Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food (55 page)

By the end of 1941 the army had lost 4.5 million men (over half of them captured) and the Soviet Union had lost most of its fertile agricultural regions, as well as a large proportion of livestock.
¹³
The country faced a food crisis of immense proportions. The centralized food distribution system focused all its energies on feeding the 12–13 million men in the armed forces.
¹⁴
Red Army soldiers were allocated a frugal 2,954 calories a day on active duty. In normal circumstances this would support a moderately active man. In combat, the rations were supposed to increase to 3,450 calories a day, a good 700 calories short of what a soldier needs to eat when fighting in cold conditions. Even the relatively modest British army ration contained 5,300 calories when the men were fighting in cold climates.
¹⁵
If the stipulated amounts were too little, the actual food which they received usually contained far fewer calories. For the first year and a half of the war, the infantry’s rations were only slightly better than the dismal food eaten by the civilian population. Meals for the front-line troops consisted of
kascha
(porridge) for breakfast,
borscht
(soup) for lunch, and bread and cucumber pickle for supper.
¹⁶
The Red Army field kitchens were elementary, producing meals out of buckwheat, dried fish, potatoes and as much fat as possible as this helped to keep out
the cold. But in the first years of the war, it was rare for Red Army soldiers to be supplied with hot meals from a field kitchen and many survived on dry rations of bread and dried fish for weeks on end.
¹⁷
A Ukrainian drafted into the army at age sixteen went with ‘great enthusiasm’, eager to fight the despised Germans but he was shocked by the terrible conditions. ‘The uniforms we got were used. Instead of shoes we got some kind of rags. How about food? Also bad. 700 grams of bread a day. Little fat. For the rest we got cabbage and frozen potatoes. That’s all. Many got sick. Only when we got a blanket we could exchange it for food. But this was punished.’
¹⁸
Some soldiers were so desperately hungry that, despite draconian punishments if they were caught, they would sell pieces of their uniform in the markets.

The soldiers lived in
zemlyanki
, which were holes in the ground boarded up with wooden planks and roofed with turf. Sometimes divided by curtains they could be tiny, or large enough to hold as many as 400 men. At least the crowd warmed the space up a little although the air generally became rank.
¹⁹
Padded jackets and trousers, fur gloves and warm hats were sometimes available but winter boots were in short supply and some Soviet soldiers had absolutely nothing to put on their feet.
²⁰

For the first year chaos prevailed. The Soviets struggled with the same problems the Wehrmacht was encountering in the occupied parts of the country: poor east–west connections, inadequate roads, and an overburdened rail system. A large proportion of the rail network had been lost to the Germans, and what was left was single-track lines which caused long delays. The slow-moving trains came under constant air attack and congestion was made worse by the operation to evacuate thousands of factories. Trains filled with new recruits and supplies for the front line had to wait while the trains evacuating the factories passed in the other direction. Most of the rail lines radiated out from Moscow, which meant that supplies had to be sent first to Moscow and then out to their destination. The return journey was made with empty wagons. This severely hampered the movement of food from surplus areas to the towns and to sections of the front line where it was needed. By 1942 the turn-around time for freight cars had increased from seven to thirteen days.
²¹
Later that year the Germans cut the rail
line running from Moscow to Stalingrad; the only connection left was a fragile line that ran close to the front line, or a much longer detour via Astrakhan and the Caspian Sea.
²²

A Ukrainian soldier recalled that the unreliability of the overburdened transport system meant that ‘sometimes the unit would be fairly well fed and sometimes it would be hungry but there was always enough vodka and cheap tobacco … About twenty or thirty kilometres in the rear food was not so bad at all but the supply of food was very irregular.’
²³
At the Volkhov front near Leningrad during 1942–43 a doctor described how sometimes the food supply would dry up completely for two days.
²⁴
Corruption aggravated the supply problems. In March 1942 a journalist for the
Krasnaya Zvezda
reported that soldiers on the Kalinin front north of Moscow were starving. The quartermaster, General Andrei Khrulev, went to investigate and to his disgust found the report to be true. The officers were using the transport problems to mask the fact that they were selling off the food on the black market. The culprits were sent to penal battalions. Despite such harsh punishment it was a common practice for officers to siphon off meat and vegetables to sell on the black market.
²⁵

The failure of the centralized food distribution system to provide a consistent and balanced food supply across the Red Army is exemplified by the disparities to be found in the food stocks of the 64th, 57th and 51st Armies, all of which were on the south-eastern front, defending Stalingrad in the summer of 1942. The 64th Army was in the worst position and was virtually out of food, with barely three days’ worth of flour and bread, just over three days’ worth of meat and no fish or fats. The situation of the 51st Army was not much better but they did have a ridiculously large reserve store of fifty-nine days’ worth of fat. Neither of these armies had any sugar. In contrast, the 57th was comparatively well off with a month’s worth of stocks of sugar, and about a week’s worth of flour, bread, cereals, meat, fish and fats. Reflecting the administrative disorganization behind these shortages, plans to bring food up to the front line were only formulated by the Chief Administration of Food Supplies of the Soviet Army (
Glavprodsnab
) a week after the Germans had captured the outer suburbs of the city. Food stocks were stored on the left bank of the River Volga, which meant
that they had to be brought across on barges under a barrage of German bombs.
²⁶

The city of Stalingrad was reduced to ‘an enormous cloud of burning, blinding smoke; it is a vast furnace lit by the reflection of the flames’.
²⁷
The fighting took place in heaps of rubble amid ruined buildings. A German Panzer division lieutenant described how in the house-to-house battles, ‘The front is a corridor between burnt-out rooms: it is the thin ceiling between two floors … eighty days and eighty nights of hand-to-hand struggles. The street is no longer measured in metres, but in corpses.’
²⁸
Even once the food was across the river it was virtually impossible to bring meals up to soldiers engaged in this sort of battle. The brave cook of one Soviet anti-tank detachment would strap a large army thermos to his back and crawl up to the point where the troops were under fire to bring them soup or warming tea.
²⁹
But more often than not the hungry soldiers had to forage in cellars for whatever food the civilians had left behind. One Soviet veteran recalled, ‘Whatever we saw we ate. There was no regular supply of food. In Stalingrad I ate horses and dogs.’
³⁰

In the end, however, it was the encircled Germans who starved. The Red Army caught General Paulus’s 6th Army in what became known as the Kessel, or cauldron, in late November 1942. The German high command instructed Paulus to hold out and he was told that the Luftwaffe would fly supplies in to the men. But the plan to airlift food and arms was never feasible given the weather conditions and the number of available planes.
³¹
Infantryman Heinz Pfennig recalled that, ‘Bread was doled out. There was rarely any extra food. Our potatoes were just dried potato flakes.’
³²
The soup was hot water with a few pieces of horsemeat floating in it. A fellow soldier, Wilhelm Hoffmann, recorded in his diary, ‘The horses have already been eaten. I would eat a cat, they say its meat is also tasty. The soldiers look like corpses or lunatics, looking for something to put in their mouths.’
³³
At Hitler’s headquarters General Kurt Zeitzler confined himself to the same rations as were available for the men caught in the cauldron and lost 11 kilograms in two weeks. Irritated, Hitler ordered him to eat properly. He did not wish to be reminded of the reality of the situation.
³⁴
When General Paulus surrendered to the Soviets, who had pressed into the city and finally retaken it, Hitler was furious.

Stalingrad was a psychological turning-point on the eastern front as both sides felt that the tide had turned and that the Red Army had finally gained the upper hand in the conflict. But the winter of 1942–43 did not mark a turning-point in the Red Army’s food situation. A theatre manager, who was an officer during the war, explained to his Harvard interviewer, ‘after Stalingrad, we had no products or food for our men … Our soldiers had only cabbage to eat. I decided to permit them to steal food.’
³⁵
He was reported and taken before the commander of the division. ‘He asked me why I had permitted this, and I replied that my soldiers were hungry, that everyone was hungry, and that the hunger of my soldiers was none of his affair. I was sentenced to go to a penal battalion.’
³⁶
Incredibly, he survived the punishment and was released just as the Red Army retook Kharkov. ‘I started everything anew … I finished the war as a senior lieutenant.’
³⁷
The theatre manager’s decision was not unusual. Red Army units horribly abused the slogan ‘everything for the front’.
³⁸
They would go into the villages and round up horses, commandeer food from the collective farms and raid peasants’ private supplies of honey and potatoes.

The soldiers became expert foragers. One veteran recalled how he would collect nettles with his comrades. They picked goosefoot (
lebeda
) and gathered frozen potatoes abandoned by fleeing civilians. In the fields they dug up garlic and onions and made green soup, motivated by an ‘intuitive belief … that they could get important nutrients from these foods’.
³⁹
Soviet soldiers would often stave off scurvy by making a foul brew of boiled pine needles, rich in vitamin C. Vera Vladimirovna Milutina, a survivor of the Leningrad siege, recalled trucks driving through the streets of besieged Leningrad carrying soldiers who had been out in the countryside collecting pine and spruce branches. ‘They were extracting vitamins from the pine needles, and this infusion, I had heard, worked miracles on the starving wounded in the hospitals.’
⁴⁰
The soldiers once tossed her a heap of branches and she gnawed on them all the way home. ‘I totally devoured their tender bark and needles … we had neither the strength nor the time to cut needles and put them into boiling water.’
⁴¹
Red Army soldiers usually carried a bag with them into which they could stuff any chance booty. These were a military extension of the ‘just in case’ bags which Soviet civilians
began to carry around with them in the 1930s on the off-chance that they might come across some rare household goods or food.
⁴²
Helmut Geidel, a German who fought with the 14th Panzer Division on the eastern front, recalled that after one battle he found a dead Russian with the head of a dog in his bag which he obviously intended to eat when the opportunity to cook it arose.
⁴³

The pre-war years of turmoil, poverty and deprivation had inured the Soviet people to low standards of care. This would have helped the soldiers to endure the appalling wartime conditions. For those who believed in the communist project, the promise of a brighter future may well have motivated them to fight. But on both sides of the eastern front repressive discipline and fear of the draconian punishments for cowardice and desertion were also powerful factors which kept the hungry men at their posts. For the Soviets a further powerful preventative against desertion was the severe punishment inflicted on the families of those men who went missing in action (and were thus not confirmed dead) as well as on the families of men taken prisoner.
⁴⁴

The fighting on the eastern front descended into an orgy of brutality which gave the conflict a powerful internal momentum.
⁴⁵
Tales spread through the Red Army of the murderous actions of both the Wehrmacht and the SS within occupied territory, and Soviet soldiers gradually became aware that Red Army prisoners of war were being deliberately starved to death. In response, the Soviets became frighteningly vengeful, which, in turn, escalated the brutality of the Germans. Hans-Ulrich Greffrath, an officer in the Wehrmacht, claimed, ‘we fought with ever-increasing defiance and bitterness not because we were Nazis, but because of the terrible experiences we had at the front. We saw mutilated soldiers who had fallen into the hands of the Russians – soldiers without noses, without eyes … We knew we had to keep on fighting if we wanted to prevent this sort of thing from happening to our families at home.’
⁴⁶
His sentiments were shared by the Soviets, who were united in a hatred and horror of the Germans and fear of the annihilation of their society, which would surely result from a German victory. It was the conviction among ordinary soldiers that the consequences of failure in battle would be apocalyptic that gave Red Army soldiers every reason to fight, with or without adequate food rations. It is a testament to their determination that they eventually proved
such a formidable force despite the fact that well into 1943 they were fighting on empty stomachs.