The shelves of historical material on the Second World War are stuffed full of volumes on weaponry, campaigns, accounts of mass-murder, the biographies of leaders and the memoirs of combatants. There is no shortage of interesting material except in one particular major area of the war – that of food. Lizzie Collingham is a scholar who has already betrayed a passing interest in food, nutrition and history, and has now put it together in The Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food; (Penguin Press, New York, 2012). The book – inevitably — gives considerable food for thought.
The normal assumption about the driving element behind the war was that it was a result of the ideological constructs of Nazism, Japanese Imperialism, and similar creeds. They were aggressive and bent on conquest and for decades we thought this was all the justification they needed. We forgot that the ideologue does not pull his ideological constructs out of thin air and that his or her concerns are often real enough.
Sometimes the ideologue is engaged by powerful concerns that are widely shared by the larger population; the difference lies with how he or she proposes to deal with those issues. Ms. Collingham reminds us that the Nazis and Japanese militarists had answers for very real preoccupations and fears in Germany and Japan which is why both gained such saliency in their home societies. Most Germans or Japanese did not share in the nuttier ‘spiritual’ beliefs of the Nazis and the Militarists. However, if the ideologues were prepared to provide solutions for pressing problems, then their leadership might be more tolerable.
One touchstone between Germany and Japan is that both were highly concerned about food security for their own peoples. Japan had a very hard time feeding its own citizens and the advent of the Great Depression, with its slump in trade, represented a severe reduction in badly needed food imports for much of its population. Germany remembered the effect of the Allied Blockade in WW1 and the hunger that it caused which persisted even after the Armistice was signed. Moreover, tight rations became another feature of the hyper-inflationary period of the Weimar Republic and yet again with the advent of the Great Depression.
Japan’s grand scheme of a “Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere” and Hitler’s articulation of the need for ‘Lebensraum’ resonated strongly with many Japanese and Germans. These involved plans for colonization for crowded homelands (just as the British had managed in the 18th and 19th Centuries), the exploitation of new resources, and the potential end of hunger. In focusing on this solution, both Germany and Japan completely overlooked how agriculture really worked in the US and the British Dominions and how much this sector of the economy had changed since the middle of the 19th Century.
The problem with ideologues is that they are lousy economists, poor managers, and they allow the requirements of their grand vision to interfere with the normal workings of society. Also their romantic views about how society should be organized normally clash with reality. At heart the ideologue seeks to create a new reality and make people fit it, focusing on what could-be rather than what-is.
Hitler and Nazi planners saw the German farmer as a sturdy and lusty yeoman who would be eager to colonize the new lands the Wehrmacht conquered. The Japanese also ascribed many virtues to the small farmer, but were at least realistic enough to know that 1-2 acre rice plots would not feed the Empire much longer. Yet both German and Japanese farmers — like most farmers all around the world — instead proved to be innately conservative. Neither was too inclined to leave home for new colonies elsewhere and those who did proved to be easy targets for angry partisans in the Ukraine and Manchuria.
Ms. Collingham points out that the Western democracies had almost no trouble feeding themselves during the war. Even at the height of the U-Boat Crisis, the British were more concerned about the morale effect of tight rationing rather than real hunger (bread, for example, was never rationed during the war). Free enterprise had worked ruthless efficiencies in Western agriculture and made new products and new devices that combined to make food production too efficient during the Great Depression. However, the coming of the war raised food prices again, guaranteed a ready market for all production and allowed farmers to recapitalize their farms.
By contrast, the Soviets were in a desperate situation for food during 1941-42, until American lend-lease powdered eggs, Spam and corned beef started to arrive in quantity in late 1942. By 1943, the USSR was the primary recipient of lend-lease food (it is interesting to notice a correlation between Soviet battlefield performance and the arrival of American proteins – the Red Army’s troops fought with increasing skill in late 1942 and ‘43). The real cause of this hunger was not so much the fact that the Germans overran much of the USSR’s best farmland as it was the horrific effects collectivization, five year plans, and government terror had on food production even before the war.
The Japanese military probably produced the most spectacular act of incompetence in the entire war. Their military administration was so utterly incompetent that while they obtained control of all three of the World’s major rice exporting areas (southeast China, Vietnam and Southern Burma), they still managed to induce hunger and famine even in these three areas. Other areas they got control of also experienced major famine deaths as did Bengal in the British Raj, which had been dependent on Burmese rice imports.
At the height of Japanese military power, long before American submarines started their depredations on shipping tonnage, the Japanese were still barely capable of raising ration entitlements at home. It also says much that perhaps half of their troops died of hunger-related conditions when the war left them stranded on New Guinea, in Rabaul, or stumbling across Burma after the brilliant British victories of 1944 and 1945.
Food even explains much of the Holocaust. While the Germans were quite capable of dishing out casual and impulsive atrocities to the Jews under their thumbs in 1939 and 1940, the systemic mass murder only started in 1941 in occupied Soviet territories and went into full gear in Poland during 1942 when the Death Camps (as distinct from the Concentration Camps) opened for business. The research behind The Taste of War explains much of the reasoning behind this.
The Germans were already intent on starving out those who they called the “useless eaters” (Jews, displaced Poles, etc.) of Poland and other areas they occupied in Eastern Europe even before invading the USSR in June 1941. They had estimated what the agricultural output should be of their envisioned new lands and underestimated what they needed to ensure the well-being of the German people and the military. However, it was a firm policy of the Reich that Germans would not go hungry again; instead everyone else could go hungry. Indeed, hunger and its related effects were the main lethal influence on the Jews forced into Polish ghettos in 1941.
The revision of the German requirements against lower production than they had estimated forced a rethink on how to secure sufficient quantities for their needs. But, guided by ideology, the administrators of the Reich did not decide on a program of agricultural reform. It is a measure of their ignorance that they believed Polish food diverted to the Black Market to feed Jews would be available for the Reich to confiscate if the Jews were gone. So they decided to accelerate the reduction of the “useless eaters” in 1942 to which category were added Soviet POWs and civilians in occupied Soviet cities who didn’t work for the Germans.
The Japanese were less efficient than the Germans proved to be at deliberate direct mass-murder: Their 1942 purge of ethnic Chinese in Malaysia and Singapore only killed about 50,000 (as a rough estimate) in three months; then they left off and levied a ‘fine’ on the survivors. However, Japanese confiscation of rice and other agricultural goods wherever they went, led to millions and millions of famine deaths.
For decades, any number of military buffs has lavished praise on German tactical skill and their acumen in operational art during the Second World War. Indeed, their standards in these fields were usually higher than those of their British and American counterparts. However, American and British staff officers and generals tended to get more training in civil administration and logistics than Wehrmacht officers did… which is much less sexy but much more practical. Ms. Collingham points out that the only area that did well – agriculturally speaking – under German supervision was Denmark, where the Germans largely allowed the Danes to run things their own way until well into 1943.
The British adroitly handled food distribution under some very trying circumstances, except for Colonial administrators in parts of Sub-Saharan Africa and the blunder of rushing wheat products to starving rural Bengali rice eaters during the famine of 1943. American military administrators did well with the populations under their control, although the phenomenal resources afforded to them by a robust agricultural sector back home made this easier. Both militaries proved much more superior in getting food, water and power to populations they governed during the war than any German, Japanese (or Soviet) occupation force ever managed.
Ms. Collingham points out another rule which should be one of those rock solid commandments that no government ever forgets (yet which they always do). If farmers are compelled to give up part of their crop with no direct benefit, then next time they sow crops they will only plant enough for themselves. The Germans and Japanese never really understood this. The USSR – in the throes of collectivization – learned this before the war but decided to collect those smaller crops too. This let the farmers starve in the following year and so made sustained coercion the bedrock of their agricultural strategy. This allowed the Soviets to squeak through the lean times of 1941-42, but also explains the inefficiency of Soviet agriculture throughout the entire span of the USSR.
Collingham’s book is history of times seven decades past us, but it remains relevant.
Seventy years later, food is starting to be in short supply again. The main problems are not so much questions of production as they are about the effects of the chimerical quest for bio-fuels in much of the world (particularly in the US), urban sprawl, growing water shortages in many regions and falling productivity in some regions due to the over-use of pesticides and fertilizers. As usual, the threat of food shortages makes people nervous, and nervous people are more likely to look for quick unrealistic answers. If we know anything about our own natures, it is that there is no shortage of people willing to provide such answers.
Ms. Collingham’s historical analysis is sound. Like many essayists, while her history is sound, her deductions about its lessons may be somewhat flawed (a charge that few essayists can escape) but her basic warning should not go unheeded. Fear of hunger is one of the primary drivers behind the Second World War; hunger was also the main killing instrument in that war. We would do well to keep both thoughts in our minds in coming years.
Who is to say that there are nations threatened by food shortages today where some thought has already been quietly given to draconian methods for taking it from others? Might the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt look at the Coptic Christians as “useless eaters”? Might somebody in a country with poor food security be already considering options about arable land elsewhere? If we want to keep our own butter, we’d make sure our guns are in working order in addition to looking to long-term solutions for the whole planet.
Ideologues are more likely to deliberately embrace the use of hunger as a weapon, but they are also singularly incompetent when it comes to managing an economy or an agricultural system. Although the catastrophic fallout from Soviet and Maoist agricultural disasters are largely – but not entirely – outside of the brief of Collingham’s book, these episodes also remind us of the deadly price the search for quick answers can yield. We forget at our peril the directions in which the fear of hunger can send people.
More than ever before, we need the sound analysis of realistic historians and economists in picking our way forward through the approaching crisis rather than hearing the prating of activists and special interests of all stripes once it is upon us. The Taste of War deserves wide readership and should provoke careful and deliberate thought now.
