Agricultural History Review, Volume 59 Part 2 (2011), p. 339

Britain’s wartime food supply problems, and its response to them, changed the pattern of international trade in agricultural products, and the effects remained after the war. Germany should have found its problems easier to solve. Admittedly it was the second-largest global food importer in 1939, after the UK, despite a long-standing policy of national self-sufficiency, but many of its imports came from continental Europe where they were safe from blockade. And after the spring of 1940 it also acquired supplies from Denmark and the Netherlands, which would previously have gone to Britain. But it had the deserved reputation of being reluctant to pay for its imports, so its suppliers in south-eastern Europe were increasingly unwilling to provide the bread- and feed-grains that it required. Dutch dairy products historically depended on feedstuffs imported from overseas, which were no longer available. German farmers were short of labour and fertilizers, and so unable to expand production to match demand. German consumers did not actually go short of food until the last year of the war, but those in the occupied territories did because much of the food they would have eaten was being forcibly exported to Germany.

Similar stories of changed priorities can be told about most countries in the Second World War. Japan was also a major food importer before the war, and its consumers suffered accordingly when the ships carrying rice from Korea, Burma, Thailand, and what is now Vietnam, were sunk by American submarines from 1943 onwards. At the beginning of the war Australian producers found that their wheat and apples were no longer required as only higher-value products such as meat and cheese were worth shipping to the UK, and farm workers joined the army and left the land for better-paid industrial jobs. But by the end of the war Australian and New Zealand farmers were working flat out to provide the million or so US service personnel in the Pacific theatre with 95 per cent of their food. It was not only the belligerent countries that were affected. Spain had difficulty both in obtaining imports of wheat and in selling its fruit and vegetables. Argentina maintained its wheat and beef exports, but the demand for its feed grains fell dramatically, to the point where maize and linseed were being burnt for fuel to replace scarce oil imports. War, as the journalist George Steer remarked, was ‘the highest form of inefficiency known to man’.

The results could go far beyond the inconveniences experienced in the UK. As Lizzie Collingham reminds us, the nineteen million deaths in battle during the war were at least matched, if not exceeded, by the number of civilian deaths from starvation or malnutrition and its associated diseases. Indeed, 60 per cent of Japanese military deaths were starvation-related rather than the result of direct enemy action. They joined the two or three million Soviet citizens (nobody knows the exact figure) who died of hunger and related diseases, one million of them in Leningrad alone. There were two or three million Chinese deaths in Henan province, three million in the Bengal famine of 1943–44, thousands of prisoners of war in Japanese, German and Soviet camps, and numerous others in the Philippines, Malaya, Greece, the Netherlands, and even, at the end of the war and shortly afterwards, in Germany.

Sobering as these figures are, this book is much more than a simple catalogue of wartime disasters, difficulties, and improvised solutions. The war affected the demand for and supply of food, and brought nutritional scientists and government planners into food debates in unprecedented ways. Equally importantly, in Collingham’s view, food issues were central to the outbreak of war, its conduct, and its eventual outcome. Concerns over future food supplies, she suggests, lay behind both the German decision to invade the USSR and the Japanese invasion of China. Once war began, food became a strategic material, as the various submarine campaigns demonstrate, and food shortages contributed to Japanese military failures towards the end of the war, whereas the USSR’s food problems did not prevent its victories. She is not alone in making these suggestions, but she pursues them in more detail, on a wider geographical scale, and in my opinion more convincingly than previous writers. In this densely referenced, clearly argued, and wonderfully readable book she takes the familiar wartime food stories of rationing and digging for victory to a completely new level, and reveals the value of examining the various national histories in a global context.