Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food (13 page)

While the Allies were cut off from supplies of some foods, they faced the additional problem that vast quantities of other types of food were stranded in the wrong place. In Britain oranges and lemons became treasured objects. Doreen Laven recalled that her neighbour kept a lemon on her dresser. ‘I was allowed to hold it. It was very hard and almost black.’ Oranges were available ‘once or perhaps twice a year’, and the anxiety was acute when one Saturday Doreen’s family came across a queue for oranges in the High Street, Bishops Stortford, and their father had to dash home for their ration books while the rest of the family waited anxiously in the queue, worried that the grocers would have sold out before he returned.
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Cyprus, meanwhile, was afflicted with a glut of oranges. Britain could not afford to waste shipping space importing bulky fruits, and every effort was made to persuade the Cypriots to eat more oranges until they were undoubtedly sick of the sight of them. In Palestine the citrus fruit industry channelled
its oranges into marmalade production. The marmalade was then fed to Allied troops in North Africa, who would have much preferred strawberry jam.
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Western Australia and Tasmania suffered from a glut of apples and pears and much of the crop had to be left to rot on the trees. While the United States tried to boost the production of maize, the Argentinians burnt their excess maize crop as fuel.
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Latin American coffee farmers, cut off from continental Europe, lost 40 per cent of their market. While Europeans had to make do with an ‘unholy concoction’ made from ground chicory mixed with roasted acorns or barley, the coffee growers tried to off-load their surplus stock in the United States.
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Anxious to keep Latin America out of the sphere of Axis influence, America eventually agreed to buy Latin American coffee at guaranteed prices. The arrangement turned out to be overly generous, and American civilians were forced to subsidize Latin American coffee farmers by paying artificially high prices for coffee throughout the war.
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The cocoa farmers of the West African Gold Coast were just harvesting their beans when war was declared. Given the luxury nature of chocolate, it was clear that shipping space for their beans would not be a priority. Caribbean banana farmers and West Indian and Mauritian sugar planters faced the same problem.

The Allies responded to the disruption of the international food trade by fighting the U-boats in the Atlantic and trying to protect their merchant shipping. But, most vitally, the free market was abandoned in order to achieve maximum efficiency in reorganizing trade. The Arcadia conference between Churchill and Roosevelt in Washington in December 1941 gave rise to a number of boards charged with co-ordinating Allied efforts and pooling their resources as effectively as possible. The Combined Food Board co-ordinated the production and distribution of food throughout the Allied world. Responsible for food for more than half of the world’s population, and covering agricultural production over two-thirds of the earth’s land mass, it negotiated and co-ordinated agricultural output and trade within and between the United States, Great Britain, its empire and the Commonwealth, the Belgian and French colonies, the Soviet Union, Latin America, the Caribbean and the Middle East.
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Its decisions were, however, always contingent on the availability of shipping. The Combined Shipping Adjustments Board presided over the Ministry of
War Transport in Britain, and the War Shipping Administration in the United States. It was in the committee rooms of the Shipping Board that the war, waged at sea between U-boats and convoy escorts, was mirrored by British and American officials who battled for access to shipping space. In this struggle, the competing claims of American and British civilians for food jostled with those of Allied troops and Britain’s colonial subjects. ‘International shipping control thus became international food control.’
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This was to prove particularly disadvantageous for Britain’s colonial subjects, the survival of many of whom was threatened by the disruption of the international food trade. Those in charge of shipping allocations often made decisions as to who would go hungry and, in some cases, who would starve.

Germany had been preparing for exclusion from the world food market since the National Socialists came to power in 1933. The campaign to increase agricultural self-sufficiency was combined with a gradual shift in food dependency towards the east. The percentage of all food imports from Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and Yugoslavia rose from 10 to 30 per cent between 1932 and 1939.
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In August 1939, under the terms of the non-aggression treaty, the Soviet Union agreed to supply Germany with grain and a variety of oilseeds, soya beans, and vegetable, fish and whale oils, all of which went some way towards compensating for Germany’s failure to achieve self-sufficiency in fodder and fat production.
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Fresh citrus and other fruits and vegetables were obtained from Italy. Nothing could be done to replace shipments of more exotic goods such as cocoa beans, cane sugar, coffee and tea. For the duration of the war Germany would have to find substitutes for these foods, eke out its stores or do without.

Germany and Japan intended to export wartime hunger. The Third Reich viewed the whole of occupied Europe, not just the Soviet Union, as a source of food for the Germans. While they did not plan to starve the inhabitants of occupied western Europe to death, the National Socialists had every intention of allowing them to suffer before they imposed food shortages on their own civilians. Japan dressed its expansion into south-east Asia in the language of pan-Asian nationalism. The Japanese would be liberating their east Asian brothers from the oppression of western colonial powers and bringing a ‘New Order’ to the outer area of the east Asian sphere.
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This was empty rhetoric. The
Japanese planned to mercilessly exploit south-east Asian raw materials and cheap labour. The hope was that while they would suffer from initial shortages, by 1943 the production of oil, rubber, tungsten and rice would be fully recovered. If south-east Asians went hungry while this was achieved, this caused the Japanese few qualms.

Faced with a decline in food imports it made sense for every wartime government to follow Germany’s agricultural example and strive for self-sufficiency in food. Even where this was impossible to achieve, the most sensible solution to the difficulties of farming in wartime was to reduce the loss of energy inherent in converting edible crops into meat and cut down livestock numbers. Grassland could then be ploughed up in order to expand the area under crops which went straight into human food, such as wheat, rice or potatoes. Potatoes became the food of the Second World War, not only grown by governments but in private gardens throughout the world. A reduction in animals brought with it a lack of animal fats in the form of butter and lard, so it was essential to grow more oilseed crops. The loss of sugar cane imports also meant that the area under sugar beet needed to be extended. These seemingly simple measures were a lot more complicated and difficult to implement in practice, and in 1939 worldwide agriculture did not appear to be in good enough shape to withstand the impact of total war.
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The Depression had left many agricultural communities across the world in a state of acute poverty. In the 1930s Japanese children in the northern prefecture of Fukushima were too ashamed of the boiled barley mixed with a little rice inside their lunch boxes to open them and show the food to their teachers.
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A district nurse in Suffolk ‘knew of quite a few children who came to school without any breakfast and who walked home to a dinner of just potatoes’.
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In the American south, migrant agricultural labourers lived in dwellings constructed out of ‘old tents, gunny sacks, dry-goods boxes and scrap tin’ with absolutely no sanitary arrangements.
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Under-nourishment left them listless and vulnerable to pellagra, malaria and hookworm. There were few rural doctors, virtually no rural hospitals and infant mortality, a good indicator of levels of health and nutrition, was, even in 1942, running at the shockingly high rate of 43 per 1,000.
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The conveniences of the modern world had yet to reach even the more prosperous farming households. Approximately 60 per cent of
American farmhouses were without electricity. The vast majority were in a dilapidated state and needed repairs or complete rebuilding. Most had no central heating or running water, and outside privies were the norm.
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Two-thirds of German farms had neither sewage nor water connections, and their isolation from the modern world was reinforced by the fact that clocks and radios were rare luxuries in farming households.
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During the war, when lower-middle-class British land girls from urban backgrounds and German evacuees from the bombed-out towns found themselves living with farmers, they were shocked to discover that the farmhouses had ‘no gas, electricity or water, no bathroom, no indoor sanitation … neither wash basin nor kitchen sink’.
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Land girl Anne Hall described the living conditions of the family she lodged with in a row of farm workers’ cottages near Bournemouth. ‘Water was drawn up out of the well … and it was hard work turning the handle to haul up the pail. The washing up was done in a basin on the kitchen table, the used water thrown into the garden. There was a garden hut down the side path in the back garden which housed an Elsan bucket loo.’ Its contents had to be emptied daily into a hole dug in the garden.
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If the living standard on farms was low, the state of farmland itself was often equally poor. In the Great Plains of America, drought had reduced the farms to a dust bowl of wind-eroded soil. In Britain, demoralized farmers had reduced their costs by spreading less fertilizing lime on their land, and leaving ditches and hedges in a state of disrepair. Rather than improving their grassland they fed their animals with cheap imported fodder.
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Similarly, Japanese farmers had cut back on repairs and improvements.
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Mechanization of farming was only just beginning and draught animals and humans were the main sources of strength on most farms. Pesticides, weedkillers and artificial fertilizers were in their infancy. John Cherrington, on his farm in Hampshire, fought a losing battle against docks, ragwort, thistles, couch grass and charlock, wireworms, leatherjackets, slugs, rooks and rabbits, with ploughs, hoes and guns the only weapons at his disposal.
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In many countries the productivity and efficiency of agriculture lagged far behind industry. In parts of Germany farmers wasted hours of each day walking between their widely dispersed fields.
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In the under-developed countries agricultural impoverishment was
the norm. Surveys by the League of Nations revealed that across Africa and Asia the peasant populations scraped together only the most meagre of livings from the land. Debt, malnutrition, periodic hunger and famine characterized most of the colonial world.
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Theodore White and Annalee Jacoby, American journalists who lived in China in the 1930s and 1940s, described the situation of the Chinese peasant: ‘The Chinese farmer does not farm; he gardens. He, his wife, and his children pluck out the weeds one by one … His techniques are primitive … his sickles, crude ploughs, flails, and stone rollers are like those his forefathers used. Frugality governs all his actions … the yield of his back-breaking labour is pitifully small … [T]he Chinese farmer is constantly at war with starvation; he and his family live in the shadow of hunger.’
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It is estimated that in the 1930s about 3 million Chinese died each year as a result of starvation.
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These farmers, living at the margins of subsistence, would be extremely vulnerable to the disruptions of war.

There were some signs of hope. Most developed countries had addressed the problems of the Depression with various schemes, such as President Roosevelt’s New Deal (1933–36) in America. In the United States the government put its faith in science, and agricultural research had begun to yield results, which the agricultural extension officers of the New Deal spread among farmers.
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In Britain new techniques such as bail milking had created pockets of regeneration.
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And a rise in farm prices in 1937 alongside the Rural Revitalization campaign had stimulated some recovery in Japan. But wartime conditions created a new set of problems which the weakened agricultural sectors of most countries struggled to overcome.

The conditions of total war created an internal competition for resources within all the combatant nations, a competition which agriculture often struggled to win. New employment opportunities, offering higher wages and a better standard of living, combined with military conscription to drain workers from the farms in Allied and Axis countries alike. The best way to compensate for a loss in farm workers is to mechanize. But the production of agricultural machinery declined precipitously as industrial plants switched to making tanks and arms. Fuel shortages and a lack of spare parts often prevented the proper use of those machines that were available.
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It was safer to rely
on draught animals, but the military demand for oxen and horses meant that they too were in short supply. Artificial fertilizers were made predominantly from nitrogen and phosphorus. These were also the basic ingredients in the manufacture of explosives and so the fertilizer industry competed with the munitions industry for scarce supplies. Lack of fertilizer meant that farmers struggled to increase the yield of their land.