Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food (54 page)

After the war, Paul Nitze of the United States Strategic Bombing Survey (USSBS) team argued that Japan was already on its knees in August 1945 and that surrender would only have been a matter of time. Nitze confidently gave a date when Japan would have been ready to accept defeat: 1 November 1945.
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What Nitze failed to take into account was that the military leadership was prepared to sacrifice any number of Japanese civilians in the final battle. Prince Konoe Fumimaro, along with most of the other Japanese leadership interviewed by the USSBS, pointed out that although Japan was ‘of course … nearing the limit … the army would not admit it. They wouldn’t admit they were near the end … The army had dug themselves caves in the mountains and their idea of fighting on was fighting from every little hole or rock in the mountains.’
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In March 1945 the government began to organize the civilian population into a Patriotic Citizens Fighting Corps.
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Young boys were issued with bamboo spears, and H was described as being filled with dread when he read an article in the newspaper in 1945 which spoke of ‘officers and men of the Imperial forces … throwing themselves into the fray with no concern for themselves, standing in the vanguard of their one hundred million compatriots’.
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It was clear that the military applied its own principles to the civilian population and expected them to die fighting rather than surrender.

In late July 1945 Emperor Hirohito, with whom lay the final decision to surrender, and the ‘peace party’ within the government were still wavering. They thought that there was some merit in the militarists’ argument that Japan would be able to force the Allies into a negotiated peace settlement superior to that offered at Potsdam if the Japanese first inflicted thousands of casualties on an American invasion force. In any case, even if they had wanted to surrender immediately, they were unable to prevail over the fixed determination of the militarists to continue fighting. To persuade these men of the need to surrender unconditionally, and to strengthen their position against the entrenched ‘war party’, would require a dramatic display of American power. A number of possible strategies were open to the United States, none of them particularly appealing. They could continue the bombardment and mass destruction of Japanese cities and the nation’s infrastructure and combine this with the continuation of the blockade in order to starve the Japanese people into submission. They could launch an invasion of Japan and take the country by force, or they could use their new weapon, the atomic bomb, and demonstrate the overwhelming force which the United States was prepared to use in order to bring the war to an end.

United States analysts thought that a strategy of blockade and bombardment would be slow and painful. The American public would have had to wait patiently for an end to the war, while thousands of Japanese civilians starved to death. In addition the Allies would have had to stand idly by while Allied prisoners of war, civilian internees and indigenous slave labourers in the Japanese empire died at an estimated rate of somewhere between 100,000 and 250,000 a month. When the prisoners of war in the Dutch East Indies were finally liberated they were found to be ‘absolutely at their last gasp’.
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It seems likely that if a policy of blockade had been chosen there would have been no prisoners of war or European civilian internees left to liberate.

The American government was reluctant to wait for Japan to come to such an agonizing end. General Marshall and army planners were certain that disillusionment would set in among the American public long before it set in among the Japanese militarists. The overriding aim of the US government was to end the war in the Pacific within twelve months from May 1945.
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General MacArthur, eager to lead the biggest amphibious assault in the history of warfare, was pushing for
an invasion of the home islands. However, throughout the summer American commanders became increasingly concerned about the defences the Japanese had constructed on the island of Kyushu, where the invasion was planned to take place. By now the Americans had learned the lesson that the Japanese would fight to the death and that, once they were dug into defensive positions, they would have to be eradicated cave by cave, foxhole by foxhole, often in hand-to-hand combat. Throughout the first half of 1945 American soldiers had paid heavily for the capture of Iwo Jima and Okinawa. At Okinawa kamikaze planes had sunk thirty-six American ships and damaged 368 more. The Japanese soldiers, dug into a network of caves, had fought to the bitter end, and while only 7,401 had been captured, 92,000 died. American casualties had also been high: 12,520 dead, 36,613 wounded. The one battle for Okinawa accounted for 17 per cent of the total US marine and naval losses during the entire war.
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On Okinawa the Americans had also witnessed the way in which the Japanese soldiers drew civilians into the battle. Soldiers and civilians had taken refuge in a complex of cave systems in the south of the island. The soldiers would send the civilians out to fetch them food and water and eventually persuaded many of them to commit suicide rather than be captured. Higa Tomiko, aged seven, wandering around the battlefield in search of her older sisters was invited to join one such group of soldiers and civilians intent on suicide. Having sunk down on her haunches to rest at the mouth of a cave ‘someone spoke from the back of the cave. “Little girl, if you want to escape, now’s the time. We’re going to seal the entrance and blow ourselves up with a bomb. Of course, you can die along with us if you like.” A shiver went right through me. I sprang out of the cave and slid down the cliff, trying to get as far away as I could. Presently, there was a loud explosion behind me.’
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Between 62,000 and 100,000 civilians died during the battle for Okinawa.
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The battle for Kyushu promised to be far more bloody. Japanese commanders had taken new heart from Okinawa and were confident that they could inflict a terrible death toll upon the Americans. The army made extensive and chilling preparations for this, their final ‘decisive’ battle. After the surrender, Edmund J. Winslett, officer in charge of Sixth Army photographic intelligence, toured the defences of Kyushu and found a ‘maze of caves’ and communicating passageways, not just
for supply and ammunition dumps, but for everything, including messes. There were also 12,275 kamikaze planes ready and waiting to inflict damage on the United States fleet.
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By August 1945, 900,000 Japanese soldiers outnumbered the American invasion force of 766,700.
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The highest estimate of casualty figures ever given to Truman for the invasion appears to have been a quarter of a million. But the estimate of W. B. Shockley, an expert on Secretary Henry Stimson’s staff, seems more realistic. On 21 July 1945 he pointed out that, given the pattern of Japanese fighting behaviour so far, ‘the Japanese dead and ineffectives at the time of defeat will exceed the corresponding number for the Germans. In other words, we shall probably have to kill at least five to ten million Japanese. This might cost us between 1.7 and four million casualties including 400,000 to 800,000 killed.’
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In the end these casualty predictions were never put to the test. On 6 August the centre of the city of Hiroshima was wiped out within just a few seconds by an atomic bomb. This was the American version of the ‘divine wind’, and it was this that finally shocked Emperor Hirohito into taking the decision to surrender. Initially, the military refused to believe that the war was over. Anami argued that the Americans would not have enough material for more than one bomb. Hirohito appears to have wavered.
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On 8 August the Soviets invaded Manchuria. On 9 August the citizens of Nagasaki followed those of Hiroshima into the dust. Somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000 civilians died in the atomic explosions.
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Given the overwhelming destructive power of the new weapon, Japanese hopes for a decisive battle of attrition on Kyushu disappeared. This time the shock was great enough for the Emperor to carry the hotheads in the government with him. On 15 August 1945 the Emperor announced the Japanese surrender to his nation.

Takezawa Shoji, then a young girl, came in from the fields where she had been catching frogs. Her schoolteacher had instructed the class to catch as many as they could and then ‘dry them in preparation for the decisive battle on the mainland’. She was tired and dispirited, having caught only six of the creatures. At her home she found scores of people listening to the Emperor’s speech of surrender on the radio. ‘To be truthful, his voice sounded as weak as I felt. I wondered if the Emperor, like us, hadn’t yet eaten his lunch.’ As she listened she found herself thinking about ‘pumpkins, potatoes, and sweet-potato-flour cakes’.
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14

The Soviet Union –

Fighting on Empty

Hunger and cold held our people in their merciless grip.

(Victor Kravchenko, head of the Department of War Engineering Armament for Russia)
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For every Briton or American that died as a result of the war, eighty-five Soviet citizens lost their lives. The Soviet Union suffered by far the highest death toll of all the combatant nations. The Japanese, in comparison, lost seven people to every Briton or American, the Germans lost twenty. The total Soviet death toll is estimated to have been somewhere between 28 and 30 million – a total which would have satisfied the Nazi architects of the Hunger Plan who intended to starve this number of Soviets to death. It represents 15 per cent of the pre-war Soviet population and about a third of all the people who died worldwide during the war. The human price the Soviets paid for victory was colossal.
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Of the 28–30 million dead 9 million were military, which leaves a figure of 19–21 million civilian casualties.
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The evidence is simply not available to give a breakdown of the causes of civilian deaths. A large proportion will have been starved or shot in the German-occupied areas. But conditions in the unoccupied Soviet civilian rear were also harsh; ‘food was in extremely short supply and sickness was rife’.
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If 1 million Soviet citizens starved in Leningrad alone, then another 1–2 million Soviet deaths are almost certainly attributable to starvation. It is known that tens of thousands of prisoners starved in the Soviet gulags where the wartime decline in the food supply subjected the inmates to famine conditions.
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In the countryside the peasants were
living on the very margins of existence and a proportion of the young, the old and infirm will have succumbed to hunger. Circumstantial evidence suggests that even if famine conditions were not reached, large numbers of the vulnerable starved in the towns and cities. In Moscow in 1942 ‘the sight of men and women falling dead of starvation on [the] streets became too commonplace to attract crowds’.
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Even valuable industrial workers starved. A worker in an aviation plant in Kuibyshev described how ‘there were cases when people fell over from hunger’ on the assembly lines. ‘Some people died on the job. I personally saw two people die because of hunger.’
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James R. Miller, writing about the impact of the Second World War on the Soviet Union, argues that the figure of 30 million war deaths does not even include ‘war-related physical consequences such as those caused by chronic malnutrition’.
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The disintegration of the agricultural sector and the food supply system meant that all but the most privileged Soviets were affected by hunger and malnutrition. This chapter asks to what extent the critical food situation in the Soviet Union threatened its ability to fight.

FEEDING THE RED ARMY

The Red Army was unprepared for the German attack on 22 June 1941. The Wehrmacht pushed its way across the Soviet Union at terrifying speed. Soldiers and civilians retreated before them in disorder, bombed by German aircraft as they fled. The soldiers ran out of ammunition, and as thousands were killed or captured still holding their guns the army began to run out of rifles. Even spades were in short supply and men had to dig trenches with their helmets.
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In the disorganization of the retreat units were forced to abandon their cooking equipment, and about 60 per cent of the troops were left without mobile field canteens. Some divisions left their food supplies behind as they fled; in others cases the evacuation of food to the rear was so efficient that the troops in combat had nothing to eat. German soldiers described the Red Army troops that emerged from the Vyazama region as ‘wild-eyed’ with hunger. Caught up in the bogs of that area with no supplies they had been reduced to gnawing the bones of dead horses.
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A Ukrainian who was called up on the second day of the war described the chaos and lack of preparation to an interviewer for the Harvard Project on the Soviet Social System. The men were initially buoyant, confident that the Soviet Union had been preparing for the war for so long that surely everything would be well organized. But after only one or two days in the army, their morale plummeted. They were given no mattresses, and slept on the bare floorboards of the barracks. The food was abysmal and insufficient and they had to eat sitting on the floor. Having been called up in the summer they had left their warm clothes behind at home for their families to sell. But they were not even issued with uniforms. Within a few days of training their clothes were in rags.
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They were hopelessly under-equipped and were given virtually no weapons. When they went into battle they ‘lost 200 men (about 70 per cent of the battalion) in the first days of fighting, mostly because they had no weapons’. The Georgian troops broke down and cried. ‘They were just like sheep.’
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