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

by Lizzie Collingham

  It was during the Second World War that scientists really began to explore and understand the impact of starvation on the human body. The most disturbing and ground-breaking of these studies was conducted by twenty-eight Jewish physicians in the Warsaw ghetto. This was the first research project to look into the effects of hunger on metabolism and circulation. Over five months, doctors in the ghetto hospitals, themselves suffering from hunger and malnutrition, carefully measured the effect of starvation on their patients using sophisticated equipment smuggled in from Warsaw’s other hospitals. They documented the way in which the body goes into a form of hibernation, slowing down and becoming very cold, while gradually breaking down muscle tissue in order to maintain the organism. They also discovered that recovery from starvation is uneven and that the effect of hunger on the metabolism can be reversed quite quickly, while the circulation and the heart take much longer to recover. Hence the concentration camp victims who ate large quantities of food after liberation killed themselves by placing too great a strain upon their circulation and their already weakened hearts.87 The Warsaw doctors’ report was smuggled out of the ghetto and left in the care of a Polish doctor until one of the few survivors reclaimed it after 1945 and had the work published.

  Since the war, doctors have run a number of long-term studies on the survivors of the Leningrad siege and the Dutch Hunger Winter. Their findings suggest that the foetus of a woman exposed to famine, especially in the first and second trimesters of pregnancy, will be adversely affected in later life. Dutch adults with a genetic predisposition to suffer from mental disease were more likely to suffer from schizophrenia and psychotic depression if they had been in the womb of a woman starved in the winter of 1944–45., 88 Children born to women who had experienced the Dutch famine were also likely to have smaller birth weights than normal. This is unsurprising, but, more importantly, their own children tended to have lower than normal birth weights, demonstrating that it is not only the mother’s but the grandmother’s environment which affects the development of the foetus. This biological mechanism allows for humans to adapt to environmental conditions over generations but it also means that mothers who suffer from unusually severe conditions will pass on the impact of their experience over two generations.89 There is some suggestion that children with smaller than average birth weights due to lack of in utero nutrition are more likely to develop chronic heart disease, non-insulin-dependent diabetes and other associated diseases.90 Studies of victims of the Leningrad siege have found it difficult to filter out other factors affecting these diseases, such as social class and adult diet, in order to produce conclusive evidence that the children of famine are more likely to develop such life-threatening conditions.91 However, there is sufficient medical evidence to confirm that the physical repercussions of the famines of the Second World War are still echoing down through the generations, into the present day.

  One of the most revolutionary effects of the Second World War was that it effectively dismantled peasant societies in the United States, western Europe and Japan. After 1945 the majority of rural men mobilized for wartime purposes never returned to the land. As many as two-thirds of the pre-war western European rural population were released from the drudgery and poverty of a farming life.92 In Japan, farmers as a percentage of the population fell from 52.4 per cent in 1947 to 9 per cent in 1985.93 These men were diverted into industry, where their labour helped to stimulate economic recovery. This reduction in the farming population was made possible by the technological advances in agricultural productivity which were unleashed during the Second World War. The United States was the only country able to increase agricultural productivity during the conflict, but between 1945 and 1965 European agricultural ‘output grew more rapidly than in any twentieth-century period before or since’.94 In the 1960s Japan’s agricultural productivity had risen to the point where the country began to export, rather than import, rice.95 Rather than acting as a drag on economic development, as it had been in the 1930s, farming became profitable, while at the same time its political influence was reduced.96 Extreme agricultural conservatives, who saw agriculture as a bastion against the pernicious effects of modernization, were resoundingly defeated.97 The revolution in agricultural productivity allowed the developed world to achieve its pre-war goal of producing plenty of affordable food. Thus, it was agricultural science that provided the solution to Germany’s and Japan’s food dilemma of the 1930s, which neither the new Lebensraum nor the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere had been able to deliver. Ironically, in the post-war world both Germany and Japan were able to achieve the prosperity to which they had aspired precisely by following the course which in the 1930s they had spurned: American aid and ‘successful incorporation into world trade resting upon capitalist competition and market economies’.98

  Part III

  The Politics of Food

  In his role as head of the Department of War Engineering Armament in Russia, Victor Kravchenko ‘constantly had to telephone factories and pressurize them to work faster and meet their targets … This was largely futile as they were working as hard as they could already … To speed up output I drafted plans for supplying workers in certain plants with bread and hot meals, and they were put into effect when Stalin signed them.’1 In the wars of the twentieth century military success was intimately linked to the ability of industrial workers to produce tanks, aircraft, artillery and heavy ammunition. Under these conditions of total war the industrial working population became cogs in a vast war machine. Every combatant government looked to scientists, engineers and factory managers to develop new weaponry and to organize its manufacture as effectively as possible. In the same way they looked to nutritionists as the new engineers of the human body, to advise on the use of food as a means to maximize the productivity of workers.

  The late nineteenth-century understanding that foods were made up of proteins, carbohydrates and fats had given rise to this new group of scientists, drawn mainly from the disciplines of biochemistry and medicine, who sought to understand the way in which the body pro-cessed food. By the late 1930s it was understood that the number and type of calories required by humans differed according to age, sex and levels of exertion, but the scientists were uncertain as to exactly how many calories were needed for different activities. In the early twentieth century the discovery of vitamins had added a new dimension to knowledge about the body’s nutritional needs. It was not yet fully understood how vitamins and trace minerals worked to maintain health, but the late 1930s nutritional consensus prioritized animal over plant proteins and argued that meat, milk and dairy products, vegetables and fruit were all essential foods which protected the body from disease. A new concept was beginning to develop of the balanced diet which included a wide range of foodstuffs.

  During the 1930s Japan and Germany drew extensively upon the new science of nutrition in order to help prepare their nations for war. In Japan nutritionists reformed the diet of the armed services and then turned their attention to the civilian population. In Germany scientists were enlisted in Herbert Backe’s campaign for nutritional freedom, which sought to cut food imports by shifting German consumption towards a more austere diet. In Britain nutritionists had a different agenda. Professor Edward Mellanby, one of the scientists who had discovered vitamins, argued that if the government were to ensure that every citizen had access to nutritious food this would have an impact on public health as revolutionary as the nineteenth-century introduction of clean water and a functioning sewage system.2 But the British government was reluctant to take on such an expensive commitment and it was not until the war that, by introducing rationing, the government was forced to take responsibility for the food its citizens ate.

  All combatant nations introduced rationing during the war. This allowed the government to distribute shortages fairly across the population and to channel food to those who contributed most to the war effort. But rationing systems also embodied ideas about entitlement. While it was accept
ed in every country that the military should receive food as a first priority, the question of how to allot extra rations to those engaged in heavy physical labour such as miners, steel workers and armaments workers was answered differently by the different regimes. In Britain the idea of equality of sacrifice was made concrete in the distribution of equal rations across the adult population. In the Soviet Union the acute shortage of food made the idea that there should be any equality of sacrifice academic, as the government struggled to provide its army, let alone its industrial workforce, with enough to eat. The Soviets were faced with the situation which the National Socialists in Germany most feared, fighting a brutal war on their own territory while the civilian population went hungry and came close to starvation. The Soviet Union was probably the combatant with the least food per capita. The level of hunger in the Soviet Union made a mockery of the argument, so often propounded by the British and the German governments, that an adequate food supply was a cornerstone of success in the circumstances of total war. Despite desperate hunger and starvation the Soviet Union did the most of all the combatant nations in the European theatre to defeat Germany. Even after the Allied invasion of France the great majority of the Wehrmacht’s fighting capacity was concentrated on the eastern front, with 156 German divisions in the east, compared to 59 in France and 27 in Italy. The Red Army was responsible for 80 per cent of Germany’s total battle casualties.3

  All the major combatants fought the Second World War in the name of a better future. This was usually expressed through grand notions such as the triumph of democracy and freedom, the realization of a strong and powerful Greater Germany or the harmonious collaboration of Asian peoples in a Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere. However, the details that filled in these sketches of an ideal world were often more prosaic and focused on material possessions and good food. In the United States the idea of a society where consumption fuelled prosperity and everyone could afford to eat steak became a powerful vision of the future. In Germany, Hitler held out the promise that the National Socialists would build a shiny modern mass consumer society to rival America’s.4 In Britain politicians from both ends of the political spectrum acknowledged that the prospect of social reconstruction which involved the creation of a welfare state where everyone had a house and enough to eat, gave the people ‘something worth fighting for’.5 The Soviet focus was on the defeat of the fascist invader but on another level many were fighting for a better future, whether it was the realization of the ideals of communism or the amelioration of the repression of the regime. As the war progressed, the idea of achieving a happy and prosperous life faded into a tantalizing fantasy for the Germans and the Japanese. But for the British and, most of all, the Americans, the possibility of realizing prosperity for all became a tangible goal.

  A crude division emerged during the war between democratic and non-democratic countries. The former attempted to safeguard the rights of citizens, even in a time of war. The latter, especially Stalinist Russia and Imperial Japan, treated civilians and soldiers as expendable tools in a battle that was above the consideration of individual lives. The democratic nations’ view of their soldiers as civilians in uniform meant that British and American military commanders went to some lengths to minimize the human cost of warfare and preferred to use superior firepower in order to reduce the number of casualties.6 The difference in attitude was revealed most glaringly in the logistics of military supply. The United States, Britain and Japan shared the problem that ‘all the principal avenues of advance lay over water’, extending for thousands of kilometres across the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.7 The space allocated to rations and service personnel on the ships of these supply lines is a good indication of the extent to which troop welfare was considered central to each military’s ethos.

  The amount of equipment needed by the Americans was particularly stunning. An American infantry division of between 10,000 and 13,000 men needed 32,000 tons of shipping to move to Britain, and this was once their requirements had been stripped down to a minimum.8 As a result the Allied armies developed particularly long tails of non-combatant service personnel, averaging out at four service troops for every soldier, but rising to eighteen US service personnel for every infantryman in the Pacific, compared to somewhere between one and two to one in the Soviet and German armies.9 The length of the American tail was in large part made up of medical staff and battalions of construction personnel who were needed to build airstrips, ports, roads and temporary harbours. But the numbers also reflected the fact that American, British and Commonwealth troops were accompanied by catering corps who made meals and baked bread, even for the front-line troops.

  The most frugal of all the armies was the Japanese. They required fewer arms and less equipment, and the principle of self-sufficiency was paramount. The troops were issued with the minimum of creature comforts and rarely supplied with new clothes.10 Before embarking for Malaya in 1941 soldiers were issued with a pamphlet entitled Read this alone – and the war will be won. The author informed them that ‘since it is no small matter to transport supplies by sea all the way from Japan, you should fight and live on a bare minimum’.11 The men were instructed to use their ingenuity, and if food were short they should supplement their diet with anything that came to hand, including wild grasses, a common famine food among the peasant families from which many of the army recruits were drawn.12

  These different expectations meant that different food crisis points existed within each country’s army and civilian population, ranging from the anxiety caused in Britain by the sight of empty grocers’ shelves in the winter of 1940–41 to the indifference shown by passers-by in the streets of Moscow towards the corpses of people who had died of starvation in the winter of 1942. While GIs would have expressed great dissatisfaction at a meal consisting of a handful of rice, soup made from miso powder, and a can of tinned fish, the Japanese found this an adequate meal. Indeed, the Japanese high command began the war thinking that it was possible for ‘the Japanese army [to] … continue fighting without food, if they had strong moral[e]’.13

  The following chapters examine how well the major combatant nations fed their armies and their civilian populations. Beginning with Japan, which was brought to its knees by food shortages, and ending with the United States, which was the only nation to enjoy an abundance of food in wartime, they ask to what extent the adequacy of the food supply affected these nations’ ability to wage war.

  13

  Japan – Starving for the Emperor

  Here’s what I learned: Men killed in real combat are a very small part of those who die in war. Men died of starvation, all kinds of disease.

  (Ogawa Tamotsu who was stationed on New Britain for three years)1

  ‘Two years from now we will have no petroleum for military use. Ships will stop moving. When I think about the strengthening of American defences in the south-west Pacific, the expansion of the American fleet, the unfinished China Incident, and so on, I see no end to difficulties. We can talk about austerity and suffering, but can our people endure such a life for a long time?’2 Japan’s Prime Minister Tojo Hideki asked this question on 5 November 1941. The vision he conjured up of a defeated Japan was used to justify the government’s decision to go to war with the United States. However, in the four years of the Pacific war the American blockade steadily eroded Japan’s sea communications with its empire until its supply of oil ran out, its ships had been sunk or immobilized, and the Japanese administration was faced with the question of how much suffering the Japanese people could endure. By attacking the United States the Japanese government brought upon itself the very state of affairs which it feared.

  During the course of its war with China and America the Japanese military went from being one of the best-fed armed forces in the world to a state of miserable starvation. By focusing on the need to fight a decisive battle with the United States, in the misguided conviction that this would persuade the Americans to come to the negotiating table, the mi
litary leadership demonstrated their failure to grasp the nature of the new modern war of attrition.