An Edible History of Humanity (18 page)

Having arrived in the vicinity of Atlanta, Sherman concentrated his efforts on seizing control of the converging railway tracks
that connected the city to the rest of the Confederacy. He was prepared to mount a long siege, since he was confident of being
able to supply his troops by rail from the north. But as things turned out, he captured the railway lines within a few weeks
and the Confederate army abandoned Atlanta. Sherman occupied the city and planned the next stage in his campaign, known as
the “March to the Sea.” By contrast with the modernity of his advance on Atlanta, this was to be a rather more old-fashioned
stratagem. The plan was to cut loose from the formal supply system and march three hundred miles through Georgia to Savannah,
on the Atlantic coast, destroying as much agricultural and economic infrastructure as possible along the way. The army would
then head north through the Carolinas to prevent reinforcements reaching Lee’s army, which was besieged at Petersburg, Virginia.
Sherman’s troops would carry some rations with them, but they would live off the land as much as possible, destroying what
they could not eat. This, one of the last and most effective campaigns of the Civil War, is a striking (some would say infamous)
example of the use of food as a weapon. Sherman issued a special field order:

The army will forage liberally on the country during the march. To this end, each brigade commander will organize a good and
sufficient foraging party, under the command of one or more discreet officers, who will gather, near the route traveled, corn
or forage of any kind, meat of any kind, vegetables, corn-meal, or what ever is needed by the command, aiming at all times
to keep in the wagons at least ten days’ provisions for the command and three days’ forage. Soldiers must not enter the dwellings
of the inhabitants, or commit any trespass, but during a halt or a camp they may be permitted to gather turnips, potatoes,
and other vegetables, and to drive in stock of their camp. To regular foraging parties must be instructed the gathering of
provisions and forage at any distance from the road traveled.

The march began in November, just after the harvest, so the barns were full of grain, fodder, and cotton. Each brigade sent
out a foraging party of “bummers” who would set out on foot and return with wagons of food, driving cattle in front of them.
Sherman’s troops fanned out and devastated the country, helping themselves to fresh mutton, bacon, turkeys, chickens, cornmeal,
and sweet potatoes, among other things. As well as taking the supplies they needed to subsist, the Union soldiers killed pigs,
sheep, and poultry and burned and looted many houses, despite their orders to the contrary. They were instructed to destroy
mills, barns, and cotton gins only if they encountered any resistance. Sherman recalled in his memoirs that the foraging became
general plunder, and was not limited to formal foraging parties as he had ordered: “A soldier passed me with a ham on his
musket, a jug of sorghum—molasses—under his arm and a big piece of honey in his hand, from which he was eating and, catching
my eye he remarked in a low voice to a comrade, ‘Forage liberally on the country.’ ” Sherman claimed to disapprove of such
lawlessness, but it was entirely in keeping with his boast to Grant that he would “make Georgia howl.”

As well as plundering and destroying farms and mills, the Union solders tore up railway tracks whenever they encountered them
and devised elaborate tricks to ensure that they could not be repaired, such as heating and warping the rails and wrapping
them around the trunks of trees. This inflicted hardship not just on the people of Georgia, but also on the Confederate armies
who relied on their produce, since supplies could no longer be delivered by rail. Sherman’s army also damaged the southern
economy by liberating black slaves, thousands of whom followed the army as it marched.

Sherman’s march spread fear and confusion, not least because his destination was unclear. By the time it became clear that
he was heading for Savannah, the Confederate armies were unable to concentrate their forces to stop him. The Union soldiers
met little resistance, and attempts by the authorities to organize a scorched-earth defense (“Remove your negroes, horses,
cattle, and provisions from Sherman’s army and burn what you cannot carry away”) failed; morale had collapsed, and with it
confidence in the government. On his arrival in Savannah, Sherman reported that “we have consumed the corn and fodder in the
region of country thirty miles on either side of a line from Atlanta to Savannah as also the sweet potatoes, cattle, hogs,
sheep and poultry, and have carried away more than 10,000 horses and mules as well as a countless number of their slaves.
I estimate the damage done to the State of Georgia and its military resources at $100,000,000; at least $20,000,000 of which
has inured to our advantage and the remainder is simple waste and destruction.”

More was to come. Sherman then continued his destructive march northward through the Carolinas in the spring of 1865, leaving
a trail of destruction forty miles wide. “Sherman’s campaign has produced bad effect on our people,” conceded Jefferson Davis,
the president of the Confederacy. Lee reported an “alarming frequency of desertions” from his Confederate army, chiefly due
to the “insufficiency of food and non-payment of the troops.” Lee realized his position was untenable and surrendered, and
the rest of the Confederate forces soon followed, ending the war.

The American Civil War encapsulated the shift from the Napoleonic era of warfare to the industrialized warfare of the twentieth
century. As Sherman’s men advanced through Georgia, living off the land as armies had done for thousands of years, the opposing
armies of Grant and Lee were engaged in trench warfare around Petersburg, their zigzag fortifications prefiguring the elaborate
ditches and tunnels that would scar the fields of France during the First World War. The emergence of trench warfare was a
consequence of improvements in the range, power, and accuracy of firearms and artillery that were not matched by corresponding
improvements in mobility. Armies had unprecedented firepower at their disposal—provided they did not move. For most of history,
an army that stayed still risked starvation, unless it could be supplied by sea. But the advent of canned food and railways
meant that soldiers could be fed all year round, and for as long as necessary, as they stayed put in their trenches.

Even so, for most of the First World War the new logistics coexisted with the old. Ammunition and food for the front were
delivered by rail; but the only way to carry supplies over the last few miles from the railhead to the front line was by using
horse-drawn wagons. Accordingly, enormous quantities of fodder also had to be sent by rail, and an ancient logistical constraint
survived into the twentieth century: Fodder was the largest category of cargo unloaded at French ports for the British army
during the war. The stalemate of trench warfare ended only with the development of the tank, which coupled greater firepower
with mobility and heralded a new era of motorized warfare in which fuel and ammunition, to feed vehicles and weapons, displaced
food for men and animals as the most important fuel of war.

This was vividly illustrated just a few years later during the Second World War, and on the North African front in particular,
where the German general Erwin Rommel found himself hemmed in by logistical constraints—primarily that of fuel. The German
and Italian troops in North Africa received supplies via the port of Tripoli. Rommel dreamed of defeating the British, based
to his east in Egypt, and then choking off the Allies’ supply of oil from the Middle East. But there was no suitable railway
line along which he could advance to the east, so his supplies had to be carried across the desert in trucks. As the German
troops advanced, convoys of trucks shuttled back and forth between Tripoli and the front, carrying fuel, ammunition, food,
and water. Seizing a deep-water port along the coast would reduce the distance that supplies needed to be carried overland,
so Rommel captured the Libyan port of Tobruk, near the border with Egypt. But the port’s capacity was limited and approaching
ships were sunk by the Allies in large numbers. Rommel’s supply lines were so overextended that 30 to 50 percent of his fuel
was being used to ferry fuel and other supplies to the front. The farther east he advanced, the more fuel was wasted in this
way. When he retreated or was pushed back westward, his supply problems eased.

Rommel’s attempt to defeat the Allies in North Africa failed. “The first essential condition for an army to be able to stand
the strain of battle is an adequate stock of weapons, petrol, and ammunition,” he eventually concluded. “In fact, the battle
is fought and decided by the quartermasters before the shooting begins.” In a previous era he would have mentioned food and
fodder. But they were no longer the critical elements of military supply. Food’s central role in military planning had come
to an end. But by the middle of the twentieth century food was already taking on a new role: as an ideological weapon.

The Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, an ideological struggle between capitalism and communism that
overshadowed the second half of the twentieth century, began in earnest with a food fight over the city of Berlin. Germany
had been divided at the end of the Second World War into four zones—those controlled by Britain, France, and the United States
in the west, and a fourth zone controlled by the Soviet Union in the east. Its capital, Berlin, situated in the heart of the
Soviet zone, had also been divided in four in this way. In early 1948, nearly three years after the end of the war, the British,
French, and Americans agreed to unite their respective zones of Germany, and of Berlin, under a single administration in order
to coordinate the reconstruction of the country. The Soviets were strongly opposed to the Western allies’ plan, because Germany
had emerged as a symbolic battleground on which, both sides agreed, the future political direction of Europe would be decided.
The Western nations wanted to establish a democratic government in a reunified Germany, whereas Russia hoped to orchestrate
the installation of a Communist regime. The disagreement between the two sides became focused on Berlin, an isolated Western
toehold in the Soviet zone of eastern Germany. As Vyacheslav Molotov, the Soviet foreign minister, put it: “What happens to
Berlin, happens to Germany; what happens to Germany, happens to Europe.”

Determined to force the Western allies to abandon West Berlin, the Soviets started interfering with the delivery of food and
other supplies to the city, interrupting road, rail, and barge traffic on various spurious pretexts. The Soviets calculated
that the Western allies would prefer to give up the city rather than go to war to defend it. In April 1948 Lucius D. Clay,
the highest ranking American military officer in Germany, told Omar Bradley, the U.S. Army chief of staff, that “if we mean
that we are to hold Europe against communism, we must not budge. We can take humiliation and pressure short of war in Berlin
without losing face. If we move, our position in Europe is threatened . . . and communism will run rampant. I believe the
future of democracy requires us to stay here until forced out.” In June, Clay underlined his position in a telegram sent to
his superiors in Washington, D.C.: “We are convinced that our remaining in Berlin is essential to our prestige in Germany
and in Europe,” he declared. “Whether for good or bad, it has become a symbol of the American intent.”

As Soviet interference with delivery of supplies to West Berlin continued, Clay proposed sending an infantry division to accompany
a convoy of trucks through Soviet-controlled East Germany to the city as a show of strength. But his plan was regarded as
too risky, since it might have sparked a firefight between American and Soviet troops that could have escalated into a broader
conflict. When the introduction of a new currency in West Germany was announced on June 18, in effect formalizing the economic
separation of East and West Germany, the Soviets expressed their displeasure by blocking freight access to West Berlin by
road, rail, and barge. By the evening of June 24 all land and water access to West Berlin had been completely sealed off.
Colonel Frank Howley, the U.S. commandant in Berlin, went on the radio to reassure the inhabitants of the city. “We are not
getting out of Berlin, we are going to stay,” he said. “I don’t know the answer to the present problem—not yet—but this much
I do know: The American people will not stand by and allow the German people to starve.”

He was speaking unofficially, because the allies had not yet decided how to respond. But they had to do something: The city
had only enough food for thirty-six days, and enough coal for forty-five days. Clay once again proposed his plan for an armed
road convoy, and was again overruled. General Brian Robertson, the British commander in Germany, said that his government
would not approve such a move either. But he suggested an alternative way to break the blockade: supplying West Berlin by
air.

On the face of it, this was a preposterous idea. Supplying the two million people in West Berlin, it was calculated, would
mean delivering some fifteen hundred tons of food and a further two thousand tons of coal and fuel every day, at a bare minimum.
(Ideally, some 13,500 tons a day would be needed, but this was a minimum figure for the summer months.) The only aircraft
available were Douglas C-47s, capable of carrying about three tons each. Even with the help of smaller British transports,
it was hard to see how it would be possible to deliver the necessary volume of supplies. The airlift idea was, however, the
only alternative to making a politically unacceptable climbdown and abandoning the city. It also had the advantage that, unlike
the land-based access routes through East Germany to West Berlin, the status of which was legally unclear, the right to use
air corridors to and from Berlin had been agreed in writing with the Soviet Union in November 1945. A small amount of supplies
had in fact already been delivered by aircraft in April 1948, after the Soviets had begun interfering with rail freight.

So Clay ordered the airlift to begin. He assumed that he would be able to get hold of more planes fairly quickly, and that
the airlift would only have to operate for a few weeks while a diplomatic solution to the crisis was agreed. The first aircraft,
carrying supplies from airfields in West Germany, arrived in West Berlin on June 26. With the backing of President Harry Truman,
who gave his formal support to the airlift despite objections from some of his advisers, the operation slowly scaled up, reaching
twenty-five hundred tons a day by mid-July.

But diplomacy with the Soviet Union was getting nowhere. Tensions rose when America stationed B-29 bombers—the type of aircraft
that had dropped atomic bombs on Japan in 1945—at airfields in Britain, within range of Moscow. The aircraft were not equipped
with nuclear weapons, but the Soviets did not know this. After the airlift had been running for a month, however, the immediate
threat of war seemed to have receded, and it had become clear that the airlift would have to operate for more than just a
few weeks. The C-47s were replaced with larger C-54s, capable of carrying ten tons of cargo, and flights were soon operating
every three minutes, twenty-four hours a day. General William H. Tunner, who was put in charge of the airlift in late July
1948, introduced new takeoff and landing rules to maximize capacity and minimize the risk of accidents. Teams of volunteers
unloaded the aircraft in Berlin and competed to do so in the shortest possible time. The Americans called the mission “Operation
Vittles”; to the British it was known as “Operation Plainfare.” By October deliveries had reached five thousand tons per day.

The Soviets made various attempts to disrupt the airlift, harrassing the freight planes by buzzing them with their own aircraft,
releasing barrage balloons that got in their way, causing radio interference, shining searchlights at incoming aircraft, and
sometimes even firing into the air in their vicinity. But they never went so far as to shoot any of the planes down. The soldiers
and airmen in Berlin, meanwhile, who had arrived in the city a few years earlier as an occupying enemy force, forged a close
bond with the city’s inhabitants, whose liberty they were now defending. Flying boats landing on a lake in central Berlin
to deliver salt, which was too corrosive to be carried in other aircraft, were met by Berliners who paddled out to present
their pi lots with bunches of flowers. And an American pi lot, Gail Halvorsen, became a hero to the children of Berlin after
he began dropping chocolate bars, sweets, and chewing gum, attached to parachutes made from handkerchiefs, out of the window
of his aircraft whenever he passed over the city. Soon other pi lots were following his example, and Halvorsen’s unofficial
venture won official approval. Over three tons of sweets, both supplied by American manufacturers and donated by American
children, were dropped on Berlin. Highlighting the link between American children and those in Berlin, as their respective
countries took a stand together against communism, gave the operation enormous propaganda value.

That the food being supplied to West Berlin was being used, in effect, as a weapon against the Communists was explicitly acknowledged
on a poster produced in 1949 by Douglas, the maker of the C-54 planes that were the mainstays of the airlift. It shows a girl
holding up a glass of milk, and hundreds more glasses floating down from passing aircraft in the sky. Under the headline MILK
. . . NEW WEAPON OF DEMOCRACY, the poster explains: “In today’s diplomatic Battle for Berlin, hope for democracy is being
kept alive for millions in Western Europe by the U.S. Air Force. Flying Douglas aircraft almost exclusively, Yankee crews
have poured over half a million tons of supplies into Berlin since last June.”

In the spring of 1949 General Tunner decided to stage a spectacular “Easter Parade” to demonstrate how committed the Allies
were to continuing the airlift for as long as necessary. Deliveries were exceeding six thousand tons a day by March 1949,
but Tunner set the ambitious target of delivering ten thousand tons on a single day: April 17, which was Easter Sunday. Maintenance
schedules were arranged so that the maximum number of aircraft would be available that day, and crews at different airfields
prepared to break their previous records. The ground crews and pi lots were determined to beat the ten-thousand-ton target,
and in the event a total of 12,940 tons were delivered. This vividly demonstrated the potential capacity of the airlift operation
and the commitment of the people operating it. The publicity surrounding the Easter Parade sent a clear signal to the Soviets
and helped to bring about a new round of negotiations, at which the Soviets finally agreed to lift the blockade of West Berlin
from May 12, 1949. Delivery flights did not end immediately, but they gradually wound down over several months, to ensure
that the operation could be stepped up again if necessary. The last flight took place on September 30. The airlift had operated
for fifteen months, during which some 2.3 million tons of supplies were delivered in more than 275,000 flights.

Subsequent negotiations failed to reach agreement on the future of Germany or Berlin. The crisis spurred the formation of
the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a military alliance of Western powers, on April 4, 1949, thus setting the stage
for the standoff between America and its allies on the one hand, and the Soviet Union and its allies on the other, in the
following decades. The first battle of this Cold War had been fought not with bullets or bombs, but with milk, sweets, salt,
and other foodstuffs and supplies. In the four decades that followed there was never a direct conflict between NATO and Soviet
forces. Instead the conflict was waged indirectly: through wars between the two sides’ client states, through propaganda,
and with ideological weapons—including food.

The Soviet leader, Josef Stalin, was no stranger to the use of food as an ideological tool. After assuming power in 1924 he
had launched a crash industrialization program with the aim of catching up with, and then surpassing, the Western industrialized
nations. Food was central to his plan. At the time, the Soviet Union was a major exporter of grain, and the purchase of industrial
machinery from foreign countries was to be funded by an increase in such exports. Small farms run by individual farmers and
their families would be crunched together to form “collective” farms owned by the state. Bringing farming under state control
in this way would, Stalin hoped, boost production. “In some three years’ time, our country will have become one of the richest
granaries, if not the richest, in the whole world,” Stalin declared in 1929, as he unveiled his plans. This would provide
extra grain to sell abroad, yielding more hard currency to fund the industrialization program. Stalin set a goal of doubling
steel output and tripling iron production within five years. The success of his program would demonstrate the superiority
of socialism, as farmers working together produced more food and as the Soviet Union rapidly industrialized.

In some respects this was an attempt to reproduce what had happened in western Europe, starting in Britain, where industrialization
had been preceded by a surge in agricultural productivity. This had liberated laborers from the land and made them available
as industrial workers, which is why Adam Smith had called industrial activity “the offspring of agriculture.” But the Soviet
approach was very different, because the state had played a very limited role in orchestrating Britain’s industrialization;
it had not been a deliberately planned outcome. Stalin’s industrialization program, by contrast, was a state-organized effort
that would be funded by squeezing as much as possible out of peasant farmers. “Collectivizing” the farms would mean that their
produce belonged to the state and therefore could be more readily appropriated for export.