Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food (14 page)

One factor which took a surprising toll on farmland was the military use of land. The army took over coastal areas and borders for defence, anti-aircraft batteries and observer posts, and they needed vast areas for practising manoeuvres. The most land-hungry arm of the military was the air force. Runways and airports were best sited on high, well-drained arable land. In Japan there was competition from the military for the limited amount of flat land. In Britain the best efforts of the ploughing-up campaign, which sought to increase the amount of cultivated land, were counteracted by the military requisitioning of 750,000 acres in England and Wales. In Germany compulsory land purchases swallowed up tens of thousands of hectares for motorways, airfields, barracks, camps, army training areas and the ‘West Wall’ defences.
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Loss of land to one’s own military was one thing, but loss of land to enemy occupation was another. The Soviet Union lost vast swathes of vitally important agricultural land to the German invaders.

If the international free market in food had to be abandoned, it was even more important that governments took control of all food imports entering the country. In addition, all governments sought to control the allocation of every scrap of food produced by its farmers. In theory rationing enabled governments to ensure that every level of society received a fair share of the whole. In most countries the rural population was the easiest to feed as they could simply be permitted to keep a share of the food which they produced. But, if they were the section of the population with the best access to food, they were not the group the government most wanted to feed. The military received first priority for food, followed by industrial workers. A common problem that government collection agencies faced was that small-scale farmers were well placed to illegally hold back more than their fair share of food, much of which they would then channel on to the black market.

The chapters that follow ask how effectively the different combatant
countries, beginning with the United States and ending with China, approached and solved these problems. How they overcame the disruption to trade, and reorganized their agriculture in response, how efficient they were at collecting food from the farmers and to what extent they were able to use the resources of their allies and occupied territories. To a large extent this part of the book looks at who was well fed during the war, who went hungry, who starved to death, and why. This part begins with those countries which were able to draw strength from their ability to command food, and ends with those which were weakened and disabled by their inability to overcome the challenges war posed to agricultural production and the food supply.

4

American Boom

We will emerge from this struggle as the dominant power, dominant in naval power, dominant in air power, dominant in industrial capacity, dominant in mineral production, dominant in agricultural production. These are the basic resources of power.

(Ralph Watkins of the US National Resource Planning Board, November 1942)
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The position of American farmers during the Second World War was exceptional. The wartime problems which they faced were minimal in comparison to those faced by farmers in other combatant nations. There was no danger of enemy invasion or the capture of vital agricultural land. Farmers had to compete with the arms and explosives industry for labour, fertilizers and machinery, but the United States was virtually the only country in the world which had sufficient resources to spare to divert raw materials into the production of large quantities of farm machinery, fertilizers and other chemical products. The Depression had left farmers with huge surpluses of food which the unemployed urban workers could not afford to buy. By providing American farmers with a market for their food, and with a healthy income, the war pulled agriculture out of the Depression. A process of modernization, which had begun tentatively in the 1930s, was accelerated and a new agricultural revolution occurred which began to transform farming into the industry which it is today. Crucially, modernization allowed fewer farmers to feed significantly more people. The wartime boom in American agriculture meant that the United States was not only able
to provide its enormous army and civilian population with plentiful quantities of food, it was also able to feed the soldiers and civilians of the Soviet Union, China and Great Britain.

The outbreak of war in Europe was, however, viewed with gloom by American agriculturalists, their outlook shaped by years of over-production, unwanted agricultural surpluses and low farm prices. They feared that, as had been the case with the First World War, a period of increased demand and production would be followed by a post-war bust and a return to the problem of surpluses. The need for textiles for uniforms did empty US warehouses of depressing piles of cotton, built up during the 1930s, but war meant that Europeans needed to husband their dollar resources and as a result they cut back on food purchases. In 1939 France reduced the amount of wheat it bought and cancelled all purchases of apples and pears. The British cut their expenditure on American food from £62 million in 1939 to £38 million in 1941. The United States Department of Agriculture warned that unless some way of selling food to Britain was found, America would be burdened by warehouses bursting at the seams with yet more unwanted food.
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America’s problem was not that the war cut off its access to imports but that it had lost a large chunk of its export market.

In March 1941 President Franklin D. Roosevelt introduced lend-lease as a means by which the supposedly neutral United States could aid Britain’s war effort. Lend-lease solved the problem of the British balance of payments by ‘loaning’ Britain war materiel and food. The Agriculture Minister, Claude Wickard, urged farmers to grow as much as they could, telling them ‘this is our war and not anyone else’s war’.
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Farmers were provided with the incentive of guaranteed farm prices, fixed at 110 per cent parity with industrial goods for the duration of the war.
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Wickard was proved right. By 1942 it was clear that food production was going to be a vital and highly profitable aspect of America’s contribution to the conflict. American farmers now had plenty of customers. Even before the United States’ official entry into the war large numbers of civilians had moved into work in the war industries where they earned good money and they had little other than food to spend it on. The civilian demand for dairy products rose by 22 per cent. In April 1941 the lend-lease system was extended to the Chinese Nationalists and in November 1941 to the Soviet Union.
Once America entered the war in December 1941 the expansion of the military pushed up the demand for food even further. The American military, together with Britain, China and the Soviet Red Army, swallowed up 15 per cent of American dairy products and 25 per cent of American eggs, although the British and the Russians would undoubtedly have preferred more canned meat to the dreaded powdered egg, which America over-produced.
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The United States’ agricultural administration rivalled the German Reich Food Corporation in its complexity, but it exercised far less control. This was partly due to Roosevelt’s failure to appoint a food administrator with overall authority. The obvious man for the job would have been Herbert Hoover. Hoover had played an important role in the United States Food Administration during the First World War and had organized famine relief for Europe and the Soviet Union in the 1920s. But Roosevelt loathed him.
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Instead, food issues were divided between the Ministry of Agriculture (which itself broke down into the War Food Administration, the Forest Service and the Bureau of Agricultural Economics) and the Office of Foreign Agricultural Relations. In addition, the Nutrition Division of the Office of Defense Health and Welfare Services and the Office of Price Administration both had a role to play in the control of food. The antipathy between different administrators, each defending their own patch, resulted in an ineffective administration. And few bureaucratic directives were ever applied in the field. The Production Goals Committee, for example, set down guidelines as to what farmers should grow, but these had little impact on the actual planting of crops.
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Thus, American farmers continued to grow too much cotton when they could more usefully have cultivated peanuts and vegetable feed. In 1944 valuable resources were wasted when fruit farmers planted a bumper crop of water melons. The Office of Price Administration considered water melons so low in nutritional value that it was not worth setting a maximum price for them. In 1943 water melons had been so scarce and the demand for them so great that they became some fruit farmers’ most profitable crop. By planting double the quantity in 1944 the relatively control-free farmers were simply responding to market forces.
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Most importantly, the American agricultural administration failed to boost milk production as much as was needed. In
order to keep the price down for the consumer, the decision was taken not to raise the price paid for milk to the farmer but to subsidize the cost of feed for the cows. The result was that farmers’ incomes increased but milk production barely rose. The United States Food Administration would have been better off adopting the British solution whereby farmers were paid well, creating an incentive for the farmer to produce more milk, while a subsidy kept down the cost to the consumer.
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The government’s relatively lax grip on farming was wasteful in a wartime context. Fortunately, American agriculture experienced a revolution in productivity which meant that the United States could afford some wastage. To many American farmers the Second World War certainly felt like a ‘good’ war. Farm incomes rose by 156 per cent.
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‘As farm prices got better and better … farm times became good times,’ recalled Laura Briggs, raised on a small farm in Idaho in the 1930s and 1940s. ‘Dad started having his land improved, and of course we improved our home and the outbuildings. We and most other farmers went from a tarpaper shack to a new frame house with indoor plumbing. Now we had an electric stove instead of a wood burning one, and running water at the sink where we could do the dishes; and a hot water heater; and nice linoleum … It was just so modern we couldn’t stand it.’
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The war also provided a painless solution to the problem of agricultural unemployment, caused by the Depression. Rural workers were attracted to the factories by a wage double that of a farm worker and which could be earned in a mere eight hours a day.
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In the United States ex-farmers and farm labourers made up 35 per cent of wartime industry’s mechanical engineers and 30 per cent of those working in production.
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Including those called up into the military, 6 million people left the farms.
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Mordecai Ezekiel, economic adviser to the Department of Agriculture, commented dryly that ‘we will have conquered unemployment by the same means that the Fascist countries conquered it, by organizing our people and our resources into a military economy’.
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Indeed, by 1942 farming was doing so well that farmers began to regret the loss of labour to industry. Farmer’s organizations began to campaign for farm workers to be exempted from the draft. So powerful was the farm lobby in Washington that they succeeded in
pushing through the Tydings Amendment to the Selective Service Law, by which means about 3.5 million farmers managed to escape the draft in 1943. In 1944 for every industrial worker who received deferment, three farm workers were exempted.
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The United States overcame the shortage of agricultural labour with relative ease by using a variety of alternative sources of farm labour. A Women’s Land Army was formed in 1943 but farmers on the Great Plains and in the Rocky Mountains resisted hiring in land girls. They preferred to rely on their wives and daughters, who extended their activities from the farmyard and vegetable-growing to working in the fields. Verda Peterson left college to work on her father’s farm in Missouri, milking cows, driving the binder to harvest the oats, and using the tractor to make hay. She replaced her older brother, who had enrolled in the naval reserve. In an article on her life in the
Country Gentleman
she explained: ‘I am needed there. I know how to farm and can do more for my country there than in industry.’
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Officials in Iowa estimated that farmers’ use of their wives and children to work on the farm increased from 13 to 36 per cent. One farmer summed up the general feeling: ‘If I have to have a woman helping me in the field, I want my wife, not some green city girl.’
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But those who overcame their prejudices against the Women’s Land Army were often pleased. A dairy farmer in Massachusetts enthused that ‘his [land] girls were the best of the lot’.
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In California schoolchildren were given the afternoons off to help bring in the 1942 fruit and vegetable harvest. By 1944 the state was employing 3 million schoolchildren part-time to pick fruit, milkweed and floss, which was used to make life jackets.
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Farmers discovered that German prisoners of war made good farm labourers. ‘They saved us!’ commented one rancher. Edward Pierce from Hillboro County recounted, ‘They do what they are told. They don’t work quite as fast as Americans … but they damage less fruit in orchards … We couldn’t have harvested our apple crop up here without help and the prisoners were the best solution.’
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The Germans were as delighted with their food as the farmers were with their hard work. One prisoner reported that he ate more in America in one day than he had in a whole week at home. Another commented that ‘at first we thought the Americans were making fun of us. Such a menu: Soup, vegetables, meat, fish, fruit, coffee and ice cream! Never in the army did we get such a meal.’
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When the US War Ministry, eager to get the prisoners off its hands, began to make plans for their repatriation in 1945 there was an outcry among farmers. Farmer George S. Sweet wrote to Senator Raymond E. Willis in desperation in August 1945, explaining that he would need his prisoners of war until at least ‘15 November, as the city folks will not come out and get these crops in’.
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