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

by Lizzie Collingham

  One of the cruellest aspects of the hunger and famine imposed on the peasantry in the name of feeding the army was that the troops themselves were frequently weak and malnourished. By 1942 the recruitment process had degenerated into a process of impressment. Gangs would forcibly round up peasants and sell them to the army. Many would die of starvation before they reached the military camp. ‘Of 40,000 conscripts arriving at a camp near Chengdu during one conscription drive, no more than 8,000 remained alive by drive’s end.’49 The officers would siphon off food to sell on the black market, leaving the soldiers with inadequate rations. It was said that ‘some units could not go even a short distance without many dying alongside of the road from disease or starvation’.50 In 1942 troops in the south were reported to be living on low-quality rice without vegetables, and one cup of boiled water per day. A second-class soldier’s pay of 50 yuan per month bought very little supplementary food, given that a pound of cabbage cost 30 yuan.51 Hunger increased the ferocity of the army’s wild requisitioning of food. In Hubei province in May 1943 troops evacuated an entire town and then set about plundering everything of value which the inhabitants had left behind. The elderly who had remained in their houses were murdered.52 In the province of Guangdong the army created a famine in which 1.5 million peasants died. Meanwhile, the rice which the army officers had requisitioned from the starving peasants was smuggled across the front line and sold to the Japanese at great personal profit.53

  The army felt the peasants’ rage in the spring of 1944 when the Japanese launched their Ichigo offensive. The Japanese aim was to capture the air bases from which the Americans were launching bombing attacks on Japanese cities and to open a land route through to south-east Asia. As they advanced, army officials in Henan began evacuating their families, along with cartloads of goods extorted from the peasantry. They even began to round up the locals’ oxen in order to pull the carts. The peasants responded with fury, at first disarming individual soldiers and then moving on to ferociously attacking the retreating Chinese troops with ancient guns and farm implements. As many as 50,000 Nationalist soldiers were disarmed by their own countrymen. About one-fifth of these were murdered, some buried alive by the peasants.54

  The Japanese captured Henan, Hunan and Jiangxi with ease. Pressure intensified on the population of Sichuan but the situation was irretrievable. The Chinese paid the price of an Allied strategy which prioritized other areas of conflict. When the Ichigo offensive began, Nationalist China’s best divisions were away in Burma fighting for the British in order to retake Rangoon. In 1945, Albert Wedemeyer, the US Chief of Staff in China, refused to divert Chinese troops to recapture the valuable agricultural areas on the northern front and insisted that Nationalist forces should be concentrated in the south, it being a priority for the Americans that Japanese troops from south-east Asia should be prevented from retreating overland into China.55

  The death toll reveals which groups in Chinese society bore the burden of the struggle against the Japanese. Two million Nationalist soldiers died and at least 15 million civilians, 85 per cent of them peasants, and virtually all of them the victims of deprivation and starvation. 56 In allowing corruption and wild requisitioning to spiral out of control the Nationalist government could not have aided the communists more effectively. On returning from Henan, Theodore White commented, ‘We knew that there was a fury, as cold and relentless as death itself, in the bosom of the peasants of Honan [sic], that their loyalty had been hollowed to nothingness by the extortion of the government.’57 Throughout the Nationalist-controlled areas the seeds of bitterness and resentment had been sown among the peasantry.

  COMMUNIST SURVIVAL

  The War of Resistance destroyed the Nationalist government. It had the opposite effect on the communists, who were able to use the war to renew their energies, consolidate their base in the north and expand the areas under their influence. The 4,000 survivors of the Long March established a base in the Shaan-Gan-Ning (Shaanxi-Gansu-Ningxia) border region, with their headquarters at Yan an in northern Shaanxi. During the war they expanded their influence further into northern and eastern central China. The Japanese did not have a firm grip on rural China and the communists would set up base areas behind the Japanese lines, surrounding the Japanese garrison towns with a communist countryside. These areas were widely scattered and varied from relatively well-consolidated control to guerrilla zones.58

  The communists were by no means firmly established as a ruling power. They were thus in a position of trying to live off the land like an army of occupation rather than an army based in its own country. An additional disadvantage was that their base area was under-developed, agriculturally poor and prone to natural disasters such as earthquakes, floods and droughts.59 In the early years of its existence the Communist Party had adopted an aggressive policy of land reform which confiscated land from rich peasants and landlords. During the war, it seemed politic to adopt a more conciliatory approach which minimized the extent of social and economic disruption.60 Thus, rather than evicting landlords, they set about redistributing wealth by reducing the amount of rent landlords could demand and the interest which could be charged on loans. By giving the peasantry greater access to potential profits these measures provided them with an incentive to work hard and produce more food. A number of schemes which introduced labour teams, crop rotation, increased manuring of crops, as well as irrigation projects, all improved agricultural productivity. The great achievement of the communists was to use their only resource – labour – most effectively within the limits of agricultural under-development.61 Like the Nationalists, the communists relied on the villages for manpower for the army but they took care to minimize the potential alienation and labour shortages which were caused by military recruitment. Soldiers’ families were given special assistance during the harvest and the Red Army routinely helped to bring in the crops, reducing the harvest time by as much as half in Shaanxi in 1938.62

  The 1936 truce with the Nationalists meant that they were able to bring in supplementary supplies from Nationalist-held regions in the first plentiful two years of the war. General Peng Dehuai, deputy commander of the Communist Eighth Route Army, bought up large quantities of grain during the bountiful harvest of 1937 and sent it north for storage in the remote mountain areas.63 The co-operation between the two parties came to an end in 1941 after a clash between Nationalist and communist troops, and from then on the Nationalists imposed a blockade on the communist-held areas. Inflation in Yan an sky-rocketed and the food situation among the communist troops deteri-orated to the point where it threatened their survival. Supplies were limited to black soya bean and even this frequently did not get through. The soldiers improvised and ate melons, tree leaves, grass roots and wild herbs.64

  Mao, in a manner reminiscent of his Japanese opponents, cham-pioned the strategy of self-sufficiency. The communists would have to take up farming and feed themselves.65 For the purposes of propaganda Mao even tilled the soil himself and his farming exploits were held up as an inspiration, not only to the ordinary people, but to the soldiers and the bureaucracy. Party and government offices, schools, factories and army units were all encouraged to set up their own farms.66 Mr Changzheng, a teenager when he went on the Long March to Yan an, recalled how, ‘Every morning, the troops went off up into the mountains with their hoes to clear the land for planting. The ground was very hard, and some of the vegetation needed two people to dig it out. By day we prepared the ground, and by night we spun and wove cotton. We had a song which went: Till the wastelands, till the wastelands; The front-line soldiers need food. Weave cloth, weave cloth; The front-line soldiers need clothing.’67 By 1944 the army had reclaimed, and was productively farming, about 830,000 mu of land, producing an impressive 13.5 million tons of grain, more than the 9 million tons of grain the Germans were able to squeeze out of the more fertile Ukraine. The communist Shaan-Gan-Ning region was able to achieve an impressive level of self-sufficiency.68

  Attempts wer
e made to extend the self-sufficiency programme to the rest of the Red Army in other communist-held areas. This had great propaganda value. When communist propaganda units travelled through the villages, urging the peasants to participate in the production movement, their job was made easier by the fact that the soldiers were themselves participating in the drive to increase the food supply.69 It was, however, still necessary to requisition food from the peasantry. In the secure communist areas the military requisitions were referred to as ‘national salvation grain levies’; in the less-established areas the communists preferred to ask for loans and contributions rather than demand taxes.70 The party administrators were aware that they were not in a strong enough position to extract food ruthlessly from the peasantry, and army officers were exhorted to pay for supplies with scrip tickets. The Fourth Brigade was issued with strict instructions that it was to abide by three principles when requisitioning food. Firstly, the soldiers should take whatever the peasants chose to give them, without complaint. Secondly, political officers should, if possible, investigate the ability of different villagers to pay food taxes, and food should not be requisitioned from the poor peasants. Finally, they were to confine themselves to taking only what they needed. Anything left over should be distributed before the troops left the area.71 The communists were certainly better at restraining wild requisitioning of food on the part of their forces, but after the vicious Japanese attacks on communist groups in 1942 the soldiers became more desperate and unofficial levies more common. There is no doubt that communist soldiers were as capable as the Guomindang army of behaving like ‘bandits’ in the villages.72 However, for the most part, they succeeded in maintaining the goodwill of the peasantry and, when the war against the Japanese came to an end and the civil war between the communists and the Nationalists began, while the peasantry did not rise up in support of the communists they were willing to co-operate with them.73

  When the war came to an end the corruption of the Nationalists acted as a foil, heightening the positive aspects of communist policies. The food crisis continued and the government responded by printing money, fuelling inflation and deepening the crisis.74 When the Nationalists moved back into the occupied areas they behaved like a colonial power and treated the locals with contempt as collaborators. One woman, who was a student in Shanghai at the time, recalled how ‘carpet-bagging officials sent by the Guomindang to take over from the Japanese had arrived from Chongqing, and appropriated all the wealth for themselves, and then they used galloping inflation to fleece ordinary people’.75 As soon as her father, a university lecturer, was paid, the family had to hurry round with heavy bags of money buying as much food as possible before inflation meant that the food prices rose again beyond their means. The Nationalists quickly lost the goodwill of the liberated population, and the rural population in the Nationalist areas were already disaffected.76

  Meanwhile the communists, armed by the Soviets with weapons left behind by the Japanese, projected an air of ‘purpose and morale’ which meant that many welcomed their victory simply because they retained a level of political credibility which the Nationalists had lost.77 In 1949 the communists won the civil war and founded the People’s Republic of China, while the Nationalist leadership fled to Formosa (Taiwan). In many ways the outcome of the civil war was determined by the way in which the two parties ran their respective campaigns against the Japanese.78 However, the reasons why this was the case have since been lost in a concerted rewriting of history. Rather than acknowledging that the communists had won the goodwill of the peasantry through the conciliatory measures which they were forced to adopt under the pressure of war, communist propaganda argued that the party had gained popular support as a result of the Red Army’s heroic guerrilla warfare against the Japanese.79 Meanwhile, the American administration’s defence against right-wing outrage in the US that the communists had won in China, led those US administrators who had decided to withdraw American support for the Nationalists during the civil war to present the Nationalist government as irredeemably corrupt.80 In the process the Nationalists’ earlier, more honourable aims and successes were forgotten. In addition, the wholesale destruction of China’s agricultural and industrial fabric by the Japanese was rarely acknowledged as a problem which virtually any government would have found insurmountable, let alone in the conditions of civil war.81

  During the Second World War only the United States had sufficient resources to produce record quantities of food in wartime. However, the ability of western European countries to withstand occupation and a drastic reduction in agricultural inputs demonstrated that countries with developed economies and relatively efficient agricultural sectors were far better at weathering the difficulties created by war than those which were predominantly rural.82 In Japan the arable nature of farming meant that there was no flexibility within the system which would allow farmers to switch from meat to grain cultivation and this made it virtually impossible to increase food production. In under-developed India and China, where the peasant-based agricultural systems were labour-intensive, and where a large section of the population was already living at the margins of subsistence, the pressures of war pushed these nations into a food crisis.

  Western industrialized countries also held up better in terms of food collection. With the notable exceptions of the Soviet Union and China, farmers were relatively well fed in all the combatant nations as they were able, legally or illegally, to hold back adequate and often ample quantities of food. However, in many countries the ability of farmers to withdraw into self-sufficiency made it difficult to collect enough food to feed the cities. In Germany and France the large number of smallholdings meant that while the rural population ate relatively well, urban dwellers frequently suffered from food shortages, vegetables and fruit in particular disappearing from grocers’ shelves. In the more rural parts of the world, in the occupied Soviet Union, Japan and south-east Asia, not only did the disillusion of farmers with the governing authorities, and their withdrawal from the open market, cause food production to fall dramatically, a large part of what was produced was channelled on to the black market. Only in the Soviet Union was the government able to prevent this from happening as collectivization proved to be a powerful instrument, allowing the government control over virtually all the food farmers were able to grow.

  All the combatant nations, bar the United States and China, remained reliant to a greater or lesser extent on food imports. Britain benefited greatly from its dominant position within pre-war world trade. It was able to command the manpower, raw materials, clothing and food resources of its empire as well as of traditional trading partners such as Argentina and the United States. Germany was pitted against not just a small island but the sum of its empire and influence. The United States was able to feed itself and its huge army, as well as British civilians and the Soviet Red Army. Thus, agrarian resources were a powerful Allied asset. It is unsurprising that Germany and Japan wanted their own empires. They benefited greatly from their occupied territories but they were to discover that the more exploitative their policies the less effective they were. This was exemplified by Denmark, which surprised Germany with the abundance of its exports, while the Ukraine ultimately proved a disappointment.

  By virtue of the fact that they were importing foodstuffs from countries suffering from food scarcity, Japan and Germany were exporting hunger. The National Socialists applied their distorted racial ideologies to their empire and, although they were determined that all nations should go hungry before Germany, they viewed the Slavs in particular as sub-human and carried through a brutal programme of starvation and extermination in the east. In the Japanese empire it was the Chinese who found themselves at the bottom of the East Asian hierarchy. But, even in the more benign sphere of the Allies, race was still a deciding factor in determining who was well fed, who went hungry and who starved. By prioritizing food imports for British civilians, the British government unashamedly transferred the problem of food shortages to
its colonies, most notably India. Colonial governments then compounded the problem by failing to protect the entitlement of the vulnerable to food in the face of rampant wartime inflation. The Soviets and the Nationalist Chinese, unable to export hunger to other parts of the world, transferred it within their own countries to the peasantry, who bore much of the burden of the war effort.

  During the Second World War the National Socialists discovered that it was an unexpectedly slow and difficult process to starve people to death. While laying plans for the starvation policy to be inflicted upon the Polish Jews, German physicians calculated that as long as the inhabitants of the Warsaw ghetto received no more than 800 calories of low-protein food per day it should take nine months for them to die. But again and again the National Socialists’ plans to starve the Soviet and Jewish population to death came up against the ingenuity and determination of their intended victims. The Jews of Warsaw survived partly by eating the ground rectums of cattle, the Ukrainians smuggled food into the blockaded cities, and in the countryside hid stores of food, dug up dead horses and collected famine foods. All displayed a steely determination to live. In Leningrad the besieged inhabitants demonstrated that it was possible to survive without sufficient food for far longer than any of the German physicians would have thought possible. A doctor who survived the siege noted that although adults were not supposed to be able to live for more than a month on a daily diet consisting of fewer than 1,300 calories a day, Leningraders survived on far less than this for up to two or three months.83 Valentina Grigorevna Burakova, a district doctor in Leningrad, asserted that ‘in practice … it was not only nutrition that was conducive to survival, but also high morale’.84 After the siege Leningraders often attributed their survival to their refusal to ‘lie down and wait’ for death.85 Women tend to survive famine better than men. This was the case in the European famines of the Second World War and in the Bengal famine. The female physique gives women a slight advantage as they tend to have more body fat and a slower metabolism than men, but observers thought that, in addition, women were more determined to survive for the sake of their children.86 The National Socialists eventually learned that only those who could be denied all access to supplementary food supplies, such as Soviet prisoners of war, could be starved to death with ease. In the case of the Warsaw Jews, rather than allow them to continue as a burden on the Polish food supply, the Nazis murdered them in the extermination camp of Treblinka in 1942.