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

by Lizzie Collingham

  THE GERMAN CITIES – HUNGRY BUT NOT STARVING

  In Britain the food situation had stabilized by the end of 1941, and even if meals were monotonous and not particularly tasty, the food supply remained stable and adequate throughout the rest of the war. In Germany, in contrast, the food situation in the cities progressively worsened until a crisis was reached in the winter and spring of 1941–42. Potato shortages had begun to impact upon urban dwellers in the summer of 1941, but by the time the exceptionally cold winter months set in there were serious problems with the potato supply to the cities and shortages were reported in Cologne, Frankfurt am Main and Berlin. Wilhelm Kiel, a social democrat living in the northern industrial area, described how he had to ‘literally go begging to the farmers, from house to house, in order to obtain, pound by pound, the quantity of potatoes we need, in order to eke out a bare existence until the autumn’.163 Women tried to disguise the lack of meat on the menu by making ‘false meatballs and cutlets’ out of potatoes, lentils, turnips and white cabbage, but with a shortage of potatoes and vegetables it became increasingly difficult to make filling meals.164 Berliners were so starved of greens that nettles and sugar beet leaves sold for high prices in the markets.165

  A further depressing development was the progressive decline in the quality of bread, the other mainstay of the diet.166 Over the months and years of the war the milling grade of wheat was continually increased until by April 1942 virtually none of the bran was removed. Gradually, more and more barley, potato and rye flour was mixed in with the wheat flour. This did not necessarily affect the nutritional value of the loaves but food offices began to complain that the bread was causing digestive problems and diarrhoea. In 1942 a report from Regensburg complained, ‘a good bread for labouring people is half the meaning of life and has a tremendous impact on productivity as well as morale’.167

  The decline in the quality and quantity of staple foods was accompanied by a Ministry of Food campaign to encourage people to find substitute foods. Teachers were instructed to take their classes out into the fields to gather weeds and grasses such as yarrow, goat’s rue and stinging nettles as replacements for cabbage. Even the roots of carnations were recommended.168 In the autumn of 1942 the Württemberg Milk and Fats Trade Association encouraged people to go out into the woods and collect beechnuts, from which a valuable edible oil could be extracted. For every kilogram delivered to them they promised to issue a voucher for 200 grams of margarine or oil.169 Unfortunately, the beechnut crop was poor that year and these exhortations to find substitute foods did nothing but remind civilians of the hunger winters of the First World War, when people were so desperate they too went out into the fields to gather wild foods.

  In the autumn and winter of 1942 the intensive exploitation of the occupied territories brought temporary relief and rations were raised. But the relief did not last long. The year 1943 brought yet more food shortages to Germany’s cities. In Essen bread and potatoes made up 90 per cent of what most people ate and the industrial towns were once more hard hit by an unsatisfactory potato harvest in the summer.170 The Ministry of Food began to make plans to distribute swedes and turnips, and Italian rice and lentils were brought in to eke out the supplies of staple foods.171 The basic meat and fat ration had to be cut yet again in May.172 Even though military rations were cut by 20 per cent, the army was too large a burden on the system. All this was exacerbated by the 7 million foreign workers in the Reich and the fact that local officials began to distribute generous rations to the homeless in the bombed-out cities.173

  In the spring of 1943 Sybil Bannister, an Englishwoman married to a German gynaecologist, discovered how serious the food situation in the towns was in comparison with the comparatively plentiful food supply in the countryside. Sybil spent the first years of the war living in Bromberg, a town in the annexed part of Poland. Here she missed cheese and sauces but felt that she ‘could not grumble. We were always able to buy a winter store of potatoes … in the summer we had ample fruit and vegetables to bottle for the winter months.’174 Then she took her baby son to stay with his grandfather in Wuppertal-Barmen. Here everyday life was much more difficult. ‘Besides the war in general, there were two things which were obviously lowering their vitality; one was the food shortage, and the other the continued air-raids … The food shortage was as yet not desperately acute. There were enough goods in the shops to supply the full complement on the ration cards, but this was just not enough. It is easy to go short for a few days or a few weeks without noticing many ill effects, but when it runs into months, the need accumulates until a permanent state of hunger and enervation ensues … in May 1943, coming straight from the country in the East where we had unlimited supplies of milk, potatoes and vegetables, into a town in an industrial centre in the West, it was remarkable to notice what a difference the deficiency in these foods made to the possibility of varying the menu and still more of satisfying appetites … In Barmen there was not only no full milk for adults, but potatoes were rationed and vegetables in short supply. As it was impossible to “fill up” with these commodities, the bread ration also proved inadequate … It was a constant worry to know how to fill the hungry mouths.’175

  It is not necessary to be actually starving in order for food deprivation to cause psychological and physical distress. Women used up a great deal of mental and physical energy thinking up different ways of preparing the same foods and producing something edible out of a few potatoes and lentils, with barely any fat or green vegetables. Long and tiring food queues, anxiety about where the next meal would come from, interspersed with periods of real deprivation, all combined to cause great stress. Then the Allied aerial bombing campaign began to hit the industrial areas in earnest and the inhabitants of the cities were reduced to a state of misery.

  Sybil Bannister was unlucky enough to experience the first bombing raid to hit Wuppertal-Barmen while she was visiting her father-in-law. The family’s home was destroyed. They were given chits which allowed them to buy food in the shops. As the air raids in Wuppertal had only just begun, the shops were still stocked but, ‘Later on … there were no goods available in the shops.’176 The bombing raids took their toll on food warehouses and household stores. More and more food had to come out of the regular rationing system to set up emergency kitchens for the homeless.177 In the city of Cologne, the last two years of the war were appalling. Lengthening food queues were matched by long walks to work as the public transport system broke down. Lack of fuel for cooking and heating, combined with frequent air raids, made home life debilitating, and the shabby clothing and worn shoes gave the civilian population a depressing air. There were no work shoes to be had or rubber boots. Washing was difficult with the tiny piece of in-ferior soap which was allocated on the monthly ration.178 The deaths of friends and neighbours from the bombing campaign, and the increasing loss of men at the front to death and injury and military defeats – first at Stalingrad, then North Africa, Italy, on the Atlantic in the submarine war, and over and over again on the eastern front – all wore down civilian morale.179

  Under these circumstances of increasing hardship industrial workers began to turn to factory canteens. Workers’ families were evacuated and the men were left with no one at home to cook for them. Others were bombed out and had no alternative but to eat at the factory canteen. The numbers using them rose from 800,000 to almost 5 million.180 Sybil Bannister was extremely glad of her canteen meals. After visiting Wuppertal she had returned to Bromberg, only to flee before the Russians in January 1945. She ended up in Hamburg working as a nurse for sick workers at a factory, where ‘there was a canteen … where they served up a wholesome hot-pot with very little meat in it, but certainly as much as the number of coupons they asked for, added to which (thrown in, coupon free) there was a good helping of potatoes and vegetables, which were rationed and in short supply. We lined up to fetch the soup-plate full of steaming stew.’181

  In Britain, as the next chapter will discuss, the diet of the
working classes improved despite the exigencies of war. In Germany, even though the regime intended to spare the workers from hunger, it was the industrial working population which bore the brunt of wartime food shortages. Germany simply did not have enough food and too much of what was grown stayed in the countryside rather than being transported into the cities. By 1944 German townspeople were eating barley grits rather than meat and potatoes, and shortages in the cities had become the norm.182 The loss of the Ukraine intensified the meat and fat shortages and led to a drastic cut in sugar supplies.183 Nevertheless, at no time did the food situation reach the disastrous levels of the last two winters of the First World War. When food shortages were at their worst between 1914 and 1919, the meat supply afforded each person only a paltry 14 grams of meat per day, while in 1944–45 Germany had enough meat to allocate each citizen a still meagre but more adequate 48 grams a day.184 There was no question of famine or mass starvation even in the urban areas. Nor was there ever any question of social unrest or worker revolt as a result of hunger, although the Sicherheitsdienst constantly warned that the workers were in a dangerously critical mood. The National Socialists had so effectively destroyed the social democratic, communist and trade union leadership during the 1930s that an organized opposition to the National Socialist government no longer existed. Ration cuts were accepted with grumbles and complaints. Those who acknowledged that working to the bitter end would help to prop up a government they detested resigned themselves to the situation, concentrated on getting on with their lives, and quietly made a concerted effort to obtain food on the black market.

  As the war came to a close in late 1944 and early 1945, the black market became an increasingly important source of food. Those with possessions to barter occupied a position of privilege. Ruth P., a child at the time, recalled with sadness how her beautiful white doll’s bed, her doll Christel, and a marionette with a black pony ‘were all given away for barter for a goose and a duck, a rabbit or something. All for something to eat.’185 Those with neither possessions to barter nor useful social connections, including many families who had fled their homes in the east or lost them to bombing, found themselves at the bottom of the social order. In a letter to her husband, written at the very end of 1944, Mathilde Wolff-Mönckeberg wrote, ‘We sometimes have very little and don’t look exactly blooming. Especially at the end of each rationing period [of 4 weeks] we have virtually nothing. We get only ¾ lb of butter each month, a disappearingly small piece of cheese, very little meat, each only ½ lb … Even the bread is insufficient … sometimes I spend hours wishing for lots of good fat things to eat! And sweet things.’186 In contrast, her landlady seemed to be faring quite well and her Christmas celebrations included real coffee made with beans, and Christmas cakes. There was still good food to be had if one had the means to acquire it. Despite a great deal of misery and some deprivation, even the least well-off in German society were still far better off than most of the rest of continental Europe. Maria H. recalled, ‘We were hungry, actually we were always hungry, but it was not as though we suffered from starvation.’187

  *At this point in the war he was First Lord of the Admiralty

  16

  The British Empire – War as Welfare

  I was determined to use the powers I possessed to stamp out the diseases that arose from malnutrition, especially those among children.

  (Lord Woolton looking back on his term as Minister of Food, April 1940 to November 1943)1

  From my own investigations I became convinced that ‘cowardice in the face of the enemy’ could be traced to nothing less than malnutrition … sufficient to undermine stamina and morale.

  (Stanton Hicks, founder of the Australian Army Catering Corps)2

  In 1945 the British Ministry of Health announced that from the beginning of the war it had used all available nutritional knowledge to create a ‘general policy laid down … on sound lines’ and which made it ‘possible to arrange for a balanced diet for all’.3 This, argues the food historian Derek Oddy, was an audacious claim and one that sits oddly with the history of the British government’s attitude to nutritional reform in the 1930s. Britain entered the war with a government which had, over the previous decade, consistently resisted the idea that the state should take responsibility for the nation’s health. In contrast to Germany and Japan, where vigorous efforts were made to change and improve the population’s eating habits, the pre-war British government demonstrated an aversion to making a potentially expensive commitment to ensuring that every citizen ate well. Nevertheless, the dominant story told about rationing in Britain between 1939 and 1945 is a heroic tale of a government seizing the opportunity presented by war to improve the nutritional lot of working people. It has also become commonplace to refer to the Second World War as the period during the twentieth century when the British people were at their healthiest. Britain certainly ended the war with a population which was eating a healthier diet than in the 1930s, and the nutritional divide between the wealthy and the poor had begun to close. A social consensus had evolved, accepted by some members of the government (but by no means all), that states must take responsibility for their citizens’ diet, health and welfare. Although the government certainly did not enter the war intending to bring about such a change, the war conferred on reformers and nutritionists a level of influence which enabled them to bring about a revolution in attitudes to food and its connection to well-being.

  A similar revolution took place within the British and Commonwealth armies. In 1939 the standard of cookery in British and Australian military messes was abysmal: the cooks were poorly trained, underpaid and took little pride in their work. During the war the dreadful food undermined military morale. In the field the British empire’s troops were still reliant on an innutritious diet of bully beef (corned beef) and biscuits, just as they had been during the First World War. The nutritional research of the inter-war years had made it pos-sible to recognize vitamin deficiency diseases, and the emergence of symptoms of vitamin deficiencies in British, Australian, African and Indian troops fighting in North Africa, Burma and the Pacific created pressure to reform army diets. There was a new sense among the British and Commonwealth governments that men called upon to sacrifice their lives for their country had a right to expect a decent level of care in return. Medical officers and quartermasters began to ask themselves what soldiers should be eating, rather than concentrating on simply sending them what food was available. The quartermasters of the empire’s various armies were stimulated into researching new ways of supplying soldiers, at their bases and on the front line, with nutritious food.

  DR CARROT – GUARDING THE BRITISH NATION’S HEALTH

  The ration which was introduced in Britain in 1940 had been calculated without any reference to nutritional advice. Despite the version of events which the Ministry of Health was to present as the official narrative at the end of the war, neither the Ministry of Health nor the Ministry of Food consulted the emerging group of nutritional scientists in order to draw up a ration which was nutritionally balanced. The ration simply reflected the food that was available.4 However, the British population was being asked to expend far more energy than in peacetime. In the war industries shifts of ten to twelve hours became the norm, and people were asked to take on extra wartime duties which made for an arduous working week.5 A worker in Portsmouth described how his life had become far harder: ‘Take last weekend. I was at work all day. I did ’Ome Guard till four in the morning. Then I had to start work again at six!’6 There were concerns that the austere diet would provide too little energy and nutrition to maintain the war effort. It was only as these anxieties began to emerge that the government turned for expert advice to the nutritionists, whose work they had for so long ignored.

  In fact, on their own initiative, the intrepid biochemists Elsie Widdowson and R. A. McCance had already set about testing ‘how far food produced in Britain could meet the needs of the population and enable them to fare well’.7 McCance recall
ed that ‘this was fun’ even though the diet the scientists put themselves on in the autumn of 1939 contained such small quantities of meat, cheese and sugar that it was ‘considered intolerable by our critics’.8 They filled up on un-restricted amounts of wholemeal bread and potatoes, and after three months on the diet, over the Christmas holidays of 1939–40, they subjected themselves to fitness tests which included bicycling to the Lake District from London and long hikes with weights in their rucksacks. They concluded that a minimal wartime diet was adequate to maintain health and fitness in all respects except the calcium intake, and immediately began a series of experiments to work out how the calcium deficiency in the diet could be remedied.9

  Meanwhile, in June 1940, the government finally convened a Scientific Sub-Committee on Food Policy, six months after rationing had been introduced. The committee was dominated by agricultural scientists, whose main concern was food production rather than consumption, but it also included Britain’s leading nutritionists – Professor E. P. Cathcart, Professor Sir Edward Mellanby and Sir John Boyd Orr – all of whom had conducted research into the deprived diet of Britain’s poor.10 Jack Drummond, a nutritional biochemist at University College London, was appointed as the Chief Scientific Adviser. It was only now that a long-term plan was drawn up by the scientists, who tried to ensure the ration diet was nutritionally balanced.11

  The influence of the Scientific Sub-Committee was felt most by the officials in charge of the food import programme within the Ministry of Food. They were instructed to consult with Drummond on the types of food to prioritize. It took about a year for the scientists and administrators to work out a satisfactory system for the consultation process, but from the middle of 1941 it began to work well. It was through this diffuse influence that nutritionists probably had the most powerful impact on the British wartime diet. The Ministry of Food used bread as the staple food. This was a more efficient use of food resources, as feeding wheat directly to humans maximized its energy-giving potential, while feeding wheat to animals wasted much of the energy in the grain. During the First World War the government had prioritized total calories and had relied almost entirely on bread to feed the population. In the 1940s, however, the new nutritional knowledge emphasized the need for protective foods and recognized the importance of animal proteins in the diet. The nutritionists on the sub-committee recommended that frozen and canned meat and calcium-rich condensed dairy products should be given priority for importation. This ensured that during the Second World War the entire population was able to supplement its bread intake with these protective foods.12