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

by Lizzie Collingham

  A few energetic district officers, wealthy Indians and charitable organizations in Calcutta began relief operations on their own initiative, but without a substantial influx of grain there were limits to what could be done. The Bengal government did not know what to do, as injecting cash into the economy did nothing to draw forth hidden stocks of food and they did not have access to sufficient quantities of food to enable them to distribute meaningful food aid. The other provinces, concerned by food shortages of their own, were reluctant to send rice supplies to Bengal. Their meagre contribution amounted to just 17,000 tons, under one month’s worth of food for Calcutta.132 Even the Punjab, which had plenty of food, showed no empathy with the plight of the Bengalis and concentrated on protecting the profits of Punjabi farmers. In June 1943, when the famine was at its height, the Revenue Minister of Punjab, Sir Chhotu Ram, instructed his farmers not to sell their grain to the government under a certain price.133 Frustrated by their inability to open up the market, the government of Bengal persuaded the government of India to re-introduce a free market in rice and open the borders. All this succeeded in doing was spreading the problems of Bengal into the neighbouring provinces of Bihar, Orissa and Assam.134

  In August the government of India finally began to send in trainloads of food from its central stocks and the provincial government set up gruel kitchens. These were soon surrounded by men and women too weak to walk backwards and forwards to the kitchen, who lay ‘about it on the cold ground … without any clothes … death soon relieves them of all sufferings’.135 The kitchens distributed a soup made of inferior grains such as millet, and a few vegetables, and probably did more harm than good. Doctors treating famine victims discovered that ‘a gut habituated throughout life to rice, and then enfeebled by weeks of privation, when switched to a diet of the rougher “up-country” grains simply will not take them and an uncontrollable flux ensues’. This was eventually recognized as a clinical state and ‘famine diarrhoea’, often caused by the aid kitchen gruel, caused yet more deaths.136

  Famine victims began pouring into Calcutta in the summer of 1943, a ‘vast slow dispirited noiseless’ army of apathetic skeletons.137 They would sit and weep for food even when food was given to them. ‘Bewildered, finding no help, they squatted in the by-ways and grew feebler and lay down and after a while died.’138 Many died on streets within sight of shops stocked with food. It became apparent to Ian Stephens, editor of the Indian newspaper The Statesman, that the Indian and British governments were doing everything they could to use wartime censorship to suppress the news of the famine. Indignant, Stephens ran an eight-week campaign against the authorities, harassing them with attacks in editorials, letters and using photographs of the dead and dying on the streets of Calcutta to publicize the plight of the Bengalis. In October the Secretary of State for India finally acknowledged the famine in a speech in Birmingham.139

  It was only with the appointment of Viscount Wavell as Viceroy in September 1943 that decisive action was taken. Wavell’s brief was to sort out the food situation before it threatened military strategy. The military chiefs of staff had warned the War Cabinet that ‘unless the necessary steps are taken to rectify this situation, the efficient prosecution of the war against Japan by forces based in India will be gravely jeopardised and may well prove impossible’.140 The famine was causing trouble among the troops who were destined to re-take Burma, 60 per cent of whom were Indian. Bengali soldiers were receiving distressing letters from their families and, although one British tank crewman witnessed Tommies dangling bits of bacon out of a train window in the faces of starving Bengalis, many of the soldiers, British as well as Indian, were so distressed by the horrific sight of the famine victims that they were reported to be feeding the beggars with their own rations.141 Meanwhile the Japanese sought to capitalize on the situation by spreading rumours that they were willing to send food aid from Burma.142

  In Bengal, Wavell mobilized the military to escort deliveries of rice into the rural areas, distribute clothing and to show villagers how to prepare the unfamiliar grains used for relief. The breakdown in the transport system was tackled, and boats removed under the denial scheme salvaged, bridges repaired and river ferry crossings re-established.143 That winter, to everyone’s relief, the rice harvest was good. This revived the rice market and measures were finally taken to protect the access to food of the most vulnerable. Price controls were enforced and rationing was introduced in Calcutta. The famine victims were cleared from the city’s streets and taken to camps. ‘The Famine of Bengal … as if by magic vanished into thin air.’ Many of those who were rounded up were separated from their husbands, wives or children in the process and their fate is unclear. It seems likely that the majority who were already too weak to recover simply died, out of sight.144

  The Indian government at last implemented a programme to safeguard food supplies for the entire sub-continent. The Food Department developed what was known as the Basic Plan, which put an end to free-market trading and ensured that food surpluses were pooled and distributed where they were most needed. Rationing was introduced in the cities and towns, and by early 1945 covered 42 million urban Indians and even extended out into the countryside to cover the rural poor.145 Although the situation in Bengal was gradually being alleviated, Wavell was concerned that famine might spread across the sub-continent. In other areas that depended on Bengali rice there had been signs of famine in 1943. A British resident on a rubber estate in Mysore had reported that it was no longer possible to walk through the estate as the starving workers posed too great a threat to safety. Many rubber estates in Travancore had closed down as they could not feed their workers, and the bodies of famished coolies were reported to be lying by the side of the roads in Coorg.146 Wavell repeatedly telegrammed London pleading for food for India. Churchill peevishly replied that if food was so scarce in India why had Gandhi not yet died?

  Given Churchill’s determination to prevent the Americans from taking all the credit in the battle against the Japanese it seems strange that he was so cavalier about the food situation in India. On 17 February 1944, India Secretary Leo Amery warned him: ‘once it becomes known that no supplies are coming from outside the machinery of the Governments of India will be quite incapable of preventing food going underground everywhere and famine conditions spreading with disastrous rapidity all over India. The result may well be fatal for the whole prosecution of the war, and that not only from the point of view of India as a base for further operations. I don’t think you have any idea of how deeply public feeling in this country has already been stirred against the Government over the Bengal Famine.’147 Prejudice and dislike seem to have made Churchill determined that India should not be helped. He is said to have thought the Indians were ‘the beastliest population in the world next to the Germans’.148 But Churchill was not alone in his refusal to prioritize India’s food needs. A committee to look into the question of food supplies for India decided that the risk of civilian hunger in India was a lesser evil than jeopardizing British civilian food supplies or military supplies for the Indian army. In November 1943 the committee even turned down a Canadian offer of 100,000 tons of wheat for India for lack of shipping and the British government prevented the Indian legislative assembly from applying to the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) for food aid.149 ‘If UNRRA operated in India in the sphere of supply and public health,’ Amery pointed out, ‘they would no doubt wish to send supervisors or inspectors whose operations would presumably be concentrated on Bengal and you must expect undesirable attention to be directed, e.g. on the breakdown of administration there.’150 He was painfully aware that the spotlight of world attention would not show the British government in a good light if it were focused on India and Bengal.

  In desperation Wavell transferred his attentions to Claude Auchinleck and Louis Mountbatten, respectively Commander-in-Chief of the Indian Army and Supreme Commander of the Allies in South-East Asia. They conceded that they could
afford a 10 per cent cut in military supplies, which persuaded the chiefs of staff in London to divert twenty-five ships from military transports and forced the cabinet to agree to a shipment of 200,000 tons of grain. Depressed by the dreadful predictions for the 1944 harvest, Wavell continued to campaign for food for India and asked Churchill to make a personal appeal to Roosevelt for shipping. Churchill’s weakly worded request meant that Roosevelt simply passed the issue on to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who, of course, replied that no ships could be spared in the light of the forthcoming invasion of France. Wavell pronounced the British cabinet ‘short-sighted and callous’.151 His disgust left the British command unmoved and it was not until there were real fears of demoralization in the Indian army at the end of 1944 that military reinforcements were replaced by a shipment of 20,000 tons of Australian wheat.152 When Wavell heard of the wealth of supplies airlifted in to Holland in March 1945 he remarked with bitterness, ‘A very different attitude [exists] towards feeding a starving population when the starvation is in Europe.’153

  Churchill was probably right in thinking the Indian government was sclerotic. It lacked the self-confidence ‘to take a firm stand against agricultural or industrial interests’ and failed to ‘make Punjab provide cheap food or industrialists cheap goods’.154 Instead it allowed businessmen and Punjabi landlords to make vast profits from the war while its efforts to protect the standard of living of workers in the cities and the countryside were ineffectual. The food situation which developed in wartime India demolished for good ‘one rationalization of imperialism [which argued] … that British rule protected the Indian poor from the rapacity of the Indian upper class’.155

  Despite the depth of anti-British feeling demonstrated by the Quit India Movement, the British took their position as the established rulers of India too much for granted. The Indian government’s failure to secure India as a safe military base was the combined result of incompetence and complacency. Millions of Indians were allowed to die of starvation before the government was galvanized into action. In contrast, when the rice-eating people of the Persian Gulf showed signs of discontent over relief supplies of wheat, the Middle East Supply Centre scraped together a shipment of Iraqi rice to avoid the threat of political unrest.156 Admittedly, British insecurity in the Middle East was exacerbated by the fact that in the spring of 1942 only a few hundred kilometres of desert lay between the German army and Cairo, while the Japanese in Burma were at the end of their supply lines and several hundred kilometres of jungle separated them from Calcutta. But the Middle East was also fortunate in Lyttelton’s appointment of Robert Jackson to the MESC. Jackson was a superb organizer who set up an efficient and dedicated organization. India’s Food Department lacked cohesion and initiative and did not bring in effective measures until after the worst had happened and famine had struck. On the ground the Bengal government and administration lacked vision, and even when it was clear that a famine was in the offing they failed to grasp that it was not simply a matter of food supply but also of the fact that the poor had lost their purchasing power and could not afford what food was available on the markets.

  ‘It was all too likely that … in upsetting the delicate mechanism of the world’s food economy’ the war would bring hunger to some part of the empire.157 It is difficult to reach any conclusion other than that racism was the guiding principle which determined where hunger struck. Churchill’s hatred of Indians was inflamed by what he regarded as the ingratitude and treachery of the Quit India Movement, and when it came to making decisions about where resources should be channelled India was given the lowest priority. By refusing to believe in the seriousness of India’s food situation Churchill and his War Cabinet determined that India would be the part of the empire where the greatest civilian sacrifices would have to be made, and displaced hunger on to the colony.

  The moral argument for British rule in India had begun to unravel long before the outbreak of the Second World War, but as Jawaharlal Nehru argued in Discovery of India, the fact that ‘rich England and richer America’ failed to come to the rescue of the Bengal famine victims placed a question mark over the sincerity of the Allies’ claim that they were fighting to bring freedom from want – let alone justice, fairness and tolerance – to the world.158 Thus, the Bengal famine gave added strength to the Congress Party’s post-war demands for Indian independence. However, the Bengal famine played far less of a role in the debates about independence than one might have expected of such a devastating event. One explanation for this is that Congress politicians were in prison at the time and so had no first-hand experience of the horrors. By the time they were released at the end of the war the political focus had shifted on to the public trials of the men who had joined the Indian National Army and to the issue of partition.159 When the Famine Inquiry Commission reports were published in April and August 1945 they were overshadowed by the end of the war and the news of the horror of the industrialized killing of Jews in the Nazi death camps. Later, the quiet and unobtrusive deaths of the victims of starvation were again overshadowed by the violent murder of up to 10,000 Indians a day in the riots that surrounded the partition of India. Besides, it was in no one’s interests to remember the Bengal famine. The British did not wish to be reminded of one of the most shameful episodes of their rule in India. Indians also felt themselves to be implicated. The provincial government of Bengal was in Indian hands at the time and while British district officers may have been incompetent in responding to the developing crisis, the old structures of welfare and charity among the Indian wealthy had also broken down. When India gained its independence in 1947 the Bengal famine faded into obscurity and was quickly forgotten.

  India was lost to Britain when it gained its independence in 1947. But if colonialism was now discredited and the seeds of independence were sown in Africa, they did not yet come to fruition. The extensive wartime controls that colonial governments had adopted were re-interpreted as development programmes and Britain concentrated on the colonial production of cash crops in order to reduce the dollar deficit which the virtually bankrupted country was struggling to overcome. Thus, the exploitation of the empire’s food resources was destined to become a feature of the post-war world.

  *The squatters were Africans who were allowed to live on and farm part of a white farmer’s land in return for labour.

  *About 86 pounds or 37 kilograms. About 2 ounces or 50 grams

  8

  Feeding Germany

  This time we robbed the occupied countries, and our people did not have to go hungry until the end of the war.

  (Elisabeth D., a German woman who lived through both the First and Second World Wars)1

  The National Socialist leadership, and in particular Hitler and Göring, were determined to feed the German population adequately throughout the war. By 1939 Walther Darré, the Minister for Food and Agriculture, and Herbert Backe, working within Göring’s organization for the Four Year Plan, had done their best to prepare the agricultural sector. Even the schoolboy Harry Simon was aware of the need for self-sufficiency and that ‘Germany must make itself independent of other countries, produce its own goods, not only farm produce, but also everything else … Nothing was to be wasted.’2 The Battle for Production in agriculture had been matched by a campaign to suppress consumption and divert consumers towards home-grown foods rather than foreign imports. Nevertheless, the leadership were well aware that a long war would prove too great a drain on the country’s manpower and industrial resources for agriculture to be able to maintain its impressive levels of self-sufficiency. If it were to rely on its own food supply Germany needed to fight a short war.

  In the end German farmers managed to maintain production remarkably well even though the war dragged on for five and a half years and the prioritization of the war industries meant less machinery and fertilizer was available to them than to British farmers. As in Britain, the productivity of German farms rested on the hard work of agricultural labourers. But while in Britain
farm labour was provided by the Women’s Land Army and prisoners of war, in Germany much of the labour was made up of workers forcibly brought into the Reich from the occupied territories. In this way Germany imported the exploitation of its newly conquered empire. By the end of 1943 the foreign agricultural and industrial workforce amounted to 7 million more mouths to feed. German agriculture struggled to produce enough food to provide an adequate civilian ration, a generous ration for the military, whose share of German food production had quadrupled by May 1943, and a miserly ration for the forced labourers. Just as Britain looked to its allies and the empire for food imports, Germany looked to the occupied territories to make up the food deficit. While Britain’s food policy had its darker side, in particular the War Cabinet’s decision in 1943 to displace hunger on to Britain’s colonial subjects rather than British civilians, Britain’s exploitation of its colonies was neither so ruthless nor so openly dismissive of the value of human life as were the National Socialists in their conquered territories. At a meeting with the leaders of the occupied countries on 6 August 1942 Göring reminded them that, ‘The Führer repeatedly said, and I repeat after him, if anyone has to go hungry, it shall not be the Germans but other peoples.’3