Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food (20 page)

FROZEN MEAT VERSUS MEN AND ARMS

As the war progressed the Ministry of Food found itself caught in a double bind. While insisting that it was doing a good job and that the people of Britain were being well fed, it needed to convince its allies that every effort must be made to supply Britain with food and that a drop in imports would be disastrous.
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Towards the end of 1942 British food officials once again came into conflict with their counterparts in the United States over meat supplies. The dispute coincided with the worst period for Britain’s shipping in the autumn and winter of 1942–43.

That summer Hitler finally prioritized the U-boat blockade of Britain, and increased submarine production meant that Admiral Dönitz took command of thirty new U-boats a month. His force was at last approaching the 300-strong mark that he had always argued was essential to success.
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U-boat sinkings of merchant shipping began to bite deep. Meanwhile, Germany had attacked the Soviet Union and the United States had officially entered the war. Both Stalin and the American chiefs of staff were eager to open a second front against Germany on continental Europe. General George C. Marshall, the United States Army Chief of Staff, visited Britain in April 1942 to lobby for a cross-Channel offensive. This put enormous additional pressure on British shipping, as it required the build-up of American troops (and their supplies) in Britain in preparation for an assault. Each American infantry division needed a substantial 32,000 tons of scarce shipping to transport its men and all their equipment across the Atlantic.
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The Allies simply did not have enough ships to cope with the competing requirements to ship adequate civilian food supplies, raw materials to support the armaments industry, and enough military materiel and men to challenge German supremacy on the European continent.
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As the German Naval War Staff smugly pointed out in October 1942: ‘They
have
or
manufacture
enough, but they cannot transport enough
for waging war, the economy, and their food supply.’
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This was a limitation that American generals were unwilling to accept. Generals Marshall, B. B. Somervell, Commander of Army Service Forces, and Somervell’s Chief of Transportation, C. P. Gross, were extremely unwilling to prioritize British civilian food imports over military shipping requirements. Somervell was ruthless. He would requisition shipping without any regard for civilian allocations and tried to establish his authority over the loading of all ships so that he could de-prioritize food imports whenever military needs arose.
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In the end it was clear to both the British and the Americans that at this stage in the war an invasion of France would have little chance of success and a compromise was reached over the question of a second front.
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It was agreed to launch an invasion of North Africa from the west, codenamed Operation Torch. Even this smaller-scale military campaign exacted a high price in terms of civilian supplies. Cargo vessels had to be re-routed to provide military supplies, and naval escorts were diverted from merchant shipping to troop ships. It was decided that this could be compensated for by allowing the faster ships in the merchant fleet to sail fast and alone rather than in slow convoys. But this made them more vulnerable, and twenty-four ships sailing on their own were sunk that autumn. The preparations for Operation Torch cost Britain a 30 per cent reduction in imports in 1942.
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Between April and September 1942 Lord Woolton was forced to use stocks of canned corned beef to make up one-seventh of the meat ration. Butchers opened the large tins and then allocated portions of corned beef according to the shopper’s entitlement. Editha Blaikley, who lived in Sussex with her sister and brother-in-law, commented on her corned-beef supper: ‘It must go to the hearts of good butchers to weigh out tiny rations of corned beef instead of cutting up proper joints to their customers’ tastes.’
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In August the American War Shipping Administration suggested relieving some of the strain on British shipping by diverting Australian meat to feed the US troops who were building up in Australia and New Zealand ready for an attack on Japanese strongholds in the Pacific. America would compensate for Britain’s loss of most of its frozen meat imports by filling the quota from American meat production. By switching meat imports on to the North Atlantic short haul, two and a half times more cargo could be
carried in the same time that it took to transport one load from the southern Dominions.
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The Americans pledged to send an extra 263,000 tons of frozen meat and offal to Britain in 1942–43. This represented a mere 4 per cent of American frozen meat production and appeared to be a reasonable quota.
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Meat production in the United States was at a record high. But competition for American meat had become even more intense since the Soviet Union and the United States had entered the war. In September 1941 Roosevelt’s special envoy to Britain, Averell Harriman, had gone to Moscow to negotiate with Stalin over Allied assistance in the fight against Germany on the eastern front. Harriman enthusiastically supported the Soviets in their claim that they would be key in defeating the Wehrmacht and in November 1941 the United States began sending the Soviet Union 500,000 tons of lend-lease food per month. The Soviets, like the British, wanted concentrated high-calorie foods such as canned and frozen meat, cheese and eggs. Throughout 1942 the dangerous convoys through the Baltic to Murmansk and Archangel used up shipping space which would otherwise have brought imports into Britain, and was extremely costly in the long term as shipping losses on this route were almost 20 per cent.
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The United States army alone took 60 per cent of ‘US choice’ grade cuts of beef.
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American civilians were also clamouring for meat, and voiced their dissatisfaction at the lack of high-grade meat in the shops. Catherine Renee Young complained to her husband in a letter in February 1943: ‘Yesterday I didn’t take any meat not because we didn’t have any but because I’m sick of the same thing … we hardly ever see good steak anymore. 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.’
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In the autumn of 1942 the United States government launched a ‘Share the Meat’ campaign. But posters depicting how the American family of Mom, Dad, Johnny and Suzy had been joined at their loaded dining table by a GI, a US marine, a Russian, a Briton and a Mexican, did little to persuade Americans to cut their meat consumption even by the small target amount of 11 pounds a year.
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The United States failed to meet its targets for the meat exports it had promised. By January and February 1943 the Americans were delivering only half of the 40,000 tons of frozen meat a month which they had pledged.
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In November 1942 the British Ministry of Food began to panic. On 8 November the Allies launched Operation Torch and American and British troops landed on the shores of Morocco and Algeria. The troops needed resupplying continuously and the heavy and prolonged battle in Tunisia meant that supply requirements were unexpectedly high well into 1943.
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Sinkings of merchant ships reached their peak in November 1942 with the loss of 700,000 tons of shipping to submarine attacks and another 160,000 tons of shipping destroyed by aircraft and mines.
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About 9 per cent of all food shipments to Britain were sunk. Meanwhile, 155,738 cubic metres of frozen food, earmarked for export to Britain, rotted on the docks of the American east coast ports while waiting for shipping. The military cold storage warehouses were empty but Somervell would not allow them to be used for civilian export cargoes.
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The Ministry of Food reminded both the British cabinet and United States food officials that without imports of flour, meat, fats and sugar Britain could only hold out for four to six months.
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Lord Cherwell, Churchill’s scientific adviser, warned ‘we are trying with the equivalent of about one-third of normal fleet to feed this country and maintain it in full war production … With all the extra military demands which have emerged … it is not surprising that our imports, which have always been regarded as some sort of inverted residuary legatee, have suffered severely. But this cannot go on.’
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In March 1943 the Ministry warned the War Cabinet that Britain was consuming three-quarters of a million tons more goods than it was importing and within two months reserves would have run dry.
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Lord Cherwell sent a veiled threat to the United States military, who were busy planning to launch an invasion of continental Europe: ‘we could hardly undertake new [military] operations, however favourable the opportunity, with stocks so near exhaustion’.
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Robert Brand of the British Food Mission in Washington was willing to concede to his American counterparts that Britain could manage short-term gaps in the supply. But, he argued, living under the threat of the German blockade, the British could not cope with a lack of guarantees or even the abandonment of a programme which ensured frozen and canned meat and cheese to Britain’s workers. One of the strengths of relying on food imports was that in theory they were more predictable than agricultural harvests and therefore guaranteed the
safety of Britain’s food supply. The United States Minister of Agriculture, Claude Wickard, showed no signs of distress over the American failure to meet its meat export quotas and gave the impression, by referring to the British as ‘companions in misfortune’, that it was beyond his control to remedy the situation.
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The American food administration was hampered by the fact that it did not fully control the meat trade and it had failed to build up sufficient stores of food stocks. This created repeated localized meat shortages in United States cities and meant that there were insufficient stores to draw upon to fill quotas for exports to Britain.
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Officials were particularly worried that meat rationing might be introduced before they had managed to solve the problem of distribution and stocks in order to guarantee that they could honour the ration in the cities. But the real nub of the problem was the fact that American War Shipping Administration officials were suspicious of British claims, certain that the British were not being candid about their figures. They were firmly convinced that British meat stocks were, in fact, more than adequate. Jealous of British stocks, and distrustful of British protestations, American food officials had decided to implement a forced reduction in British reserves by refusing a certain quantity of the promised exports.
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There was some justification for the Americans’ mistrust of British claims. A tendency to overestimate stock requirements and to err on the side of safety was built into the British food system.
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But Wickard was cavalier when, in the face of British protests, he suggested that the meat diversion scheme with Australia should be abandoned. The British were not in a position to revert to their old sources of frozen meat. The Australians had already refocused their meat industry on canning, and a drought in South America meant that there were shortages in Argentina. Robert Brand eventually appealed directly to the White House through Harry Hopkins, Roosevelt’s closest adviser and the chief administrator of lend-lease. Brand pointed out that while the amount of meat the United States had pledged to export represented just 2 per cent of what the Americans ate themselves, it represented 10 per cent of the British meat ration.
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Hopkins agreed to divert frozen meat destined for the Soviet Union to Britain and pledged 250,000 tons in the future. The United States finally introduced meat rationing in March 1943 and this helped to
ensure that this pledge was honoured and Britain was able to rebuild its stocks.
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Nevertheless, throughout the worst months of the Battle of the Atlantic British civilians were never confronted with the problem of hunger, let alone the spectre of starvation. In his memoirs Lord Woolton asserted that ‘the country never realized how nearly we were brought to disaster by the submarine peril’. He then went on to tell the story of how five ships, all of them carrying bacon, were sunk on the same day. The Ministry of Food had to go to great lengths to make up for the losses. It diverted stock from Liverpool and sent special lorries to distribute around the country the load of the one ship which did arrive. Woolton ended the anecdote dramatically, ‘We honoured the ration but it was a near thing.’
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This is a tale of temporary shortage overcome, not catastrophe averted. In fact, the British, having become accustomed to rationing, were managing well. Laboratory technician Edward Stebbing was of the realistic opinion that although ‘the first nine months of 1942 were perhaps the most depressing of the war … [and] some restrictions have proved irksome … I think we are better off than most other countries at war and that we could put up with much more inconvenience before we could be said to know what real hardship is’.
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In January 1942, a year after concluding that the food outlook was grim, the journalist Maggie Joy Blunt reflected in her Mass Observation diary, ‘we have been and are promised to be the best fed nation in Europe … A regular supply of butter, marg, cooking fat, cheese, bacon, sugar and tea arrives each week. As much bread and flour as I need. Custard powder and starchy things like rice, tapioca and so on can be had at intervals liberally without “points”. The milk ration is helped out by tinned and powdered varieties. There are still plenty of tinned beans, carrots and soups. Potatoes, carrots and some greens at nearly normal prices. Eggs are very scarce. Meat is more difficult than it was, but there is often sausage meat and corned beef as substitutes and makeweights. Fruit is very scarce but I have had several lots of good apples from the greengrocer recently and occasionally dried fruit.’
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In contrast to the devastating impact which the United States blockade had upon Japan, ‘there was never any real likelihood that Britain would starve or even that the Allied land campaigns would be seriously handicapped, let alone halted, through losses at sea’.
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