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

by Lizzie Collingham

  There was some justification for the Americans’ mistrust of British claims. A tendency to overestimate stock requirements and to err on the side of safety was built into the British food system.60 But Wickard was cavalier when, in the face of British protests, he suggested that the meat diversion scheme with Australia should be abandoned. The British were not in a position to revert to their old sources of frozen meat. The Australians had already refocused their meat industry on canning, and a drought in South America meant that there were shortages in Argentina. Robert Brand eventually appealed directly to the White House through Harry Hopkins, Roosevelt’s closest adviser and the chief administrator of lend-lease. Brand pointed out that while the amount of meat the United States had pledged to export represented just 2 per cent of what the Americans ate themselves, it represented 10 per cent of the British meat ration.61 Hopkins agreed to divert frozen meat destined for the Soviet Union to Britain and pledged 250,000 tons in the future. The United States finally introduced meat rationing in March 1943 and this helped to ensure that this pledge was honoured and Britain was able to rebuild its stocks.62

  Nevertheless, throughout the worst months of the Battle of the Atlantic British civilians were never confronted with the problem of hunger, let alone the spectre of starvation. In his memoirs Lord Woolton asserted that ‘the country never realized how nearly we were brought to disaster by the submarine peril’. He then went on to tell the story of how five ships, all of them carrying bacon, were sunk on the same day. The Ministry of Food had to go to great lengths to make up for the losses. It diverted stock from Liverpool and sent special lorries to distribute around the country the load of the one ship which did arrive. Woolton ended the anecdote dramatically, ‘We honoured the ration but it was a near thing.’63 This is a tale of temporary shortage overcome, not catastrophe averted. In fact, the British, having become accustomed to rationing, were managing well. Laboratory technician Edward Stebbing was of the realistic opinion that although ‘the first nine months of 1942 were perhaps the most depressing of the war … [and] some restrictions have proved irksome … I think we are better off than most other countries at war and that we could put up with much more inconvenience before we could be said to know what real hardship is’.64 In January 1942, a year after concluding that the food outlook was grim, the journalist Maggie Joy Blunt reflected in her Mass Observation diary, ‘we have been and are promised to be the best fed nation in Europe … A regular supply of butter, marg, cooking fat, cheese, bacon, sugar and tea arrives each week. As much bread and flour as I need. Custard powder and starchy things like rice, tapioca and so on can be had at intervals liberally without “points”. The milk ration is helped out by tinned and powdered varieties. There are still plenty of tinned beans, carrots and soups. Potatoes, carrots and some greens at nearly normal prices. Eggs are very scarce. Meat is more difficult than it was, but there is often sausage meat and corned beef as substitutes and makeweights. Fruit is very scarce but I have had several lots of good apples from the greengrocer recently and occasionally dried fruit.’65 In contrast to the devastating impact which the United States blockade had upon Japan, ‘there was never any real likelihood that Britain would starve or even that the Allied land campaigns would be seriously handicapped, let alone halted, through losses at sea’.66

  The most serious threat to the British food supply in 1942–43 was not the submarines but the American decision not to honour the promise to replace Australian meat supplies, combined with the US military’s determination to prioritize military shipments over British civilian food cargoes. In May 1943 when, at 28 ounces a week, the newly introduced American meat ration was double that of the British, Somervell’s Chief of Transportation C. P. Gross asserted that the British ‘were still living “soft” and could easily stand further reductions’.67 The British food officials in Washington usually won the arguments and managed to secure shipping space and cargoes but they never managed to convince the Americans that their requirements were legitimate.68

  VICTORY IN THE ATLANTIC

  Victory in the Atlantic was achieved through the enormous American shipbuilding programme which began to gather momentum in 1942. At his shipyards on the west coast Henry Kaiser applied the principles of mass production, learnt in the automobile industry, to ships. The Liberty ships were built to a standard design out of prefabricated pieces which were then welded together. This was much quicker than riveting.69 Chauncey Del French and his wife Jessie moved to Vancouver, Washington, to work at the Kaiser shipyards, along with 38,000 others. They lived in makeshift housing at Ogden Meadows, one of the eight housing projects hastily constructed for the influx of workers. The cooking and bathing facilities were rudimentary, the walls so thin that they could hear their neighbours sneeze two apartments away.70 Vancouver itself was transformed into a huge gambling den with queues of men waiting to play at the poker tables in every beer parlour. The food stores never closed.71 Chauncey worked as a pipe fitter in the hectically busy shipyard. ‘Blue prints were runoff twenty four hours a day, stopping for only a half hour for lunch and between shifts to clean the machine. The prints came off in a continuous run and then were cut, trimmed and folded to specifications. Girls on motor scooters carried folders full of blueprints to where they were needed.’72 Jessie was a sweeper. This was a tough, dirty job, cleaning up the oil, water and bits of metal left behind by the construction teams before the painters moved in. ‘Work never stopped on the ships. Early in the morning or late at night it was possible to hear the roar of construction at Ogden Meadows, five miles from the shipyard.’73 Men and women lost their lives in accidents but Chauncey regarded their deaths as ‘no different than [those experienced by] a fighting combat division in the front line’.74

  The American shipbuilding programme is one of the most striking examples of the United States’ immense productive powers, with which the Axis could not hope to compete. By the spring of 1942 it took just two months to build one ship and the average evened out at forty-two days.75 In 1943 three ships a day were rolling out of the eighteen shipyards producing Liberty ships around the United States. Each ship represented 14,000 tons of shipping and could carry a cargo of 10,000 tons. By 1943, as fast as Dönitz and his crews could sink ships, Kaiser and his workers built them. By the beginning of 1943 new construction was producing 1.5 million tons’ worth more shipping than was sunk at sea, and throughout 1944 the rate was sustained at a steady 2 million tons over and above the replacement of losses.76

  Meanwhile, from mid-1943 the Allies began to beat back the U-boat threat in the Atlantic. The development of radar gave them a powerful new weapon, which denied the submarines their invisibility, and more up-to-date escort ships carrying better-trained crews improved the protection of convoys. The Allies learned that the most effective way of disposing of the submarines was to attack them by both sea and air as they approached their prey. Air cover from bases in Greenland and Iceland greatly improved the North Atlantic convoys’ chances and the air gap was later filled by planes from aircraft carriers. The behind-the-scenes work of decoding enemy communications carried out by the team of academics at Bletchley Park meant that, bar a gap in 1941–42, the Allies always knew more or less where the U-boats were lying in wait. In October 1943 the US Admiral Ernest King relegated the U-boats to the category of a problem rather than a menace.77

  Britain’s food supply benefited. The percentage of imports lost to sinkings fell to 0.6 in the last quarter of 1943. More shipping was available for the long-haul routes to Australia and New Zealand and increased imports of mutton and lamb from the southern Dominions boosted British meat imports. By the end of the year the Ministry of Food had built up stocks of about 6.7 million tons of food (before the war stock levels had run at about 2.5 million tons). The food warehouses were so full that sugar and oilseeds had to be kept outside under tarpaulin.78 More importantly, by the end of that year the Allies were in a position to take the military initiative and on 6 June 1944 they finally launched their attac
k on German forces in continental Europe and invaded France.

  Despite the large food reserves which the Ministry of Food had managed to amass towards the end of 1943, British food officials were unable to relax. It could be argued that they developed a form of ‘stocks hypochondria’.79 This was inflamed by the battles they fought in the committee rooms of the Combined Food and Combined Shipping Adjustments Boards. Here discussions were guided by an unspoken hierarchy of food entitlement, which reflected the balance of power in the Allied world. The United States military effortlessly placed themselves at the pinnacle of this hierarchy. Next in line were American civilians. The United States food administration continually demonstrated its unwillingness to impose strict consumption restrictions on the American public, and even when rationing was introduced Americans received the most generous food allocations of any country in the world. It was no wonder that those responsible for feeding British civilians, who came fourth in line after their own military forces, felt that they needed to fiercely defend British civilian supplies against the encroachments of the US food officials.

  In the closing years of the war it became increasingly clear that a severe food shortage threatened the world once the war was won. As the British tried to maintain supplies in order to preserve large food stocks against this contingency, Anglo-American wrangling continued. O. A. Hall of the Ministry of War Transport exclaimed in January 1944, ‘[the] squabbling that goes on as to how many ½ ships we have against so many, 7/8 of a ship … simply drives one crazy, and … will cause us perhaps to overlook the really important things in life!’80 Throughout 1944 the British constantly found American allocations contingent on their willingness to distribute their hard-earned food stocks to newly liberated Europeans.81 These disputes were to continue long after victory in Europe when the Allies were indeed confronted by a worldwide food shortage of catastrophic proportions.

  7

  Mobilizing the British Empire

  A populace three-parts starved is in no state to support armies or resist dangerous rumours. It may be a seedbed for devastating epidemics of disease which spread to the troops.

  (Editorial in The Statesman, August 1943)1

  Narratives of the Second World War frequently represent Britain as an island nation standing bravely alone against the Nazi domination of Europe. But Britain was by no means alone. Although the war is often represented as the beginning of the end for empire, in fact, between 1939 and 1945 the empire can be said to have come into its own as a ‘formidable, efficient and effective power system, prepared to exploit its apparently limitless resources, and able to deploy large-scale fighting forces simultaneously throughout the world’.2 The empire was presented at the time as pulling together in Britain’s hour of need and there was undeniably a sense of this among its many peoples. After the fall of France, and Britain’s ignominious withdrawal from Dunkirk, Australians rallied to the British cause and more than 100,000 volunteered for the armed forces between June and August 1940.3 The chiefs of Bechuanaland drew on a deep-seated loyalty to the long-dead Queen Victoria to rally their men to fight for Britain, their traditional defender against the rapacious South Africa Company, and within six months had recruited 5,500 men for the British army.4 Men from Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) fought alongside Indians, Ceylonese, and Africans from Basutoland (now Lesotho), Bechuanaland (now Botswana), the Gambia, the Gold Coast, Kenya, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Swaziland, Tanganyika (now Tanzania) and Uganda. British military manpower came from as far afield as Mauritius and the Seychelles, and Britain had two important military bases in the empire, in Egypt and India, while the United States used Australia and New Zealand as their Pacific base.

  There was, however, tension between this projected image of working together for a common cause and the exploitation inherent in the notion of empire. Throughout the later part of the war, for example, the Australians found themselves sacrificing lives in campaigns in New Guinea with barely any strategic significance. Yet they felt they had to continue to take an active role in the military campaign in orderto claim their right to influence the post-war settlement.5 In Britain, the Secretary of State pronounced that the colonies could contribute to the war effort by dispensing with unnecessary consumption, reducing imports and building up reserves of food. The Resident Commissioner in Bechuanaland responded that the majority of Africans were already consuming a bare subsistence diet, and that the poorer sections of society were already ‘taxed to the limit’.6 He found it difficult to see how the poor, who made up most of the African population, could find room to make extra sacrifices.

  The war intensified the exploitative nature of colonialism. The British sold imperial assets to the Americans in return for lend-lease and used the empire to levy taxes and raise what amounted to forced loans. Government intervention in ordinary people’s lives increased substantially. Africans were told what crops to plant and were forcibly recruited to work in tin mines in Nigeria and on white settlers’ farms in Southern Rhodesia.7 Before the war the philosophy that colonies should be self-supporting rather than a drain on the British government’s budget perpetuated under-development. The financial resources to stimulate industrial growth and manufacturing were not made available. In 1940 a new attitude to colonial government was ushered in by the Colonial Development and Welfare Act which acknowledged the need for colonial administrations to facilitate the economic development of the countries in Britain’s possession.8 The under-development which the earlier policy had fostered ran counter to the needs of the war effort. First and foremost, colonial economic and industrial development during the war facilitated Britain’s exploitation of its empire’s resources.

  War industries burgeoned in the colonies as the shipping shortage reduced the amount of imports arriving and gaps opened up in the market. Often the level of manufacturing remained basic, processing foodstuffs, providing materials for the building industry and small goods for the armed forces. In Nigeria, production of rubber, columbite (used in making metal alloys), coal, cotton, ropes, bricks and tiles, and soap all increased under the pressure of wartime shortages.9 If industrial development was small-scale it still contributed to the greater war effort by making the colonies less of a burden on Britain. It also relieved some of the pressure on Allied shipping by supplying goods and foodstuffs to the military bases scattered across the empire. In India, industry adjusted to a war footing. The iron and steel company Tata expanded and began producing motor engines, parts for aircraft, landing craft and large quantities of munitions. Most of all, India produced billions of yards of cloth for the military and is said to have ‘clothed the armies east of Suez’, while it also supplied them with millions of blankets and tents.10

  There were groups within colonial societies who profited greatly from the growth of these war industries. Indian industrialists and businessmen reaped phenomenal rewards as the fixed prices set by the government of India left them with a large profit margin, and many in India added to their incomes by evading taxation.11 In some parts of the colonial world cultivators were also able to cash in as the drop in food imports created an insatiable demand for home-grown food. In the wheat-growing region of the Punjab the price of wheat rose by 300 per cent. Farmers paid off their debts, invested in irrigation and took up the high-status habit of sipping tea in the evenings. Villagers from Rampura in Mysore sold as much of their rice and sugar as they could on the black market and used their substantial gains to send their sons to school and to expand into shops and rice mills.12 In Niumi, a district of the Gambia, women from the villages around the town of Bathurst grew extra tomatoes to sell in the market and became relatively wealthy, although the drastic cut in the import of consumer goods meant that there was little for them to buy.13

  Throughout the colonial world the arrival of Allied troops, the recruitment of men into the armed forces, who sent remittances back to their families, and the creation of new and comparatively well-paid jobs led to unprece
dented levels of cash flowing into previously impoverished economies. This increased the demand for consumer goods just as the shipping crisis led to their scarcity. Inevitably, this resulted in inflation. In Britain, strict price controls and rationing protected civilians from wartime inflation and, in particular, rising food prices. But colonial administrations showed themselves less willing to intervene to protect their more vulnerable subjects from the negative economic impact of war. The exception to this rule was the Middle East, where the Middle East Supply Centre (MESC) successfully reorganized trade and agriculture within the region and prevented food shortages from sparking off social unrest. The success of the MESC suggests that, given the political will, the British might have made a better job of harnessing the economic potential of the rest of the colonial world while at the same time protecting its inhabitants from hunger and starvation.

  Elsewhere in the empire measures to stimulate domestic food production and maintain reasonable prices remained much more limited. British colonial administrations argued that it was impossible to impose rationing on food systems which were dispersed and beyond full colonial control. In Bechuanaland the British relied on a ‘gentleman’s agreement’ with the food traders who ran the stores in the African reserves, that they would not increase prices unfairly. Of course, this was continually ignored. The purchase of items which no one wanted would be made compulsory by the traders on the purchase of a more desired foodstuff.14 The Government Secretary wrote to the district administration in 1943 to complain that men in the armed forces were receiving letters from their wives at home complaining that they did not have enough to eat. ‘In view of the allotments made to their wives by the men [out of their pay packets] it is difficult to understand this complaint unless traders in the Territory are making more profit than they should on essential foodstuffs.’15 But the district claimed (probably fairly) that it could not afford the ‘large and expert staff’ which would be needed to enforce price controls.