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

by Lizzie Collingham

  United States analysts thought that a strategy of blockade and bombardment would be slow and painful. The American public would have had to wait patiently for an end to the war, while thousands of Japanese civilians starved to death. In addition the Allies would have had to stand idly by while Allied prisoners of war, civilian internees and indigenous slave labourers in the Japanese empire died at an estimated rate of somewhere between 100,000 and 250,000 a month. When the prisoners of war in the Dutch East Indies were finally liberated they were found to be ‘absolutely at their last gasp’.214 It seems likely that if a policy of blockade had been chosen there would have been no prisoners of war or European civilian internees left to liberate.

  The American government was reluctant to wait for Japan to come to such an agonizing end. General Marshall and army planners were certain that disillusionment would set in among the American public long before it set in among the Japanese militarists. The overriding aim of the US government was to end the war in the Pacific within twelve months from May 1945.215 General MacArthur, eager to lead the biggest amphibious assault in the history of warfare, was pushing for an invasion of the home islands. However, throughout the summer American commanders became increasingly concerned about the defences the Japanese had constructed on the island of Kyushu, where the invasion was planned to take place. By now the Americans had learned the lesson that the Japanese would fight to the death and that, once they were dug into defensive positions, they would have to be eradicated cave by cave, foxhole by foxhole, often in hand-to-hand combat. Throughout the first half of 1945 American soldiers had paid heavily for the capture of Iwo Jima and Okinawa. At Okinawa kamikaze planes had sunk thirty-six American ships and damaged 368 more. The Japanese soldiers, dug into a network of caves, had fought to the bitter end, and while only 7,401 had been captured, 92,000 died. American casualties had also been high: 12,520 dead, 36,613 wounded. The one battle for Okinawa accounted for 17 per cent of the total US marine and naval losses during the entire war.216 On Okinawa the Americans had also witnessed the way in which the Japanese soldiers drew civilians into the battle. Soldiers and civilians had taken refuge in a complex of cave systems in the south of the island. The soldiers would send the civilians out to fetch them food and water and eventually persuaded many of them to commit suicide rather than be captured. Higa Tomiko, aged seven, wandering around the battlefield in search of her older sisters was invited to join one such group of soldiers and civilians intent on suicide. Having sunk down on her haunches to rest at the mouth of a cave ‘someone spoke from the back of the cave. “Little girl, if you want to escape, now’s the time. We’re going to seal the entrance and blow ourselves up with a bomb. Of course, you can die along with us if you like.” A shiver went right through me. I sprang out of the cave and slid down the cliff, trying to get as far away as I could. Presently, there was a loud explosion behind me.’217 Between 62,000 and 100,000 civilians died during the battle for Okinawa.218

  The battle for Kyushu promised to be far more bloody. Japanese commanders had taken new heart from Okinawa and were confident that they could inflict a terrible death toll upon the Americans. The army made extensive and chilling preparations for this, their final ‘decisive’ battle. After the surrender, Edmund J. Winslett, officer in charge of Sixth Army photographic intelligence, toured the defences of Kyushu and found a ‘maze of caves’ and communicating passageways, not just for supply and ammunition dumps, but for everything, including messes. There were also 12,275 kamikaze planes ready and waiting to inflict damage on the United States fleet.219 By August 1945, 900,000 Japanese soldiers outnumbered the American invasion force of 766,700.220 The highest estimate of casualty figures ever given to Truman for the invasion appears to have been a quarter of a million. But the estimate of W. B. Shockley, an expert on Secretary Henry Stimson’s staff, seems more realistic. On 21 July 1945 he pointed out that, given the pattern of Japanese fighting behaviour so far, ‘the Japanese dead and ineffectives at the time of defeat will exceed the corresponding number for the Germans. In other words, we shall probably have to kill at least five to ten million Japanese. This might cost us between 1.7 and four million casualties including 400,000 to 800,000 killed.’221 In the end these casualty predictions were never put to the test. On 6 August the centre of the city of Hiroshima was wiped out within just a few seconds by an atomic bomb. This was the American version of the ‘divine wind’, and it was this that finally shocked Emperor Hirohito into taking the decision to surrender. Initially, the military refused to believe that the war was over. Anami argued that the Americans would not have enough material for more than one bomb. Hirohito appears to have wavered.222 On 8 August the Soviets invaded Manchuria. On 9 August the citizens of Nagasaki followed those of Hiroshima into the dust. Somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000 civilians died in the atomic explosions.223 Given the overwhelming destructive power of the new weapon, Japanese hopes for a decisive battle of attrition on Kyushu disappeared. This time the shock was great enough for the Emperor to carry the hotheads in the government with him. On 15 August 1945 the Emperor announced the Japanese surrender to his nation.

  Takezawa Shoji, then a young girl, came in from the fields where she had been catching frogs. Her schoolteacher had instructed the class to catch as many as they could and then ‘dry them in preparation for the decisive battle on the mainland’. She was tired and dispirited, having caught only six of the creatures. At her home she found scores of people listening to the Emperor’s speech of surrender on the radio. ‘To be truthful, his voice sounded as weak as I felt. I wondered if the Emperor, like us, hadn’t yet eaten his lunch.’ As she listened she found herself thinking about ‘pumpkins, potatoes, and sweet-potato-flour cakes’.224

  14

  The Soviet Union –

  Fighting on Empty

  Hunger and cold held our people in their merciless grip.

  (Victor Kravchenko, head of the Department of War Engineering Armament for Russia)1

  For every Briton or American that died as a result of the war, eighty-five Soviet citizens lost their lives. The Soviet Union suffered by far the highest death toll of all the combatant nations. The Japanese, in comparison, lost seven people to every Briton or American, the Germans lost twenty. The total Soviet death toll is estimated to have been somewhere between 28 and 30 million – a total which would have satisfied the Nazi architects of the Hunger Plan who intended to starve this number of Soviets to death. It represents 15 per cent of the pre-war Soviet population and about a third of all the people who died worldwide during the war. The human price the Soviets paid for victory was colossal.2

  Of the 28–30 million dead 9 million were military, which leaves a figure of 19–21 million civilian casualties.3 The evidence is simply not available to give a breakdown of the causes of civilian deaths. A large proportion will have been starved or shot in the German-occupied areas. But conditions in the unoccupied Soviet civilian rear were also harsh; ‘food was in extremely short supply and sickness was rife’.4 If 1 million Soviet citizens starved in Leningrad alone, then another 1–2 million Soviet deaths are almost certainly attributable to starvation. It is known that tens of thousands of prisoners starved in the Soviet gulags where the wartime decline in the food supply subjected the inmates to famine conditions.5 In the countryside the peasants were living on the very margins of existence and a proportion of the young, the old and infirm will have succumbed to hunger. Circumstantial evidence suggests that even if famine conditions were not reached, large numbers of the vulnerable starved in the towns and cities. In Moscow in 1942 ‘the sight of men and women falling dead of starvation on [the] streets became too commonplace to attract crowds’.6 Even valuable industrial workers starved. A worker in an aviation plant in Kuibyshev described how ‘there were cases when people fell over from hunger’ on the assembly lines. ‘Some people died on the job. I personally saw two people die because of hunger.’7 James R. Miller, writing about the impact of the Second World War on the Soviet Union,
argues that the figure of 30 million war deaths does not even include ‘war-related physical consequences such as those caused by chronic malnutrition’.8 The disintegration of the agricultural sector and the food supply system meant that all but the most privileged Soviets were affected by hunger and malnutrition. This chapter asks to what extent the critical food situation in the Soviet Union threatened its ability to fight.

  FEEDING THE RED ARMY

  The Red Army was unprepared for the German attack on 22 June 1941. The Wehrmacht pushed its way across the Soviet Union at terrifying speed. Soldiers and civilians retreated before them in disorder, bombed by German aircraft as they fled. The soldiers ran out of ammunition, and as thousands were killed or captured still holding their guns the army began to run out of rifles. Even spades were in short supply and men had to dig trenches with their helmets.9 In the disorganization of the retreat units were forced to abandon their cooking equipment, and about 60 per cent of the troops were left without mobile field canteens. Some divisions left their food supplies behind as they fled; in others cases the evacuation of food to the rear was so efficient that the troops in combat had nothing to eat. German soldiers described the Red Army troops that emerged from the Vyazama region as ‘wild-eyed’ with hunger. Caught up in the bogs of that area with no supplies they had been reduced to gnawing the bones of dead horses.10

  A Ukrainian who was called up on the second day of the war described the chaos and lack of preparation to an interviewer for the Harvard Project on the Soviet Social System. The men were initially buoyant, confident that the Soviet Union had been preparing for the war for so long that surely everything would be well organized. But after only one or two days in the army, their morale plummeted. They were given no mattresses, and slept on the bare floorboards of the barracks. The food was abysmal and insufficient and they had to eat sitting on the floor. Having been called up in the summer they had left their warm clothes behind at home for their families to sell. But they were not even issued with uniforms. Within a few days of training their clothes were in rags.11 They were hopelessly under-equipped and were given virtually no weapons. When they went into battle they ‘lost 200 men (about 70 per cent of the battalion) in the first days of fighting, mostly because they had no weapons’. The Georgian troops broke down and cried. ‘They were just like sheep.’12

  By the end of 1941 the army had lost 4.5 million men (over half of them captured) and the Soviet Union had lost most of its fertile agricultural regions, as well as a large proportion of livestock.13 The country faced a food crisis of immense proportions. The centralized food distribution system focused all its energies on feeding the 12–13 million men in the armed forces.14 Red Army soldiers were allocated a frugal 2,954 calories a day on active duty. In normal circumstances this would support a moderately active man. In combat, the rations were supposed to increase to 3,450 calories a day, a good 700 calories short of what a soldier needs to eat when fighting in cold conditions. Even the relatively modest British army ration contained 5,300 calories when the men were fighting in cold climates.15 If the stipulated amounts were too little, the actual food which they received usually contained far fewer calories. For the first year and a half of the war, the infantry’s rations were only slightly better than the dismal food eaten by the civilian population. Meals for the front-line troops consisted of kascha (porridge) for breakfast, borscht (soup) for lunch, and bread and cucumber pickle for supper.16 The Red Army field kitchens were elementary, producing meals out of buckwheat, dried fish, potatoes and as much fat as possible as this helped to keep out the cold. But in the first years of the war, it was rare for Red Army soldiers to be supplied with hot meals from a field kitchen and many survived on dry rations of bread and dried fish for weeks on end.17 A Ukrainian drafted into the army at age sixteen went with ‘great enthusiasm’, eager to fight the despised Germans but he was shocked by the terrible conditions. ‘The uniforms we got were used. Instead of shoes we got some kind of rags. How about food? Also bad. 700 grams of bread a day. Little fat. For the rest we got cabbage and frozen potatoes. That’s all. Many got sick. Only when we got a blanket we could exchange it for food. But this was punished.’18 Some soldiers were so desperately hungry that, despite draconian punishments if they were caught, they would sell pieces of their uniform in the markets.

  The soldiers lived in zemlyanki, which were holes in the ground boarded up with wooden planks and roofed with turf. Sometimes divided by curtains they could be tiny, or large enough to hold as many as 400 men. At least the crowd warmed the space up a little although the air generally became rank.19 Padded jackets and trousers, fur gloves and warm hats were sometimes available but winter boots were in short supply and some Soviet soldiers had absolutely nothing to put on their feet.20

  For the first year chaos prevailed. The Soviets struggled with the same problems the Wehrmacht was encountering in the occupied parts of the country: poor east–west connections, inadequate roads, and an overburdened rail system. A large proportion of the rail network had been lost to the Germans, and what was left was single-track lines which caused long delays. The slow-moving trains came under constant air attack and congestion was made worse by the operation to evacuate thousands of factories. Trains filled with new recruits and supplies for the front line had to wait while the trains evacuating the factories passed in the other direction. Most of the rail lines radiated out from Moscow, which meant that supplies had to be sent first to Moscow and then out to their destination. The return journey was made with empty wagons. This severely hampered the movement of food from surplus areas to the towns and to sections of the front line where it was needed. By 1942 the turn-around time for freight cars had increased from seven to thirteen days.21 Later that year the Germans cut the rail line running from Moscow to Stalingrad; the only connection left was a fragile line that ran close to the front line, or a much longer detour via Astrakhan and the Caspian Sea.22

  A Ukrainian soldier recalled that the unreliability of the overburdened transport system meant that ‘sometimes the unit would be fairly well fed and sometimes it would be hungry but there was always enough vodka and cheap tobacco … About twenty or thirty kilometres in the rear food was not so bad at all but the supply of food was very irregular.’23 At the Volkhov front near Leningrad during 1942–43 a doctor described how sometimes the food supply would dry up completely for two days.24 Corruption aggravated the supply problems. In March 1942 a journalist for the Krasnaya Zvezda reported that soldiers on the Kalinin front north of Moscow were starving. The quartermaster, General Andrei Khrulev, went to investigate and to his disgust found the report to be true. The officers were using the transport problems to mask the fact that they were selling off the food on the black market. The culprits were sent to penal battalions. Despite such harsh punishment it was a common practice for officers to siphon off meat and vegetables to sell on the black market.25

  The failure of the centralized food distribution system to provide a consistent and balanced food supply across the Red Army is exemplified by the disparities to be found in the food stocks of the 64th, 57th and 51st Armies, all of which were on the south-eastern front, defending Stalingrad in the summer of 1942. The 64th Army was in the worst position and was virtually out of food, with barely three days’ worth of flour and bread, just over three days’ worth of meat and no fish or fats. The situation of the 51st Army was not much better but they did have a ridiculously large reserve store of fifty-nine days’ worth of fat. Neither of these armies had any sugar. In contrast, the 57th was comparatively well off with a month’s worth of stocks of sugar, and about a week’s worth of flour, bread, cereals, meat, fish and fats. Reflecting the administrative disorganization behind these shortages, plans to bring food up to the front line were only formulated by the Chief Administration of Food Supplies of the Soviet Army (Glavprodsnab) a week after the Germans had captured the outer suburbs of the city. Food stocks were stored on the left bank of the River Volga, which meant that they had to be brough
t across on barges under a barrage of German bombs.26

  The city of Stalingrad was reduced to ‘an enormous cloud of burning, blinding smoke; it is a vast furnace lit by the reflection of the flames’.27 The fighting took place in heaps of rubble amid ruined buildings. A German Panzer division lieutenant described how in the house-to-house battles, ‘The front is a corridor between burnt-out rooms: it is the thin ceiling between two floors … eighty days and eighty nights of hand-to-hand struggles. The street is no longer measured in metres, but in corpses.’28 Even once the food was across the river it was virtually impossible to bring meals up to soldiers engaged in this sort of battle. The brave cook of one Soviet anti-tank detachment would strap a large army thermos to his back and crawl up to the point where the troops were under fire to bring them soup or warming tea.29 But more often than not the hungry soldiers had to forage in cellars for whatever food the civilians had left behind. One Soviet veteran recalled, ‘Whatever we saw we ate. There was no regular supply of food. In Stalingrad I ate horses and dogs.’30