Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food (12 page)

Just as the German General Plan for the East envisaged the creation of a modern but idyllic version of German society, Japan’s plan for Manchuria imagined an idealized agrarian version of Japanese society. The pioneers would live in a network of communities where each peasant would be allocated an equal holding with the same number of livestock. The entire village would work together as a co-operative using the most up-to-date farming techniques. By the end of the twenty years it would take to implement the scheme, 10 per cent of the population of Manchuria would be Japanese. Thus, the colony would have been assimilated into the Japanese polity. At the same time the farmers would double as ‘mainland warriors of the plough’, providing ‘a shield for the nation’ in the face of a possible attack by the Soviets.
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The Japanese plan did not go so far as the German one, in that it did not envisage wholesale extermination of the indigenous population. But the reality that lay behind the idyll was equally brutal and the impact on the Chinese farmers was comparable. The usual Japanese method of obtaining land for the settlers was simply to misclassify it as uncultivated, ignoring the Chinese and Korean peasants’ farms. The farmers were evicted or coerced into ‘selling’ their land for artificially low prices. In 1941 many of them were still waiting for their payments.
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Tsukui
Shin’ya, an official who organized forcible land purchases in 1938, later recognized that he had participated in a crime: ‘We trampled underfoot the wishes of farmers who held fast to the land and, choking off their entreaties full of lamentations and kneeling, forced them to sell it. When we thrust on them a dirt-cheap selling price, even if the colonization group resettled the terrain, I was saddened that we would be leaving them to a future of calamity, and I felt that we had committed a crime by our actions.’
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The Chinese twisted the name of the colonial office (
kaituoju
) and renamed it the ‘office of murders’ (
kaidaoju
).
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Reality did not, of course, live up to the ideal. Those Japanese settlers who were persuaded by their fellow villagers in Japan to make the journey to China were not pursuing some planner’s dream of an ideal collective society. The idea that the Japanese settlements should function in self-sufficient isolation from Chinese society would have condemned the settlers to wearing home-made woollen clothes, and eating a basic diet of rice mixed with millet, local game and vegetables.
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Instead, they chose to hire Chinese labour to farm the large plots and they grew rice and soya beans as cash crops so that they could pay farmhands and buy in household goods. For the majority of settlers life in Manchuria was unhappy and alienated. The army’s plan that the Japanese settlements should be located in the strategically vulnerable north and east meant that farming was hard and life was brutal. The Japanese villages were surrounded by hostile Chinese and frequently subject to attack by ‘bandits’.
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If the scheme was not an unqualified success in Manchuria, it did little to solve rural problems on the mainland. Settlers tended to come, not from the areas where overpopulation was a problem, but rather from those silk-producing areas which had been worst hit by the Depression.
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By the time the emigration movement was in full swing, industrial expansion was absorbing labour from the farms and, in conjunction with increased conscription due to the war in China, villages were suffering from the new problem of a lack of labour. Urban youths, members of the Patriotic Farm Labour Brigades, had to be brought in to help with planting and harvesting. Increasingly, the pioneer settlers were recruited not from the farms but from youth brigades such as the Volunteer Army of Young Colonists.
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Brides were found for them from among a variety of training institutes which taught
young women how to be good wives. Those who hoped to escape from the exigencies of wartime Japan were fed the rhetoric that they would be a comfort and help to their pioneer husbands, while nurturing the future generation of Japanese Manchurians. The reality of life in an isolated village, detested by the indigenous inhabitants, was harsh.
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The eventual fate of the Japanese settlers was tragic. The army made no plans to evacuate them as the Soviet army advanced across Manchuria in August 1945. Many of the men formed a scarecrow contingent of soldiers while the women and children fled, ‘hiding in the mountains during the day, running for their lives at night, carrying small children on their backs, feeding on whatever they could pick in the field, or aided by those Manchurians who remained humane.’
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Kuramoto Kazuko, whose family fled from Manchuria to the house of an aunt in Dairen, recalled that winter of 1945 as ‘a winter of death. It claimed hundreds of lives among the homeless Japanese refugees. They died of cold, hunger, and lack of sanitation … Many hung themselves in the parks … The hills behind the evergreen forest in the Central Park … were now covered by piles of abandoned bodies. Wild dogs fed on them and multiplied fast.’
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Of the 220,000 farmer settlers, around 80,000 died. About 11,000 of them met a violent end at the hands of the avenging Chinese, some committed suicide, and about 67,000 starved to death. The remaining 140,000 traumatized survivors were eventually repatriated to Japan.
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FROM NANJING TO PEARL HARBOR

While the settlement of Japanese farmers in Manchuria was under way, the conflict, which the Japanese called the ‘China Incident’ and the Chinese the ‘War of Resistance against Japan’, degenerated into a war of attrition. Japan’s dogged determination to win the war in China placed it in opposition to the western powers of America, Britain and the Netherlands, whose interests were bound up with the fate of the Nationalists, whom they supported.
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In response to Japan’s war on China the Americans had given financial aid to the Nationalist government, hoping that it would be able to at least weaken, if not defeat, the Japanese. The Japanese army’s orgy of rape and massacre in Nanjing in the winter of 1937–38 had severely damaged Japanese relations with the United States. However,
the war in China also perversely made Japan even more dependent upon trade with the United States. By 1938 the Japanese were running out of weapons and, more importantly, their stocks of fuel were virtually exhausted. If the United States were not placated by a peace deal in China they might well place an embargo on the scrap metal and oil imports that Japan so badly needed to maintain the war effort.
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However, 62,000 Japanese soldiers had already lost their lives in China and the Japanese military command felt that to withdraw would betray their sacrifice.
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Then, as Germany stormed across western Europe in the spring and summer of 1940, the weakness of the European colonial powers encouraged the Japanese chiefs of staff to think that they could take over the entire south-east Asian treasure house of resources.
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Occupation of the French, British and Dutch colonies in south-east Asia would enable Japan to achieve decisive victory in the Chinese war by cutting off supplies of Indo-Chinese rice to Nationalist China.
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They also set their sights on the oil supplies in the Dutch East Indies. Expansion into south-east Asia was a gamble but the potential rewards made it seem worth the risk. The Japanese military command felt that this was their only chance to end western dominance and establish their own claim as a great power in east Asia. In September 1940 Japan signed the Tripartite Pact, and became an official ally of Germany and Italy. Nevertheless, the military still hoped to secure Indo-China and the Dutch East Indies without drawing the United States into the conflict. However, the army began to follow a circular course of reasoning, which argued that they must prepare for war with America. This meant that they must take over the oil resources in the Dutch East Indies. But if they invaded the Dutch East Indies, this would inevitably lead to war with America. The navy was under no illusions that it could win a protracted war of attrition with the United States. Victory would have to be achieved quickly and in a decisive battle. But having justified their funding with arguments that they were preparing for war with the US they were not in a position to admit this to the army.
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Provoked by Japan’s continued aggression in China in June 1940 the Americans had placed an embargo on exports of scrap metal. A year later, prompted by the German attack on the Soviet Union, the Japanese occupied French Indo-China and the United States cut off their oil supplies. The Japanese political and military leadership overestimated
the abilities of their German ally and placed their faith in Germany managing to neutralize both Britain and the Soviet Union. The only way to avoid war with the United States was to capitulate in China, but the military were inexorable in their refusal to back down. The Japanese government had manoeuvred itself into a position where it felt that war with the United States was the only possible course of action. Japan’s military commanders judged correctly that the United States possessed immense resources and could defeat Japan in a long war of attrition. However, unlike the National Socialists who hoped to defeat their enemies, Japan hoped to bring America to the negotiating table. They calculated that the Americans would be unwilling to sacrifice the lives of thousands of young men in the Pacific. When they authorized the attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941 Japan’s leaders knew they were entering a war they could not really hope to win. Unfortunately, they woefully overestimated the willingness of the United States to enter peace negotiations once a war had begun.
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And it was this utterly unrealistic determination to force America into a negotiated peace which provided the rationale for the refusal of the military leadership to surrender, even in the summer of 1945 when Japan’s war effort lay in ruins.

The National Socialist solution to the problems associated with the global market in food, combined with a backward farming community in need of reform, pushed Germany into war in Europe. Rather than engaging with capitalist world markets, the National Socialists chose the alternative path of autarky and an aggressive search for land. Across the globe, Japan was placed in a similarly difficult position with regard to the international economic system. A weak and failing agricultural sector which was tipped into crisis by the Depression added to Japanese woes. In a parallel process, the agrarian problem propelled Japan’s politicians into ever more conservative solutions, resulting in the decision to seek the same solution: autarky and expansion. Both Germany and Japan looked to their military to appropriate enough land not only to reverse the decline of agriculture but to recreate a ‘flourishing farm economy [which] could hold its own against the pressures of industry and commerce’. Empire was seen by both regimes as a means of making ‘peace with modernity’.
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Unfortunately, it also guaranteed that they would be unable to make peace with their neighbours.

Part II

The Battle for Food

When Hitler took the world to war by invading Poland on 1 September 1939, many governments were caught off guard by the insatiable wartime appetite for food. The expansion of military forces created armies of voraciously hungry men. The corresponding growth of war industries created a second pool of men and women whose arduous physical labour meant that they too needed to eat an extra 500–1,000 calories a day. Employment and rising wages meant that even ordinary civilian demand for food (especially for meat and milk products) rose far more than most governments had expected. With the virtual disappearance of consumer goods, there was, after all, virtually nothing else on which people could spend their money.

The Allied governments had to switch quickly from the Depression mentality of trying to persuade farmers to grow less in order to reduce food surpluses, to encouraging farmers to cultivate every available inch of their land and to grow crops with the highest ratio of nutritional return for the effort expended. The need to increase agricultural yields was all the more urgent given that for many countries food imports disappeared, or were drastically reduced, because the war had thrown the global food trade into disarray. In August 1940 continental Europe was cut off from the world food market by the British blockade of Germany and all of occupied Europe. In June 1941 the German invasion effectively removed the Soviet Union from the market. By the end of 1942 Japan had imposed a blockade on Nationalist China and taken control of south-east Asia and large parts of the western Pacific. German U-boats patrolled the oceans, posing a threat to Allied shipping and this, combined with a shortage of ships, meant that every cubic inch of shipping space was hotly contested. Civilian food supplies had to
compete for space on ships with coal and fuel, steel, phosphates for explosives, military supplies and troops.

In peacetime the British Isles sat at the centre of a complex web spun by its 3,000-strong merchant shipping fleet. Britain itself relied on ten to fifteen ships arriving in its ports each day, bringing in 68 million tons of imports a year, 22 million tons of which were food.
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An intensive network of ‘cross-trade’ carried tea from India to Australia, beef cattle from Madagascar to sugar-producing Mauritius, cocoa beans from West Africa to America. Britain was now denied valuable imports of Danish and Dutch bacon, cheese and butter. Onions, which before the war were imported from Spain, France and the Channel Islands, disappeared from British greengrocers. Japanese successes in China, south-east Asia and the Pacific meant that the Allies lost access to a variety of essential raw materials such as Malayan rubber and tin and Dutch East Indian oil. One sign of the shortages was the disappearance of tinfoil wrappings on candy bars in America.
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The Americans were denied Sumatran palm oil to manufacture margarine, Filipino coconut flesh and Chinese soya bean and peanut meal, which they used as fodder for livestock. The loss of Burma to the Japanese in May 1942 opened a gaping hole in the British empire’s food network. Burmese rice was a staple food in India and Ceylon, the Gambia, Kenya, South Africa and Zanzibar, and in far-flung islands such as Mauritius and Fiji.