Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food (5 page)

Britain was the first European country to follow the path of transferring the job of growing food to its colonies. From the mid-nineteenth century Britain’s agricultural economy began to shrink as labourers left the countryside for the cities, and others travelled abroad, swapping a life of deference for one of greater dignity, if not wealth, farming in the colonies. The British food-import economy turned on its head as the spices, sugar, cocoa and tea which had been unloaded at the docks
in the early eighteenth century as luxuries for the dining tables of the wealthy, were, during the nineteenth century, redirected into the kitchens of the masses. Sugar from the Caribbean, tea from India and China, wheat and meat from the Commonwealth countries, all connected the British working man to every part of Britain’s empire, from the tropics to the temperate zones.
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By 1914 Britain was reliant on imports for over half of its food (measured by value) and was Europe’s major importer of grain. Indeed, the British developed a preference for the roller-ground hard wheat produced in Minneapolis and Buffalo over the soft European stone-ground wheat. The hard, glutinous American wheat produced a soft, moist loaf which stayed fresh for longer.
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The apparent improvement in the British working man’s diet hid a decline in the nutritional quality of his food. Roller-grinding wheat to make flour is a process which discards much of the wheat germ, the source of wheat’s protein, vitamins, minerals and fats. The softer loaf may have been more easily digestible than the old style stone-ground bread but it was far less nutritious. Even though the British working classes could afford more meat, the loss of vitamins and minerals in the bread was not compensated for by an increase in the consumption of vitamin-rich foods such as fruit, vegetables, cheese and eggs. In the towns fresh milk was hard to store and the urban population tended to rely on less nutritious imported cans of condensed and evaporated milk. Much of the energy in the working-class diet came from the sugar in their tea, and in the jam they spread on their bread. Sugar consumption per person increased dramatically over the nineteenth century until by the early twentieth century the British were eating about 36 kilograms a year. Thus, an unhealthy quantity of sugar had replaced the energy derived from plant carbohydrates that had been the main source of calories in the eighteenth century. This diet combined with urban poverty meant that hunger and malnutrition haunted the poorer sections of the working class, especially families with many children.
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However, the British celebrated their cheap white loaf; a direct product of free trade, it was regarded as a symbol of Britain’s powerful international status and the benefits this brought Britain.
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The country’s dependence on imports was a positive force as ‘the large food deficit acted as a pump for the world’s commerce’.
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The vast colonial agricultural hinterland provided a market (made wealthy by exporting
food) for the manufactured goods that Britain needed to export in order to pay for its food. The ships that sailed for Canada, Jamaica and Australia were laden with Sheffield knives and Lancashire cloth, and returned with holds full of wheat, sugar and wool. British service industries invested in these same countries, further enriching British companies.
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Germany, in contrast, found itself in an uncomfortable position. Bismarck’s protectionist tariffs had sheltered farmers from the growth in the global trade of cheap grain and had enabled the large farms owned by Junkers
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east of the River Elbe, to prosper. Germany’s industrial revolution began almost half a century later than Britain’s but, as the process began to gather speed, more liberal voices within the country advocated a less protectionist economic course. Germany, they argued, should follow a path similar to that of Britain and expand manufacturing in order to produce exports which would then pay for the import of primary products, including cheap food to feed the growing urban population.
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In fact, protectionism ensured the German working classes ate a slightly healthier diet than the British. German-grown rye produced a far more nutritious loaf of bread and fewer imports meant that the Germans drank more fresh milk than the British and ate a more modest 21 kilograms of sugar per head.
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But German workers also wanted to indulge in luxurious, light crusty white bread and they wanted more meat in their diet. In the 1890s Bismarck’s successors began to dismantle the wall of tariffs in order to enable German export industries to develop. The economic writer and social reformer Karl Oldenberg warned that this would lead to ruin. Germany would become dependent on the United States and China for its food. The farming communities, which were the source of the nation’s social health, would be destroyed. Meanwhile, the expanding urban areas would spread decay and undermine the nation’s social fabric.
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A
fin-de-siècle
fear of the anonymous and corrupting city was widespread throughout Europe, but in Germany conservative forces prevailed and in 1902 protectionist tariffs were reintroduced.
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Nevertheless, the German economy continued to expand and more and more imports of raw materials and food were required. The
German chancellor, Count Leo von Caprivi (1890–94), tried to solve the problem of dependence on food imports by increasing Germany’s self-sufficiency in food and this was fairly successful. In 1916 German farmers were feeding about seventy people per 100 acres of cultivated land, in contrast to the British farmer who fed about forty-five people from an equivalent area. Only 19 per cent of the German population’s calories came from imports. But these meat, livestock feed and fat imports were important sources of energy and taste, providing 27 per cent of the protein and 42 per cent of the fat consumed in Germany. By 1914 Germany (together with the Low Countries) formed the largest wheat-deficit area in the world.
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But by delaying migration from the countryside to the cities, agricultural protectionism had burdened the nation with a large agricultural sector which held back the process of industrialization. It also kept food prices artificially high, with the result that urban working-class protests about the price of milk, butter, and especially meat, erupted between 1906 and 1912.
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Those who advocated free trade within Germany argued that it was only by becoming a manufacturing and trading nation that Germany could hope to raise the standard of living of its growing urban population.
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For the British, the German loaf of rye bread symbolized the barbarism of autocratic German society, hemmed in by protectionism. German politicians were frustrated by their inability to challenge American and British dominance both over the world’s wheat-growing areas and the sea lanes, and by Germany’s lack of a dependent agricultural hinterland which could supply raw materials, or colonial markets to boost the German economy, in the same way that the empire created British wealth.
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Behind the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century jostle for a balance of power between Britain, Germany, Russia, Austria-Hungary and France, lurked the problem of how to feed a working population within the constraints of the economics of global trade. Within Germany, nationalist social commentators, and an increasing number of German Conservative Party politicians, thought that successful pursuit of profit, power and influence was contingent on the country finding a more equitable position in the global economy of food production, import and export, and the only way to achieve this was through war. If it fought a short war the German government felt confident that it could feed its people for the duration of the conflict.
Then, if Germany were victorious, it could defeat France and expand eastwards into a belt stretching from Finland to the Black Sea coast, thus establishing German dominance over western and eastern Europe. When they went to war in 1914 German politicians were hoping that the conflict would be decisive in disentangling the German nation from the world markets which put it at such a disadvantage.
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DEFEAT, HUNGER AND THE LEGACY OF THE FIRST WORLD WAR

If the problem of food supply was one of the factors which placed the great powers in hostile relations with each other, it was also one of the causes of Germany’s downfall in 1918. The First World War is associated with stagnant trench warfare but the battle was also fought in the Atlantic. For the first time naval battles became subordinate to commercial warfare, and in this way the First World War prefigured the Second. The international specialization of food production made both Britain and Germany vulnerable to blockade. Both countries relied on imports of raw materials, food and fodder to keep the war economy afloat and to feed their people. Even a reduction in imports could cause food prices to skyrocket and cripple industry. Hungry, unemployed workers might then pressurize the government to negotiate a peace before a military victory was clear.

The British Admiralty planned to impose an economic blockade on Germany long before the war began, and a new dimension was added to the concept of blockade when the British revised the naval code in 1907 and 1908, extending the definition of an instrument of war to food, and changing the rules of engagement to allow for attacks on neutral shipping, if the ship was carrying supplies to the enemy.
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When the war began Britain not only blockaded the German ports but extended the action to neutral continental countries by severely limiting the amount of imports they could receive, in an effort to prevent them from re-exporting surplus goods to Germany.
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During the Second World War these principles were applied even more harshly when occupied countries came under a complete blockade and the amount of food and petrol allowed in to neutral countries such as Spain was strictly limited.
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The German Admiralty introduced their own crucial change in blockade techniques by using the submarine as a weapon against merchant shipping. They wanted to use the submarines to attack Britain’s supply of wheat, but in the early years of the war the German military command hesitated to employ this strategy for fear of hitting an American ship and thus drawing the United States into the conflict.
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The Germans did not adopt all-out submarine warfare until mid-1917, by which time America had entered the war. However, by then the Allies had begun to co-ordinate their use of shipping space and had introduced the system of grouping ships into convoys travelling together with escort vessels, which was very effective in reducing the number of sinkings.
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German submarines did, however, inflict painful damage on Allied shipping and in 1917 Britain came close to using up its food reserves.
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High food prices even caused a certain amount of industrial unrest but Britain was able to keep open its supply lines and feed its population adequately. Ultimately, the international system of maritime trade was not only a weakness but also a strength as it enabled Britain to draw on the economies of the Commonwealth and the colonies, which provided raw materials, men, clothing and food.
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It was to prove equally crucial as a site of vulnerability and a source of strength during the Second World War.

The German submarine campaign was less successful than Britain’s traditional blockade, which succeeded in cutting Germany off from ‘direct imports from five enemy nations that together in 1913 had accounted for 46 per cent of Germany’s total imports’.
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When America entered the war in 1917 Germany’s fate was sealed, as the United States placed an embargo on exports not only to Germany but also to neutral continental countries. This put an end to Germany’s indirect trade with America while at the same time Britain gained better access to the boundless resources of the United States.
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Eventually, a shortage of agricultural labour combined with the blockade to reduce the Germans to a miserable state of hunger.

Inspecting the food ration lines in Berlin in the autumn of 1916, the American newspaper correspondent George Schreiner wrote: ‘among the 300 applicants for food there was not one who had had enough to eat for weeks. In the case of the younger women and children the skin was drawn hard to the bones and bloodless.’
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Shortages began with
bread, and then spread to potatoes, butter, fats and meat, until the Germans were forced to resort to eating turnips and swedes, which were normally fed to animals. The winter of 1916–17 became known as the turnip winter. Ethel Cooper, an Australian then living in Leipzig, wrote to her family: ‘I think that if I were to bray … it is all that could be expected … after a month of living on parsnips and turnips.’
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It was bitterly cold, coal ran out, electricity was cut off, the trams stopped running, even turnips were running short. ‘Germany’, Ethel wrote, ‘has at last ceased to trumpet the fact that it can’t be starved out.’
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Life was thoroughly exhausting and uncomfortable, interspersed with periods of absolute deprivation when the urban population teetered on the verge of starvation. The Germans lost weight, the birth-rate fell and the mortality rate rose. Deaths from pneumonia and tuberculosis increased significantly, a strong indicator of malnutrition and poor sanitary conditions. Three-quarters of a million Germans died of malnutrition. George Schreiner noticed that the underfed bodies on the trams gave off an odour reminiscent of ‘a cadaver’.
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