Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food (27 page)

Churchill was probably right in thinking the Indian government was sclerotic. It lacked the self-confidence ‘to take a firm stand against agricultural or industrial interests’ and failed to ‘make Punjab provide cheap food or industrialists cheap goods’.
¹⁵⁴
Instead it allowed businessmen and Punjabi landlords to make vast profits from the war while its efforts to protect the standard of living of workers in the cities and the countryside were ineffectual. The food situation which developed in wartime India demolished for good ‘one rationalization of imperialism [which argued] … that British rule protected the Indian poor from the rapacity of the Indian upper class’.
¹⁵⁵

Despite the depth of anti-British feeling demonstrated by the Quit India Movement, the British took their position as the established rulers of India too much for granted. The Indian government’s failure to secure India as a safe military base was the combined result of incompetence and complacency. Millions of Indians were allowed to die of starvation before the government was galvanized into action. In contrast, when the rice-eating people of the Persian Gulf showed signs of discontent over relief supplies of wheat, the Middle East Supply Centre scraped together a shipment of Iraqi rice to avoid the threat of political unrest.
¹⁵⁶
Admittedly, British insecurity in the Middle East was exacerbated by the fact that in the spring of 1942 only a few hundred kilometres of desert lay between the German army and Cairo, while the Japanese in Burma were at the end of their supply lines and several hundred kilometres of jungle separated them from Calcutta. But the
Middle East was also fortunate in Lyttelton’s appointment of Robert Jackson to the MESC. Jackson was a superb organizer who set up an efficient and dedicated organization. India’s Food Department lacked cohesion and initiative and did not bring in effective measures until after the worst had happened and famine had struck. On the ground the Bengal government and administration lacked vision, and even when it was clear that a famine was in the offing they failed to grasp that it was not simply a matter of food supply but also of the fact that the poor had lost their purchasing power and could not afford what food was available on the markets.

‘It was all too likely that … in upsetting the delicate mechanism of the world’s food economy’ the war would bring hunger to some part of the empire.
¹⁵⁷
It is difficult to reach any conclusion other than that racism was the guiding principle which determined where hunger struck. Churchill’s hatred of Indians was inflamed by what he regarded as the ingratitude and treachery of the Quit India Movement, and when it came to making decisions about where resources should be channelled India was given the lowest priority. By refusing to believe in the seriousness of India’s food situation Churchill and his War Cabinet determined that India would be the part of the empire where the greatest civilian sacrifices would have to be made, and displaced hunger on to the colony.

The moral argument for British rule in India had begun to unravel long before the outbreak of the Second World War, but as Jawaharlal Nehru argued in
Discovery of India
, the fact that ‘rich England and richer America’ failed to come to the rescue of the Bengal famine victims placed a question mark over the sincerity of the Allies’ claim that they were fighting to bring freedom from want – let alone justice, fairness and tolerance – to the world.
¹⁵⁸
Thus, the Bengal famine gave added strength to the Congress Party’s post-war demands for Indian independence. However, the Bengal famine played far less of a role in the debates about independence than one might have expected of such a devastating event. One explanation for this is that Congress politicians were in prison at the time and so had no first-hand experience of the horrors. By the time they were released at the end of the war the political focus had shifted on to the public trials of the men who had joined the Indian National Army and to the issue of partition.
¹⁵⁹
When the Famine
Inquiry Commission reports were published in April and August 1945 they were overshadowed by the end of the war and the news of the horror of the industrialized killing of Jews in the Nazi death camps. Later, the quiet and unobtrusive deaths of the victims of starvation were again overshadowed by the violent murder of up to 10,000 Indians a day in the riots that surrounded the partition of India. Besides, it was in no one’s interests to remember the Bengal famine. The British did not wish to be reminded of one of the most shameful episodes of their rule in India. Indians also felt themselves to be implicated. The provincial government of Bengal was in Indian hands at the time and while British district officers may have been incompetent in responding to the developing crisis, the old structures of welfare and charity among the Indian wealthy had also broken down. When India gained its independence in 1947 the Bengal famine faded into obscurity and was quickly forgotten.

India was lost to Britain when it gained its independence in 1947. But if colonialism was now discredited and the seeds of independence were sown in Africa, they did not yet come to fruition. The extensive wartime controls that colonial governments had adopted were re-interpreted as development programmes and Britain concentrated on the colonial production of cash crops in order to reduce the dollar deficit which the virtually bankrupted country was struggling to overcome. Thus, the exploitation of the empire’s food resources was destined to become a feature of the post-war world.

^*
The squatters were Africans who were allowed to live on and farm part of a white farmer’s land in return for labour.

^*
About 86 pounds or 37 kilograms. About 2 ounces or 50 grams

8

Feeding Germany

This time we robbed the occupied countries, and our people did not have to go hungry until the end of the war.

(Elisabeth D., a German woman who lived through both the First and Second World Wars)
¹

The National Socialist leadership, and in particular Hitler and Göring, were determined to feed the German population adequately throughout the war. By 1939 Walther Darré, the Minister for Food and Agriculture, and Herbert Backe, working within Göring’s organization for the Four Year Plan, had done their best to prepare the agricultural sector. Even the schoolboy Harry Simon was aware of the need for self-sufficiency and that ‘Germany must make itself independent of other countries, produce its own goods, not only farm produce, but also everything else … Nothing was to be wasted.’
²
The Battle for Production in agriculture had been matched by a campaign to suppress consumption and divert consumers towards home-grown foods rather than foreign imports. Nevertheless, the leadership were well aware that a long war would prove too great a drain on the country’s manpower and industrial resources for agriculture to be able to maintain its impressive levels of self-sufficiency. If it were to rely on its own food supply Germany needed to fight a short war.

In the end German farmers managed to maintain production remarkably well even though the war dragged on for five and a half years and the prioritization of the war industries meant less machinery and fertilizer was available to them than to British farmers. As in Britain, the productivity of German farms rested on the hard work of agricultural
labourers. But while in Britain farm labour was provided by the Women’s Land Army and prisoners of war, in Germany much of the labour was made up of workers forcibly brought into the Reich from the occupied territories. In this way Germany imported the exploitation of its newly conquered empire. By the end of 1943 the foreign agricultural and industrial workforce amounted to 7 million more mouths to feed. German agriculture struggled to produce enough food to provide an adequate civilian ration, a generous ration for the military, whose share of German food production had quadrupled by May 1943, and a miserly ration for the forced labourers. Just as Britain looked to its allies and the empire for food imports, Germany looked to the occupied territories to make up the food deficit. While Britain’s food policy had its darker side, in particular the War Cabinet’s decision in 1943 to displace hunger on to Britain’s colonial subjects rather than British civilians, Britain’s exploitation of its colonies was neither so ruthless nor so openly dismissive of the value of human life as were the National Socialists in their conquered territories. At a meeting with the leaders of the occupied countries on 6 August 1942 Göring reminded them that, ‘The Führer repeatedly said, and I repeat after him, if anyone has to go hungry, it shall not be the Germans but other peoples.’
³

THE BATTLE FOR PRODUCTION

In his quest for ‘nutritional freedom’ Backe had directed ministerial funding into a variety of autarky-oriented research projects such as the development of protein- and oil-rich plants and the best type of potato to provide maximum quantities of vitamin C over the winter months; he had encouraged the setting-up of fish farms, the production of organic fertilizers and home production of animal feed.
⁴
One of the most successful of the Reich Food Corporation’s autarky programmes aimed to make dairy farmers self-sufficient in feed for their cows. Before the war Germany relied on imports for about 50 to 60 per cent of its butter and margarine and 95 to 99 per cent of its vegetable oils.
⁵
The Allied blockade cut off Germany’s access to supplies of whale oil, which was one of the main ingredients in margarine.
⁶
Under instruction from the Reich Food Corporation farmers extended the acreage of oilseed
crops but this could not compensate for the deficits in fat imports and the Corporation looked to dairy farmers and butter production as a means of maintaining the fat content of the German ration.
⁷
In order to feed the cows dairy farmers were encouraged to plant root crops such as turnips and sugar beet to replace grain (which was needed for bread), and special silos were built where green stuff could be stored for long periods without losing its nutrients.
⁸
This allowed farmers to produce more butter, and by 1943 German dairy farms were the source of 60 per cent of the butter consumed in the Reich, up from 30 per cent at the beginning of the war. By then Germans were, of course, eating less butter and the quality had declined noticeably. Wartime butter was watery, and older Germans still make a distinction today between wartime butter (and margarine) and a higher quality product, when they redundantly refer to ‘good butter’. But even though consumption levels fell considerably and the quality was marred, these efforts did ensure that fat, an essential source of energy, taste and the feeling of fullness, was still present in the German diet throughout the last two years of the war.
⁹

One of the greatest challenges for German farmers was the maintenance of both potato and pig production. The German pre-war diet was heavily dependent on potatoes, and Germans displayed a marked preference for pork, consuming far more than the British, who in the 1930s ate substantially more mutton and lamb.
¹⁰
The problem with pigs is that they compete with humans for food as they are usually fattened on grains, potatoes and sugar beet. A reduction in the number of pigs has the undesirable effect of reducing the amount of animal fat in the diet as pigs produce the most fat of all farm animals out of a given amount of feed. A decline in the number of pigs leads to a vicious cycle. As meat and fat become less available humans eat more potatoes, which in turn takes fodder away from pigs.
¹¹

Problems had already begun in January 1940 when bad weather affected the supply of potatoes.
¹²
Then in 1941 German pig farmers were hit by a poor barley harvest, which meant that they needed more potatoes for their animals. In June, rationing for potatoes had to be introduced and the meat ration was cut by 25 per cent as the number of pigs began to fall.
¹³
The entire consumption of potatoes rose from 12 million tons a year before the war to 32 million tons during the
war. If farmers had been able to grow more, the consumption would have risen even further.
¹⁴
But a poor potato harvest in 1943 meant that competition for potatoes became so intense that both human and pig potato consumption fell. By 1944 Germany’s pig herds had fallen to 60 per cent of their pre-war levels and the amount of potatoes available for each pig had fallen by half.
¹⁵
This was reflected in a 10 per cent reduction in pigs’ selling weight and a further fall in the supplies of pork, bacon and fat. By 1944 meat supplies had fallen to nearly one half of what had been available in 1933.
¹⁶

German farming became caught up in a spiral of falling pork and potato production. Supply problems led to food shortages in Germany’s towns and cities throughout the summer of 1941. The Swiss consul in the city of Cologne reported that this meant the townspeople had been unable to lay down sufficient stores of food for the winter. When, for two weeks in November, it became impossible to buy potatoes this became a problem because the city’s inhabitants had no food in their cellars to tide them over. There were protests in the city in December which had to be controlled by the police until the supply of potatoes finally revived.
¹⁷
The scarcity of meat was made worse by the potato shortages and this problem plagued Germany’s towns and cities throughout the war.