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

by Lizzie Collingham

  Palm oil is obtained from a kernel inside the stone of the palm fruit. In West Africa the job of extracting the kernel was done by women and children who would crack the stone open, using a rock. In an effort to stimulate villagers into greater palm kernel production, collecting stations were set up across West Africa, and competitions were organized to see which school could crack open the most stones and extract the kernels. Lord Swinton visited one such school in a remote part of eastern Nigeria where, to help them along with the work, the teacher and pupils had invented a song with a refrain which ran along the lines that they were ‘cracking Hitler on the head’.85 Given that it took up to a million of the feather-light kernels to make a ton in weight, West Africa’s wartime export of over 400,000 tons of kernels a year represented an incredible cracking effort on the part of its women and children. British housewives had West African villagers to thank for their weekly supplies of 2–3 ounces of margarine which supplemented the butter ration of 4 ounces.86 In his memoirs Swinton proudly related that ‘we won the battle of the fat ration’.87

  The palm oil produced in Nigeria was marketed through the West African Produce Control Board, originally set up to deal with the problem of excess cocoa beans. The demand for West African oils was ‘virtually bottomless’ and a wartime use was found even for cocoa beans, which were sold to the United States for the production of emergency chocolate rations for the armed forces.88 The sale of Nigerian cocoa alone yielded £2,700,068. Similar sums were made on Nigeria’s other export crops, including palm oil.89 A substantial fund accumulated in British government hands, which it used to repay American loans. The Boards had been set up at the beginning of the war in a benevolent attempt to save colonial farmers from financial ruin. They provided the merchants and farmers with stability throughout the war but at consistently low prices, which were set at a minimum below which the government might have faced political unrest. But they were far below the market prices of the later years of the war and rose much less than the cost of living.90 Thus, the producers were cheated of the profits created by the eventual wartime boom in demand for food. This was an iniquitous way of raising a ‘forced loan’ from West African farmers.91 And when the funds from the marketing boards were eventually reinvested in the region they were used to develop industry and gave little back to farmers.

  The post-war decision to carry on the work of the Boards continued the exploitation of West Africa’s cultivators. In post-war Gambia, where wartime shipping shortages had severely cut down the imports of consumer goods, the population were asked to carry on making reductions in imports. The Gambians had to put up with a lack of even the most basic consumer items such as cotton cloth, soap, matches and cigarettes. At the same time they were asked to increase production of their main cash crop, peanuts, which Britain sold to America to help reduce the nation’s dollar deficit.92 This pattern of using colonial cash crops to sell to the United States and solve the on-going problem of the balance of payments was replicated across Africa. This pushed Britain’s post-war colonies into a position whereby cash crops became their only purchase on the world economy. At the same time post-war protectionist policies, which created trade barriers around the developed world, meant that these under-developed countries were unable to export enough of their agricultural goods to boost industrial growth.93 When West African states inherited the marketing boards, these were an unfortunate gift to governments which tended to exercise extreme authority over their citizens.94 A competitive produce trade in West Africa and fair payments to West African farmers were effectively stifled by this legacy, until Nigeria closed down the state marketing of cocoa in 1986.95

  THE BENGAL FAMINE

  India was for the British as important a military base as Egypt. It was the empire’s only significant source of military manpower in the east and supplied a large proportion of the soldiers who fought against the Japanese on the Burma front. The only reason the Japanese advance had ground to a halt on India’s eastern border was because Japan simply could not fight the Chinese, the United States and the British in India all at once.96 Nevertheless, Japanese military commanders consistently harboured a desire to invade India and bring the British empire crashing to its knees. In 1943 India was the supply base for the Chinese Nationalists, cut off from the world by the Japanese blockade, and British preparations were under way to launch a military campaign to re-take Burma and Malaya.

  Despite India’s strategic importance, the Indian government made lamentably little effort to maintain economic stability within the colony, particularly in comparison to the work of the Middle East Supply Centre, which exercised far less power. Indeed, in 1942–43 the Indian government presided over the development of a nationwide food shortage, which in Bengal developed into full-scale famine. At least 1.5 million Bengalis died during 1943–44, when food scarcity was at its height. Altogether about 3 million may have died as a result of the famine as epidemics of smallpox, cholera and a particularly nasty strain of malaria which killed its victims within six hours swept through Bengal, killing those weakened by malnutrition.97 This was a death toll greater than that for Indians in combat in both the First and Second World Wars, and it overshadows the death toll of 60,000 British civilians killed by aerial bombing.98 If the Middle East Supply Centre was a British success story, the failure of the colonial government in India to protect the sub-continent’s inhabitants from the inflationary consequences of war was, in the words of Leo Amery, Secretary of State for India, ‘the worst blow we have had to our name as an Empire in our lifetime’.99

  ‘No words can describe the plight of the destitute of Loharjang … Most of the children were mere skeletons. A young girl of 17 had lost the use of one hand and could hardly speak. The old people were incessantly crying and falling at our feet … In the afternoon we crossed over to the other side of the river where I saw three corpses lying uncared for: women and children were squatting or lying pell-mell in slush and mud all through the narrow streets … an old woman who could not walk had managed to creep to the [gruel] kitchen but she could not creep back to her hut and was lying on the road.’100 These were the scenes that met the reporter for the Hindustani Times, K. Senthanam, as he toured Bengal in 1943.

  The government of India, which was composed of Indian politicians as well as British officials under the Viceroy Lord Linlithgow, showed a complacency towards the problem of wartime food supplies that was both irresponsible and callous. Once tragedy had struck in Bengal in 1943 Ian Stephens lambasted the government in an editorial for the Calcutta newspaper The Statesman: ‘Blame for the extremely grave situation rests heavily on the Government of India. We find ourselves amazed by their lack of vision … in this vital matter. From the knowledge in their possession risk of a food shortage and rocketing prices should have been discernible to an alert eye within their organization from the moment of Japan’s belligerence … yet a full year was allowed to elapse before a Food Department at the Centre was even set up … [B]y mumbling that food shortage did not exist, they willed themselves into belief that the dread spectacle would vanish.’101

  At the beginning of the war the government was naively pleased that rising food prices were benefiting the peasants, whose incomes had sunk pitifully low during the Depression. In the wheat-producing Punjab cultivators enjoyed a new prosperity. The Indian Civil Service officer Malcolm Darling noted that the increase of silver jewellery on the women’s arms and ankles was a sure sign that the peasantry were growing wealthy.102 But the greatest beneficiaries of inflation were the food merchants and traders who began to hoard grain, speculating on ever higher prices. Although pre-war India exported wheat, it imported rice from Burma. When Burma fell to the Japanese in the spring of 1942 India lost 15 per cent of its rice supply and there was a scramble for rice. Prices rose as traders competed to buy up stocks and the market then froze as speculators sat on their stores, waiting for inflation to push prices higher. Bombay, Travancore-Cochin and Bengal were worst hit by the loss of Burmese imports
as they depended on them the most.103 In 1941 the government had taken what turned out to be the ‘tragic step’ of handing responsibility for food administration over to each province. When Burmese rice imports dried up most provinces reacted with what Justice H. L. Braund, Regional Food Controller for the Eastern Areas, later termed ‘insane provincial protectionism’.104 The British governor of Madras banned rice exports from the province and other provinces followed suit.105 The machinery of trade in food was strangled; in particular, flows of food from surplus to deficit areas within the country came to a halt.106

  Throughout 1942 the government of India did not have a clear picture of the food situation and it was in any case reluctant to act decisively. The government lacked the self-confidence to impose its will on the Indian upper classes. Cautious of provoking political dissent, the government shied away from imposing heavy taxation, price ceilings and consumption restrictions on India’s business and industrial classes, on whose collaboration it depended for the expansion of Indian industry and manufacturing, which were making a significant contribution to the war effort. Given that the government did not exert its powers to impose stringent price controls to clamp down on inflation, it should have done more to protect the vulnerable from its consequences and in particular to cushion them from rising food prices.107 This was particularly important given that a considerable section of the population was already living at a bare subsistence level.108 Rationing would have entitled the worst hit to at least a minimum of food. But Justice H. L. Braund unwisely advised the government that rationing could not be practically implemented. He argued that the administration of a complicated and largely unregulated trade would be beyond the government’s capabilities.109 By April 1942 food queues had become a feature of India’s larger towns. The people would wait patiently for days in the hope that supplies would not run out before they reached the head of the line. Prices in Bombay rose by 25 per cent just six weeks after the declaration of war.110 As the conflict wore on the middle-class clerks and administrators who worked for the colonial bureaucracy found they could afford less and less meat, fish and milk, despite the fact that they were spending an increasingly large proportion of their income on food.111 In the countryside the wages of agricultural labourers and artisans remained virtually static but food prices climbed every day.

  The Quit India Movement, which began in August 1942, distracted British administrators from the growing seriousness of the problem. Angered by the British government’s offer of only limited self-government in return for Indian support during the war, Gandhi and the Indian National Congress called for immediate independence and for a civil disobedience campaign until it was granted. The British felt they had been stabbed in the back in their moment of greatest need and they responded harshly. The Congress leadership were imprisoned and Indian resisters encountered brutal repression. The police and army opened fire on demonstrations. In Bengal the government lost control in parts of the district of Midnapur, and army and police reprisals included burning down houses, raping women, and shooting and imprisoning troublemakers.112 Many officials adopted an unsympathetic attitude towards Indian complaints of food shortages and blamed the problem on Congress politicians who had urged producers and merchants to withdraw their support from the government by closing their shops.113

  It was not until December 1942 that the government of India finally woke up to the fact that they were facing an extremely serious food crisis, although they were still unaware that famine conditions were building up in Bengal. The newly created Food Department set about reviving the flow of food around the country by buying up food in surplus provinces to distribute to deficit areas. Unfortunately, the only grains available were wheat and millet, both of which rice-eating people lacked the means to prepare and which they found relatively indigestible. Therefore this did little to solve the acute rice shortage.114 It was estimated that India as a whole was short of a million tons of food and the Viceroy, Lord Linlithgow, asked for 200,000 tons of grain to be diverted to India by April 1943, and 400,000 tons thereafter.115 But the shipping crisis was at its height and with the failure of the United States to meet its meat import quotas, as well as Operation Torch in North Africa, Britain was struggling to maintain civilian food supplies. If Britain were to meet India’s request, shipping and supplies would have to be withdrawn from either British soldiers fighting the Germans or British civilians making do on corned beef.

  The immediate response to Linlithgow’s request came from Lord Cherwell, scientific adviser to the British government and a friend of Churchill. He replied (incorrectly) that ‘India’s yearly production of seventy million tons of cereals made it self-sufficient in grains’. He could not see how ‘India’s larger populace would derive … comfort from aid that disproportionately deprived the British people of ten times the sustenance’.116 The War Cabinet as a whole was hostile towards India and its demands, but Churchill in particular despised Indians and their independence movement. Ill, and irritable, Churchill was not inclined to be generous with India at Britain’s expense. He is said to have claimed that Indians had brought these problems on themselves by breeding like rabbits and must pay the price of their own improvidence.117 When, at the beginning of 1943, he ordered a 60 per cent cut in both military and civilian shipping to the Indian Ocean, he asserted, ‘There is no reason why all parts of the British Empire should not feel the pinch in the same way as the Mother Country has done.’118 India was ordered to live on its stocks and with this instruction Churchill exported shortages within the empire’s food system to India.

  The first signs of famine appeared in the Bengali province of Midnapur at the end of 1942. After the Japanese invasion of south-east Asia, boat- and rice-denial schemes had been implemented in the coastal areas. Most of the boats and rice stores in the area were removed. This was intended to deprive any invading Japanese of the means of transport and sustenance and was an over-zealous attempt to learn the lessons of Burma when the British authorities had failed to destroy boats which were then used by the invading Japanese.119 This had the unfortunate effect of denying the local populace both transport and sustenance. When a cyclone hit the area and destroyed the rice crops in October 1942 the people descended into misery and signs of starvation began to appear.120

  Throughout 1942 the cost of rice in Bengal had been steadily mounting. Before the war the price for one maund* of rice had been 9 rupees. By March 1942 one maund of rice sold in some districts for 100 rupees.121 The Bengali coalition government, under the leadership of the Muslim politician Fazlul Huq, proved themselves as incompetent as the central government at dealing with the problem. In an attempt to prevent further inflation they fixed rice prices in July but the price was set too low below prevailing market prices and supplies of rice disappeared from the market.122 Tarak Candra Das, an anthropologist at Calcutta University, was visiting his home town of Brahmanberia in Tippera when the price controls were announced. ‘A few petty dealers of rice were forced to part with their goods at the controlled price, either by the police or the public … [T]he effect of this on the market was disastrous. Petty dealers stopped coming to the market and the permanent shops had no rice. Thus a market where hundreds of maunds of rice used to be sold every day could not offer a chatak† even. One cannot think of it nor imagine. The consequence was that men of all positions had to go to the villages to purchase rice from the farmers and petty dealers and at once the price rose by 10 to 20 rupees in a few days.’123 It quickly became clear to traders that the government had neither a reserve of grain with which to flood the market, thus bringing down prices, nor effective measures in place to punish those who breached the controls. Consequently, the black marketeers lost all inhibitions and the government all credibility.

  Most economic and historical examinations of the causes of the Bengal famine take the view that there was plenty of food in Bengal safely stashed away in the village stores of landlords and traders, all of whom were waiting for inflation to push prices highe
r.124 New research, using figures for the yields at the rice research stations in the province, which are the only hard figures of actual yields available, suggests, however, that the winter rice harvest of 1942 had in large measure failed. The unusually warm, humid and cloudy weather, together with the cyclone in October, had spread the spores of a fungal disease throughout the region. There may have been as little as half the usual amount of rice available in the Bengal food system. This would provide an alternative explanation as to why landlords and farmers with rice stores were in no hurry to release them, as they knew that there was a real and frightening shortage of rice in Bengal.125 Whether it was the product of greed or anxiety, by the end of 1942 the Bengali rice trade had frozen. There was not enough food on the market and there was no hope of receiving extra supplies of food from outside India.

  The provincial government focused its attention on protecting the food supply for Calcutta. The city had been bombed by the Japanese four times and the working population were nervous. Calcutta, so close to the front line with Burma, could not be allowed to go under. The stocks of the city’s traders were seized and special shops were set up in factories which supplied the industrial workers with subsidized food. Industrialists, unable to get rice any other way, often bought their supplies on the black market, fuelling the price rises. Special ‘control shops’ sold food to the poor at low prices and government markets supplied the middle classes. In the scramble to find 20,000 tons of rice each month for the city the needs of the rural population were ignored.126

  District officers watched helplessly as the rural population began to die of starvation. By 1943 famine had spread throughout the whole of Bengal. The schoolmaster Bisewar Chakrabati wrote to the Bengal Relief Committee describing the scenes he witnessed in his home village. ‘The whole population seems to be moving silently towards death. Men have neither the capacity nor the energy even to try to live. A stupor seems to have overtaken all.’127 The traditional strategy of selling children for food no longer worked as nobody wanted extra mouths to feed. Instead, girls were sent ‘to a merchant or a Muslim jotdar [large tenant farmer] for a night. Thus they can procure a few annas or a few chataks of rice.’128 In a group of villages which contained 592 families in 1942, 90 families died during the famine. All of them were labouring families dependent on cash incomes, and simply did not have enough money to buy extortionately expensive food.129 The rural middle classes were also hard hit. The high-caste Bengali author H. K. Gupta wrote to a wealthy merchant in September 1943 explaining that his family had sold all their valuables and clothes. They were now naked and dying ‘by inches’, but ‘on account of my position in society’ he did not feel that he could ‘beg from door to door [or] … stand on the roads with the beggars’.130 Patronage and charity, which usually acted as a safety net, broke down. If labourers and artisans asked to be paid in rice rather than cash landlords simply stopped employing them.131