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

by Lizzie Collingham

  If the health of Japan’s urban population was beginning to be affected by the blockade in 1943, its impact on the imperial army’s troops scattered across the Pacific islands was devastating. In the spring the flow of food from Japan and south-east Asia to Rabaul was seriously disrupted, and stocks of rice, barley, canned vegetables, oranges, meat, fish, miso paste, soya sauce, beer and sake all ran low. Stores were frequently ‘insufficient to allow a satisfactory food issue to all’.78 The military high command’s answer to such problems was that the campaign for self-sufficiency must be intensified. Divisions based on the Solomon Islands and New Britain were instructed that total self-sufficiency must be achieved by the end of 1943. On Bougainville in April troops stationed in the south-west of the island were instructed: ‘The regiment will confidently complete its mission even if its supply line is cut in the rear by bravely establishing a self-supporting status in the present location … Direct the main effort towards the development of agricultural areas and the securing of staple food with which to make the place self-sufficient.’79 Each unit was ordered to employ half their men in farming. The locals were also employed in intensive gardening activities.80 On New Guinea the troops stationed around Madang and Wewak were ordered to cover 50 per cent of their food needs with crops which they were to requisition or grow themselves, while the rest of the troops on the island were instructed to supply themselves with 25 per cent of their food. Even the front-line troops on New Guinea were told that Allied air attacks on communication lines meant that despite the fact that they were engaged in combat they would have to purchase, requisition and confiscate their food from the locals or cultivate their own vegetable gardens.81

  The commanding officer on Rabaul, Imamura Hitoshi, responded by starting a farming initiative. The men at the base began to lead a strange semi-agrarian, semi-military existence. Each soldier planted up about 500 square metres with green stuff, sweet potatoes and aubergines. The unit commanders even held competitive exhibitions of the men’s crops as an incentive to intensive gardening.82 One Japanese diarist recorded that ‘beautiful [vegetable gardens] just like in Japan’ covered the area.83 The men also kept chickens, cultivated edible snails and made great efforts to catch lizards and snakes.84 The soldiers began to divide their time equally between self-sufficiency, construction of an underground fortress, and training, with a small amount of time allotted to sanitation and rest. In addition, the locals were urged by the military police to cultivate as much food as possible. They were told that ‘there is nothing else for you to do, except for the whole village to strive for that one thing [to grow as much taro, bananas, and papayas as possible]’.85 The Eighth Fleet military supplies section noted that ‘fresh provisions at Rabaul were unexpectedly favourable’.86 Indeed, they calculated that the men on the island were producing approximately 12 tons of food a day in June 1943. Even in 1945, although a disillusioned military diarist complained that his unbalanced diet of rice, barley, pumpkin and soya sauce was making him skinny, the death toll from starvation was low.87 While the policy of self-sufficiency was reasonably successful on Rabaul itself, the soldiers-turned-farmers at the base could not possibly hope to produce enough food to continue to provide adequate supplies for troops stationed elsewhere on dependent islands.

  GUADALCANAL

  Meanwhile, on Guadalcanal in the Solomons, Japanese soldiers paid the price for the navy’s inability to protect the sea lines of communication and provide adequate food supplies for troops engaged in combat. Japanese troops were in the process of building an air base on Guadalcanal when US marines attacked on 7 August 1942. By 18 August the Americans had captured and finished the airfield, which they named Henderson Field. It became the focus of six months of bitter fighting. Under the cover of darkness, the Japanese ran troops, food and ammunition from Rabaul past Bougainville and along a channel between New Georgia and Santa Isabel known as the Slot, a supply line which the Americans referred to as the ‘Tokyo Express’. The Japanese continued to land reinforcements on the island until November, but their position became increasingly hopeless. The transports were unable to carry enough food supplies, as well as men and equipment, and the rations on the island were reduced to one-third of their normal quantity. Then the Americans began to attack the destroyers that accompanied the supply barges and, not wishing to lose vital ships, the Japanese adopted a method of dropping barrels of supplies from ships sailing past at a safe distance. The barrels were attached to rubber bales and tied together with rope and floated in to shore where the soldiers could collect them. But one private, who recalled stuffing oil drums with rice, powdered miso, matches and candles for the men on Guadalcanal, commented that the soldiers were too weak from hunger to go out to the shore and retrieve them.88

  Japanese divisions made three attacks on Henderson Field. Each one ended in wholesale slaughter. The few men who survived were then faced with hiding out on the island with nothing to eat. As each new Japanese unit arrived for a fresh attack it met the starving remnants of the previous force. Making their way up to the airfield, Major-General Kawaguchi Kiyotake’s second assault team met a few stragglers from the first – Colonel Ichiki Kiyonoa’s unit. ‘They were so much skin and bone … clothes torn and boots falling to pieces; some had no footwear at all. They bowed repeatedly and asked for food.’89 The third assault team of the 2nd Division were met by those few of Kawaguchi’s men who had not been mown down by concentrated machine-gun fire on the Bloody Ridge. Skinny from starvation, they exhibited the symptoms of severe vitamin deficiency and malnutrition. ‘Their ribs protruded. Their black hair had turned a dirty brown and could be pulled out in patches. Their eyebrows and eyelashes were dropping off and their teeth were loose. For almost three weeks no one had had a bowel movement and their bodies were so starved of salt that the sea water tasted sweet.’90

  By December 1942 the fact that the Japanese were having trouble getting supplies of ammunition through to the island became irrelevant in the face of the death of 120–30 soldiers from starvation each day. Two staff officers, sent to investigate conditions on what had become known as the ‘starvation island’, reported back to Imamura Hitoshi on Rabaul that the soldiers were so weak that each man on patrol needed the food of four men.91 By January 1943 the death toll had risen to 200 a day. Lieutenant-General Hyakutake Harukichi (now in charge on the island) drew up a timetable of death in which he calculated that a man who could still rise to his feet had about thirty days left to live, while a prone man who could nevertheless still speak might last for only two.92

  Finally admitting defeat, the Japanese evacuated about 13,000 sur-vivors in January. They were barely able to walk the 30 kilometres to the evacuation point. Unusually for a Japanese commander, used to keeping his emotions under control, Imamura, visiting the survivors on Bougainville, was moved to tears by the men, ‘thin as thread, their faces … blistered in blue … staggering … unable to stand … ill-fed they were dejected’.93 Imamura estimated that 15,000 Japanese soldiers had starved to death on Guadalcanal while only 5,000 had been lost in combat.94 It was this experience which shook Imamura’s, until then, unshakeable faith in the Japanese fighting spirit.95

  NEW GUINEA

  For the troops fighting on New Guinea, the high command’s policies on the provisioning of troops proved disastrous from beginning to end. The capture of the capital settlement of Port Moresby on the south-eastern tip of the island was considered to be crucial to Japanese plans. It was seen as a gateway to Australia, and by controlling the island of New Guinea they hoped to prevent the Allies from establishing a bridgehead from which to attack their base at Rabaul on New Britain. The battle of the Coral Sea in May 1942 prevented the landing force from achieving their goal of attacking Port Moresby from the sea, so the Japanese decided to attack by land. In July 1942 they began landing troops in the north-eastern area of the island around Buna. From here they planned to travel by means of the Kokoda Trail over the Owen Stanley range of mountains to Port Moresby.

&nb
sp; The Japanese arrived on New Guinea without having carried out any serious investigations into the geography or climate of the island. It quickly became clear to the commanding officer Major-General Horii Tomitaro that the route over the mountains would present a challenge to bringing supplies up to the front line. The men would require about 3 tons of food and equipment each day, which would have to be taken 20 kilometres along a treacherously slippery log road, subject to Allied air attack, before the supplies were transferred to the heads of native porters for the journey along the trail. This was a narrow, single-track jungle path which zigzagged its way through thick forest, losing 180 metres for every 300 gained, so jagged were the mountains. At high altitudes it was bitterly cold; down in the valleys the humidity was unbearable. ‘The fringes of the forest [were] interwoven from ground to treetop level with vines and creepers to form an almost solid mat of vegetation which has to be cut by the machete … before progress is possible.’96 Tramped over by an army of soldiers in the pouring tropical rain the track turned into ‘boot-sucking porridge’.97 As the Japanese advanced, Horii worked out that the number of porters needed to make what would eventually become a twenty-day round trip would increase to 4,600. To compound the problem, as the journey lengthened, the carriers themselves would need to consume more and more of the provisions they were carrying.98

  In a manner characteristic of Japanese commanders, Horii gambled on quick advances and the capture of enemy food stores. One prisoner of war later claimed his unit had been issued with as few as seven days’ rations, another that they were only given fourteen days’ worth of food for the march across the 350-kilometre trail.99 By the time they reached the Iorabaiwa Ridge, which was the furthest point of their advance, the soldiers were more interested in capturing food than in defeating the Australians. They swarmed on to the ridge and began crazily searching for ration dumps. Distressed to discover that the Australians had taken most of their food with them, they struggled with each other over the remnants. ‘In the scramble for punctured tins and mud-stained rice, the warrior spirit evaporated. The Australian rearguard went unmolested.’100 The Australians had by now adopted the cruel policy of contaminating any food that had to be left behind in a retreat. One Australian soldier recalled taking great delight in bayoneting the tins of food and scattering the sacks and meat over the muddy ground before withdrawing.101 After eating everything they could find, the Japanese were afflicted by horrible gastric complaints.102 In a last-ditch attempt to motivate their troops, the Japanese officers promised them plentiful Allied food stores if they captured Port Moresby itself.103 But then in September 1942 the Japanese high command prioritized the battle of Guadalcanal. Even though they could see the lights of Port Moresby shining in the distance, Horii’s troops retreated and dug in, back where they had started, at Buna.

  Here malaria and amoebic dysentery swept through the troops. Malnutrition meant that their resistance to malaria was ‘nil’ and this was a particularly nasty strain which attacked the mucous membranes in the nose and stomach. A side-effect was severe diarrhoea and if this and a fever continued for more than four days the result was death.104 The Japanese, sitting in their foxholes ‘like mummies’, began to suffer from shell-shock.105 The Allies forced them out of their bridgeheads and they retreated back along the northern coast of the island. A Japanese army report entitled ‘Lessons learned from battles at Buna and Giruwa and intelligence on future offensives’ attempted to analyse why they were unable to hold their positions. Malnutrition was identified as the main reason for defeat. Lack of food, the report concluded, had led to a loss of morale, even despair, and the breakdown of military discipline. The absurd aspect of the report was that rather than identifying Allied destruction of Japanese shipping as the cause of the supply problem, it focused on the fact that New Guinea was a ‘barren wasteland’ with a harsh climate and an environment in which it was virtually impossible to cultivate additional provisions. Lack of supplementary produce, in other words failure to achieve self-sufficiency, was held to blame.106

  However, the idea that troops on New Guinea could achieve even 50 or 25 per cent food self-sufficiency was ludicrous and the failure of the supply lines in 1943 meant that they received far less than half of the food they needed. The system of dropping oil drums stuffed with supplies was employed in New Guinea as well as at Guadalcanal. Unfortunately, the rocket the ship fired to alert the soldiers to the bales of supplies drifting in on the tide also caught the attention of the enemy. ‘Suicide squads’ were sent out to gather in as much as they could under a heavy barrage from the Allied soldiers.107 Eventually there were too few ships left to continue with these so-called ‘rat’ runs. The Americans had systematically torpedoed them, claiming fifty-eight which had been on supply missions. The Japanese switched to the ‘mole’ system. Now it was submarines that towed in the rubber bales and set them free without surfacing. Each submarine could drag enough supplies to feed 30,000 men for two days but the soldiers were only able to recover perhaps as few as one-third of the drums. Then in August 1943 Imperial Headquarters announced that New Guinea would now be self-sustaining. No more supplies would be brought in. The Japanese forces on the island were abandoned to starvation.

  In an effort to conserve what food supplies there were on the island the commanding officers warned the troops in September that they must not carry out wild acts of plunder on the villagers’ gardens. The natives ‘are are to be pacified’, the troops were told, ‘and we are planning thereby to increase our supplies especially fresh vegetables’.108 But the inhabitants of Loboda village near Milne Bay recalled that the Japanese constantly pilfered from their gardens, killed their pigs and even ate raw taro they were so hungry. Others would go from hamlet to hamlet begging for gifts of food in exchange for a compass or clothing.109 About a third of the 20th Division stationed at Finschhafen were allocated gardening tasks, while about one-sixth of the men went out foraging for food in the local area. Japanese troops became more preoccupied with finding their next meal than fighting to hold on to territory, and the Allies found that they fought hardest to maintain their occupancy of areas where they controlled native gardens. If the gardens were eaten out then they might fight to gain ground in areas where there was more food, and they were so hungry that they would sometimes raid native vegetable gardens behind the Allied lines.110 A significant number of ambushes and attacks were carried out with the express purpose of stealing Allied rations.111 For the natives, 1944–45 was a period of terror. Their buildings, cooking fires and gardens all attracted Allied bombing. On the ground the Japanese foraging parties were brutal and vindictive.112 But even when the Australians arrived, conditions did not improve greatly as their soldiers raped the women without fear of being disciplined. One senior Australian officer was said to have commented that ‘after all, “the Marys raped very easily”’.113

  Allied interrogations of Japanese prisoners revealed an army slowly disintegrating from hunger.114 An Allied Intelligence Research Report concluded, ‘officers and men alike, in forward areas, are preoccupied almost to the exclusion of everything else with the shortage of food … Bitterness and resentment, reaching at times a homicidal level, are generated by this life or death competition, especially towards officers who are, or appear to be abusing the privileges of their rank … Comparison of their own plight with the enemy’s comparative affluence, especially brought home by the capture of our parachute dropped supplies or one of our ration dumps, reminds the Japanese soldier again of the extent of his abandonment.’115 Superior Private Nakata Motoo told his interrogators that he had decided to surrender after his officers had ordered the men into the fields to collect potatoes during mortar and air attacks and then had taken the best food for themselves.116

  By the summer of 1944 the Japanese were reduced to eating sacsac, a tasteless, brown starch made from sago palms. Water was passed through the fibre hollowed out of the palm trunks to produce a glutinous mass which was wrapped in leaves and cooked. The sticky mess
was even sent up to feed the front-line troops. At first they mixed it with rice or wheat but eventually they ate plain sacsac, which did little to assuage hunger pangs or provide energy or nutrition. In the Sepak river area the men in combat were given dried grasses to eat.117 Well aware of how hungry the Japanese were, the Allies bombed supply bases, and even strafed the palm trees to deny them coconuts and sacsac.118

  On 10 December 1944 the commander of the 18th Army on New Guinea, General Adachi Hatazo, issued an order that ‘while troops were permitted to eat the flesh of the Allied dead, they must not eat their own’.119 This admission of cannibalism among Japanese troops is supported by a number of Australian War Crimes Section reports as well as by US army documents which indicate that the Japanese on New Guinea ate each other, members of the local population, Asian prisoners of war who had been brought to the islands as forced labourers and Allied soldiers. The reports contain eyewitness accounts by soldiers who discovered the mutilated bodies of their comrades, as well as evidence that their flesh had been eaten. On 20 May 1945 an Australian soldier recovered the body of one of his battalion. He had been stripped, and both his arms were cut off at the shoulder. ‘The stomach had been cut out, and the heart, liver and other entrails had been removed, all fleshy parts of the body had been cut away … A Japanese mess tin which appeared to contain human flesh was lying four to five yards away … between two dead Japanese soldiers.’120 Hatam Ali, an Indian soldier taken prisoner by the Japanese, was sent to New Guinea as part of a labour force to build an airfield in 1943. He later recounted that when the Japanese ran out of food in 1944 the guards would select one prisoner each day who ‘was taken out and killed and eaten … I personally saw this happen.’121 The prisoners had been transformed from a workforce into a food supply.