The Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food

by Lizzie Collingham

Irene Rush, Memoir, MS8316

  Harry Simon, Memoirs, MS7514

  Imperial War Museum, London (IWM)

  E. Barrington Papers, Department of Documents, 88/58/1 (P)

  Miss E. Blaikley Papers, Department of Documents, 86/46/1

  R. B. Buckle Papers, Department of Documents

  R. P. Evans Papers, Department of Documents

  G. R. Page Papers, Department of Documents

  Fus. H(arold Walter) Simons Papers, ‘Army Cookery Notebook, 1944’, Department of Documents, Misc180 Item 2726

  A. W. Winter Papers, Department of Documents

  OFFICIAL PAPERS

  Australian National Archives (ANA)

  Records:

  Series A816/1

  Series A5954/69

  Australian War Memorial (AWM)

  Allied Translator and Interpreter Section Reports, 1942–46, AWM 54 & 55

  NEWSPAPERS

  Guardian

  New Yorker

  INTERNET SITES

  Australian Defence Force: Good food to stay fighting fit. http://www.dsto.defence.gov.au/research/5170/

  William H. Bauer, Interview, 7 October 1994, Rutgers Oral History Archives, New Brunswick History Department, http://oralhistory.rutgers.edu/Interviews

  Katarzyna Cwiertka, ‘Popularizing a military diet in wartime Japan and postwar Japan’, IIAS Newsletter, 38, http://www.iias.nl/iias/show/id=51553

  Extracts from the Report of the Hot Springs Conference, http://www.worldfood dayusa.org/?id-16367

  Food and Agriculture Organization, ‘Assessment of the world food security and nutrition situation’, Committee on World Food Security, Thirty-fourth Session, Rome, 14–17 October 2008. Agenda Item II, http://ftp.fao.org/docrep/fao/meeting/014/k3175e.pdf

  Harvard Project on the Soviet Social System Online, http://hcl.harvard.edu/collections/hpsss/index.html

  David R. Henderson, ‘German economic miracle’, The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics, http://www.econlib.org

  Don Joseph, comments to http://www.woodlands-junior.kent.sch.uk/Homeword/war/ratgioning.htm

  Mira Kamdar, ‘The threat of global food shortages – Part II’, Yaleglobal online, http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/content/threat-global-food-shortages-%E2%80%93-part-ii

  Ron Klages and John Mulholland, ‘Number of German divisions by front in World War II, Axis History Factbook, http://www.axishistory.com/index.php?id=7288

  ‘Eduard Schulte’, US Holocaust Memorial Museum, http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/article.php?lang=en&ModulId=10005682

  Seabrook Farms, New Jersey, http://www.usgennet.org/usa/nj/state/seabrook_farms_nj.htm

  Nicholas Stern, ‘Climate change, internationalism and India in the 21st century’, the Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Lecture, Chatham House, 15 July 2009, http://www.chathamhouse.org.uk/files/14384-15070

  ‘The things we forgot to remember’, BBC Radio 4, 7 January 2008, http://www.opennet/thingsweforgot/bengalfamine_programme.html

  C. Peter Timmer, ‘The threat of global food shortages – Part I’, Yaleglobal online, http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/content/threat-global-food-shortages-%E2%80%93-part-i

  US Army Air Forces Statistical Digest, World War II, Table 211 – ATC Operations from Assam, India, to China (over the Hump): Jan 1943 to Aug 1945, http://www.usaaf.net/digest/t211.htm

  Myron Winick, ‘Hunger disease: studies by the Jewish physicians in the Warsaw ghetto, their historical importance and their relevance today’, 27 October 2005, http://www.columbia.edu/cu/epic/pdf/winick_lecture

  BOOKS AND ARTICLES

  Adamovich, Ales and Daniil Granin, A Book of the Blockade (trans. Hilda Perham, Raduga Publishers, Moscow, 1983).

  Adams, R. L., Farm Problems in Meeting Food Needs (University of California Press, Berkeley, 1942).

  Adapting Livestock Products to War Needs, by members of the staffs of the divisions of dairy industry, animal husbandry, and poultry husbandry, College of Agriculture, University of California (University of California Press, Berkeley, 1943).

  Addison, Paul, Churchill on the Home Front 1900–1955 (Jonathan Cape, London, 1992).

  —— and Angus Calder (eds), Time to Kill. The Soldier’s Experience of War in the West 1939–1945 (Pimlico, London, 1997).

  Ahmad, Abu Talib, ‘The Malay community and memory of the Japanese occupation’, in P. Lim Pui Huen and Diana Wong (eds), War and Memory in Malaysia and Singapore (Institute of Southeast Asia Studies, Singapore, 2000).

  Ajayi, J. F. A. and Michael Crowder (eds), History of West Africa, 2 vols (Longman, London, 1974).

  Akashi, Yoji, ‘Japanese policy towards the Malayan Chinese, 1941–45’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 1 (2) (1970): 61–89.

  Allen, Louis, Burma. The Longest War 1941–45 (J. M. Dent & Sons, London, 1986).

  Anderson, David and David Throup, ‘Africans and agricultural production in colonial Kenya: the myth of the war as a watershed’, Journal of African History 26 (1985): 327–45.

  Anh, Nguyên Thê, ‘Japanese food policies and the 1945 great famine in Indochina’, in Paul H. Kratoska (ed.), Food Supplies and the Japanese Occupation in South-East Asia (Macmillan, London, 1998), pp. 208–26.

  Apfelbaum, Emil, ‘Pathophysiology of the circulatory system in hunger disease’, in Myron Winick (ed.), Hunger Disease. Studies by the Jewish Physicians in the Warsaw Ghetto (trans. Martha Osnos, John Wiley & Sons, New York, 1979), pp. 125–60.

  Aquila, Richard, Home Front Soldier. The Story of a GI and his Italian American Family During World War II (State University of New York Press, Albany, 1999).

  Arnason, Ragnar, The Icelandic Fisheries. Evolution and Management of a Fishing Industry (Fishing News Books, Oxford, 1995).

  Ashwell, Margaret (ed.), McCance and Widdowson. A Scientific Partnership of 60 Years 1933 to 1993 (British Nutrition Foundation, London, 1993).

  The Australian Army at War. An Official Record of Service in Two Hemispheres 1939–1944 (Australian Army Staff, Merriam Press, Bennington, VT, 2008).

  Backe, Herbert, Um die Nahrungsfreiheit Europas. Weltwirtschaft oder Großraum (Wilhelm Goldmann Verlag, Leipzig, 1942).

  Bacon, Edwin, The Gulag at War. Stalin’s Forced Labour System in the Light of the Archives (Macmillan, London, 1994).

  Baer, George W., One Hundred Years of Sea Power: The US Navy 1890–1990 (Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA, 1996).

  Baker, J. V. T., The New Zealand People at War. War Economy (Historical Publications, Department of Internal Affairs, Wellington, 1965).

  Bankier, David (ed.), Probing the Depths of German Antisemitism. German Society and the Persecution of the Jews, 1933–1941 (Berghahn Books, Oxford, 2000).

  Bannister, Sybil, I Lived Under Hitler. An Englishwoman’s Story (Rockliff, London, 1957).

  Barber, John and Andrei Dzeniskevich (eds), Life and Death in Besieged Leningrad, 1941–44 (Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2005).

  Barber, John and Mark Harrison, The Soviet Home Front, 1941–1945: A Social and Economic History of the USSR in World War II (Longman, London, 1991).

  Barkawi, Tarak, Globalization and War (Rowman & Littlefield, Oxford, 2006).

  Barker, D. J. P., ‘Fetal origins of coronary heart disease’, British Medical Journal 311 (July 1995): 171–4.

  Barnhart, Michael A., Japan Prepares for Total War. The Search for Economic Security, 1919–1941 (Cornell University Press, London, 1987).

  Barral, Pierre, ‘Agriculture and food supply in France during the Second World War’, in Bernd Martin and Alan S. Milward (eds), Agriculture and Food Supply in the Second World War. Landwirtschaft und Versorgung im Zweiten Weltkrieg (Scripta Mercaturae Verlag, Ostfildern, 1985), pp. 89–102.

  Barrett, David P. and Larry N. Shyu (eds), China in the Anti-Japanese War, 1937–1945. Politics, Culture and Society (Peter Lang, Oxford, 2001).

  Bartov, Omer, The Eastern Front, 1941–45. German Troops and the Barbarisation of Warfare (Macmillan, London, 1985).

  ——, Hitler’s Army. Soldiers, Nazis and War in the Third Reich (Oxford Un
iversity Press, Oxford, 1991).

  ——, Germany’s War and the Holocaust. Disputed Histories (Cornell University Press, London, 2003).

  Baten, Jörg and Andrea Wagner, ‘Autarchy, market disintegration and health: the mortality and nutritional crisis in Nazi Germany, 1933–37’, Economics and Human Biology 1 (1) (2002): 1–28.

  Bayly, Christopher and Tim Harper, Forgotten Armies. The Fall of British Asia 1941–1945 (Allen Lane, London, 2004).

  Beasley, W. G., Japanese Imperialism 1894–1945 (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1987).

  Beaumont, Joan (ed.), Australia’s War, 1939–1945 (Allen & Unwin, St Leonards, NSW, 1996).

  ——, ‘Australia’s war: Asia and the Pacific’, in Joan Beaumont (ed.), Australia’s War, 1939–1945 (Allen & Unwin, St Leonards, NSW, 1996).

  ——, ‘Australia’s war: Europe and the Middle East’, in Joan Beaumont (ed.), Australia’s War, 1939–1945 (Allen & Unwin, St Leonards, NSW, 1996).

  ——, ‘Starving for democracy: Britain’s blockade of and relief for occupied Europe, 1939–1945’, War and Society 8 (2) (1990): 57–82.

  Beck, Earl R., Under the Bombs. The German Home Front 1942–1945 (University Press of Kentucky, Lexington, KY, 1986).

  Becker, Jasper, Hungry Ghosts. China’s Secret Famine (John Murray, London, 1996).

  Beer, Edith Hahn, The Nazi Officer’s Wife. How One Jewish Woman Survived the Holocaust (Little Brown & Company, London, 2000).

  Beevor, Antony, Berlin. The Downfall 1945 (Penguin, London, 2004).

  ——, Stalingrad (first pub. 1998, Penguin, London, 2007).

  Behrens, C. B. A., Merchant Shipping and the Demands of War (HMSO and Kraus Reprint, London, 1978).

  Belcham, John, Industrialization and the Working Class: The English Experience, 1750–1900 (Scolar Press, Aldershot, 1990).

  Bell, Philip and Roger Bell, Implicated. The United States in Australia (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1993).

  Bellamy, Chris, Absolute War. Soviet Russia in the Second World War: A Modern History (Macmillan, London, 2007).

  Bengelsdorf, Joachim, Die Landwirtschaft der Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika im Zweiten Weltkrieg (Scripta Mercaturae Verlag, St Katharinen, 1997).

  Bennett, George, ‘British settlers north of the Zambezi, 1920 to 1960’, in L. H. Gann and Peter Duigan (eds), Colonialism in Africa 1870–1960. Vol. 2. The History and Politics of Colonialism 1914–1960 (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1970), pp. 58–91.

  Bentley, Amy, Eating for Victory. Food Rationing and the Politics of Domesticity (University of Illinois Press, Chicago, 1998).

  Berghoff, Hartmut, ‘Methoden der Verbrauchslenkung im Nationalsozialismus. Konsumpolitische Normensetzung zwischen totalitärem Anspruch und widerspenstiger Praxis’, in Dieter Gosewinkel (ed.), Wirtschaftskontrollen und Recht in der nationalsozialistischen Diktatur (Klostermann, Frankfurt am Main, 2005), pp. 281–316.

  Berkhoff, Karel C., Harvest of Despair. Life and Death in Ukraine under Nazi Rule (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 2004).

  Bernstein, Irving, A Caring Society. The New Deal, the Worker, and the Great Depression (Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, 1985).

  Betts, Raymond F., Uncertain Dimensions: Western Overseas Empires in the Twentieth Century (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1985).

  Bidlack, Richard, ‘Survival strategies in Leningrad during the first year of the Soviet–German war’, in Robert W. Thurston and Bernd Bonwetsch (eds), The People’s War. Responses to World War II in the Soviet Union (University of Illinois Press, Chicago, 2000), pp. 84–107.

  Bierman, John, and Colin Smith, Alamein. War without Hate (Viking, London, 2002).

  Bindon, James R., ‘Breadfruit, banana, beef and beer: modernization of the Samoan diet’, Ecology of Food and Nutrition 12 (1982): 49–60.

  ——, ‘Taro or rice, plantation or market: dietary choice in American Samoa’, Food and Foodways 3 (1989): 59–78.

  Bird, John, American POWs of World War II. Forgotten Men Tell their Stories (Praeger, London, 1992).

  Bird, Peter, The First Food Empire. A History of J. Lyons & Co. (Phillimore, Chichester, 2000).

  Bix, Herbert P., Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (Duckworth, London, 2001).

  Black, Maggie, A Cause for Our Times. Oxfam the First Fifty Years (Oxfam, Oxford, 1992).

  Blum, John Morton, V Was for Victory. Politics and American Culture During World War II (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York, 1976).

  Blythe, Ronald, Akenfield. Portrait of an English Village (Allen Lane, London, 1969).

  Bohn, Robert (ed.), Die Deutsche Herrschaft in den ‘germanischen’ Ländern 1940–1945 (Franz Steiner Verlag, Stuttgart, 1997).

  Boog, Horst, Joachim Hoffmann, Ernst Kluk, Rolf-Dieter Müller, Gerd Ueberschör, Der Angriff auf die Sowjet Union (Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Stuttgart, 1983).

  Boog, Horst, Werner Rahn, Reinhard Stumpf and Bernd Wegner, Germany and the Second World War. Volume 6. The Global War. Widening of the Conflict into a World War and the Shift of the Initiative 1941–43 (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 2001).

  Boon, Timothy, ‘Agreement and disagreement in the making of World of Plenty’, in David F. Smith (ed.), Nutrition in Britain. Science, Scientists and Politics in the Twentieth Century (Routledge, London, 1997), pp. 166–89.

  Bordiugov, Gennadi, ‘The popular mood in the unoccupied Soviet Union: continuity and change during the war’, in Robert W. Thurston and Bernd Bonwetsch (eds), The People’s War. Responses to World War II in the Soviet Union (University of Illinois Press, Chicago, 2000), pp. 54–70.

  Bose, Sugata, ‘Starvation amidst plenty: the making of famine in Bengal, Honan and Tonkin, 1942–45’, Modern Asian Studies 24 (4) (1990): 699–727.

  Bosma, Koos, ‘Verbindungen zwischen Ost- und Westkolonisation’, in Mechtild Rössler, Sabine Schleiermacher and Cordula Tollmien (eds), Der “Generalplan Ost”. Hauptlinien der nationalsozialistischen Planungs- und Vernichtungspolitik (Akademie Verlag, Berlin, 1993), pp. 198–214.

  Bosworth, Michal, ‘Eating for the nation: food and nutrition on the home front’, in Jenny Gregory (ed.), On the Home Front. Western Australia and World War II (University of Western Australia, Nedlands, 1996).

  Boyce, Robert and Esmonde M. Robertson (eds), Paths to War. New Essays on the Origins of the Second World War (Macmillan, London, 1989).

  Braithwaite, Rodric, Moscow 1941. A City and its People at War (Profile Books, London, 2007).

  Bramwell, Anna, Blood and Soil. Richard Walther Darré and Hitler’s ‘Green Party’ (Kensal Press, Abbotsbrook, Buckinghamshire,1985).

  Brandt, Karl, in collaboration with Otto Schiller and Franz Ahlgrimm, Management of Agriculture and Food in the German-Occupied and Other Areas of Fortress Europe. A Study in Military Government (Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA, 1953).

  Brandt, Nat, Harlem at War. The Black Experience in WWII (Syracuse University Press, Syracuse, 1996).

  Brash, D. T., The Hegemony of International Business 1945–1970. Vol. 5. American Investment in Australian Industry (Routledge, London, 1966).

  Brassley, Paul, ‘British farming between the wars’, in Paul Brassley, Jeremy Burchardt and Lynee Thompson (eds), The English Countryside between the Wars. Regeneration or Decline? (Boydell Press, Woodbridge, 2006), pp. 187–99.

  —— ‘Wartime productivity and innovation, 1939–45’, in Brian Short, Charles Watkins and John Martin (eds), The Front Line of Freedom. British Farming in the Second World War (British Agricultural History Society, Exeter, 2006), pp. 36–54.

  ——, Jeremy Burchardt and Lynee Thompson (eds), The English Countryside between the Wars. Regeneration or Decline? (Boydell Press, Woodbridge, 2006).

  —— and Angela Potter, ‘A view from the top: social elites and food consumption in Britain, 1930s–1940s’, in Frank Trentmann and Flemming Just (eds), Food and Conflict in Europe in the Age of the Two World Wars (Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2006), pp. 223–42.

  Brewer, John and Frank Trentman
n (eds), Consuming Cultures, Global Perspectives. Historical Trajectories, Transnational Exchanges (Berg, Oxford, 2006).

  Britnell, G. E. and V. C. Voake, Canadian Agriculture in War and Peace 1935–50 (Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA, 1962).

  Brown, Alan S., Ezra S. Susser, P. Lin Shang, Richard Neugebauer and Jack M. Gorman, ‘Increased risk of affective disorders in males after second trimester prenatal exposure to the Dutch Hunger Winter of 1944–45’, British Journal of Psychiatry 166 (1995): 601–6.

  Brown, Lester, Who Will Feed China? Wake-up Call for a Small Planet (Earthscan, London, 1995).

  Bruce, Colin John, War on the Ground (Constable, London, 1995).

  Brune, Peter, Those Ragged Bloody Heroes: From the Kokoda Trail to Gona Beach 1942 (Allen & Unwin, London, 2005).

  Brzeska, Maria, Through a Woman’s Eyes. Life in Poland under the German Occupation (Max Love Publishing, London, 1945).

  Bullard, Steven, ‘“The great enemy of humanity”. Malaria and the Japanese medical corps in Papua, 1942–43’, Journal of Pacific History 39 (2) (2004): 203–20.

  Burchardt, Lothar, ‘The impact of the war economy on the civilian population of Germany during the First and Second World Wars’, in Wilhelm Deist (ed.), The German Military in the Age of Total War (Berg, Leamington Spa, 1985), pp. 40–70.

  Burleigh, Michael, The Third Reich. A New History (Macmillan, London, 2000).

  ——, Death and Deliverance. ‘Euthanasia’ in Germany c.1900–1945 (Pan Books, London, 2002).

  Burnett, John, Plenty and Want. A Social History of Diet in England from 1815 to the Present Day (first pub. 1966, 3rd edn, Routledge, London, 1985).

  ——, ‘The rise and decline of school meals in Britain, 1860–1990’, in John Burnett and Derek J. Oddy (eds), The Origins and Development of Food Policies in Europe (Leicester University Press, London, 1994), pp. 55–69.

  —— and Derek J. Oddy, ‘Introduction’, in John Burnett and Derek J. Oddy (eds), The Origins and Development of Food Policies in Europe (Leicester University Press, London, 1994), pp. 1–6.