Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food (19 page)

Despite the air of triumph which surrounded the submarine campaign against British merchant shipping, Germany did not direct more resources into U-boat production, which in 1940 only kept pace with losses. Neither Dönitz nor Admiral Erich Raeder, Commander-in-Chief of the German navy, could interest Hitler in their plans for naval economic warfare. Hitler still cherished unrealistic hopes of persuading Britain to ally with him, and, like the German Admiralty during the First World War, he was reluctant to provoke the United States by unleashing a ruthless campaign on its merchant marine. His priorities lay elsewhere, first with the invasion of France, and then with the attack on the Soviet Union. This meant that U-boat production was starved of the steel and labour needed to build a fleet of 300 submarines, which Döntiz argued would be necessary to have a decisive impact on Britain’s imports.
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This was fortunate for Britain, as in the first year of the war the government discovered that it had badly miscalculated the negative impact war would have on shipping. During the First World War Britain had learned that fewer ships were sunk if they travelled together in convoys and the convoy system was introduced as soon as war broke out, but as all ships had to sail at the speed of the slowest vessel in the convoy this lengthened the journey time and meant that ships were often inconveniently re-routed. Chaos in the British ports made matters worse. The U-boats’ control over the North Sea meant that all shipping activity from the eastern ports had to be diverted to the Clyde, the Mersey and the Bristol Channel. Lack of storage space meant that goods piled up on the quays.
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Before the introduction of lend-lease Britain’s shortage of foreign exchange meant that as many export goods as possible needed to be loaded on to the ships to pay for the imports Britain needed. Relations between the dock workers and their employers were poor, and disaffected workers loading and unloading the ships in a desultory fashion, with inadequate equipment, delayed the entire process. The unnecessarily long ship turn-around in British ports reduced imports by 10 per cent.
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This caused the first wartime food crisis. In 1939 the arrival of imports of bulk foodstuffs had already fallen far below expected levels and the government rapidly began to use up its stocks of wheat and flour. Wheat storage had been moved to the west of the country, as far out of reach of aerial bombardment as possible, but the transfer of
shipping from the eastern to the western ports meant that Britain’s poor east–west rail links could not cope with the volume of traffic. The Ministry of Food struggled to convey sufficient supplies to the eastern flour mills, some of which ran out of grist. This did not affect supplies of bread to the population but it made the government extremely sensitive to falling stock levels, which it blamed, wrongly, for the problem. In December 1939 the cabinet affirmed that a minimum of thirteen weeks’ stock of flour was essential to ensure that the distribution of wheat did not break down. This figure failed to take into account that it was the way in which stocks were distributed around the country which had caused the problem, and was unnecessarily high. This early mistake reinforced a tendency to overestimate the necessary level of stocks and this was to be the cause of much bad feeling in the future between British and American food officials.
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Britain’s war effort was entirely dependent on the continued arrival of imports for all of its oil, most raw materials for industry and more than half its food (in calories).
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The sudden cut in shipping led to industrial shortages in the first year of the war, and in response planners allocated loads of steel to ships which normally carried wheat across the Atlantic. The heavy cargoes damaged many of these ships as they crossed the seas in stormy winter weather and this intensified the shipping crisis by taking ships out of action while they waited for repairs. The British shipbuilding industry had gone into decline in the 1930s and had not recovered by 1939. Lack of skilled workers, appalling relations between employers and their workers and run-down shipyards left Britain completely unable to repair these ships speedily and replace those which were sunk.
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Thus, the German U-boats were only one factor among many which caused the shipping crisis. At the beginning of the war the disorganization at the ports, longer journeys and delays, and the inadequacy of the shipbuilding industry were far more significant in causing the shipping shortage.
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The crisis was compounded by military competition for shipping space. On 10 June 1940 Italy entered the Second World War and launched attacks from its colonies in Libya and Ethiopia on the British in North and East Africa. Churchill was determined to achieve victory in these campaigns and in order to do so he was prepared to compromise the quantity of civilian imports arriving in Britain. German U-boats
had closed the Mediterranean to Allied shipping and all men and military supplies for the campaign had to make a 20,000-kilometre journey around the African Cape and up the Red Sea. In order to carry troops and their arms as quickly as possible, the fastest ships in the merchant fleet, the refrigerated ships, which normally carried frozen meat and dairy products, were withdrawn from carrying civilian cargoes and converted into troop carriers. Forty to fifty escort ships were also diverted from the protection of merchant shipping in the North Atlantic in order to escort them on their journey. Refrigerated ships were in extremely short supply and their diversion to military duties (combined with losses to enemy attack) resulted in a one-fifth reduction of the merchant marine’s refrigerated capacity. This cut refrigerated goods coming into Britain by 30 per cent. At the end of the year dairy and fruit imports had reached only half of their target level and frozen meat imports had fallen drastically.
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In addition, German bombing raids had ‘made serious inroads into our refrigerated stocks of meat’ and by January 1941 only two weeks’ worth of reserve stocks of frozen meat were left in Britain’s warehouses.
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The meat allowance, which had risen in September 1940 following the slaughter of livestock as feed-grain imports were reduced, was cut back to one shilling’s worth in March 1941. This amounted to about a pound of meat a week, although it could be stretched to a little more if choice cuts were avoided in favour of poorer cuts and offal.
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The autumn and winter of 1940–41 was the worst period for British food during the entire war. At the end of January 1941 Maggie Joy Blunt, a freelance journalist keeping a diary for Mass Observation, summed up the atmosphere of foreboding in Britain. ‘It is as though we are beginning to see at last the slow subsidence of our river of wealth. We are not starving, we are not even underfed but our usually well-stocked food shops have an empty and anxious air. Cheese, eggs, onions, oranges, luxury fruits and vegetables are practically unobtainable … Housewives are having to queue for essential foods. We live on potatoes, carrots, sprouts, swedes, turnips, artichokes and watercress … the meat ration … was cut at the beginning of the month and now includes all the offal we could once buy without coupons … Prices are rising. We are warned by statesmen repeatedly that Hitler intends to invade us … The outlook really seems very grim indeed.’
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The low point in the food supply was exacerbated by initial problems in the newly created wartime administration. The Ministry of Food had not yet developed a clear strategy of how to feed the British population and in the first year and a half of the war tended to concentrate on one shortage at a time, rather than developing an all-encompassing policy. They responded to the meat shortage by encouraging consumers to stretch out the meat ration with oats. The price of oats was subsidized and an advertising campaign started. However, the Ministry failed to take into account the limited facilities for milling oatmeal and the result was a shortage of oats in the shops.
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People were unable to eke out their protein allowance by turning to fish, as the closure of fishing grounds and military requisitions from the fleet had reduced the catch and made fish very expensive, much to everyone’s dissatisfaction.
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The public also complained vociferously about the disappearance of onions, the supply of which from continental Europe and the Channel Islands had been cut. The Ministry responded by controlling their price but this drove the few onions that were available under shop counters.
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However, even in this difficult period it was only the meat ration which came under real threat and a solution was found. The fast refrigerated ships took the troops as far as South Africa where they transferred to slower vessels to complete their voyage to Egypt. The reefers (as refrigerated vessels were known) then sailed on to Argentina to pick up frozen meat supplies.
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The U-boat threat was to get much worse, but the cut in the meat ration in early 1941 was the only time during the entire war that the Ministry was unable to provide the amount of food which it guaranteed the population through the ration. It was the government’s failure to plan for a sudden and acute shortage of shipping, combined with the problems that surrounded the organization of the ports and transport, and, finally, the demands of the military campaign, which posed the greatest threat to civilian food supplies in the second winter of the war.

THE AMERICAN LIFELINE

In March 1941 Churchill took action. He set up the Battle of the Atlantic Committee, which concentrated its efforts on getting the docks
running as efficiently as possible and released 40,000 men from the armed forces to work in the shipyards repairing the backlog of 800,000 tons of damaged ships.
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At the same time the Americans introduced the lend-lease programme, which enabled Roosevelt to support the Allied war effort without actually taking the unpopular step of declaring war. One of the positive side-effects of this was that the British no longer needed to pay for their imports with exports and this allowed dock workers to concentrate on channelling imports into the country as quickly as possible before sending the ships on their way to pick up another cargo. Lend-lease also provided for the repair of British ships in American ports, alleviating the pressure on British shipyards.
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Moreover, lend-lease made plentiful supplies of American food available to the British. It enabled the Ministry to provide British civilians with sufficient quantities of meat to make the ration bearable, it provided tinned and dried foods and it supplied Britain with the cod liver oil and orange juice which allowed the government to transform the ration into an instrument of welfare provision for the needier sections of society.
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In fact, Britain’s reliance on imported foods was to turn out to be one of the strengths of the food-rationing system. Imports could generally be relied upon to arrive in the quantities that the Ministry had requested (the requests made allowance for the fact that a proportion of the imports would be sunk on their way to Britain). In contrast, the domestic food supply was often harder to manage as the yields of various crops, especially potatoes, were far harder to predict.
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However, the reliance on American food was not without its problems. From March 1941 British food officials were caught up in endless wrangling with American officials over the quantities of food which Britain requested.

Immediately after the introduction of lend-lease the British made a mistake which would sour Anglo-American negotiations over food throughout the rest of the war. After the miserable food situation of the winter of 1940–41 Churchill decided to prioritize the import of foodstuffs over raw materials and acceded to Minister of Food Lord Woolton’s request for a target of 15 million tons of food imports for 1941. This decision was definitely unwise. Churchill was often to prove a liability when he intervened in shipping allocation, and Woolton had failed to pay sufficient attention to actual food availability in America.
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The United States had not yet joined the war and rationing had not been imposed on the American consumer. In fact the Americans were enjoying a meat-eating bonanza. A juicy steak was the American meal of choice, regarded as perfect sustenance for a hard-working man. But rationing during the First World War, recession and inflation in the 1920s, followed by the Depression of the 1930s, meant that for several decades Americans had been denied the chance to indulge in red meat. Rising employment and wages in the war industries had given Americans the opportunity to satisfy their love of beef. The farmers responded by implementing the largest ever increase in livestock production. There was plenty of meat in the United States but American per capita consumption had risen from 126 pounds to 141 pounds a year and there were no extra supplies available to meet the increased British demands.
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The only foodstuff available in the United States in sufficient bulk to fill the cabinet orders to import 15 million tons of food was grain for animal feed: 276,000 tons of feed grains were duly shipped to Britain. Cabinet Office economists indignantly pointed out that beef cattle were eating shipping space while the blast furnaces of Britain were idle for lack of raw materials.
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Feed imports were stopped but the food quota was not revised to allow for food to be replaced by raw materials. British officials feared that if they admitted that meat stock requirements had been set too high then American food officials would be discouraged from doing their utmost to find meat supplies to fill the cargo quotas. Meanwhile, those in charge of finding a cargo for the ships ended up loading the only foodstuffs that were available – wheat and sugar, neither of which the British needed in such large quantities. When the imports arrived in Britain the Ministry of Food stockpiled them. Illogically, this did not create a sense of abundance. The Ministry was always fearful that food imports might fall further and they sat on the stocks rather than distributing them, and in the end much of the food went to waste.
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The most damaging consequence of the entire incident was that American food officials now regarded British estimates of their needs, especially their figures for necessary reserve stocks, with immense scepticism. Woolton’s inflated food import quota had done nothing to improve the protein content in the British diet. This was achieved by increasing meat imports from Argentina. Instead
it had created an atmosphere of mutual distrust between food officials which flourished once the Americans entered the war on 7 December 1941.
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