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

by Lizzie Collingham

  Townspeople moved into the countryside in order to find plots to cultivate and students stopped attending school and stayed at home to help in the family garden. Only eight or ten students out of forty continued to come to lessons at the Malim Nawar Malay School in Zaharah Hamzah. Those who did attend came in tattered clothing and showed signs of malnutrition and its associated diseases.64 In mid-1943 the Japanese began destroying rubber and coconut plantations in order to found agricultural settlements. The raw materials could no longer be transported to Japan because of lack of shipping and the American blockade. Chinese, Malay and Indian Associations were instructed to find recruits to farm these projects. Many went to escape being drafted for military labour. They were given all kinds of inducements: ‘rice and cloth rations; free vegetable seeds and manures; free medicines and medical services; cheap agricultural implements; subsidies and loans’.65 But the conditions on these agricultural settlements, populated by people with barely any agricultural knowledge or experience, were appalling. In the remaining rubber plantations, where it was difficult to grow food, the children starved. When the British finally reoccupied the country in August 1945, 35 per cent of schoolchildren in Malacca were found to have anaemia and 30 per cent had vitamin deficiencies of various kinds.66

  In Singapore tapioca noodles were substituted for the rice ration. Bread was made with a mixture of tapioca and soya flour. ‘It was just like rubber, you bite, you pull, the thing stretches. Terrible!’ The writer A. Samad Ismail described how an obsession with tapioca took over people’s lives. ‘These days everyone loves tapioca … nothing is talked about except tapioca; in the kitchen, in the tram, at wedding ceremonies – absorbed with tapioca, tapioca, tapioca; until dreams are sometimes about tapioca.’67 The problem was that while tapioca provided calories, it contained no vitamins. A resident of Singapore summed up the feeling created by living on tapioca, ‘We are full in tummy but we lack good substance.’68 Tropical ulcers became common, malaria, beriberi and tuberculosis claimed thousands.69 By 1946 the death rate in Malaya had risen to double the pre-war rate.70

  In Indo-China the misguided agricultural policies of the Japanese and their ruthless requisitioning of rice caused one of the worst famines of the Second World War. Indo-China, nominally under French control, was designated the main supply base for the southern army operating in south-east Asia and the south Pacific.71 The Japanese decided to use the northern area of Tonkin to compensate for jute and hemp shortages, needed for making rope and sacks. Tonkin had always been dependent on supplementary rice supplies from Cochin-China in the south but the re-allocation of land from rice to jute and hemp caused a fall in the harvest in 1943, which made the northerners more dependent than ever on southern rice imports.72 However, by 1944 there were only five ships operating the coastal trade between the north and south, and most of the junks which provided supplementary shipping had been requisitioned by the military.73 The region was cut off from its food imports.

  Rice shortages throughout south-east Asia placed even greater pressure on Indo-China to produce rice and, even though the harvest was insufficient to feed the population, the French authorities continued to levy rice on behalf of the Japanese. To make matters worse, rather than going through the French, the Japanese army began to go out into the villages and requisition rice directly. Army representatives arrived in the village of Mieng-Ha in Ung-Hoa district with trucks. The people of Mieng-Ha only cultivated 300 hectares. When the Japanese departed they took with them 200 tons of rice. The villagers were left with nothing. Villages all over Tonkin experienced such visits and, with their stores empty, they were forced to buy rice at the market in order to fulfil their quotas for the French authorities, who bought it back from them at one-third of the price they had paid.74

  The Tonkin peasantry began to starve. Thousands abandoned their homes and wandered about looking for food. ‘They roam in long endless groups, comprising the whole family, the elderly, the children, men, women, all of whom are disfigured by poverty, skinny, shaky, almost naked, including young girls of adolescent age who should have been very shy. From time to time they stop to close the eyes of one of them who has collapsed and who would never be able to rise again or to take the piece of rag (I do not know what to call it exactly), that has covered the fallen victim. Looking at these human shadows who are uglier than the ugliest animals, seeing the shrunk corpses, with only a few straws covering them for both clothes and funeral cloth, at the side of the roads one could feel that human life was so shameful.’75 Tran Van Mai, who wrote an account of the famine, described a couple who realized that if they continued to divide their food between themselves and their four young children they would all die. The couple decided to let the children die in the hopes that they would survive to have more offspring when the famine was over.76

  Neither the French nor the Japanese authorities ever tried to gather accurate figures for the number of deaths. It has been estimated that between 1 and 2 million Vietnamese died.77 New research suggests that the scale of the horror was far greater. The researchers found that in one small area some villages lost 500 inhabitants in the thirty years of war which followed the Second World War. But this was still fewer than those they lost to famine in the fifteen months between March 1944 and August 1945. There were villages which had lost as many as 40 per cent of their inhabitants during the famine. For many villages in north Vietnam, the famine rather than the Vietnam war was the worst experience of the twentieth century.78

  The most grotesque aspect of it all was that the Japanese continued to requisition rice amidst the human tragedy. When they unseated the French colonial government on 9 March 1945, they held in storage in the country 500,000 tons of rice that was waiting to be shipped to their troops in south-east Asia and to hungry civilians in Japan.79 But the American blockade of Japanese shipping made it almost impossible to transport the rice, and by October 1945 30,000 tons of the stores had rotted and were no longer fit for consumption. Even after the Japanese surrender, the area had been so denuded of shipping that there were not enough boats available to take the remaining stores of rice north to feed the starving.80 When in November 1945 Chinese Nationalist troops were brought in to disarm the Japanese troops, they ransacked the area and transported as much food as possible over the border into China.81

  In the first two years of the war a combination of overly cautious American submarine commanders and faulty torpedoes had given Japanese merchant shipping breathing space.82 But Japanese industry spent these two years of the war in a state of disorganization. Industrialists won in the battle against the army, which wanted industry to be brought under its effective control. The result was a lack of cross-industry co-operation and collaboration essential in the making of complex armaments.83 Added to this was the corruption and self-serving nature of the traditional industrial families, more interested in pursuing their own profits than mobilizing for war. It was not unusual for the large industrial undertakings to stockpile materials and then sell them on the black market.84 The result was that the shipbuilding industry was disastrously under-resourced.

  The navy was obsessed by the need to win a decisive battle against the enemy and ship construction concentrated on building up the battle fleet.85 The Japanese would have been better off building as many cargo ships as possible, as well as numerous escort vessels. Energy should have been spent developing submarine detection equipment, and training the crews of escort ships and aircraft pilots in submarine surveillance and attack.86 At the end of 1943 the state finally took effective control of industry. Aircraft production and the electronics sector were greatly improved, as was the production rate of the shipbuilding industry, which began to turn out merchant ships at some speed. The time it took to construct the new merchant ships matched the US rate of about forty days, but the quality of the vessels was inferior and they could be sunk with relative ease. Besides, these efforts were too little too late.87 More confident US commanders, aided by intelligence (the Americans broke all the J
apanese naval codes), improved torpedoes and wolf-pack tactics doubled their sinkings of Japanese tonnage that year.88 The Japanese had absolutely no hope of building enough ships to compensate for these losses. Their only real hope was in protecting those ships that they did have. But they did not have enough escort ships and their anti-submarine tactics were obsolete and ineffective. By 1944 Japan’s shipping capacity had been reduced by 60 per cent.89

  Throughout south-east Asia the collapse of the rice trade combined with the effectiveness of the American blockade had a terrible impact. In the Philippines, Japanese attempts to introduce Formosan strains of rice and improve agriculture were as unsuccessful as in Malaya.90 Unable to enforce a policy of self-sufficiency the Japanese reluctantly continued to import rice from Indo-China, but as the Americans stepped up their submarine campaign against Japanese shipping much of it sank to the bottom of the ocean. The price of black market rice in Manila tracks the growing severity of the food shortage. In 1941 rice cost 6 or 7 pesos per cavan;* by late 1942 the price was 30 pesos; and 70 pesos by mid-1943. Then the crisis escalated, and a year later a cavan of rice cost 250 pesos; six months later the price stood at 3,000 to 5,000 pesos, and by 1945 it had risen to 12,000 pesos. The wages for unskilled labour rose from about 1.30 pesos a day to 3 or 4 pesos in 1944.91 The wealthy went out into the countryside to barter jewellery, clothes and furniture for rice; the poor were so desperate that they ate foul-smelling rice recovered from the polluted bottom of Manila Bay. By 1944 it was common to see the corpses of those who had starved lying in the street.92

  In contrast, in the rice-growing area of central Luzon the Hukbalahap guerrillas were in control and the peasants lived well. Landlords, afraid of the guerrilla bands, withdrew from the region and failed to collect their rent in cash or kind. From the end of 1942 to late 1943 the Japanese, wary of conflict, kept to the coastal roads and towns and did not come into the area to requisition rice. Good weather ensured a bumper rice crop and many recall the period 1942 to 1947 as the period in their lives when food was most plentiful.93 Ironically, when left to their own devices, the Filipinos adopted the policy of self-sufficiency which the Japanese were so unsuccessful in imposing upon their Malayan subjects. Artisan crafts were revived and villagers made soap from lime, ashes and coconut oil, wove cloth, used tree bark to make baskets, extracted salt from seawater and brewed soft drinks from ginger and coconuts.94 A resident of Manila who moved out to southern Luzon reminisced: ‘Manila was gloomy and depressing. People were suffering. They were hungry. There were many beggars. There was despair. People just wondered when the bad dreams would be over. When I moved away, though, to be with relatives, I found people in the barrios were more confident. They were living better, more organized, more positive about things, more light-hearted, freer. It’s because there we were far away from the Japanese and we were part of the guerrillas.’95 However, in late 1943 the troops on the islands were reinforced and Japanese patrols moved into the region along the back trails. A priest who was a member of a guerrilla band recalled how the Japanese ‘raped, tortured, bayoneted, burned houses and crops, drove off animals and carried away clothing, food, even the agricultural equipment. In their wake they left hunger, malnutrition and starvation.’96

  On the island of Java in the Dutch East Indies the Japanese followed a desperate strategy similar to the one they adopted in Malaya and gutted the plantations in order to grow subsistence crops. Over 2 million men were conscripted to work as forced labourers on these newly created farms, but the lack of rice imports meant that the Japanese were unable to feed them properly and they were struck down by dysentery and yaws. Meanwhile, their families in the villages struggled to grow food without their labour. Rather than alleviating the food shortage the Japanese policy spread hunger, and a drought in 1944 made matters worse. Although Javan officials colluded in allowing the villagers to squirrel much of their harvest away, hiding it from the greedy requisitioning Japanese, the occupying forces were able to collect a large share of the much-diminished harvest.97 The food was stored away in order to supply naval ships which came to the island to pick up stores. The loss of increasing numbers of ships to submarine attacks meant that they came back again and again to requisition yet more rice from the dwindling stores.98 By 1944 thousands could be seen along the sides of the road, dressed in sacking and rags, ‘waiting for death’.99

  Caught up in the chaos of the ever-worsening food situation in the Japanese empire were hundreds of thousands of Allied prisoners of war. On average, prisoners during the Second World War lost 38 pounds in captivity. Allied prisoners of the Japanese lost an average of 61 pounds. Many of those who survived never fully recovered and suffered from poor health for the rest of their lives.100 The staple ration in the prison camps was white rice, which meant that the diet was seriously deficient in vitamin B. In Changi jail in Singapore the prisoners set up a ‘grass soup factory’ to alleviate the problem. The soup made of crushed grass tasted ‘like nothing on earth’ but it provided the men with essential vitamins.101 But by the end of the war beriberi in varying degrees of severity afflicted virtually all the prisoners of the Japanese. Forrest Knox, captured on Bataan at the beginning of the war, recalled that by 1945 he had turned into ‘a human balloon full of fluid’. The guards would periodically turn him over so that they could amuse themselves watching alternate sides of his face filling up with fluid.102

  H. E. Jessup, an Australian officer imprisoned in Changi, recorded in his diary the worsening condition of his fellow prisoners as the food situation in Malaya deteriorated throughout 1944. In July he noted that the only available source of protein was a tiny quantity of dried fish which was often inedible.103 The rice and salt rations were cut in October and the Japanese announced that they would no longer be issuing vegetables.104 Despite the grass soup, many of the men began to go blind, a symptom of vitamin B deficiency.105 By February 1945 Jessup was worried that the men would soon begin to die of starvation. In March he recorded that ‘food is our main preoccupation these days. We get up hungry from each meal, and barely exist until the next. The nights are the worst, with our stomachs an aching void. All sorts of things are being eaten, snails from the garden, sparrows, doves (if we can catch them) and even quite a few rats have found themselves in the cooking pots. Of course all cats and dogs disappeared long ago.’106 Jessup managed to hold out until August, and after the Japanese surrender the commandant of the jail was persuaded to release a stock of Red Cross parcels which the Japanese had been hoarding in warehouses in Singapore. The parcels tided the men over until they were liberated – on this diet Jessup even began to regain weight.107

  The American submarines gradually drew in a net around the home islands of Japan. In 1944 and 1945 the Japanese government abandoned all hope of using the wider empire as a source of food and concentrated its efforts on extracting as much food as possible from Manchuria, accessible via the shorter and initially less dangerous shipping routes across the Sea of Japan.

  In Manchuria the Japanese continued to live well. Teruko Blair spent fourteen months in Manchuria between May 1944 and July 1945. Back at home, food shortages were becoming painful but here she revelled in the fact that only sugar was scarce.108 The picture was very different among the Chinese population. Tsukui Shin’ya, an agricultural officer in Manchuria, recalled that ‘the year that the Pacific War broke out … the demands of the military administration increased sharply. The forwarding of agricultural produce and the commandeering of labourers shot up proportionately to the expansion of the war itself. The situation in foodstuffs ultimately brought on starvation for a group of poor farmers within the county.’109 In the early years of the war the failure of the Korean harvest increased the pressure on Manchuria’s farmers as coarse grains were sent to Korea in order to free up more rice for export to Japan. As the war wore on, Japan compensated for its own diminishing rice crop by importing Manchurian sweet potatoes, soya beans and barley. By 1945 as much as half or even three-quarters of the ration of �
��rice’ was made up of foodstuffs from Manchuria.110

  An article produced by the Allied Air Headquarters, India, observed, ‘The Nazis said that if anybody starves in Europe, they would be the last to starve, and the same principle seems to be applied by the Japanese in Manchuria.’111 The article outlined that even though the Vice-Minister for Agriculture in Manchuria had admitted that there had been a serious drought and locust damage to the harvest he had reiterated, ‘Whatever happens, the planned quota for export must be fulfilled.’112 The author was astonished to find that Japanese-occupied central China, an area which was itself suffering from a food crisis, was sending wheat to Manchuria. Meanwhile, Manchuria was sending Japan record amounts of soya beans. The Japanese had reportedly stripped Shanghai of its reserve food stocks (mainly food imported before the war from Canada and Australia) and sent them to Japan. ‘What is this great city going to eat?’ asked the report. The price of rice was said to have increased 240–fold.113 Tsuchiya Yoshio, a member of the Japanese military police in Manchuria, described the misery which resulted from the requisition of more and more foodstuffs. In the winter of 1944 he visited Lindian County, Heilongjiang Province. ‘There were homes in the area without clothing and bedding. There were even children living there naked.’114 Tsuchiya wondered how the children survived the cold. In the area along the Great Wall in Rehe Province, half of the residents lived without clothing, in utter despair. ‘Without any assistance, they will simply flicker out of existence.’115