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

by Lizzie Collingham

  Perhaps the most pervasive and damaging legacy of the war in the Pacific was to inflame the islanders’ passion for western imported foods such as pasta, wheat bread, ice cream and Coca-Cola. As Paul Madden, a technical observer running a Coca-Cola bottling factory on New Guinea, commented in 1945, ‘many of the smaller children had never tasted Coca-Cola before … but they’ll certainly be steady customers from now on’.255 The adoption of western foods had a powerful and mainly negative nutritional impact. The rice and fried flour balls which were used to replace the starchy element in Pacific meals, usually made up of taro or plantain, were far less nutritious. Instead of fresh fish islanders would often eat canned meat, and most meals were now accompanied by Coca-Cola or some other sugary soda. While western Europe emerged from the Second World War having shaken off the problem of malnutrition and vitamin deficiencies among its population, the war brought these problems to the Pacific.256 These non-traditional meals are packed with fat, sucrose and salt, and today Polynesians are afflicted by an epidemic of the modern diseases of obesity, diabetes and heart disease.257 Without the Second World War Pacific islands would eventually have been drawn into the global marketplace but the war accelerated the process and often made it a painful experience.

  Wherever they went during the Second World War, Americans had more food than anyone else. It was thus that food became central to the Americans’ view of themselves. The majority of US servicemen had only the haziest notion as to why the United States was fighting the Second World War. In the end many fixed on the idea that they were fighting to preserve the American lifestyle. GIs interviewed by the Saturday Evening Post for a series on ‘What I am Fighting for’ cited the President and their relatives, but many claimed they were fighting for a home and a future: ‘the big house with the bright green roof and the big front lawn’.258 Soldiers stationed abroad aspired to the suburban lifestyle just as much as the civilians back home. The idealization of the American way of life sustained many homesick soldiers, and for many of them all that was good about their country was summed up by its bountiful and good food.259 When the journalist John Hersey asked American troops at Guadalcanal ‘What are you fighting for?’ it was unsurprising, given the Pacific combat diet of corned beef hash and dehydrated vegetables, that a faraway look came into their eyes and one of them ‘whispered: “Jesus, what I’d give for a piece of blueberry pie”’.260 If good and plentiful food came to symbolize America for the Americans, it also became central to other nationalities’ view of the United States. To those whose countries America used as a base, liberated or defeated, plentiful American food became a symbol of the United States’ economic superiority.

  The Panzer grenadier, Helmut Geidel, recalled that ‘when the bags of the wounded were loaded on to carts to be taken away, the other soldiers would go through them looking for the emergency ration and eat it’.261 Allied and German troops carried fortified chocolate bars as emergency rations. In contrast, Japanese soldiers created their own more basic emergency kits. Sumeragi Mutsuo, who survived four months in the jungles of the Philippines, listed the three items which he considered essential to survival: ‘salt, matches, and a mess tin’.262 Rice went mouldy too quickly to make it worthwhile to transport. Tinned food was an item of such rarity it would have been laughable to try to find some. Salt, however, was vital; without it the feet swelled up and it was impossible to make palatable the field grasses which were the main food. A mess tin was useful for cooking the grasses, and, even more importantly, for boiling water, which was essential to avoid dysentery. The matches, of course, made these two activities possible. ‘Death’, he concluded, ‘awaited the soldiers who lacked these three items.’263

  Despite promising beginnings in the 1920s and 1930s, Japanese army rations were not only far worse than those of any other armies, they were at times non-existent. The US marines, appalled by the weevil-ridden bread and the lack of shower facilities on Pavuvu, would surely have been in revolt if asked to live and fight under the same conditions as the Japanese soldiers.264 The armed forces of all the combatant countries understood that it was not always possible to bring supplies up to the front line and would fight on bravely through temporary starvation. On the other hand, each army had a different breaking point at which lack of food led to either withdrawal, surrender or defeat. In April 1942, once it became clear to the besieged Americans on Bataan in the Philippines that neither food supplies nor reinforcements would be arriving, they surrendered. Their food supplies had run out and many of the Filipino and American troops were emaciated with hunger.265 The Americans recognized that their position was hopeless and there seemed no point in fighting to the death to hold a position which would inevitably fall to the enemy. If they had known their fate as captives of the Japanese they might have considered fighting a little harder: 34.5 per cent of American prisoners of the Japanese died in captivity as a result of senseless acts of violence, disease and starvation.266

  For a Soviet soldier the understanding that death probably awaited him as a prisoner of the Germans helped him to fight on through hunger and against the odds, when British and American soldiers might well have fallen back. The response to food shortages and adversity was also determined by the level of discipline within each army, whether it was enforced externally, as it was in the Red Army and the Wehrmacht, or internalized as in the imperial army.267 The ethos of victory or suicide was so thoroughly instilled in Japanese soldiers that they would often continue to offer resistance even when they were too weak from emaciation to stand. However, this did little for the Japanese war effort. The complete breakdown of the Japanese supply lines meant that even if their fighting spirit was not broken by the experience of extreme hunger, without the fundamental necessities of life, the soldiers could not achieve victory and instead starved to death.

  Allied troops, bar the Soviets, possessed a more developed sense of entitlement and their rations reflected the high standards of personal comfort which they were used to in civilian life. The ability to fulfil their soldiers’ higher expectations was crucial to the success of the democratic armies. Fortunately for the Americans, they had the resources to pump seemingly endless quantities of food into their supply lines, and the military might to protect them. By 1945 the generous food rations distributed to US troops symbolized the immense power of the United States, not only for the miserable Japanese starving on the Pacific islands, but also for their envious comrades in arms, the British, Commonwealth and Soviet armies.

  Different levels of expectation within the civilian populations of the combatant countries also determined how far each nation could be pushed before it collapsed. Soviet and Japanese civilians were more likely to continue in a state of misery, when American, British and German civilians might well have begun to protest.268 One of the most vital elements in motivating civilian populations seems to have been whether it was a war that the people believed in. The United States was hampered by a weak emotional investment in the war among its civilian population, which made them resentful and likely to grumble over hardships and shortages. Fortunately, the superior resources of the United States meant that the commitment of American civilians to winning the war was never too severely tested. In Britain there was ‘an extraordinary degree of unanimous and single-minded commitment to unqualified resistance to Hitler’.269 The British were held together by a determination that they could not and would not live under Nazi rule and somehow the war must and would be won. A crucial difference from the situation during the First World War was that in Britain there was political consensus that this was the right and only course. The anti-war voices of the pacifists and communists faded away as the war progressed, and between 1939 and 1945 political consensus was maintained by a coalition government.

  In Germany political opposition had been effectively silenced during the 1930s. The only group in a position to attempt a putsch or coup was the old conservative elite in the army and their attempt to assassinate Hitler failed in July 1944. Even if they were
not committed National Socialists, the majority of the German population did not relish a repeat of the humiliation they had suffered at the hands of the Allies in 1918. There were many who were aware of the crimes the regime had committed in the east and they feared the revenge which the Red Army would wreak upon them if it invaded – as Hitler had told his people in 1943, at the end of the war there would be only ‘survivors and annihilated’.270 War-weary or not, Germans had little choice other than to put their hopes in the Endsieg or final victory.

  In Britain and Germany, therefore, surrender was not a readily available option. Although British and German morale would probably have collapsed under circumstances similar to those endured by the Soviets, their governments almost certainly underestimated how much their civilians would have been prepared to put up with. In any case, both the British and the German governments were so acutely aware of the dangers of civilian discontent as a consequence of the mismanagement of the food supply that they organized the food system to ensure that food could not become a decisive factor in the outcome of the war. Although British and German civilians grumbled about their monotonous diet they were never threatened with real hunger, let alone starvation. In Britain the perception that the food supply was well organized and fair even seems to have buoyed morale. It seems likely that the British and the Germans would have held out against much worse food hardships.

  Political opposition had been silenced in Japan in the 1930s. Even when a ‘peace party’ emerged within the ruling elite in the summer of 1945 its members found it almost impossible to prevail over the milit-arists within the government, who insisted that Japan would never surrender. The Japanese leadership may not have been willing to admit that they were defeated but, as the urban population teetered on the verge of famine, there were those in the government who feared that urban civilians might rise up in protest. The inability to protect the food supply lines was a significant factor in bringing about the defeat of Japan. Although the American atomic bombs were decisive in persuading the Emperor to accept defeat, he also acknowledged that fear of a popular uprising was a contributory factor in his decision to surrender.271

  In contrast, virtually the entire Soviet population was hungry throughout the Second World War. Both rural and urban civilians suffered from malnutrition, hunger and starvation. At times lack of food came close to collapsing the economy and the war effort, but it did not break Soviet morale. The Soviets stayed at the assembly lines and continued to yoke themselves to their ploughs in the face of appalling food hardship. It is true that Stalin’s purges of the 1930s had spread fear and repression, and the lack of political alternatives meant that they simply had to keep going. However, the knowledge that German victory would bring about the annihilation of their homes and families meant that the Soviets were determined to defeat the invaders and they did so despite hunger and starvation. In contrast to the First World War, when Germany ran out of bread, potatoes and the will to fight, the outcome of the Second World War in Europe was not determined by food.

  *Later the division was transferred to the War Food Administration and renamed the Industrial Feeding Programs Division of the School Lunch and Distribution Branch, Commodity Credit Corporation

  *In the central Pacific Ocean, now called Tuvalu.

  Part IV

  The Aftermath

  18

  A Hungry World

  After the war? … Now it is more difficult … There are no living-quarters … there are no homes … It is like it was at the front during the war: the people live in the ground – the workers and peasants. The food is bad and is difficult to get … The conditions were bad before the war; now they are worse.

  (A Russian veteran describing conditions in the Soviet Union in 1948)1

  The aftermath of the Second World War was a hungry world. The end of hostilities did not bring to an end the misery and starvation which the war had engendered. The overall amount of food available worldwide had fallen by 12 per cent per person since 1939, but the scarcity was unevenly distributed. Many millions of people were living on less than half the amount of food they would have eaten in 1939.2 For the Japanese, defeat intensified the hunger of the last months of the war and the urban population survived on watery rice gruel and a wheat bran that was usually fed to horses. In the three months after the surrender, about 100,000 starved to death in Tokyo, and the situation was similar in other cities across the country.3 In Germany the population only began to experience hunger after May 1945. The country was divided into four zones, governed by the French, British, Americans and Soviets, and the four powers could not agree over the question of reparations or the level of industrial development Germany should be allowed to regain.4 Germany’s run-down agricultural sector was able to produce only enough food to provide the urban areas with 1,000 calories per person per day and hunger raged in the cities of occupied Germany.

  The Allies reluctantly imported some food, but the official ration in the American zone provided only 1,135 calories a day, rising to 1,550 calories in January 1946. The United Nations recommended minimum was 2,300 calories a day.5 In March 1946, rations in the British zone provided just 1,014 calories, which in food terms translated into ‘two slices of bread a day spread thinly with margarine, a spoonful of porridge, and two potatoes – except that potatoes were often unavailable’.6 In Hamburg, one of the most devastated cities, the population began to lose weight at the alarming rate of 1 kilo a day. The hospitals were inundated with horrific cases of hunger oedema. The population survived by buying food on the black market. Rampant inflation had created a barter economy in which American cigarettes and chocolate were the main currency. Widespread malnutrition was reflected in a rising mortality rate, as hunger-related diseases such as diphtheria, typhoid and tuberculosis took hold among the population. The birth weight of babies fell.7 The miserable state of the defeated Germans made something of a mockery of Churchill’s speech of 20 August 1940 in which he defended the European blockade by arguing that the Allies would ‘build up reserves of food all over the world so that these will always be held up before the eyes of the people of Europe – I say it deliberately – the German and Austrian peoples, the certainty that the shattering of the Nazi power will bring them all immediate food, freedom and peace’.8

  The food misery was compounded by homelessness. Many of the world’s cities had been reduced to rubble. Half of Germany’s housing stock had been lost to bomb damage and in Japan 40 per cent of the urban areas had been destroyed. In Germany 13 million were homeless, in Japan 15 million.9 Willy Brandt, later to become German chancellor, described the state of German cities: ‘Craters, caves, mountains of rubble, debris-covered fields, ruins that hardly allowed one to imagine that they had once been houses, cables and water pipes projecting from the ground like the mangled bowels of antediluvian monsters, no fuel, no light, every little garden a graveyard and, above all this, like an immovable cloud, the stink of putrefaction. In this no-man’s land lived human beings.’10 Even in Hiroshima survivors continued to live among the ruins. About two weeks after the atomic bomb was dropped Teruko Blair and her family returned to the remains of their home in the city. ‘The bathtub was still there, surrounded by an iron wall. The rice cooker and a battered saucepan which father had thrown in the bath had also survived. The toilet was there and the tiles around it. There was no roof.’ Despite suppurating radiation burns on his hands and face, Teruko’s father cleared away the rubble from the space where the house had been and her sisters and mother (who was suffering from radiation sickness) went in search of a roof. When they returned with a piece of sheet metal balanced on their heads, ‘you could see them coming for miles as the whole place was flattened’. They secured the sheet of metal to the gate posts, which were still standing, and slept under this makeshift shelter ‘like sardines in a tin’. Their life, she recalled, was ‘worse than animals’. Despite the fact that they had been told that nothing would grow in the city for seventy-five years, her mother discovered new b
uds unfurling and so they cleared the spaces where their neighbours’ houses had stood and ‘grew wheat in the middle of the city – well there was lots of space, lots of people never came back’.11

  If defeated Germany and Japan were now hungry, their erstwhile empires were in a dire state of deprivation. In Europe, where food production had fallen to 36 per cent of the pre-war level, the fortunate were able to secure 1,900 calories a day. But millions were living on the edge, able to obtain only 1,000 calories or less per day. Malnutrition and tuberculosis had reached epidemic proportions among children in Czechoslovakia, Greece and Italy.12 In south-east Asia, which had once produced almost 70 per cent of the rice traded on the world market, the population were barely surviving on as little as 250 grams of food daily. The death-rate had almost doubled.13 Korea was slipping into starvation and millions were dying on Java.14 In the British empire, India was slowly recovering from the chaos of the mismanagement of the food supply system but only 9.5 ounces (269 grams) of grain were available per person each day.15 Even in Latin America, which had remained comparatively remote from the conflict, inflation meant that poorer Mexicans were spending almost their entire income to buy less food than they had consumed in 1939.16 But the situation was worst in China, which was devastated by the war. Farmers in the province of Hunan, who had fled from the invading Japanese in 1944, returned to their villages to find their seed grain had been eaten, their draught animals and livestock slaughtered, their tools stripped for metal and their homes burned to the ground. Many Chinese in the central and southern provinces were surviving on ‘grass, roots, tree bark, and even clay’.17 At least 30 million were suffering from the effects of undernourishment, and in 1946 the United Nations estimated that 7 million Chinese faced starvation within a couple of months.18