence of the entire incident was that American food officials now regarded British estimates of their needs, especially their figures for necessary reserve stocks, with immense scepticism. Woolton’s inflated food import quota had done nothing to improve the protein content in the British diet. This was achieved by increasing meat imports from Argentina. Instead it had created an atmosphere of mutual distrust between food officials which flourished once the Americans entered the war on 7 December 1941.33

  FROZEN MEAT VERSUS MEN AND ARMS

  As the war progressed the Ministry of Food found itself caught in a double bind. While insisting that it was doing a good job and that the people of Britain were being well fed, it needed to convince its allies that every effort must be made to supply Britain with food and that a drop in imports would be disastrous.34 Towards the
end of 1942 British food officials once again came into conflict with their counterparts in the United States over meat supplies. The dispute coincided with the worst period for Britain’s shipping in the autumn and winter of 1942–43.

  That summer Hitler finally prioritized the U-boat blockade of Britain, and increased submarine production meant that Admiral Dönitz took command of thirty new U-boats a month. His force was at last approaching the 300-strong mark that he had always argued was essential to success.35 U-boat sinkings of merchant shipping began to bite deep. Meanwhile, Germany had attacked the Soviet Union and the United States had officially entered the war. Both Stalin and the American chiefs of staff were eager to open a second front against Germany on continental Europe. General George C. Marshall, the United States Army Chief of Staff, visited Britain in April 1942 to lobby for a cross-Channel offensive. This put enormous additional pressure on British shipping, as it required the build-up of American troops (and their supplies) in Britain in preparation for an assault. Each American infantry division needed a substantial 32,000 tons of scarce shipping to transport its men and all their equipment across the Atlantic.36

  The Allies simply did not have enough ships to cope with the competing requirements to ship adequate civilian food supplies, raw materials to support the armaments industry, and enough military materiel and men to challenge German supremacy on the European continent.37 As the German Naval War Staff smugly pointed out in October 1942: ‘They have or manufacture enough, but they cannot transport enough for waging war, the economy, and their food supply.’38 This was a limitation that American generals were unwilling to accept. Generals Marshall, B. B. Somervell, Commander of Army Service Forces, and Somervell’s Chief of Transportation, C. P. Gross, were extremely unwilling to prioritize British civilian food imports over military shipping requirements. Somervell was ruthless. He would requisition shipping without any regard for civilian allocations and tried to establish his authority over the loading of all ships so that he could de-prioritize food imports whenever military needs arose.39

  In the end it was clear to both the British and the Americans that at this stage in the war an invasion of France would have little chance of success and a compromise was reached over the question of a second front.40 It was agreed to launch an invasion of North Africa from the west, codenamed Operation Torch. Even this smaller-scale military campaign exacted a high price in terms of civilian supplies. Cargo vessels had to be re-routed to provide military supplies, and naval escorts were diverted from merchant shipping to troop ships. It was decided that this could be compensated for by allowing the faster ships in the merchant fleet to sail fast and alone rather than in slow convoys. But this made them more vulnerable, and twenty-four ships sailing on their own were sunk that autumn. The preparations for Operation Torch cost Britain a 30 per cent reduction in imports in 1942.41

  Between April and September 1942 Lord Woolton was forced to use stocks of canned corned beef to make up one-seventh of the meat ration. Butchers opened the large tins and then allocated portions of corned beef according to the shopper’s entitlement. Editha Blaikley, who lived in Sussex with her sister and brother-in-law, commented on her corned-beef supper: ‘It must go to the hearts of good butchers to weigh out tiny rations of corned beef instead of cutting up proper joints to their customers’ tastes.’42 In August the American War Shipping Administration suggested relieving some of the strain on British shipping by diverting Australian meat to feed the US troops who were building up in Australia and New Zealand ready for an attack on Japanese strongholds in the Pacific. America would compensate for Britain’s loss of most of its frozen meat imports by filling the quota from American meat production. By switching meat imports on to the North Atlantic short haul, two and a half times more cargo could be carried in the same time that it took to transport one load from the southern Dominions.43

  The Americans pledged to send an extra 263,000 tons of frozen meat and offal to Britain in 1942–43. This represented a mere 4 per cent of American frozen meat production and appeared to be a reasonable quota.44 Meat production in the United States was at a record high. But competition for American meat had become even more intense since the Soviet Union and the United States had entered the war. In September 1941 Roosevelt’s special envoy to Britain, Averell Harriman, had gone to Moscow to negotiate with Stalin over Allied assistance in the fight against Germany on the eastern front. Harriman enthusiastically supported the Soviets in their claim that they would be key in defeating the Wehrmacht and in November 1941 the United States began sending the Soviet Union 500,000 tons of lend-lease food per month. The Soviets, like the British, wanted concentrated high-calorie foods such as canned and frozen meat, cheese and eggs. Throughout 1942 the dangerous convoys through the Baltic to Murmansk and Archangel used up shipping space which would otherwise have brought imports into Britain, and was extremely costly in the long term as shipping losses on this route were almost 20 per cent.45

  The United States army alone took 60 per cent of ‘US choice’ grade cuts of beef.46 American civilians were also clamouring for meat, and voiced their dissatisfaction at the lack of high-grade meat in the shops. Catherine Renee Young complained to her husband in a letter in February 1943: ‘Yesterday I didn’t take any meat not because we didn’t have any but because I’m sick of the same thing … we hardly ever see good steak anymore. And steak is the main meat that gives us strength. My Dad just came back from the store and all he could get was blood pudding and how I hate that.’47 In the autumn of 1942 the United States government launched a ‘Share the Meat’ campaign. But posters depicting how the American family of Mom, Dad, Johnny and Suzy had been joined at their loaded dining table by a GI, a US marine, a Russian, a Briton and a Mexican, did little to persuade Americans to cut their meat consumption even by the small target amount of 11 pounds a year.48 The United States failed to meet its targets for the meat exports it had promised. By January and February 1943 the Americans were delivering only half of the 40,000 tons of frozen meat a month which they had pledged.49

  In November 1942 the British Ministry of Food began to panic. On 8 November the Allies launched Operation Torch and American and British troops landed on the shores of Morocco and Algeria. The troops needed resupplying continuously and the heavy and prolonged battle in Tunisia meant that supply requirements were unexpectedly high well into 1943.50 Sinkings of merchant ships reached their peak in November 1942 with the loss of 700,000 tons of shipping to submarine attacks and another 160,000 tons of shipping destroyed by aircraft and mines.51 About 9 per cent of all food shipments to Britain were sunk. Meanwhile, 155,738 cubic metres of frozen food, earmarked for export to Britain, rotted on the docks of the American east coast ports while waiting for shipping. The military cold storage warehouses were empty but Somervell would not allow them to be used for civilian export cargoes.52 The Ministry of Food reminded both the British cabinet and United States food officials that without imports of flour, meat, fats and sugar Britain could only hold out for four to six months.53 Lord Cherwell, Churchill’s scientific adviser, warned ‘we are trying with the equivalent of about one-third of normal fleet to feed this country and maintain it in full war production … With all the extra military demands which have emerged … it is not surprising that our imports, which have always been regarded as some sort of inverted residuary legatee, have suffered severely. But this cannot go on.’54 In March 1943 the Ministry warned the War Cabinet that Britain was consuming three-quarters of a million tons more goods than it was importing and within two months reserves would have run dry.55 Lord Cherwell sent a veiled threat to the United States military, who were busy planning to launch an invasion of continental Europe: ‘we could hardly undertake new [military] operations, however favourable the opportunity, with stocks so near exhaustion’.56

  Robert Brand of the British Food Mission in Washington was willing to concede to his American counterparts that Britain could manage short-term gaps in the supply. But, he argued, living unde
r the threat of the German blockade, the British could not cope with a lack of guarantees or even the abandonment of a programme which ensured frozen and canned meat and cheese to Britain’s workers. One of the strengths of relying on food imports was that in theory they were more predictable than agricultural harvests and therefore guaranteed the safety of Britain’s food supply. The United States Minister of Agriculture, Claude Wickard, showed no signs of distress over the American failure to meet its meat export quotas and gave the impression, by referring to the British as ‘companions in misfortune’, that it was beyond his control to remedy the situation.57 The American food administration was hampered by the fact that it did not fully control the meat trade and it had failed to build up sufficient stores of food stocks. This created repeated localized meat shortages in United States cities and meant that there were insufficient stores to draw upon to fill quotas for exports to Britain.58 Officials were particularly worried that meat rationing might be introduced before they had managed to solve the problem of distribution and stocks in order to guarantee that they could honour the ration in the cities. But the real nub of the problem was the fact that American War Shipping Administration officials were suspicious of British claims, certain that the British were not being candid about their figures. They were firmly convinced that British meat stocks were, in fact, more than adequate. Jealous of British stocks, and distrustful of British protestations, American food officials had decided to implement a forced reduction in British reserves by refusing a certain quantity of the promised exports.59