HISTORY: ROBERT GERWARTHreviews The Taste of War: World War Two and the Battle for FoodBy Lizzie Collingham Allen Lane, 656pps. £30
ON MAY 2nd, 1941, several senior Nazi officials gathered in Berlin to discuss the economic requirements for the imminent German crusade against the Soviet Union. They agreed that the invading army would have to be supplied with food from within Russia if Germany was to stand a chance of winning the war against a numerically far superior enemy. In other words, agricultural produce and livestock essential for the survival of the Soviet population would have to be requisitioned for the provision of the Wehrmacht and the German home front. By implementing this policy, the meeting’s protocol laconically stated, “many tens of millions” of civilians in the conquered Soviet Union “will doubtless starve to death”.
This deliberate policy of extermination by starvation, generally known as the Hunger Plan, became a defining feature of the Nazi war of conquest in eastern Europe. The siege of Leningrad, during which a million people died of starvation, the blockades of the Ukrainian cities of Kiev and Kharkov, which accounted for at least another 200,000 deaths from famine, and the conscious neglect of Soviet POWs, which led to a further 2.35 million deaths, were all part of the implementation of this murderous scheme.
The Nazis' Hunger Plan, its origins and consequences form an important part of Lizzie Collingham's stimulating new book, The Taste of War, an ambitious global history of the centrality of food (and the lack thereof) to the experience of the second World War. Collingham quotes impressive statistics to illustrate the importance of her subject: between 1939 and 1945 at least 20 million people died of starvation, malnutrition and hunger-related diseases, a figure that is at least equal to the 19.5 million military casualties suffered during the second World War.
The book opens with an insightful discussion of the important role of food in driving Germany and Japan to war. Both countries sought to resolve the problem of food autarky through violent expansion. Hitler aimed to realise this goal by building an eastern European empire in which the fertile fields of Ukraine would make Germany independent of world trade. The experience of the first World War, during which the Allied naval blockade had successfully cut off vital German imports, taught the Nazis that adequate food supply was crucial to the maintenance of civilian morale. The Japanese army simultaneously sought to reduce its country’s economic dependence on the United States by expanding its colonial possessions in mainland Asia.
IF THE AXIS POWERS’ drive for expansion and economic self-sufficiency was undoubtedly one of the causes of the second World War, its outcome was also affected by the failure to achieve these objectives. Throughout the war, the Allies were more successful in feeding their troops and home fronts. American dominance in particular, Collingham argues, was a result not only of the United States’ immense industrial capacity but also of its abundance of food. Although American GIs never experienced shortages of food (unless they found themselves in a Japanese POW camp), a staggering 60 per cent of the 1.7 million Japanese military dead can be attributed to starvation, not combat. That said, war-related hunger and famine were not only caused by Nazi Germany and imperial Japan but were also the result of Allied mismanagement and neglect, particularly in India, where up to three million Bengalese civilians died during the 1944 famine.
The global scope of this investigation – its focus on the various fronts of the war – is a major achievement and the book’s greatest strength. The author demonstrates that securing food supplies became a central preoccupation for the governments of all the countries drawn into the conflict. Where food supplies failed, the impact was felt immediately.
The book ends with a brief epilogue considering the aftermath of the second World War, from the Marshall Plan to the full economic recovery of Europe and Japan. Collingham convincingly demonstrates how a new consumer culture, infused with American food habits and tastes, rapidly emerged in post-war Europe, a process whose ramifications, from the rise of processed food to obesity, are keenly felt in the western world in the present day.
Although most of Collingham’s arguments are illuminating and convincing, her insistence on food shortages as a motivational factor for the escalation of German anti-Jewish policies seems exaggerated. Ever since Christian Gerlach’s ground-breaking study on the Nazis’ Hunger Plan we know that death through starvation was a quintessential part of German population policy towards the Slavic inhabitants of eastern Europe during the second World War. The Jews by contrast – a small minority of the population even in Poland – were killed not because they were “useless mouths” but because they were Jews. A number of Nazi officials even argued that the murder of the Jews should be delayed as they played an important role as slave labourers in the German war industry, where they were anything but “useless”.
In the end, however, ideology triumphed over economic pragmatism. The decision to move from mass shootings to stationary gassing facilities in late 1941 and early 1942 was primarily driven by the desire to ease the unpleasant task of the perpetrators. Himmler and Heydrich feared that the mass shootings of Jews of all ages would have psychologically negative effects on the shooters and generate a group of brutalised men unable to reintegrate into post-war society.
Despite these reservations, Collingham is to be congratulated on writing a gripping and original book that highlights the important role of food in the most murderous conflict in human history. She adds an important and often overlooked dimension to our understanding of the second World War.
Robert Gerwarth is director of the Centre for War Studies at University College Dublin (ucd.ie/warstudies)
