Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food (47 page)

The most frugal of all the armies was the Japanese. They required fewer arms and less equipment, and the principle of self-sufficiency was paramount. The troops were issued with the minimum of creature comforts and rarely supplied with new clothes.
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Before embarking for Malaya in 1941 soldiers were issued with a pamphlet entitled
Read this alone – and the war will be won
. The author informed them that ‘since it is no small matter to transport supplies by sea all the way from Japan, you should fight and live on a bare minimum’.
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The men were instructed to use their ingenuity, and if food were short they should supplement their diet with anything that came to hand, including wild
grasses, a common famine food among the peasant families from which many of the army recruits were drawn.
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These different expectations meant that different food crisis points existed within each country’s army and civilian population, ranging from the anxiety caused in Britain by the sight of empty grocers’ shelves in the winter of 1940–41 to the indifference shown by passers-by in the streets of Moscow towards the corpses of people who had died of starvation in the winter of 1942. While GIs would have expressed great dissatisfaction at a meal consisting of a handful of rice, soup made from miso powder, and a can of tinned fish, the Japanese found this an adequate meal. Indeed, the Japanese high command began the war thinking that it was possible for ‘the Japanese army [to] … continue fighting without food, if they had strong moral[e]’.
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The following chapters examine how well the major combatant nations fed their armies and their civilian populations. Beginning with Japan, which was brought to its knees by food shortages, and ending with the United States, which was the only nation to enjoy an abundance of food in wartime, they ask to what extent the adequacy of the food supply affected these nations’ ability to wage war.

13

Japan – Starving for the Emperor

Here’s what I learned: Men killed in real combat are a very small part of those who die in war. Men died of starvation, all kinds of disease.

(Ogawa Tamotsu who was stationed on New Britain for three years)
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‘Two years from now we will have no petroleum for military use. Ships will stop moving. When I think about the strengthening of American defences in the south-west Pacific, the expansion of the American fleet, the unfinished China Incident, and so on, I see no end to difficulties. We can talk about austerity and suffering, but can our people endure such a life for a long time?’
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Japan’s Prime Minister Tojo Hideki asked this question on 5 November 1941. The vision he conjured up of a defeated Japan was used to justify the government’s decision to go to war with the United States. However, in the four years of the Pacific war the American blockade steadily eroded Japan’s sea communications with its empire until its supply of oil ran out, its ships had been sunk or immobilized, and the Japanese administration was faced with the question of how much suffering the Japanese people could endure. By attacking the United States the Japanese government brought upon itself the very state of affairs which it feared.

During the course of its war with China and America the Japanese military went from being one of the best-fed armed forces in the world to a state of miserable starvation. By focusing on the need to fight a decisive battle with the United States, in the misguided conviction that this would persuade the Americans to come to the negotiating table,
the military leadership demonstrated their failure to grasp the nature of the new modern war of attrition.

An Englishman living in Japan in the late 1930s noticed, ‘the Japanese have something of a genius for austerity … They can be called upon by their government to subsist for long periods on a diet so frugal that no European people would put up with it.’
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Accustomed to this austere civilian diet Japanese soldiers were prepared to accept levels of rationing which British Commonwealth, German and American soldiers would have considered unbearable. Many Japanese soldiers took pride in their ability to survive with minimal support and poured scorn on the decadent and pampered GIs. Despite having just lost the island of Biak (off the northern coast of New Guinea) to the Americans in September 1944, one anonymous Japanese diarist declared, ‘spiritually, we are the winners of this battle … Americans cannot live in a jungle subsisting on leaves and grasses; only Japanese can. The “Have” nations like America, could afford to throw away food and equipment. It is simply wasteful … Japan will surely reoccupy this island.’
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New recruits into the Japanese army were subjected to a brutal training programme which indoctrinated them with a belief in
bushido
(fighting spirit), the idea that self-discipline and willpower could overcome all obstacles. Military commanders firmly believed that Japanese soldiers could be expected to continue fighting in the most impossible circumstances. This attitude was exemplified by Lieutenant-General Mutaguchi Renya, the commander in charge of the Japanese attack on India in April 1944. When the Japanese became bogged down at Imphal he stubbornly repeated the mantra, ‘drummed into [Japanese officers] from their cadet days, that because the difference between victory and defeat was razor thin, the most tenacious side would be the victor’.
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From the safe distance of Burma he instructed his troops: ‘The struggle has developed into a fight between the material strength of the enemy and our spiritual strength. Continue in the task until all your ammunition is expended. If your hands are broken fight with your feet. If your hands and feet are broken use your teeth. If there is no breath left in your body, fight with your spirit. Lack of weapons [and he might well have added lack of food] is no excuse for defeat.’
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The fervent belief that spirit would prevail despite the overwhelmingly superior resources of their enemies was the central principle of
the Japanese war effort. The ultimate expression of this belief was the use of kamikaze pilots in the last desperate months of the war when ‘human lives were substituted for material substance’.
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However, the Japanese military command was eventually to discover that there were limits to
bushido
. Starving Japanese troops on Guadalcanal, too weak to stand up for lack of food, were said to have brandished their bayonets at any American soldiers who approached them, demonstrating their continued fighting spirit. But when the Japanese commander Imamura Hitoshi witnessed the pitiful state of the troops on the island, he admitted that
bushido
was useless in the face of starvation.
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In August 1945 the Japanese government faced the decision of whether to make their civilian population, teetering on the edge of famine, suffer the same fate as their soldiers. Their dilemma was resolved by the United States dropping atomic bombs on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, thus bringing about the Japanese surrender.

HEALTHY EATING AS A PATRIOTIC VIRTUE

Before the war the Japanese military were far in advance of the other combatant nations’ armed forces in terms of their attitude towards, and application of, the newly developing science of nutrition. The Meiji government, which came to power in 1868, was determined to create a strong modern Japanese army and navy modelled on those of the European powers. But in the 1870s Japanese sailors were plagued by ill health and routinely fell sick with beriberi. This was caused by an over-reliance on vitamin B-deficient polished white rice as the staple naval food. A research committee was set up to look into the matter. One of its members was Takaki Kanehiro, director of the Tokyo Naval Hospital, who had studied at St Thomas’s Hospital in London. Vitamins were not yet understood but he suggested that one ship’s company should try the experiment of living on a high-protein British naval diet of bread, ship’s biscuit, salted meat and beans. When the experimental crew arrived fit and well in Hawaii the Japanese navy decided to adopt a western diet for its sailors.
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Although the reasons for the improvement in the sailors’ health were not fully understood, this was an important development. Firstly, it predisposed military caterers to look
to foreign diets as a way of reforming the eating habits of the Japanese military. Secondly, it established a strong link between physicians and the Japanese quartermaster, which was a crucial factor in facilitating the application of the discoveries of nutritional science to military rations. This placed Japanese military catering far in advance of the European and American armed services, in which this medical-catering connection was not established until the Second World War.

Co-operation was established between army caterers and doctors in 1921 when a Military Diet Research Committee was set up to investigate the nutritional value of meat and fish. The army was beset by the problem that most of its rural recruits, drawn from a countryside in crisis and many having grown up in desperately poor farming households, were malnourished and physically weak. The committee concluded that the customary Japanese diet of rice, miso soup, a little fish, a few vegetables and pickles was not suited to the creation of robust warriors. The physical prowess of westerners had long been attributed to their meat-based diet, and it was decided to increase the amount of meat in the ration. In the 1920s Japanese soldiers were fed about 13 kilograms of beef a year. In comparison to the European annual consumption of about 50 kilograms this seems a paltry amount, but it was vastly more than the 1 kilogram a year consumed by the Japanese civilian population.
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Under the direction of Marumoto Shozo, First Army Accountant at the Army Provisions Depot, army meals were transformed. In order to integrate meat into the soldiers’ diet Marumoto copied dishes from the inexpensive Chinese eateries and western-style restaurants which had sprung up in Japanese cities in the 1920s. Japanese servicemen were introduced to curries and stews, stir-fries, wheat noodles, pork cutlets, pan-fried chicken and breaded meats, none of which they would have encountered in their rural homes. The advantage of these western and Chinese dishes was that while they were relatively inexpensive they substantially increased the protein and fat content of army rations. Stewing, deep- and stir-frying were all novel culinary methods in 1920s Japan and a training school for army cooks was established to initiate them in the practices of foreign cookery. Mess kitchens were provided with newfangled equipment such as meat grinders and vegetable cutters. Marumoto gathered together a team of catering instructors who were
sent throughout the Japanese empire re-educating army cooks. To help in this process he published a series of military cookbooks packed with information on high-calorie, low-budget meals.
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The strategy of reforming the army diet using Chinese and western dishes was boldly innovative. Most military caterers go to great lengths to avoid serving unfamiliar foods to servicemen, who are renowned for their conservative taste buds. However, it was easier to produce meals that pleased the majority if the army cooks avoided Japanese dishes. Each region had its own distinctive cuisine and preferred a mixture of flavours, which made it extremely difficult to create even a simple miso soup which all the men liked. The taste of home-made miso varied from household to household, while different regions preferred miso with varying levels of saltiness or sweetness. An army catering reformer who conducted experiments with soldiers serving in China in 1936–37, found that while the majority liked the miso soup they were served, 22 per cent found it too sweet and 10 per cent too salty.
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The adoption of foreign dishes flattened out these taste differences and accustomed all the men to the same set of standardized tastes. This was reinforced by the use of factory-produced and thus standardized soya sauce as the predominant flavouring instead of miso.
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No matter which region the men came from, they all liked the meat-based and deep-fried dishes.
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The fact that Japanese servicemen took to these foreign dishes was, without doubt, aided by the military practice of serving white rice (mixed with barley to provide vitamin B) with breakfast, lunch and dinner. Many rural recruits, used to a frugal diet based on brown rice mixed with barley or millet and eked out with radish leaves, had never eaten so well. For conscripts of the 1920s and 1930s the experience of eating plentiful and unusual food appears to have been one of the dominant memories of their time in the military.
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In 1925 the army extended its efforts to improve Japanese health into the general population. The Army Provisions Depot set up the Provisions Friends’ Association which set about introducing the military principles of mass catering into schools, hospitals and work-place canteens. The Home Ministry provided funding for school canteens, of which there were more than 12,000 by 1940. Training academies for dieticians were founded. The army proselytized the strange arts of boiling and deep-frying and unusual ingredients such as potatoes and
lard, through exhibitions and talks, radio broadcasts and cooking demonstrations.
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The aim was that every home in Japan would adopt the economical and nourishing military diet. Women’s magazines, aimed at both farming households and the urban middle classes, all included menus and recipes detailing how to prepare the high-calorie dishes that were by now standard military fare.
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