Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food (81 page)

The food misery was compounded by homelessness. Many of the world’s cities had been reduced to rubble. Half of Germany’s housing stock had been lost to bomb damage and in Japan 40 per cent of the urban areas had been destroyed. In Germany 13 million were homeless, in Japan 15 million.
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Willy Brandt, later to become German chancellor, described the state of German cities: ‘Craters, caves, mountains of rubble, debris-covered fields, ruins that hardly allowed one to imagine that they had once been houses, cables and water pipes projecting from the ground like the mangled bowels of antediluvian monsters, no fuel, no light, every little garden a graveyard and, above all this, like an immovable cloud, the stink of putrefaction. In this no-man’s land lived human beings.’
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Even in Hiroshima survivors continued to live among the ruins. About two weeks after the atomic bomb was dropped Teruko Blair and her family returned to the remains of their home in the city.
‘The bathtub was still there, surrounded by an iron wall. The rice cooker and a battered saucepan which father had thrown in the bath had also survived. The toilet was there and the tiles around it. There was no roof.’ Despite suppurating radiation burns on his hands and face, Teruko’s father cleared away the rubble from the space where the house had been and her sisters and mother (who was suffering from radiation sickness) went in search of a roof. When they returned with a piece of sheet metal balanced on their heads, ‘you could see them coming for miles as the whole place was flattened’. They secured the sheet of metal to the gate posts, which were still standing, and slept under this makeshift shelter ‘like sardines in a tin’. Their life, she recalled, was ‘worse than animals’. Despite the fact that they had been told that nothing would grow in the city for seventy-five years, her mother discovered new buds unfurling and so they cleared the spaces where their neighbours’ houses had stood and ‘grew wheat in the middle of the city – well there was lots of space, lots of people never came back’.
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If defeated Germany and Japan were now hungry, their erstwhile empires were in a dire state of deprivation. In Europe, where food production had fallen to 36 per cent of the pre-war level, the fortunate were able to secure 1,900 calories a day. But millions were living on the edge, able to obtain only 1,000 calories or less per day. Malnutrition and tuberculosis had reached epidemic proportions among children in Czechoslovakia, Greece and Italy.
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In south-east Asia, which had once produced almost 70 per cent of the rice traded on the world market, the population were barely surviving on as little as 250 grams of food daily. The death-rate had almost doubled.
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Korea was slipping into starvation and millions were dying on Java.
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In the British empire, India was slowly recovering from the chaos of the mismanagement of the food supply system but only 9.5 ounces (269 grams) of grain were available per person each day.
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Even in Latin America, which had remained comparatively remote from the conflict, inflation meant that poorer Mexicans were spending almost their entire income to buy less food than they had consumed in 1939.
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But the situation was worst in China, which was devastated by the war. Farmers in the province of Hunan, who had fled from the invading Japanese in 1944, returned to their villages to find their seed grain had been eaten, their draught
animals and livestock slaughtered, their tools stripped for metal and their homes burned to the ground. Many Chinese in the central and southern provinces were surviving on ‘grass, roots, tree bark, and even clay’.
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At least 30 million were suffering from the effects of undernourishment, and in 1946 the United Nations estimated that 7 million Chinese faced starvation within a couple of months.
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The situation was little better in the victorious Soviet Union. The peasants in the liberated western areas were still barely surviving on a famine diet of wild grasses and frozen potatoes, foraged from the fields. The dishes were execrable as was indicated by their names, such as
toshnota
from the Russian word for nausea, an ironic word play on
toshnoiki
, meaning food.
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On a visit to the Soviet Union in December 1945, Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin was not allowed to see the full extent of the wartime destruction. But he ‘understood’ that 1,700 towns and 60,000 villages had been ‘completely knocked down’. He concluded, ‘we have no measure at all [of the terrible conditions] under which her people are living’.
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In the liberated areas of the Soviet Union, at least half of the peasantry and many of the townspeople were dwelling, like the soldiers had done at the front, in miserable damp holes in the ground, roofed over with whatever materials they could find.
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A respondent to the Harvard Project explained that although they were the victors ‘the Russian people looked and acted like defeated people … They looked as if a stone were in their heart. (Respondent touches the left side of his chest, with his right hand.)’ When he returned to Rostov for a visit in 1948 he saw ‘several people still living in the ground’, and found his aunt surviving on maize bread and soya bean soup, a little cabbage, potatoes, tea and sugar. Four years after the Germans had departed, she was still wearing the clothes the soldiers had sold to her before they retreated. There were beggars everywhere. Many were disabled veterans missing an arm or a leg. The railway stations were infested with orphaned children, singing for a rouble.
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In northern Russia there were many villages to which no men ever returned.
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Without machines or fuel, women continued to yoke themselves to the ploughs.
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Repatriated Soviets who had been prisoners of war and forced labourers in the Reich were diverted from the gulags and work battalions to which they were normally sent and used to
alleviate the labour problem on the collective farms, which became miserable places of forced exile.
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All hopes that the war would soften the Stalinist regime and that life would improve were cruelly dashed. In September 1946 Stalin reinstated central planning and the state distribution of food. The peasants’ private plots, the kitchen gardens and allotments set up by factories and city dwellers were all outlawed. It was announced that an earlier decree of May 1939, which prevented collective land from being put to such uses, had been ‘forgotten’. The fact that the government itself had actively encouraged people to ignore this decree was also conveniently forgotten.
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In the summer of 1946 a drought in the steppe regions of southern Russia and the Ukraine caused the harvest to fail. But Stalin needed more, not less, grain. Food exports to the new satellite states in eastern Europe were designed to cement Soviet control in these countries. Stalin ruthlessly implemented his usual policy of sacrificing the countryside to hunger. The state requisitioned almost the entire harvest, leaving the peasants with a few potatoes.
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Party provincial committees warned the Central Committee in Moscow that the collective farmers were starving. The city of Kalach in Voronezh district reported that they were living in ‘frightful conditions. We have absolutely nothing, we eat only acorns, and we can scarcely drag our feet. We will die from hunger this year.’
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‘A human head and the soles of feet’ were found under a bridge near the town of Vasilkovov, outside Kiev. ‘Apparently a corpse had been eaten.’
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Groups of bandits, many veterans without education or employment, began to wander the countryside stealing food. Units from the Ministry of State Security were sent to wipe them out.
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Food was so short that Stalin was unable to cushion the urban areas, and a campaign to ‘economize on bread’ was announced in September just as private allotments were banned. The number of people entitled to ration cards was cut. Those who were still entitled to bread received an inferior product with oats, barley and corn mixed in with the wheat. V. F. Zima, a Soviet historian who calculated the impact of the drought and famine of 1946–47, estimated that in the entire Soviet Union about 100 million people were already suffering from malnutrition as a result of the war, and through the famine years of 1946–47 at least 2 million died of starvation and associated diseases.
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In Britain the joy of victory was followed by a disappointing period
of increasing austerity. In 1945 the electorate voted in a Labour government in the hope that they would begin constructing the more equitable society for which a great majority of the British people felt they had been fighting. The National Health Service was established in 1948, a concrete expression of government’s new willingness to take responsibility for the nation’s health. However, the Labour government was faced with economic bankruptcy, and rather than ushering in a new age of prosperity it presided over a period of increasing food regulation and worsening shortages.

Rationing had to be kept in place, as with the abrupt and unexpected end to American lend-lease aid in September 1945 Britain was now in a position similar to that of Germany in the 1930s. The government lacked the foreign exchange to be able to allow an unlimited flow of food imports into the country. It even found itself using up precious gold and dollar reserves to buy food for its erstwhile enemies in Germany.
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The British people were forced to adopt a National Socialist-style diet of autarky. In July 1946 bread was rationed for the first time and a special system was introduced to control the sale of potatoes.
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The two staple foods that the Ministry of Food had made a principle of allowing in unlimited quantities were now restricted. The actual consumption of these two items did not fall substantially, but it was a blow to morale. The Labour government planned to produce its way out of its economic difficulties. It was essential that British workers laboured hard to produce goods for export which would finance food imports. This required yet more hard work amid a continued atmosphere of frugality and self-sacrifice.
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The war-weary British people were, however, sick of self-sacrifice and bread and potatoes. After the war the amount of fat and meat in the British diet fell and average calorie consumption dropped to 2,300, which was about two-thirds of American post-war consumption. Jack Drummond, the government’s nutritional adviser, who resigned when bread rationing was introduced, warned that ‘meals have become so much more unattractive that people will not eat sufficient’, and he was anxious that they would begin to lose weight.
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It was in this post-war period that the government began to import what to the public were bizarre and revolting substitute foods. Lack of foreign exchange, problems with securing Argentinian beef, and the drain on canned meat
stocks by liberated Europe led the Ministry of Food to look for meat alternatives: whale meat and snoek. Lyons Corner Houses marinated the whale meat in vinegar and water for twenty-four hours and managed to sell quite a few whale steaks, but British housewives were reluctant to buy them. Although they could be cooked with fried onions to look like steak, they had a nasty fishy aftertaste.
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In 1950, 4,000 tons of whale meat languished at Tyne docks.
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In 1948 10 million tins of snoek were imported from South Africa where the fish was prized by the Asian community, who cooked it with onions and potatoes or smeared it with apricot jam and grilled it.
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Unfortunately, the oily and bony fish, which tastes a little like mackerel, was not very well canned, and despite the best efforts of the Ministry of Food to promote it with recipes such as ‘snoek
piquante
’, the British refused to eat it. Probably, very few people even tried it. The unwanted tins of snoek were soon joined by a pile of 9 million tins of Australian barracuda, and sold off as cat food.
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Subsidies, welfare benefits and employment meant that the wartime improvements in the working-class diet were sustained. For the working classes it did seem as though Labour would eventually deliver on its promise of a better life. But the middle classes, whose lifestyle had been levelled down by the war, felt as though they had been defeated. They found themselves spending a far higher proportion of their food budget on necessities as opposed to luxuries, and their calorie and protein intake had fallen to a boringly healthy level of moderation.
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The perception that their lifestyle was quietly being eroded is exquisitely described by Molly Panter-Downes in her novel
One Fine Day
(1947). Stephen Marshall and his wife Laura find themselves ‘saddled with a house which, all those pleasant years, had really been supported and nourished’ by its staff of servants. Now the gardener, the cook, the maids and the nanny have left, the house is subsiding into a state of ‘shabbiness and defeat’.
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Laura struggles ineptly with the domestic chores, spending her mornings queuing for food outside near-empty shops, failing to make palatable meals in a kitchen she barely knows how to use. Stephen can hardly believe that he now spends his evenings doing the washing up.