All Hell Let Loose (59 page)

Until 1943, when Stalingrad and bombing began to change everything, most German civilians save those who lost loved ones found the conflict a numbing presence rather than a trauma. ‘Is it possible that one can get used to war?’ mused Mathilde Wolff-Monckeburg, the elderly wife of an academic living in Hamburg, in 1941. ‘This question tantalises me and I am afraid of a positive reply. All that was unbearable at first, all that was impossible to fathom, has by now become somehow “settled”, and one lives from day to day in frightening apathy … We still have our comforts and warmth, we have enough to eat, we occasionally have hot water, we do not exert ourselves apart from daily shopping expeditions and small household duties.’ Like all Germans except National Socialist functionaries, who enjoyed privileges in food as everything else, she complained chiefly about the dreariness of rations: ‘One grows ever more sensitive to the emptiness inside and greed for the unobtainable becomes ever more intense,’ Wolff-Monckeburg wrote in June 1942. ‘Glowing fantasies multiply in tantalising colours when one thinks of large juicy beefsteaks, new potatoes and long asparagus with lumps of golden butter. It is all so degrading and miserable – and there are people who call this a “heroic” period.’ But if Germans complained of privation, this was slight by global standards: whereas British output of consumer goods fell by 45 per cent between 1939 and 1944, Germany’s declined only by 15 per cent. If its people disliked what they were obliged to eat – their annual consumption of potatoes rose from twelve to thirty-two million tons – they experienced severe hunger only when the war ended in May 1945; the Nazis starved the conquered nations to keep their own citizens fed.

More than any other aspect of the war, food or lack of it emphasised the relativity of suffering. Globally, far more people suffered serious hunger, or indeed died of starvation, than in any previous conflict, including World War I, because an unprecedented range of countries became battlefields, with consequent loss of agricultural production. Even the citizens of those countries which escaped famine found their diets severely restricted. Britain’s rationing system ensured that no one starved and the poor were better nourished than in peacetime, but few found anything to enjoy about their fare. A land girl, Joan Ibbertson, wrote: ‘Food was our obsession … In my first digs the landlady never cooked a second vegetable, except on a Sunday; we had cold meat on Monday, and sausage for the rest of the week. Sometimes she cooked potatoes with the sausage, but often she left us a slice of bread each. The two sausages on a large, cold, green glass plate greeted us on our return from a day on leeks or sprouts, and a three-mile cycle ride each way … A neighbour once brought round a sack of carrots, which he said were for the rabbits, but we benefited from this act of kindness … We had dried eggs once a week for breakfast, but the good lady in charge liked to cook it overnight, so it resembled, and tasted like, sawdust on toast. We had fishpaste on toast, too, some mornings … One Christmas we were allowed to buy a chicken. My bird was so old and tough that we could hardly chew through it.’

Each week a British adult was entitled to four ounces of lard or butter, twelve ounces of sugar, four ounces of bacon, two eggs, six ounces of meat, two ounces of tea and unlimited vegetables or home-grown fruit ‘off-ration’, if available. Most households resorted to improvisation to supplement authorised issues. Derek Lambert, then a small boy, recorded a scene at his family’s table: ‘One morning a jar was put on the breakfast table with supreme nonchalance … My father, an undemonstrative man, spread the nectar on his bread and bit into it. He frowned and said: “What was that?” “Carrot marmalade,” said my mother. With unusual deliberation, he picked up the jar, took it into the garden and poured it onto the compost heap.’

Yet any Russian or Asian peasant, or Axis captive, would have deemed carrot marmalade a luxury. Kenneth Stevens was a prisoner in Singapore’s Changi jail. He wrote: ‘In this place one’s mind returns continually and dwells longingly on Food … I think of Duck and Cherry Casserole, Scrambled Eggs, Fish Scallops, Chicken Stanley, Kedgeree, Trifle, Summer Pudding, Fruit Fool, Bread & Butter Pudding – all those lovely things were made just perfectly “right” in my own home.’ Stevens died in August 1943 without ever again tasting such delicacies. Only in 1945 did his wife receive his diary from the hands of a fellow prisoner, and share his anguished fantasising from the brink of the grave. Meanwhile, the average height of French girl children shrank by eleven centimetres and of boys by seven centimetres between 1935 and 1944. Tuberculosis stimulated by malnutrition increased dramatically in occupied Europe, and by 1943 four-fifths of Belgian children were displaying symptoms of rickets. In most countries city-dwellers suffered more from hunger than country people, because they had fewer opportunities for supplementing their diet by growing their own produce. The poor lacked cash to use the black market which, in all countries, continued to feed those with means to pay.

In the matter of diet Canada, Australia and New Zealand escaped lightly, and Americans scarcely suffered at all. Rationing was introduced to Roosevelt’s people only in 1943, and then on a generous scale.
Gourmet
magazine gushed tastelessly: ‘Imports of European delicacies may dwindle, but America has battalions of good food to rush to appetite’s defence.’ Meat was almost the only commodity in short supply, though Americans complained bitterly about that. A housewife named Catherine Renee Young wrote to her husband in May 1943: ‘I’m sick of the same thing … We hardly ever see good steak any more. And steak is the main meat that gives us strength. My Dad just came back from the store and all he could get was blood pudding and how I hate that.’ But whatever the shortcomings of wartime quality, in quantity American domestic meat consumption fell very little, even when huge shipments were exported to Britain and Russia.

Every nation with power to do so put its own people first, heedless of the consequences for others at their mercy. The Axis behaved most brutally, and with the direst consequences: Nazi policy in the east was explicitly directed towards starving subject races in order to feed Germans. Such was the regime’s administrative incompetence that food imports to the Reich, and consequent Soviet deaths, fell far short of the hopes of agriculture minister Herbert Backe and his ‘Hunger Plan’. People in occupied regions displayed extraordinary ingenuity in hiding crops from the occupiers, and clung tenaciously to life in defiance of the predictions of Nazi nutritionists, who anticipated thirty to forty million fatalities. But many people indeed perished. Pre-war Soviet agriculture was grossly inefficient, and much farmland had been overrun by the Wehrmacht. Even when it was reclaimed, machinery had been seized or destroyed, the countryside laid waste. In pursuit of the Wehrmacht’s policy of seeking to live off the land, German soldiers in the east consumed an estimated seven million tons of Russian grain, seventeen million cattle, twenty million pigs, twenty-seven million sheep and goats and over 100 million domestic fowls.

The Japanese throughout their empire adopted draconian policies to provide food for their own people, which caused millions to starve in South-East Asia. China also suffered appallingly, its peasants despoiled by both the Japanese and Nationalist armies. In Henan province in 1942, when unseasonable frost and hail were followed by a plague of locusts, millions left their land and many perished, to the horror of Western eyewitnesses: ‘As they died the government continued to wring from them the last possible ounce of tax … Peasants who were eating elm bark and dried leaves had to haul their last sack of grain to the tax collector’s office.’

Though the Allies were not responsible for anything like the human toll exacted by the Axis, their policies displayed a harsh nationalistic selfishness. The United States insisted that both its people at home and its armed forces abroad should receive fantastically generous allocations of food, even when shipping space was at a premium. For every pound of supplies the Japanese transported to their island garrisons, many of whom – at Rabaul, for instance – spent the second half of the war engaged in subsistence vegetable gardening rather than combat operations, the US shipped two tons to its own forces. American reluctance to feed their men on local supplies was increased by the shortcomings of some nations’ canning processes: eight US airmen died in an outbreak of botulism after eating Australian tinned beetroot. American specialists were thereupon dispatched to raise local standards. Major Belford Seabrook, of the famous New Jersey agribusiness, introduced its principles to Australia. Coca-Cola established forty-four bottling plants in theatres of war, which produced 95 per cent of all soft drinks sold in camp PXs. The United States reduced agreed allocations of meat to Britain to maintain supplies to its own civilians and soldiers; Gen. Brehon Somervell, a notorious anglophobe, supported his transportation chief’s 1943 assertion that the British people ‘were still living “soft” and could easily stand further reductions’.

For Italians, hunger was a persistent reality from the moment the country became a battlefield in 1943. ‘My father had no steady income,’ recalled the daughter of a once-rich Rome publisher. ‘Our savings were spent, we were many in the house, including two brothers in hiding. I went with my father to the [public] soup kitchen because my mother was ashamed to do so. We made our own soup from broad-bean skins. We had no olive oil … A flask of oil cost 2,000 lire when our entire house had cost only 70,000. We bought whatever was available on the black market, bartering with silver, sheets, embroidered linen. Silver was worth less than flour; even our daughters’ dowries were exchanged for meat or eggs. Then in November with the cold weather we had to exchange goods for coal: the longest queues formed at the coal merchants. We carried the sacks back on our own, because it was better that no man showed his face [lest he should be conscripted for forced labour].’

‘Hunger governed all,’ Australian correspondent Alan Moorehead wrote from Italy. ‘We were witnessing the moral collapse of a people. They had no pride any more, or dignity. The animal struggle for existence governed everything. Food. That was the only thing that mattered. Food for the children. Food for yourself. Food at the cost of any debasement or depravity.’ Prostitution alone enabled some mothers to feed their families, as British Sergeant Norman Lewis witnessed in 1944. At a municipal building in the outskirts of Naples, he encountered a crowd of soldiers surrounding a group of women who were dressed in their street clothes,

In December 1944, when there was hunger verging upon starvation in Italy and indeed all Europe, a British Embassy official in Washington visited assistant secretary of war John J. McCloy to protest against the policy of shipping extravagant quantities of supplies to US forces overseas, while liberated civilians were in desperate straits: ‘“In order to win the war,”’ he demanded of McCloy, ‘“were we not imperilling the political and social fabric of European civilization on which the future peace of the world depended?”’ This drew from Mr McCloy the immediate rejoinder ‘that it was a British interest to remember that, as a result of the complete change in the economic and financial position of the British Commonwealth which the war had brought about, we, in the U.K., depended at least as much upon the U.S. as we did upon Europe. Was it wise to risk losing the support of the U.S. in seeking the support of Western Europe? This was what was involved.’ The shocked British official persisted in pressing the case for feeding Europe’s civilians. McCloy stuck to his guns, asserting that it would be fatal for Britain ‘to argue that the war in the Pacific should be retarded in order that the civilian population of Europe should be fed’.

The Foreign Office in London professed acute dismay on receiving the minute of this meeting, but British impotence in the face of US dominance remained a towering reality. That only a relatively small number of Italians died of starvation between 1943 and 1945 was due first to the illicit diversion of vast quantities of American rations to the black market, and thereafter to the people – much to the private enrichment of some US service personnel; and second to the political influence of Italian-Americans, which belatedly persuaded Washington of the case for averting mass starvation.

The British government, in its turn, imposed extreme privation on some of the peoples of its empire, to maintain the much higher standard of nourishment it deemed appropriate at home. In 1943, allocations of shipping to Indian Ocean destinations were slashed, for good strategic reasons but at deplorable humanitarian cost. Mauritius suffered shocking hardships, as did some East African countries where white settlers made fortunes from wartime agricultural production, exploiting conscripted native labour paid derisory wages.

The 1943–44 Bengal famine, of which more will be said below, prompted a brutally callous response from Britain’s prime minister. When Wavell, then Viceroy, heard of the massive British 1945 airlift to Holland, where people had been reduced to eating tulip bulbs, he noted bitterly: ‘A very different attitude [exists] towards feeding a starving population when the starvation is in Europe.’ Greeks also suffered from the British blockade of Hitler’s empire – at least half a million died of hunger. Churchill was assuredly right, that concessions to allow food imports into Greece and other occupied nations would have served the Wehrmacht. But a fundamental reality persists: the Allied powers provided for their own peoples levels of nourishment which they denied to others, including societies notionally under their protection.