Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food (107 page)

West Africa 3, 67, 68, 39–41

wheat 21, 24, 28, 53, 70, 76, 87, 109, 125, 128, 163, 182, 222, 225, 256, 276, 282, 297, 412, 491

as fodder 479, 480–81

as relief aid 129, 130 151, 152, 167, 478, 479–81, 485

as substitute for rice 124, 145, 278, 287, 467, 496–7

cultivation 19–20, 22, 89–96, 98, 132, 163, 172–3, 220–21, 251, 469

exports to Germany 171, 173, 217

exports to Japan 246

glut 444

milling process 20, 354, 379, 388–9

nutritional value 232, 387, 408, 411

prices 4, 122, 143, 484

shortages 129, 170, 173, 174, 250, 252, 471, 476

stocks 104, 105, 129, 477

Wickard, Claude 76, 114

Wiepking-Jürgensmann, Heinrich 41, 47, 48

Women’s Land Army 79, 94, 156

women in industrial workforce 8, 66, 117, 181, 231, 306, 326, 329–30, 367, 369, 371, 424, 425

Woolton, Lord 108, 109, 111, 115, 139, 361, 362, 366, 384, 392, 395, 396, 398, 428

1. Herbert Backe, German Minister for Food and Agriculture and architect of the Hunger Plan. A typical S
chreibtischtäter
(desk perpetrator).

2. A dispossessed Polish family, some of the thousands who were evicted from their farms to make way for the settlement of ethnic Germans.

3. One of Norman Rockwell’s extremely popular illustrations of Roosevelt’s four freedoms, which reinforced the notion that Americans were fighting to defend their way of life.

4. The British Ministry of Agriculture promoted potatoes as a perfect energy food by using the cheerful cartoon character Potato Pete.

5. The practice of bartering for food in the countryside was endearingly known in German as ‘hamstering’. Severe food shortages in the urban areas meant that hamstering eventually became a vital source of food.

6. For occupying troops in France the Wehrmacht’s policy of living off the land translated into living off the fat of the land. These German soldiers are buying cakes from a street stall in Paris in 1940.

7. The banner on the side of the train reads, ‘First foodstuffs – Ukraine/Berlin’. While food was confiscated from the east, the German blockade of Ukrainian cities and the extermination of Polish Jews was intensified in order to remove ‘useless eaters’ from the food chain.

8. A Jewish man suffering mistreatment from a civilian in the Ukraine, June 1941.

9. All over the Soviet Union hundreds of thousands of peasants and workers were reduced to living in primitive circumstances. This woman is cooking on a makeshift oven in a suburb of Stalingrad.

10. Two Malayan natives at an Australian treatment centre on the island of Balikpapan, Borneo, in July 1945. These Malayans, who had been brought to Borneo as forced labourers by the Japanese, are clearly suffering from severe malnutrition. Millions of south-east Asians died of hunger as a result of Japanese policies.