The situation was little better in the victorious Soviet Union. The peasants in the liberated western areas were still barely surviving on a famine diet of wild grasses and frozen potatoes, foraged from the fields. The dishes were execrable as was indicated by their names, such as toshnota from the Russian word for nausea, an ironic word play on toshnoiki, meaning food.19 On a visit to the Soviet Union in December 1945, Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin was not allowed to see the full extent of the wartime destruction. But he ‘understood’ that 1,700 towns and 60,000 villages had been ‘completely knocked down’. He concluded, ‘we have no measure at all [of the terrible conditions] under which her people are living’.20 In the liberated areas of the Soviet Union, at least half of the peasantry and many of the townspeople were dwelling, like the soldiers had done at the front, in miserable damp holes in the ground, roofed over with whatever materials they could find.21
A respondent to the Harvard Project explained that although they were the victors ‘the Russian people looked and acted like defeated people … They looked as if a stone were in their heart. (Respondent touches the left side of his chest, with his right hand.)’ When he returned to Rostov for a visit in 1948 he saw ‘several people still living in the ground’, and found his aunt surviving on maize bread and soya bean soup, a little cabbage, potatoes, tea and sugar. Four years after the Germans had departed, she was still wearing the clothes the soldiers had sold to her before they retreated. There were beggars everywhere. Many were disabled veterans missing an arm or a leg. The railway stations were infested with orphaned children, singing for a rouble.22
In northern Russia there were many villages to which no men ever returned.23 Without machines or fuel, women continued to yoke themselves to the ploughs.24 Repatriated Soviets who had been prisoners of war and forced labourers in the Reich were diverted from the gulags and work battalions to which they were normally sent and used to alleviate the labour problem on the collective farms, which became miserable places of forced exile.25 All hopes that the war would soften the Stalinist regime and that life would improve were cruelly dashed. In September 1946 Stalin reinstated central planning and the state distribution of food. The peasants’ private plots, the kitchen gardens and allotments set up by factories and city dwellers were all outlawed. It was announced that an earlier decree of May 1939, which prevented collective land from being put to such uses, had been ‘forgotten’. The fact that the government itself had actively encouraged people to ignore this decree was also conveniently forgotten.26
In the summer of 1946 a drought in the steppe regions of southern Russia and the Ukraine caused the harvest to fail. But Stalin needed more, not less, grain. Food exports to the new satellite states in eastern Europe were designed to cement Soviet control in these countries. Stalin ruthlessly implemented his usual policy of sacrificing the countryside to hunger. The state requisitioned almost the entire harvest, leaving the peasants with a few potatoes.27 Party provincial committees warned the Central Committee in Moscow that the collective farmers were starving. The city of Kalach in Voronezh district reported that they were living in ‘frightful conditions. We have absolutely nothing, we eat only acorns, and we can scarcely drag our feet. We will die from hunger this year.’28 ‘A human head and the soles of feet’ were found under a bridge near the town of Vasilkovov, outside Kiev. ‘Apparently a corpse had been eaten.’29 Groups of bandits, many veterans without education or employment, began to wander the countryside stealing food. Units from the Ministry of State Security were sent to wipe them out.30 Food was so short that Stalin was unable to cushion the urban areas, and a campaign to ‘economize on bread’ was announced in September just as private allotments were banned. The number of people entitled to ration cards was cut. Those who were still entitled to bread received an inferior product with oats, barley and corn mixed in with the wheat. V. F. Zima, a Soviet historian who calculated the impact of the drought and famine of 1946–47, estimated that in the entire Soviet Union about 100 million people were already suffering from malnutrition as a result of the war, and through the famine years of 1946–47 at least 2 million died of starvation and associated diseases.31
In Britain the joy of victory was followed by a disappointing period of increasing austerity. In 1945 the electorate voted in a Labour government in the hope that they would begin constructing the more equitable society for which a great majority of the British people felt they had been fighting. The National Health Service was established in 1948, a concrete expression of government’s new willingness to take responsibility for the nation’s health. However, the Labour government was faced with economic bankruptcy, and rather than ushering in a new age of prosperity it presided over a period of increasing food regulation and worsening shortages.
Rationing had to be kept in place, as with the abrupt and unexpected end to American lend-lease aid in September 1945 Britain was now in a position similar to that of Germany in the 1930s. The government lacked the foreign exchange to be able to allow an unlimited flow of food imports into the country. It even found itself using up precious gold and dollar reserves to buy food for its erstwhile enemies in Germany.32 The British people were forced to adopt a National Socialist-style diet of autarky. In July 1946 bread was rationed for the first time and a special system was introduced to control the sale of potatoes.33 The two staple foods that the Ministry of Food had made a principle of allowing in unlimited quantities were now restricted. The actual consumption of these two items did not fall substantially, but it was a blow to morale. The Labour government planned to produce its way out of its economic difficulties. It was essential that British workers laboured hard to produce goods for export which would finance food imports. This required yet more hard work amid a continued atmosphere of frugality and self-sacrifice.34
The war-weary British people were, however, sick of self-sacrifice and bread and potatoes. After the war the amount of fat and meat in the British diet fell and average calorie consumption dropped to 2,300, which was about two-thirds of American post-war consumption. Jack Drummond, the government’s nutritional adviser, who resigned when bread rationing was introduced, warned that ‘meals have become so much more unattractive that people will not eat sufficient’, and he was anxious that they would begin to lose weight.35 It was in this post-war period that the government began to import what to the public were bizarre and revolting substitute foods. Lack of foreign exchange, problems with securing Argentinian beef, and the drain on canned meat stocks by liberated Europe led the Ministry of Food to look for meat alternatives: whale meat and snoek. Lyons Corner Houses marinated the whale meat in vinegar and water for twenty-four hours and managed to sell quite a few whale steaks, but British housewives were reluctant to buy them. Although they could be cooked with fried onions to look like steak, they had a nasty fishy aftertaste.36 In 1950, 4,000 tons of whale meat languished at Tyne docks.37 In 1948 10 million tins of snoek were imported from South Africa where the fish was prized by the Asian community, who cooked it with onions and potatoes or smeared it with apricot jam and grilled it.38 Unfortunately, the oily and bony fish, which tastes a little like mackerel, was not very well canned, and despite the best efforts of the Ministry of Food to promote it with recipes such as ‘snoek piquante’, the British refused to eat it. Probably, very few people even tried it. The unwanted tins of snoek were soon joined by a pile of 9 million tins of Australian barracuda, and sold off as cat food.39
Subsidies, welfare benefits and employment meant that the wartime improvements in the working-class diet were sustained. For the working classes it did seem as though Labour would eventually deliver on its promise of a better life. But the middle classes, whose lifestyle had been levelled down by the war, felt as though they had been defeated. They found themselves spending a far higher proportion of their food budget on necessities as opposed to luxuries, and their calorie and protein intake had fallen to a boringly healthy level of moderation.40 The perception that their lifestyle was quietly being eroded is e
xquisitely described by Molly Panter-Downes in her novel One Fine Day (1947). Stephen Marshall and his wife Laura find themselves ‘saddled with a house which, all those pleasant years, had really been supported and nourished’ by its staff of servants. Now the gardener, the cook, the maids and the nanny have left, the house is subsiding into a state of ‘shabbiness and defeat’.41 Laura struggles ineptly with the domestic chores, spending her mornings queuing for food outside near-empty shops, failing to make palatable meals in a kitchen she barely knows how to use. Stephen can hardly believe that he now spends his evenings doing the washing up.
Over the years middle-class discontent translated into dissatisfaction with the Labour Party. The British Housewives’ League organized protests against bread rationing and in 1951 Labour was defeated in the general election by the Conservatives, who had campaigned on the platform that they would bring an end to austerity.42
The United States was the only combatant nation to end the war in a healthy economic state. Indeed its economic expansion during the war had transformed it into ‘a giant on the world scene’.43 Almost two-thirds of the world’s industrial production now took place in the United States. The American gross national product had doubled and incomes had risen. Its workers were the most productive in the world; its farmers produced the highest yields per acre of any country.44 Amid the destruction and shabbiness of post-war Europe and Japan, US military bases stood out as islands of affluence. The economic resources of the United States, which had been so powerfully demonstrated by the firepower at the disposal of its soldiers, were now made manifest to the defeated civilian populations by their bountiful supplies of food. In Germany, children would beg outside the US army camps and the troops would pass out the remains of their amazing meals of soup, vegetables, steak and salad.45 One of the commonest memories of liberation is that of American soldiers doling out sweets and chewing gum to children as they drove through the towns and villages. In Japan children greeted American servicemen with the salutation, ‘Give me chocolate.’46 European children were also eager to gain access to the Coca-Cola sold in the PX stores on the bases, and in Austria children could be lured to attend youth activities by the promise of free Coca-Cola. Although the company was not supposed to use its monopoly as a supplier of sodas to the troops as a marketing scheme, the sale of the drink to American soldiers acted as ‘the greatest sampling program in the history of the world’.47 By 1950 when the GI Coke bottling programme came to an end Coca-Cola had established itself as a preferred drink among veterans returning to the United States as well as among the youth of Europe, who saw anything enjoyed by American soldiers as desirable.48
The physique of the Americans in comparison to the thin, grubby, malnourished bodies of the Europeans and the Japanese made an enormous impression.49 Miura Akira recalled how ‘well-fed and well-dressed [the Americans were], so healthy. In contrast to us, who were all emaciated. That was the first thing that hit us so hard. We said to ourselves, Why did we fight these people? We couldn’t have won. (Laughs.)’ Even their food was outsized. ‘We sometimes received American potatoes and we couldn’t believe how huge they were. (Laughs.) Japanese potatoes are much, much smaller. These were two, three times as large. The canned goods may not have been great by American standards, but to us everything tasted great.’50 The contents of CARE packages, arriving in Europe from America, were marvelled at by their recipients. Over 100 million of these packages were sent to Europe (and from 1948 to Japan). As Reinhold Wagenleitner put it, the ‘relief packages in a starving Europe became equated with an overflowing shop window, which displayed the overwhelming achievements of the American economic system’.51
19
A World of Plenty
Food will win the war and write the peace.
(Slogan of the US Department of Agriculture)1
Disaster struck the hungry post-war world in 1946 in the form of a drought which affected Europe, the Soviet Union, Australia, parts of South America, parts of Africa, India, China and the rest of Asia.2 The run-down state of global agriculture meant that the world supply of meat, milk and fats was already inadequate. Now the harvest of staple foods (wheat and rice) was jeopardized. ‘The realisation of staggering shortages in the very cereals which had been expected to ensure an ample filler for deficit diets … transformed what had been contemplated with comparative equanimity as a shortage of preferred but not absolutely necessary foodstuffs into the threat of widespread and desperate suffering.’3 It was estimated that one-third of the world’s population, around 800 million people, were facing starvation.4 The only country in the world which had a bumper harvest in 1945 was the United States. The rest of the world looked to America to provide the food supplies to alleviate its misery. It was in the crucial years from 1944 to 1946 that Roosevelt’s stirring pronouncement that Americans were fighting for ‘freedom from want’, not just for America but for the whole world, was tested.5 In these initial post-war years the United States was caught in an internal conflict between self-interest and altruism. The government and its people were torn between the desire to at last reap the benefits of the wealth generated by the war or to continue to make sacrifices in the name of freedom and international co-operation, and thus take an honourable lead in shaping post-war policies. The United States’ Food Administration strongly favoured the course of self-interest and determinedly worked to ensure plenty for American citizens.
AMERICAN PLENTY VERSUS EUROPEAN RELIEF
American agronomists had been anxious since the beginning of hostilities that the end of the conflict would bring about a sudden drop in demand for food, which, with America’s food production at unprecedented levels, would trigger a return to the economic depression, unemployment and food surpluses of the 1930s. Throughout 1944 the War Food Administration was dominated by officials drawn from the food industry for whom this was a particular concern. The pessimistic predictions of European analysts, who warned that liberated Europe would be faced with an immense food shortage, made little impression on them.6
As the Allies drove the Wehrmacht out of Europe, the military were allocated the initial task of distributing food to the liberated populations. Behind them came the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), which had been set up in November 1943 to assist the people of the Allied countries.* Brigadier-General William O’Dwyer, Chief of the Economic Section of the Allied Control Commission for Italy, was shocked by the utter deprivation the US army found in Italy. The basic ration in Rome provided only 665 calories and the infant mortality rate had risen to 438 per 1,000 live births. As the Allies moved through France, Belgium and Greece they were in the distressing position of distributing less food to the people than the people had been receiving under the German occupation.7 Based on this experience, UNRRA and the US military called for America to increase food production and begin stockpiling in preparation for victory. Instead, the United States Department of Agriculture concentrated on decreasing surpluses and cut harvest targets for 1945. They stockpiled only 280 million bushels of wheat, compared with 630 million in 1942. This so-called ‘bare shelves policy’ aimed to have disposed of every surplus ‘GI’ potato, pat of butter and slice of bread exactly as the war came to an end.8
The actions of the Department of Agriculture in 1944 ensured that America would have difficulty meeting the needs of UNRRA in 1945. But it was the Food Administration’s response to a pork shortage in American cities at the beginning of the year that ensured that wheat, supposedly earmarked for liberated Europeans, ended up in the stomachs of America’s pigs and chickens. Sequestered from the realities of starvation and food shortages in the rest of the world, the American public particularly disliked meat rationing. They had more money in their pay packets than ever before and now that the war was drawing to a close they wanted to buy choice cuts of meat. Complaints about the pork shortages were vociferous and in response Harry Truman* appointed Clinton P. Anderson, the leading critic of the government’s management of food sup
plies, to the position of Food Administrator. Anderson’s main interest was the defence of the American consumer. He immediately set about revitalizing American meat production, in particular he promised to keep feed-corn prices low and hog prices high in order to encourage farmers to produce more pork.9
Throughout 1945 the Under-Secretary of State, the American Federation of Labor and President Truman himself made various statements to the effect that Americans were willing and must share their food in order to avert misery and politically undesirable unrest in newly liberated Europe. A public opinion survey found that 70 per cent of Americans claimed they would be prepared to put up with food cuts in order to help the starving in Europe, including their former enemies the Germans. Their sincerity was indicated by the millions of CARE packages sent to Europe.10 But the government implemented no policies to ensure that there would be sufficient food to spare. The day after the Japanese surrender rationing was lifted and in 1945, even though food production fell, civilian consumption rose. The Americans were eating more meat, butter and milk than ever before in the twentieth century. Average daily calorie consumption rose to 3,300.11 The amount of food allocated to commercial shipments, government-financed aid and, crucially, the armed forces who were responsible for the initial task of feeding liberated civilians, all fell. In September Truman explained the problem in terms of the need to work out financial credit schemes with European governments and UNRRA.12 But the real problem was that American pigs, chicken and cattle were devouring grain at an unprecedented rate.
The Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food Page 58