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

by Lizzie Collingham

  When the German attack on Russia was announced, a disgruntled peasant in Archangel province was reported to have remarked, ‘Our government fed the Germans for two years, it would have been better to have saved food for our army and for the people, but now all of us expect hunger.’15 He was right in thinking that the Soviet people were going to go hungry. The country was living so close to its food margins that almost no surplus existed from which to create food reserves.16 The Soviet Union lost the central black soil area, the Ukraine, parts of the Crimea and the Caucasus to German occupation. The Germans came into possession of just under half the Soviet Union’s crop regions and land for beef and dairy cattle, more than half the Union’s pigs and virtually all the sugar-producing land.17 Grain and sugar beet now had to be grown in the less fertile north and east. Great efforts succeeded in expanding the cultivated area but yields were driven down by lack of technical expertise and the unsuitable climate in these areas, let alone all the usual wartime difficulties of insufficient manpower, lack of machines (or fuel to run them) and draught animals, as well as shortages of fertilizer and seed.18

  The redirection of all energies towards maintaining the fighting at the front dealt agriculture a fundamental blow.19 Nineteen million able-bodied peasants were called up, more than half of the male rural workforce. The tractor drivers were the first to go, leaving the collective farms without workers trained to use the machinery.20 In 1942 the peasants were reduced to sowing and harvesting 79 per cent of the grain by hand.21 It was not uncommon for the peasant women to resort to yoking themselves to the plough in place of draught animals. Almost the entire burden of providing food for the Soviet Union fell on women, children, the elderly and the infirm. By 1945 women made up 92 per cent of the agricultural workforce.22 Victor Kravchenko and his fellow army recruits, walking across snowbound Tataria as they were evacuated east in November 1941, were ‘amazed to see great fields of wheat, unharvested, under the snow and now and then even sheaves of harvested grain. Later a peasant gave us the explanation: “with all able-bodied men taken for the army and horses commandeered for the fronts, only women, children and cows” remained to do the harvesting and immense quantities of produce could not be carried off.’23

  The collective farms were pushed into a vicious cycle of over-extraction, falling yields and demotivation. Decline could possibly have been reversed if the collective farms had been dismantled and the newly independent peasants motivated to increase production by high prices for agricultural produce. But this would have required large capital investment to inject much-needed equipment and livestock into the countryside. The Soviet Union in 1941 did not have the economic wherewithal to do this. Industry was overwhelmed and stretched to its limit simply trying to produce enough armaments to keep the men at the front fighting. There was absolutely no question of producing tractors or agricultural equipment. Besides, the benefits would have been felt only in the long term.

  Collectivization served the government well in that it gave it a level of control over the countryside which the German occupiers across the front line would have envied. While the peasants on the collectives in the Ukraine were inadequately supervised and often able to evade and deceive their German masters, in the Soviet Union farms were treated as part of the front line. The peasants’ working day was lengthened and the number of workdays they were obliged to contribute to the collective increased. Punishments for absenteeism were as harsh as they were for soldiers and industrial workers. Through the collectives the government exercised a level of control over the harvest that no other combatant government was able to achieve. Compared to the First World War, when the Russian government had to extract food from millions of landlords and small peasant producers and the food supply to the towns had dried up, the Soviets now had 200,000 collective and state farms, and an efficient working system in place for collecting the farm produce.24 The procurements extracted during the war were ruthless. The requisition quota for each farm was calculated according to a theoretical biological yield rather than the actual yield. Before the war this resulted in unfair demands, during the war it became almost absurd. In Kazakhstan in 1940 the difference between the biological and actual yields was 33 per cent but by 1942 and 1943 it had risen to 100 per cent.25 Any protest was regarded as an attempt to ‘sabotage grain procurements’ and carried the risk of imprisonment or hard labour.26

  When official procurements did not yield enough food, the government would return with orders for the collectives to contribute to the Defence Fund or the Red Army Fund. Milk was requisitioned for the Fund for the Health of the Defenders of the Motherland. In this way yet more work and food were squeezed out of the collective farmers. Despite declining agricultural yields the percentage of the collective grain harvest allocated to the military increased. By 1942 the military were consuming 24 per cent of the total grain harvest, as opposed to 9 per cent in 1940. Thus the military were fed at the expense of both the peasantry and the urban population, who received a diminished share of a smaller harvest.27 If the peasants on the Soviet side of the eastern front were spared the murderous attentions of the Einsatzgruppen, the Red Army, like the Wehrmacht, also organized its own independent system of requisitioning, above and beyond the official quotas. In 1942 this was officially acknowledged when each unit was allocated 30 kilometres behind the front line from which they were allowed to requisition food directly.28 When Lev Mischenko’s volunteer regiment was sent into the fighting in defence of Moscow he was told to supply his regiment directly from the collective farms near the front, but the farmers had virtually nothing to give. They had no meat or milk and made ‘bread’ from potatoes rather than grain. ‘Everything had been delivered to the state. It was a stark contrast to all the propaganda we had been fed about happy peasants on flourishing collective farms.’29 He simply took whatever he could find to feed the soldiers, although his conscience troubled him.

  In most countries the rural areas were better off in wartime than the urban areas. The Soviet Union was an exception. The Soviet farms were stripped of food; often the collectives had absolutely nothing to distribute to their workers, and even seed stock was taken, endangering the sowing of a new crop for the next year.30 The principle introduced by collectivization, that the brunt of hunger should be borne by the countryside, was maintained throughout the war.

  Soviet farms were simply unable to grow enough food. Figures citing the number of tons of a particular crop produced often convey little information about the amounts of food actually available, but a comparison of the Soviet production figures for 1940 and 1942 clearly demonstrates the immensity of the food crisis the Soviet Union faced. From a grain harvest of 95.6 million tons in 1940 the figure fell to 26.7 million in 1942. Potatoes fell from 76.1 million to 23.8 million tons, sugar beet from 18 million to 2.2 million tons, meats and fats from 4.7 million to 1.8 million tons.31 The number of people entitled to rations was 61 million, rising to over 80 million in 1945.32 Translated into the amount of food available for ordinary people these figures meant that in 1942 the official food ration could provide only about half the amount of food that had been available to Soviets in 1940 when the population was already heavily dependent on bread and potatoes and only 28 per cent of workers had felt that the food supply was adequate.33

  In 1940 only 3 per cent of the peasantry had felt that the food supply was adequate.34 By 1942 if they had attempted to live solely on the food they received in payment from the collective farms they would certainly have starved to death. Fortunately, Soviet peasants were accustomed to looking starvation in the face and had had years of experience of living on the edge. They knew which wild grasses were edible and how to make acorns palatable. In the forests of northern Russia the farm families supplemented their protein and vitamin intake by collecting berries, edible mushrooms and nuts, while they fed their cattle ‘twig fodder’, and acorns to their pigs.35 They also stole from the collectives. A Ukrainian student who worked on a kolkhoz near Novosibirsk recalled that sometimes
a peasant would ‘go out into the field at night with a pair of scissors and snip off the ears of corn’. This was an extremely dangerous activity. ‘When this was discovered, the man who did this would get eight or ten years in jail, whether he had stolen one ear or a hundred.’36 It was even an offence to scavenge the ears of wheat missed during the harvest. Bread became a luxury and potatoes, grown in their private plots, became the peasants’ staple food. They fried and boiled potatoes and made potato cakes and potato soup. During the miserable spring of 1943 the family of Andrei Sakharov’s future wife used ‘the rather complicated “technology”’ developed by generations of starving peasants to transform ‘frozen, half-rotten’ potatoes into edible pancakes.37 If they were lucky they ate some salted cucumber or pickled cabbage and drank a little milk with their potatoes.38

  If the peasants’ private plots kept them alive, they were also an important source of nutrition for the rest of the population. Throughout the war the government allowed the collective farm markets to revive, and here the peasants sold their surplus produce. In many towns and cities the farm markets were the only source of fresh vegetables and dairy products.39 J. A. Alexander, an Australian diplomat in Russia during the war, described the ‘dilapidated and dirty’ market in Moscow where ‘rows of peasants in greasy cotton padded jackets’ ladled out the most repulsive-looking milk from grubby cans.40 Although half of all food sales made during the war occurred at these markets, the overall drop in food availability meant that the quantity of food on offer declined considerably. Often thousands of potential buyers would be disappointed to find only a couple of farmers with a few sacks of potatoes.41

  Although Soviet industry teetered on the brink of collapse in 1941–42, the industrial system eventually adapted and found inventive ways of overcoming problems. Agriculture also went to the brink of collapse, but it remained there. While the rest of the economy showed signs of recovery, in 1943 Soviet agriculture fell further into crisis and the grain harvest dropped again by a further 6 million tons.42 The recapture of German-occupied territory made matters worse by increasing the number of mouths to feed without the compensation of regaining productive farmland. The Germans had scorched the earth as they retreated and as the Soviets retook the Ukraine they found ‘no evidence of the existence of any mechanical farm machinery, work animals, or dairy herds’.43

  If the communist government had been more enlightened in its treatment of the peasantry and in its approach to agriculture in the 1930s it might have created a healthier agricultural sector which would have been better equipped to feed the population in wartime. However, it was the loss of the most fertile agricultural regions to the Germans that made the agricultural crisis so acute. Under these circumstances, collectivization was probably what saved the Soviet Union from spiralling into an unsustainable food crisis. Collectivization enabled the government to extract virtually every crumb of food from the farms and to just about feed its army and industrial workers, although they did still go very hungry. If the peasants had been able to retreat into self-sufficiency the situation in the Soviet Union’s cities would surely have become untenable. Nevertheless, agriculture remained a dangerously weak area of the Soviet economy throughout the entire war, and it was fortunate that the climate remained fairly favourable during the period 1941 to 1945. If the drought that hit the Soviet Union in 1946 had occurred a few years earlier it seems very likely that the malnourished and demotivated peasants would have toppled over the edge into famine, with a devastating impact on the Soviet war effort.44

  11

  Japan’s Journey towards Starvation

  If we had breakfast, we would not eat lunch.

  (Malayan commenting on food shortages under the Japanese occupation)1

  Japan’s need for food imports was to prove one of its gravest weaknesses, and its inability to bring food into the home islands led to a steadily worsening food crisis in its cities during the last two years of the war. In contrast to pre-war Britain, which obtained half of its food (by weight) from abroad, pre-war Japan only imported 20 per cent of its food. However, while Britain was able to cope with the wartime decline in food imports by cutting down on the import of superfluous foods such as fruit and sugar, it was much more difficult for Japan to reduce imports. Although they only accounted for a small percentage of total food consumption they were vital to the Japanese diet. Japan imported nearly all of its salt, 92 per cent of its sugar, most of its soya beans and about one-third of its rice.2 Salt, albeit in small quantities, is an essential element in regulating the functions of the human body. Manchurian soya beans were processed into miso, a soya-bean paste which was ubiquitous in Japanese cooking and a vital source of protein in farmers’ diets.3 The urban population was dependent on Korean and Formosan rice.4 Any fall in the quantity of these imports would lead to serious deficits in the Japanese diet. The only import which Japan could cut down on relatively painlessly was sugar, and imports did decline steadily throughout the war from over 800,000 tons a year to 182,000 tons in 1945. However, as sugar accounted for 7 per cent of the already meagre calorific intake of the pre-war diet, the loss of imports led to a decline in the energy value of the Japanese diet. The lack of sugar also contributed greatly to a decline in the palatability of food.5

  Most of the animal protein in the pre-war Japanese diet came from fish. By 1941 the fish ration mainly consisted of squid. The teacher of Saito Mutsuo, studying at a crammer in Tokyo, observed that squid lived in shallow coastal waters and that this was an ominous sign that deep-sea fishing had virtually stopped.6 Wartime labour shortages, the requisitioning of fishing boats by the military, lack of fuel and even of cotton and hemp for the manufacture of rope and fishing nets, all contributed to a fall of more than 50 per cent in the fish catch, which led to a significant decline in the nutritional value of the wartime diet.7 Britain compensated for the loss of grain imports by restructuring its agricultural sector and switching from livestock to arable farming. There was far less room for manoeuvre in Japan’s agricultural economy. Farming was already predominantly arable and the only way to increase the rice harvest was to extend the cultivated area, but virtually every scrap of flat land and even the hillsides were already covered with paddy. Wartime labour shortages and a precipitate decline in fertilizer imports also impacted hard on agricultural productivity. This meant that while Japanese farming was unable to adjust and compensate for the fall in imports, it also produced less food, thus creating a greater dependence on imports.

  RICE AND SWEET POTATOES

  Strangely for a country which in its pursuit of autarky had acquired a maritime empire, Japan entered the war with a merchant fleet which only just about covered its requirements for shipping.8 In order to survive the war it was vital that the shipbuilding industry should immediately begin constructing cargo ships, as well as a fleet of escorts to protect the vulnerable merchant marine from American submarines. Instead, shipbuilding focused on the production of battleships and in 1943 the Japanese were completely without the resources to protect themselves from a full-scale American blockade, which combined the use of submarines, aircraft and mines. This meant that from 1943 Japan was unable to bring in imports of rice from south-east Asia, and the home islands were gradually cut off from essential sources of food.9 As imports declined and farmers struggled to maintain crop yields, the demand for food rose ever higher. Home-based military forces grew from 1 to 3.5 million between 1941 and 1945, and the amount of rice they consumed increased from 161,000 to 744,000 tons, which in 1943 equalled the entire amount of rice the merchant marine had managed to slip past the American blockade.10 The voracious demands of the military contributed significantly to the food crisis which pushed Japan’s urban inhabitants towards starvation in the summer of 1945.

  By 1942 Japan had acquired an empire in China, south-east Asia and the Pacific. The Japanese military policy, like that of the Wehr-macht, was that troops should live off the land. Shipping space was too scarce and the domestic harvest too small to all
ow for food supplies to be sent to the armies overseas. The burden of feeding the occupying forces was therefore firmly placed on the shoulders of the farmers in the occupied territories. If there were insufficient supplies in one area, they were sent in from another part of the empire. Thus, the occupying forces in Manchuria were sent trainloads of food from Korea and the troops stationed on the Philippines were sent rice supplies from Indo-China and Siam (now Thailand), which remained independent but was allied to the Japanese. Burma, Malaya and Indo-China together represented the world’s largest rice-exporting area, but mismanagement of the rice trade led to a dramatic decline in production which combined with ruthless requisitioning of supplies to create widespread hunger and, in Burma and Indo-China, famine. As the Malayan schoolteacher Chin Kee Onn commented, ‘the much-publicised and rosily-painted “New Order” turned out to be the “New Disorder” and what was proclaimed to be the “Co-prosperity Sphere” was actually the “Co-poverty Fear”’.11

  Throughout the wartime world it was women who made up the majority of the agricultural labour force and this was also the case in Japan. By 1944 more than half the Japanese rural labour force was made up of women.12 Returning from a lecture tour in Kyushu in May of that year, the journalist Kiyosawa Kiyoshi recorded in his diary: ‘when I looked out from the train, the people working in the fields were only women and children. Occasionally when I saw a man it was a really old man.’13 It was not so much military conscription which depleted the agricultural workforce as the war industries. Even though half the population of Japan were peasants, they made up only 23 per cent of military draftees during the Pacific war. Having relied on the countryside for recruits during the early 1930s, for the war with China and America the military preferred to rely on skilled young men from the factories, who made up 43 per cent of the draft between 1937 and 1945.14 However, large numbers of fit and active young men and women left the countryside for the towns where better wages could be earned. When she left her village to work unloading coal from ships at the docks in Niigata, the family of fifteen-year-old Toshié was delighted with her wage of 5 yen a day.15 Between 1941 and 1945 the military and industry together swallowed up 4 million rural labourers.