The Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food
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The poor peasantry, artisans and the middle classes on fixed incomes suffer most in the face of inflation. Throughout the empire those who bought their food on a daily basis were faced by inexorable rises in the price of food, which meant that every day they were able to buy a little less to eat. For some the price rises deprived them of their ability to buy even the most basic of subsistence diets. Uncontrolled inflation in effect robbed them of their entitlement to food.16 In the Gambia, American cracked wheat was brought in to replace imports of Burmese rice but those villagers without sufficient cash to buy ever more expensive food resorted to eating seed nuts.17 The Scottish Livingstone hospital in Moleopolole, Bechuanaland, reported in 1945 that acute food shortages meant that the poorest people were living on roots and berries.18 The number of the British empire’s African subjects who died of wartime hunger is unknown. Starvation peaked with the arrival of drought in many areas in 1942 and there was famine in northern Nigeria and Tanganyika. Outside British Africa similar processes claimed the lives of 25,000 Cape Verde islanders and 300,000 Rwandans.19
The failure of colonial administrations to protect the vulnerable from the impact of wartime inflation was exacerbated by a policy which, in effect, exported food shortages to the empire. Britain was never as ruthless as Germany and Japan in its exploitation of its empire’s resources, nor did it engage in deliberate acts of murder or dispossession, but its officials and politicians did act according to an unspoken food hierarchy which gave the lowest priority to the needs of the empire’s colonial inhabitants. The exportation of hunger was perhaps at its most stark in tiny island colonies such as Mauritius.
For the sugar-producing island of Mauritius the shipping shortage spelled disaster. The island was left with a crop which nobody wanted and no means of making the money to buy in the food imports on which its inhabitants were completely dependent. And then in 1942, with the Japanese occupation of Burma, their main supplier of food disappeared from the world market. In exchange for buying up the bulk of the sugar crop the British government insisted that the islanders attempt to achieve some level of self-sufficiency, and stipulated that a third of the land under sugar be planted with food crops.20 The islanders made a valiant attempt to replace their annual imports of 50,000 tons of Burmese rice with 49,000 tons of manioc, maize and sweet potatoes and some peanuts. A Nutrition Demonstration Unit toured the island showing the villagers how to make maize bread and prepare manioc flour. A combination of droughts, cyclones, a losing battle against weeds, and the despondency and malnutrition of those few labourers who were available, meant that the crops yielded far less than the islanders had hoped.21
The Allied shipping crisis of 1942–43 posed a real threat to the survival of the Mauritians. The fact that the United States was supplying less meat to Britain than it had promised meant that the Ministry of Food was lobbying hard for extra shipping to be sent to Argentina and Australia to replenish Britain’s depleted meat reserves. The Anglo-American Torch landings in North Africa were diverting thousands of tons of shipping away from civilian to military supply. The pressure was also building up for an assault on continental Europe and this meant that yet more ships had to be allocated to the build-up of American troops in Britain. In response to these problems Churchill took the decision at the beginning of 1943 to cut by 60 per cent the amount of shipping travelling to the Indian Ocean.22 This augmented British imports by about 2 million tons.23 But the success of the British government in sheltering its own civilians from the worst consequences of the disruption of world trade came at a cost elsewhere in the empire. By March 1943 the cut in shipping meant that the Mauritians’ food stores were virtually exhausted. The islanders were now at the mercy of the Combined Food Board of British, American and Canadian officials who controlled the allocation of food on the available ships. Shipping officials took pity on the islanders and diverted a ship carrying 3,000 tons of wheat to the island, and manioc starch from Madagascar helped eke out the food further, until later on in the year a consignment of flour arrived from Australia. In a stroke of exceptionally bad luck the ship carrying a long-awaited peanut processing plant was torpedoed when it was in sight of the island. Although the Mauritians did not starve to death, their wartime diet contained far too little fat and minuscule amounts of protein. Throughout the war Mauritius received not a single cargo of lentils and pulses, the main source of protein in the local diet. In contrast to the British who ended the war generally physically healthier, the Mauritians ended the war severely malnourished.24 Although Britain did not set out with the explicit intention of exporting wartime hunger to their empire, this is in fact what happened.
THE MIDDLE EAST SUPPLY CENTRE
No sooner had the British finished evacuating their troops from Dunkirk on 3 June 1940 than Italy joined the war and launched attacks on the British in their African empire. Fighting in East Africa ended with British victory in Ethiopia in May 1941. But by then the Italians in Libya had been joined by the German Afrikakorps led by Lieutenant-General Erwin Rommel. Until June 1944 this was the only front on which the British and American armies engaged in combat with the Wehrmacht. The fighting ranged backwards and forwards across the western desert until Anglo-American landings in Morocco and Algeria in November 1942 helped to push the Axis forces, now under attack from the east and the west, back across the Mediterranean to Sicily.
Britain’s military base for the North African campaign was Egypt, technically independent and neutral, but still treated by the British like the colony it once had been. The Middle East command based in Cairo was responsible for a vast area which encompassed the Mediterranean islands of Cyprus and Malta, and stretched from Turkey in the north down through Syria, Palestine, Iraq and Iran to the sheikhdoms of the Persian Gulf and on into the Sudan, Ethiopia and Somalia. It included six sovereign states, four British colonies, four League of Nations mandates (including two Free French regimes) and former Italian colonies, as well as the Anglo-Egyptian condominium.25
At the beginning of the war the supply situation in the Middle East was chaotic. Troops and equipment flooded into the area. The German U-boats had effectively closed the Mediterranean to Allied shipping and just a few convoys ran the gauntlet of air and submarine attacks in order to supply Malta. Everything was brought in around the Cape to the ports on the Red Sea, which were not equipped to deal with this level of tonnage. Their capacity was about 5.5 million tons and the military campaign alone needed at least 5 million tons of goods and equipment. To make matters worse, once the Italians in East Africa capitulated, the United States, which was not yet in the war, declared the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden open again to American ships. In the spring of 1941 American businessmen, capitalizing on the wartime shortage of consumer goods, began sending cargoes of clothing and luxuries to the already overcrowded ports. Pyramids of crates filled with stockings, cosmetics and underwear built up on the quays next to tanks and crates filled with arms and military supplies.26
The military activity injected a steady flow of cash into the Middle Eastern economy, causing inflation. As food prices went up, merchants began to hoard grain, speculating on rising prices. The British could not afford to allow inflation and food shortages to spark off food riots, hunger or famine in the towns and cities behind the North African front line. Not only might this threaten the military campaign but it was politically inexpedient, given that Egypt and the rest of the Arab countries were not particularly well disposed towards the British. In the spring of 1941 the British managed to avert an Axis takeover in Iraq and were struggling to set up Free French regimes in Syria and Lebanon. There was a perpetual sense of unease surrounding Allied dealings with Egyptian officials, who it was felt would happily have swapped them for Axis masters. To make matters worse, the battle for North Africa began to go against the British. In April and May 1941 the Germans conquered first the Greek mainland and then Crete. Rommel began to drive the Allies back across the western desert. In July 1941 Oliver Lyttelton was appointed Minister of
State in the Middle East. In a characteristic tête-à-tête dinner with Churchill – ‘a small dinner table: a bottle of champagne: one servant: the Prime Minister in a boiler suit, fresh from his bath, hungry and relaxed’ – the situation was made clear, and in particular it was impressed upon Lyttelton that ‘the strain on our shipping was at breaking point’ and a solution must be found.27
One of Lyttelton’s most effective acts was to reanimate a modest operation known as the Middle East Supply Centre with a small office in General Headquarters, Cairo. In December 1941 he appointed a young Australian commander, Robert Jackson, to its head, having recognized in him a man of exceptional organizational talent.28 The MESC remained an advisory body throughout the war but Jackson adopted ‘an executive posture’ and behaved as though he could impose his will on the various governments under the jurisdiction of Middle East command.29 He managed to get things done by fully exploiting his connections and good relations with his employer, Oliver Lyttelton (who in February 1942 returned to Britain as Minister of Production), General Sir Wilfred Lindsell, chief supply officer for the three armed services in Cairo, and Frederick G. Winant, who became the US representative on the Executive Committee of the Centre and facilitated co-operation in Washington.30
Under Jackson’s direction the MESC expanded into a vast undertaking which attempted to meet the supply needs of this large but economically stagnant region from its own resources. When Lyttelton left Egypt in February to take up his new post as Minister of Production, Jackson lost no time in making good use of the gap before the next Minister arrived. He went on a tour, going from government house to embassy to cabinet chancellery to military headquarters and royal palaces, cajoling, persuading and pleading for co-operation from the various heads of the strange assortment of countries that came under the Middle East Supply Centre’s purview. Jackson compensated for the Centre’s lack of executive powers by fully exploiting his one sanction – control of shipping space – to pressure the various governments into accepting his suggestions.31
Jackson urged the various governments to co-operate with a number of initiatives, including a harvest collection scheme. Before the MESC took over there had been no central assessment of stocks and reserves for the region. Private merchants bought up local grain and then sat on stores waiting for prices to rise. The British military competed with local governments to buy as much locally produced flour as possible and all the various Middle Eastern governments competed for shipping space to bring in Australian and Canadian wheat and South African maize. Jackson set up a central body to collect the harvest and store it in a collective pool along with any other essential imports. In this way the region’s entire stocks of basic foods such as grains, sugar, fats, oils, tea, coffee, canned milk, meat and fish, as well as other vital raw materials and equipment such as pharmaceuticals, coal and tyres, were controlled by the MESC. The military were included in the scheme to ensure that they no longer disrupted local markets by requisitioning food independently. Competition for shipping space between the different countries was thus eliminated and the ability of merchants to hoard goods and wait for prices to rise as they became scarce was curtailed.32 Food and the various other goods were then allocated to those places most in need of them.
There was no time to lose in implementing Jackson’s plan. From the beginning of 1942 the Middle East rapidly began heading towards a food disaster. In January 1942 the poor of Cairo stormed the bakeries and protested that the bakers were mixing sawdust with the bread flour.33 There were food riots in Tehran, Beirut and Damascus, and workers in British camps in Iran went on strike over lack of food.34 In January Lyttelton warned London that stocks of wheat from the poor harvest of 1941 were already running out. There were several months to be struggled through before the next harvest would again bring a flow of food into the cities. The British government took these warnings to heart and shipping was diverted to bring 350,000 tons of wheat into the area.35 Jackson’s friendship with General Sir Wilfred Lindsell, chief supply officer for the three military services in Cairo, now paid off as he was able to persuade Lindsell to cut the troops’ rations and release small quantities of food from army stores on a daily basis. Rommel was approaching Cairo across the western desert and there was a mounting sense of panic among the British community. As the British prepared to evacuate to Palestine, General Headquarters began to burn their files, covering Cairo in a pall of smoke.36 In the end, the military situation was saved by the second battle of El Alamein, which brought Rommel’s advance to a halt. The risk of civilian food riots in Cairo was averted by the MESC’s newly introduced food collection programme, which brought grain from that year’s harvest into the city three weeks earlier than usual.37
The Centre created new chains of interdependence within the region which relied more upon trucks and trains than scarce ships, although for the transport of some products the Centre used the ancient sailing dhows of Zanzibar, which enjoyed an Indian summer before they were eclipsed in the post-war era by modern shipping. In Egypt rice was grown in place of cotton and fed to the Indian troops stationed in North Africa. The surplus went to Ceylon to replace Burmese rice. The reduction of cotton-growing in Egypt led to a shortage of cottonseed oil, which was instead supplied by the Sudan.38 Australian and Canadian imports of wheat, upon which the Arabian Peninsula, Cyprus and Palestine were dependent, were replaced by local imports of barley brought in by rail.39 Ironically, given our present-day image of Ethiopia as a country of famine, it supplied wheat and millet to southern Arabia, Eritrea and Somalia and to the famine-stricken inhabitants of Hadhramaut in the Aden Protectorate.40
This alternative supply network was supplemented by attempts to innovate in agriculture, although the level of agricultural under-development in the region meant that virtually all the efforts of the Centre had to be focused on improving civilian rather than military food supplies.41 Marshall Macduffie, an American employee of the Centre, was impressed by the ability of the British to rustle up experts whenever they were needed. The military allowed the Centre to analyse the professional qualifications of all the men and women serving in the area and, if they were likely to prove useful, re-assign them to work for the Centre. Businessmen, old colonial hands, experts in agronomy, would be tracked down and within a few days these men (and sometimes women) would appear and set off to share their knowledge with the farmers of the region.42 Irrigation schemes were set up in Syria, Lebanon and Iran, improved seed selection and the breeding and distribution of hybrid maize, good use of fertilizers, improvements in animal husbandry and mixed farming were all introduced under the auspices of the MESC.43 The army was enlisted in the campaign for agricultural production and soldiers helped to bring in the harvest in Iran. In one of the Centre’s most ambitious projects, troops were sent to the Sudan, southern Arabia, the Persian Gulf, upper Egypt, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Tripolitania and Kenya to lay poisoned bait in the breeding grounds of locusts. Where they were unable to deal with the locusts while they were still land-bound, the RAF and the Soviet air force (who almost never co-operated with civilian schemes), sprayed the swarms of this destructive pest from the air. In this way the 1943–44 crops were saved from the rapacious insect.44
Industrial production was also stimulated. Steel was made in Turkey and Egypt, Palestine made canteens and clothing for the army.45 Every scrap of useful material was salvaged and recycled: tin from scrap metal, sulphuric acid from kerosene production for phosphate fertilizers, sodium sulphide from oil refineries for use in the manufacture of leather.46 One of the Centre’s most valuable schemes to save shipping space was to convert the region’s trains from coal- to diesel-powered engines. Every request for any article, from spare parts for tractors to rubber tyres, was first scrutinized by an army of office workers and checked against availability elsewhere in the region and its priority compared with a host of other requirements for imports. Macduffie recalled an MESC meeting to review import licences. ‘Arrayed around a table were seven trim men in British Army un
iforms. Before them were sheaves of papers … The meeting … resembled a tobacco auction held in low conversational tone. The papers were picked up and quickly passed down the line of uniforms with barely audible comments in the clipped rapid-fire speech that is characteristic for person-to-person communications among the British military.’ At the end of an hour Macduffie had not understood a word of what had been said, but ‘several hundred claims on Anglo-American resources, of vital importance to millions, had been processed’.47
The Centre succeeded in reducing the tonnage entering the region’s ports by more than half.48 A certain amount of smuggling still went on: Arab dhows took rice, fats, oils and tea from India to Iran and the sheikhdoms of the Persian Gulf. Iran was denied shipments of fats in 1942 because it was felt that this black market was supplying them with more than their fair share.49 Even though the area was flooded with British soldiers in Egypt, Soviets and Americans in Iran and the Gulf, and French in the Levant – all with money to spend – and there was a shortage of consumer goods amid a wartime boom in demand, uncontrolled hoarding and runaway inflation were held in check. For the most part the MESC managed to protect the entitlement to food of the poor and those on fixed wages. There was famine in Hadhramaut in the Aden Protectorate and in British Somaliland, and there were bread shortages, but the food situation for most inhabitants of the region remained stable, and possibly even improved. About a third of the Egyptian rice crop was used to enrich the diet of the Egyptian population and infant mortality declined in the region during the war, which is usually an indicator of satisfactory nutrition.50 The MESC was thus a success in that it maintained an important military region and sustained the military effort, while at the same time cutting down demands on shipping space and cushioning the indigenous population from the impact of war.