Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food (59 page)

In 1943 the Red Army began to push the Wehrmacht out of occupied territory and was able to requisition large quantities of food from the previously occupied peasants. The liberated areas provided the soldiers moving through with half of their flour requirements, almost all the vegetables and meat they needed, as well as fodder. This indicates just how ineffective the German occupation forces had been in requisitioning food from the peasantry. The Soviets were equally ruthless in their policy of feeding the army at the expense of their own people and far more efficient in extracting food. When the Red Army occupied other countries it proved itself as pitiless as the Wehrmacht. As the Soviets moved through Hungary and Romania the military ration was increased, first by 15 and then by 34 per cent.
¹⁶³

Once the Red Army reached East Prussia its vengeance was unleashed on the German civilian population in an orgy of rape and plunder. In many towns Soviet soldiers raped every German woman, regardless of her age. Confronted with the comparative wealth, even of wartime Germany, the Soviets were at a loss to understand why the Germans had invaded the Soviet Union. What could such a prosperous nation have hoped to gain from such a poor one?
¹⁶⁴
When a Ukrainian rail engineer first arrived in Germany with the Red Army he was amazed. ‘We would walk into an apartment and there would be some old man there. We would look around and see how he was living and we would say, “You must be a bourgeois!” And he would say, quite timidly, “No, I am just an ordinary worker; I have been working all my life.” And here the fellow was living in three or four rooms! When the young people in the army saw this sort of thing, they became convinced by the evidence of their own eyes that the Soviet propaganda had been giving them great lies.’
¹⁶⁵
The Ukrainian took part in the looting of German homes. Mirroring the ‘
Führerpakete
’, which encouraged German troops to bring home as much food as they could carry when they went on leave from the occupied territories, Soviet troops were given permission ‘to send packages home, ten kilograms a month’, but the shops were empty. ‘So we would go into a German’s apartment together and simply clear out the place and send everything that we took home. We were especially interested in getting clothes, because we knew that in the Soviet Union all the people had were rags. Of course, the order did not say that we were permitted to loot the
Germans’ houses, but it was really implied in it. Anyway, no one ever stopped us.’
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PERSEVERANCE DESPITE HUNGER

A Soviet citizen’s average daily intake of calories between 1942 and 1943 is estimated to have been 2,555 calories. In 1944, the amount is thought to have increased to 2,810 calories. This was a sign that the war had turned a corner.
¹⁶⁷
This quantity of food would be perfectly sufficient to sustain relatively sedentary contemporary lives but it was far below what was necessary to sustain health and energy in the tough everyday life of the Soviet citizen in wartime. The Soviets survived on far less food than all other combatant nations except the Japanese. They consumed at least 500 calories less than the average British or German civilian, while Americans were, on average, consuming at least 1,000 more calories a day than a Soviet. However, the picture conveyed by averages fails to convey the unreliability of the food supply, the periods of shortages and severe lack of food, the fact that food was distributed unequally across the population, so that while the communist elite might stuff themselves on stewed meat for breakfast, the dispossessed and hungry were reduced to licking the plates after others had finished their meal. A dependant’s or non-manual worker’s ration of 200 to 400 grams of sub-standard bread meant that it took great ingenuity to scrape together enough to eat. Irene Rush recalled, ‘how we hungered for and enjoyed that meagre food! We were always hungry an hour or two before it was time to eat; and by meal time, a piece of dry bread tasted like manna from heaven.’
¹⁶⁸
This is not the statement of a person living comfortably on 2,555 calories a day. From the evidence which fills in the picture of averages it is safe to conclude that only a tiny minority of the privileged were eating the actual number of calories that their bodies required. The majority of Soviet civilians were severely undernourished.

Apart from the problem that the food did not fill the Soviets’ energy requirements, it was nutritionally sub-standard. The Soviet Union was the only European nation to suffer from an outbreak of scurvy during the Second World War. The irregular and deficient diet caused gastritis,
stomach ulcers, dysentery, diarrhoea and vitamin C, K and A deficiencies.
¹⁶⁹
Even the Australian diplomat J. A. Alexander, who had privileged access to food, suffered from his virtually vitamin-free diet. Only one month after his arrival in the country in August 1944 he had ‘lost a good deal of weight …We are finding our urgent food needs here to maintain health are milk, vegetables, fruit and fruit juices.’ In October he complained that he had not had ‘a fresh egg or any fresh milk since I arrived’.
¹⁷⁰
The Soviet birth-rate fell by half during the war and disease flourished. Typhus, a sickness which goes hand in hand with malnourishment and poor hygiene, increased greatly, although the government did manage to implement effective measures, including disinfecting every train passenger before a journey, which prevented a raging epidemic.
¹⁷¹

The breakdown of ordinary civilian life was a serious threat to the war effort. But the appalling food situation was never so bad that there were not enough soldiers to fight on the front line or workers to struggle on the industrial assembly line. The impressive wartime achievements of the Soviet Union were, however, achieved at a terrible cost. The lives of the entire population were reduced to nagging hunger and grinding drudgery. Daily life was a perpetual misery. Kemp Tolley, sent to Komsomolsk to check on the use of lend-lease equipment, was filled with sadness ‘that fellow humans should have to exist in such hardship, without a shred of beauty, no control over their private destiny – in effect, human manure that will hopefully fertilize and improve the lives of succeeding generations’.
¹⁷²

Once the war was over, starvation was never mentioned by Stalin. Indeed, wishing to disguise the weaknesses of the post-war Soviet Union, he was only prepared to admit to 7 million war deaths, a figure which does not even cover the 9 million military casualties.
¹⁷³
The starvation of the besieged Leningraders received no official acknowledgement. When the Leningrad poet Olga Berggolts visited Moscow at the end of 1942 she was shocked to find that while the Muscovites talked of the people of Leningrad as heroes they had no idea that they had starved to death defending their city. Berggolts was in Moscow to give a radio interview. She was told, ‘no recollections of the starvation. None, none. On the courage, on the heroism of the Leningraders, that’s what we need … But not a word about hunger.’
¹⁷⁴
The unacknowledged
loss of millions of Soviet civilians to starvation could only be imposed upon a population by a dictatorship at ease with the notion that the lives of the majority of its people were expendable. However, given the pressing circumstances of the war, the Soviet government could probably not have fed its people much better. The Soviets had little room for manoeuvre. Admittedly, the problems of the agricultural system were partially self-imposed but there was no time or spare capacity to address them during the war. And in order to make as much food available to the urban population as possible the communist regime did abandon its principles and re-open the free market in food.

Germany and Britain feared that hunger, let alone starvation, would undermine morale to such an extent that this would bring the war effort to a halt. No such collapse in morale appears to have occurred in the Soviet Union. The people were used to shortages and difficult living conditions, and the fact that it was clear that the government was prepared to sacrifice the peasantry to hunger before the urban population contributed to the morale of the urban civilians, who kept the economy running. Moreover, the youth of the Soviet Union had been brought up to believe in the communist struggle. A sincere belief in collectivism and the political conviction that communism would bring about a better future undoubtedly motivated many of the young. Vladimir Ivanovich Mikhailov was nineteen when the war began. When he first went to the front his sincere belief in the ‘spirit of internationalism’ made it hard for him to fight the Germans. ‘I thought, these are probably the workers of the Ruhr, the dockers of Hamburg … how on earth can this be?’
¹⁷⁵
Once he realized that the National Socialists were intent on destroying the Soviet Union he fought with fervour despite suffering from terrible hunger pangs. ‘We endured. But I remember what a human turns into, consumed by this terrible feeling of hunger.’
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Many in the generation born in the 1920s seem to have been imbued with this spirit of sacrifice. For them the war was one more test of the Soviet people on the road toward the triumphant attainment of the communist ideal.
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The spirit of sacrifice which undoubtedly permeated the entire wartime Soviet population was not, however, always directed towards the support of communism but was inspired by more personal motives. Victor Kravchenko admired the sense of purpose and motivation among
the workers. When there was a rush order they would ‘remain in their factories for many days without a break, snatching some sleep on the premises … I watched them working in one shop when the shop next-door had been turned into a blazing hell by a direct bomb hit. I know that these plain people were the real heroes and the real strength of the Russian war … They were struggling to give all possible support to their sons and brothers and fathers at the fighting fronts.’
¹⁷⁸
In addition, fear should not be underestimated as a motivating factor in the Soviet Union. The purges of the 1930s had created an atmosphere of terror within society, and the labour camp was a tangible and horrible prospect which kept workers and peasants at their posts and discouraged open expressions of discontent. However, many Soviets felt that the cloud of repression lifted slightly during the war. Andrei Sakharov noted a temporary release from ‘the daily grind of a totalitarian, bureaucratic society’ which allowed the workers a measure of pride and dignity, which they relished.
¹⁷⁹
There was certainly a widespread although misplaced hope that after the war the regime would soften and life would improve.

The strongest motivational force which kept the Soviets going through the war was fear and hatred of the Germans. This was shared by virtually every Soviet no matter what their position with regard to the communist regime. Once civilians realized that labour camps, execution and starvation were the lot of Soviets in the occupied areas, a hatred of the Germans and a determination not to come under their rule became a driving force in the war effort. Victor Kravchenko explained that although he detested Stalin’s regime he nurtured a ‘passionate hatred for the invader’. This, he argued, was ‘the key to the mystery why the Russians fought and in the end conquered. They did not fight
for
Stalin but
despite
Stalin.’
¹⁸⁰
The Second World War was of a completely different nature from the First World War, when capitulation was an option. The Soviets were faced with ‘national extermination’ and they saw the conflict as a fight to the very end.,
¹⁸¹
Thus, under certain conditions, the Soviets demonstrated that hunger, malnutrition and deaths from starvation do not necessarily prevent a nation from fighting, and indeed winning, a total war.

^*
RSFSR–Russian Federation Council of People’s Commissars

15

Germany and Britain – Two

Approaches to Entitlement

As the army marches on its stomach … so does the industrial worker produce his best work when his stomach is well looked after.

(Noel Curtis-Bennett, author of a book on feeding British industrial workers during the war)
¹

The fighting won’t stop until Göring fits into Goebbels’ trousers.

(Popular Berlin saying in early 1945)
²

When the war began in September 1939 the National Socialists had already accomplished the difficult task of switching the German population’s diet to a wartime footing. Throughout the 1930s, as part of Herbert Backe’s campaign for ‘nutritional freedom’, strenuous efforts had been made to guide consumption away from scarce, high-quality foods towards lower-quality substitutes. Germans had been encouraged to eat fish instead of meat, margarine rather than butter, and to base their meals on potatoes and brown bread. In 1940 British nutritionists envied the Germans their frugal diet of autarky. Ernest Graham-Little, a member of the Food Education Society and an MP, attributed the Germans’ military successes of that year to the fact that their diet was ‘more scientific and effective than ours’.
³
In the
British Medical Journal
, Jack Drummond, Scientific Adviser to the Ministry of Food, explained: ‘The present German rations are based on the simple but sound principle that a “peasant diet” of “high extraction” or wholemeal bread, plenty of vegetables and potatoes, and some dairy produce in the form of cheese or separated milk, provides all the essentials of sound nutrition.’
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