The history of food is trendy these days. Not only are many monographs coming off the presses, but we also see new academic journals devoted to food scholarship, major food encyclopedias, and publishers rolling out new food series. During a stroll down the aisles of the book exhibit at the latest American Historical Association meeting, I observed that every major publisher seems to have at least one new book on some aspect of food history.
And now food scholarship is making its way into military historiography. It must be noted at the outset that the topic of food is certainly not new to the field. Logistics and supply, especially in the last few decades, have become integral to understanding war. But we are seeing a different approach to food in military history: food identified as a major instrument of war. Two recent books, neither written by a military historian, illustrate this new emphasis and add to our understanding of two modern wars that one might assume have already been exhaustively covered.
Andrew Smith’s Starving the South is a lively “gastronomical look” at the Civil War that highlights the crucial role food played in the conflict from start to finish. It is not an entirely new story, but Smith’s narrative demonstrates how access to abundant agricultural resources benefited the Union, whereas the Confederacy was dogged almost from the outset by scarcity, hunger, and malnutrition. Initially the Confederacy dismissed the Union strategy of blockade and economic strangulation. Dependency on southern cotton would ruin New England’s economy, force a break in any blockade, and eventually lead the British and French to recognize the South’s independence. None of this happened. Cotton from Egypt and India largely replaced that from the American South. But in the first years of the war, plantation owners continued to grow large amounts of cotton. Only a small portion of the crop ever made it through the Union blockade or was traded to the North. Most of it rotted away or was burned to prevent its capture. Smith reminds us that although the South was decidedly agrarian, its best farmlands were devoted to growing cotton and tobacco. So planters’ decisions to grow cotton in the hope of European diplomatic recognition and a short war had serious consequences. Had the South produced foodstuffs in place of cotton in those early years, “it might well have made a difference to the outcome of the war.”
Actually, in the first year of the war, food production in the South increased substantially. But by late 1862, the food situation for the Confederacy was a deep concern. Union forces controlled many important food-producing areas, especially in Kentucky and Tennessee, and much of the Confederacy east of the Mississippi suffered from a severe drought. Labor shortages, hoarding, and speculators exacerbated the problem that reached the crisis stage in 1863. Food riots broke out that year in several southern cities, including Richmond, Milledgeville, and Mobile.
Belatedly, Jefferson Davis asked farmers to plant “food for man and beast” instead of cotton and tobacco. Some responded, but government proclamations did little to address the fundamental problems confronting the Confederate food system. Smith contends that by mid-war, only strong governmental action to force planters to shift priorities and even to take over plantations, if need be, could have solved the food emergency. But such a radical solution was unthinkable for southern leaders wedded to a states’ rights conception of government and laissez-faire economic policies.
The Confederate military, on the other hand, found it necessary to confiscate food from civilians, but it lacked the ability to pay but a fraction of its value. As a result, farmers often hid their provisions and livestock. Food scarcity also began to degrade Confederate military effectiveness: soldiers were furloughed to help their families plant or harvest crops, while others deserted because they were going hungry.
While the South suffered, the North enjoyed an abundance of foodstuffs and livestock, as well as a transportation system that effectively distributed these to both troops and civilians. The contrast was remarkable. And it showed on the battlefield. “Well-fed armies do not always win wars,” Smith argues, “but the superior physical stamina of the well-nourished soldiers and sufficient food on the homefront helped the North win the Civil War.” Specifically, Smith highlights a change in Union strategy after the fall of Vicksburg. Key generals concluded that traditional military operations by themselves could not win the war. They feared protracted guerrilla warfare against any Federal troops that would have to garrison the South. So they developed a new strategy that focused on the disruption of food supplies to make it harder for Confederate armies and guerrilla forces to operate. The new scorched-earth strategy took the war directly to the civilian population in the hope of destroying the South’s willingness to continue the war. Not everything went according to plan, but Sheridan’s devastating march down the Shenandoah Valley in the summer of 1864—burning crops, farmhouses, barns, and mills—demonstrated the military effectiveness of the strategy. Later that year, Sherman followed suit with his “march to the sea” from Atlanta to Savannah and then northward to interdict Lee’s supply lines in North Carolina. This “hard war” ruined the Confederate food system and significantly eroded civilian and military morale. By January 1865 the Army of Northern Virginia was on one-quarter rations. And substantial numbers of Confederate soldiers deserted, most heading home or leaving their units to find food anywhere they could.
Did hunger defeat the Confederacy, as Smith’s publisher would have us believe? That is undoubtedly an overstatement. Smith himself is more measured. He admits that there were many reasons for the Confederacy’s defeat. But he makes a strong case that food-supply issues were a major distraction for Confederate military and political leaders throughout the war and probably “tipped the scales in favor of the South’s surrender.” In some respects this is a familiar story. Although traditional military historiography has tended to neglect logistics, over the last 20 to 25 years more military historians have turned to food and fodder and the task of supplying war. But the approach that Smith adopts in Starving the South is different. This can be appreciated by comparing his book with one of the best recent military histories of the conflict, Donald Stoker’s The Grand Design: Strategy and the U.S. Civil War (Oxford, 2010). For Stoker, food is a function of logistics and supply lines; for Smith food is more. It is an instrument of war.
In The Taste for War, Lizzie Collingham makes an even stronger case for viewing food as an instrument of modern war. Collingham, an academic historian now turned writer, effectively highlights the pivotal role that food played in the waging of World War II. It is an important book that in many ways complements Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands while expanding the focus well beyond Eastern Europe. Food, Collingham maintains, was “the fundamental basis for every wartime economy,” and she provides an exhaustive treatment of how governments tried to control the food supply to troops, civilians, and occupied peoples. She demonstrates how food played a significant role in driving both Germany and Japan into war. Food, Collingham argues, was “an engine not only of war but also of German and Japanese atrocities.”
In the case of Germany, Hitler’s vision of Lebensraum (living space) in the east was largely a function of wanting to ensure agricultural self-sufficiency, especially after the intense hunger Germany experienced near the end of World War I. Nazi leaders appreciated how food shortages had pushed a demoralized Germany toward capitulation in 1918. They resolved that the German population would not go hungry during this next war; others would have to go without food. This was the reasoning behind the “defining feature of the National Socialist food system”: deliberate extermination by starvation. It was the brainchild of Herbert Backe, author of Germany’s so-called Hunger Plan. Hitler had always wanted to eliminate Bolshevism and colonize the east. Backe gave him an additional rationale for invading Russia. The occupied Soviet Union could feed the massive German military, but only by diverting Ukrainian grain from Soviet cities, which would eventually eliminate the Soviet urban population, some 20 million people, by starvation. Backe’s plan was bogus. The Wehrmacht never succeeded in extracting the food it need from the occupied Soviet Union. There were many reasons for this, including greatly underestimating the disruption that war creates with the loss of agricultural labor, animals, and fertilizer, and adopting draconian collection quotas without price incentives that caused peasants to hide food and participate in the black market. Because the crop yields expected from occupied Ukrainian and Russian territory were so disappointing and starvation was a slow process, the Nazis decided to speed things up and eliminate as many “useless eaters” among the Soviet and Polish populations as they could. Millions of Eastern European Jews and Soviet citizens were murdered in order to free up food for the German occupiers. But Collingham is skeptical that these murderous measures contributed much to the actual collection of food.
What makes Collingham’s narrative so significant, and disturbing, is that she goes well beyond Nazi Germany’s “systematic eradication of entire peoples” to show how other combatants deliberately or unintentionally “inflicted famine, hunger, and malnutrition on their own inhabitants and those of occupied countries.” During World War II, approximately 20 million people died from starvation, malnutrition, and associated diseases. This is roughly equal to the number of military deaths. A substantial number of the 1 million German prisoners who died in Soviet hands, the 23,000 or so Allied prisoners and civilian internees who died in Japanese camps, and the nearly 300,000 Asians who died while working as forced laborers for the Japanese lost their lives to hunger, malnutrition, and related diseases. Food requisitioning policies led to a famine that killed 2 million Vietnamese in 1943-44. In China’s Henan province, between 2 and 3 million died of hunger and malnutrition because of the Nationalists’ decision to prioritize feeding their army and bureaucracy over the peasantry. The death toll from starvation alone in China may have been as high as 10 million. Three million Bengalis died in 1943 in a man-made famine that was far from Churchill’s finest hour. And it is estimated that 60 percent of the 1.74 million Japanese military losses in World War II were the result of starvation, not combat.
These numbers are so staggering that it is easy to view them as abstractions. Another temptation is to think of starvation as being less horrifying than death on the battlefield. But Collingham emphasizes that starvation was an especially terrible way to die. The body uses up all its fat reserves and muscles are broken down to obtain energy. As the small intestine atrophies, it becomes increasingly difficult for the body to absorb nutrients from whatever food the victim might be able to obtain. Vital organs slow down their activity, overpowering fatigue sets in, and eventually organ failure brings death.
In the last half of The Taste of War, Collingham discusses how well the major combatants fed both their armies and civilian populations. During the course of World War II, Japan went from having one of the best-fed militaries in the world to one that experienced “miserable starvation.” This was a result of the increasingly effective American naval blockade that severely disrupted Japan’s sea communications. As her shipping succumbed to a devastating submarine campaign supplemented later by extensive aerial mining (dubbed Operation Starvation), thousands of Japanese troops across the Pacific were stranded. Soldiers were told to be self-sufficient, which by the end of the war was another way of saying they were being left to starve. The air-sea blockade of the Japanese home islands shut off essential supplies and foodstuffs, and by the summer of 1945 Japan’s urban population was on the verge of starvation. American war planners projected that if the home islands had to be invaded, famine and starvation would have killed hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians.
The Soviet Union also experienced severe food deprivation. An estimated 1 million Soviets starved as a result of the protracted Nazi encirclement of Leningrad alone. And the German invasion in 1941 radically disrupted the centralized Soviet food supply system. In the first years of the war, the Red Army survived on rations of bread and dried fish. Hot meals were a rarity, and soldiers became expert foragers. It was not until 1943 that the situation began to improve as a result of recaptured farmlands, an intensive gardening campaign (mainly potatoes), and substantial American food assistance. For countless civilians, daily life was “a perpetual misery.”
Both Germany and Britain had adequate food supply and distribution systems in place throughout most of the war. Both nations resorted to rationing, and both experienced black market activity. A potato shortage in the winter and spring of 1941-42 generated something of a food crisis in Germany, but exploiting the production of occupied territories relieved the situation. As a result of reversals on the battlefield and an intensified Allied bombing campaign, the Germans experienced some shortages from 1943 until the final months of the war, when the system finally broke down. But this was nothing like what Germany experienced during the last two winters of World War I. Britain, on the other hand, relied increasingly on nutritionists to draw up rations that were more healthy, if not more appetizing, than standard pre-war fare. Most Britons got by on a diet of things like Spam, soya-based sausages, meat pies, powdered soup, and fish paste. Collingham notes, however, that because of full employment and fairer distribution of food by means of rationing, the poorest third of British society had better access to animal protein, vitamins, and calcium than they enjoyed before the war began. An important legacy of the war for Britain was that thereafter, government took responsibility for citizens’ health and well-being.
Food was as much a weapon of war for the United States as were ships, planes, and tanks. The U.S. was able to feed its army and civilians extravagantly, compared to other militaries, as well as to supply its allies with large quantities of foodstuffs. As was the case in Britain, many Americans ate a healthier diet during the war than they had during the Depression of the 1930s, and the U.S. came out of the war with a booming agricultural sector. Americans did experience rationing of things like sugar, butter, cheese, and red meat. But although many complained about the red meat ration, Americans barely suffered any hardships during the war, unless one considers such things as the replacement of butter with margarine a hardship.
American servicemen and women were by far the best fed of any nation’s troops in the war. The U.S. army accorded food the same priority as the rest of the equipment troops needed to fight. To their allies, American rations seemed “lavish to the point of extravagance.” The jealousy that an Australian maintenance crew felt toward the Americans camped across a road in New Guinea captures how Allied troops often viewed American abundance:
They had proper beds, a mosquito-proof recreation hut, regular deliveries of mail, and oranges which they generously shared… . [The Australians] felt bitter as, with empty stomachs, they unloaded trucks one December morning, tantalized by the aroma of bacon and eggs frying in the American camp… . “We [had] not eaten a fresh egg since coming to New Guinea.”
Collingham does a nice job discussing the impact of the war on American and global food-ways. She is critical of the Western diet that was shaped by the postwar agricultural and processing revolution. Coca-Cola, the only manufacturer of soft drinks exempt from sugar rationing because it was the main supplier of soda for military bases, infiltrated both the PX stores and the workplace and secured its postwar standing throughout the world as the American beverage. The West became overly reliant on unhealthy processed foods high in refined carbohydrates and low on nutritional value. The Allies may have won the war, but one unwelcome unintended consequence has been an American population, increasingly mimicked by others, with far too many obese people experiencing the manifold health risks that come with being overweight.
In drawing our attention to the importance of food in modern warfare beyond logistics, these two books perform a real service. A quarter of a century ago, in Oil and War, Robert Goralski and Russell W. Freeburg made a good case that World War II was fought and won over access to oil. Now food seems to have emerged—to borrow from Lester Brown writing in a different context—as “the new oil.” But Smith and Collingham are careful not to exclude or minimize other interpretations. And we must resist the temptation to do just that. Food alone, of course, cannot adequately explain the outcome of the American Civil War or World War II. Modern war necessarily defies our attempts to capture its essence by focusing on any one dimension, no matter how significant it may have been. That said, I suspect few will be able to think of either the Civil War or World War II in quite the same way after reading these two books. Given the enormous literature we have on both conflicts, that is a significant accomplishment.
Donald A. Yerxa is professor of history emeritus at Eastern Nazarene College. He is senior editor of Historically Speaking and editor of Fides et Historia.
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