Booklist Review
Surveying the food factor in WWII, Collingham seeks its due weight in the instigation and course of the conflict. Based on formidable research, her history considers the importance of food supplies to the major belligerents. Venturing a thesis that the agricultural preoccupations of Japanese and German leaders were significant causes of WWII, she recounts Japan's plan to convert occupied Manchuria into a breadbasket and the Nazis' impetus to conquer an eastern agrarian empire. Alongside the unfolding of the Nazis' fantastical schemes, Collingham analyzes food administration on the Allied side, examining closely the situation in the British Empire, whose maritime food trade attracted enemy attack. Shifting her narrative spotlight among soldiers' and civilians' food-hunting and -eating experiences; the improvisations of nutritionists, agronomists, and food processors; and the decisions of officials tasked with food distribution, Collingham shows the tautness of supply chains and the wartime famines to which their disruption through genocidal intent, combat attrition, and misunderstanding of economics gave rise. Covering a neglected aspect of WWII, Collingham's is an important, original contribution to the global conflict's historiography.--Taylor, Gilbert Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
CALORIES were made to be counted, but they have generally been counted for two very different reasons. We associate calories with excess, but for most of its history this little unit of energy was linked to shortage. The years since World War II have been a time of cheap and plentiful food, and of obese and sick citizens. Since our own daily struggle is fought against fat, we fail to see that many of the conflicts of the past were wars against hunger. Just as obesity leads to diabetes and human blindness, so plentiful food leads to decadent forms of history and social blindness. We are fortunate to have a bracing book like "The Taste of War," which does much to correct understanding of the causes of armed conflict and mass murder. If World War II were only about bad ideas, as we like to think, then we are all safe. Who among us admires Hitler, Himmler or Hirohito? But if the war and its atrocities had to do with material want, we cannot so easily separate ourselves from evil. Lizzie Collingham soberly argues that the expansionist designs of both Nazi Germany and imperial Japan must be understood within a world political economy in which the single crucial commodity was food. The British Empire had dominated a global system of free trade that was disrupted by the Great Depression. States like Germany and Japan, unable to supply themselves with sufficient food for their own citizens from domestic sources, had two choices. They could play the game by the British rules, which could seem humiliating and pointless in the 1930s, or they could try to control more territory. Collingham, the author of "Imperial Bodies" and "Curry," sketches the hunger motive on the body of the Japanese soldier in Asia, who not only starved others but was starved himself. The energetic Japanese attacks remembered with chagrin by British and American soldiers were driven by the need to capture food from the enemy. In the end, more Japanese soldiers died from starvation and associated diseases than in combat. Nazi Germany planned to control a vast Eastern European empire whose inhabitants would be starved in the tens of millions. It was a rare case of planning more murder in war than actually happened. When the Nazis had to choose whom to starve in an uncertain and long war, they thought racially and picked the Jews. Most of the world's Jews, seen by the Nazis as the source of all ills to Germany, lived in the very territories that were to be colonized. Collingham shows, and here she is in the mainstream of Holocaust historians working beyond the United States, how food shortages were one of the factors that led toward the policy of full extermination. Another reason we dismiss the material causes of war is that aggressive wars of colonization tend to fail. The Germans and the Japanese lost the war and returned to home territory and home islands. The Germans had hoped to supply themselves for eternity with grain from the rich black soil of Ukraine; but in fact they got very little. This is because, as Collingham demonstrates, war itself tends to disrupt labor, harvests and markets. Even if the intention of the Germans had not been to cause starvation, invasions tend to do so. Some two million people starved to death in French Indochina. At least 10 million starved in China, whose, army was living from the land on its own territory. About three million starved in Bengal in British India. Collingham argues that many of them might have been saved if Churchill had not been annoyed with Gandhi and the Free India movement and inclined to see Indians as racial inferiors. Collingham's case, in one respect, is even stronger than it seems. Rather than seeing the Soviet Union as an aggressor in the war, which it certainly was in 1939 and 1940, she discusses its fate after it was betrayed by its Nazi ally and invaded in 1941. But larger history confirms her argument. Like Germany and Japan, the Soviet Union too was reacting to an international political economy dominated by Britain. It too wished to create economic self-sufficiency on a continental scale. The solution Stalin advanced was not to seize territory from abroad, but to colonize itself from within. Agriculture was "collectivized," brought under state control. As Collingham notes, millions of people died of malnutrition as a result. They died in what their own leaders called a "war" against prosperous farmers, and in a process that Stalin saw as necessary preparation for a general war to come. The result was control without productivity, which left the Soviet Union vulnerable when it was invaded by Nazi Germany. Communist agriculture survived through a kind of parasitism upon capitalism: Stalin allowed collective farmers to work private plots and middlemen to profit on sales of food. In the end, though, it was American food that ensured the Soviet soldier did not go hungry. As Collingham rightly notes (if not without some self-indulgent swipes at American culture), the war was a very special moment for American agriculture, offering a perfect conjuncture: demand abroad, stability at home and a technological revolution. Prosperity depended in considerable measure upon a world calamity, but in the United States it was ascribed only to domestic freedom. Thus, Collingham argues, the war did not boost policies of planning and redistribution in America as it did in Europe, and it permitted the false lesson that laissez-faire is always enough. The improvements in technology (pesticides, fertilizers, hybrids) were very real, and spread from the United States to the rest of the world after the war. They were and remain enough to oversupply America and Europe with food. Had this green revolution come 20 years earlier, World War II might have been unthinkable. But will such abundance last forever? The combination of population growth and prosperity in this century means that we have ever more urban people eating ever more meat, which requires ever more grain, ever more land, ever more efficiency. Climate change and water shortages make soil fertility uncertain. The early 21st century is coming to resemble the early 20th century, with expectations of shortfall influencing ideology and strategy. The American understanding of World War II arises from the special circumstances that made it, for us, the source of postwar plenty. But how would we behave if we anticipated that we will no longer be able to feed ourselves as we are accustomed? How will Asia look in 30 years, after China's topsoil is eroded and its glaciers have melted? Collingham's book masterfully corrects our understanding of the great conflict that made America what it is, and thus prepares us for the conflicts that are all too likely to come. Its usefulness is hard to overstate. During World War II, Lizzie Collingham argues, the single crucial commodity was food. Timothy Snyder is the Housum professor of history at Yale University and the author of "Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin." Most recently he helped Tony Judt to write "Thinking the Twentieth Century."
Choice Review
In the early chapters of this engaging narrative, independent historian Collingham makes a convincing case for the need to address undernourished populations of Germany and Japan as one cause for the outbreak of WW II. The meat of the book, however, is an examination of how participant countries managed to feed their peoples through the long years of war. While popular notions portray Britain in a military David and Goliath struggle against the Nazis after the fall of France, the country was aided at least in feeding her population through the efforts of a number of collaborators, including the US, the Commonwealth countries, and, to a lesser extent, British colonies in Africa and the Far East. The German food plan was to appropriate the agricultural land of Poland and the Ukraine, exterminate its proprietors, and replace them with agrarian Ubermenschen. Collingham further describes the efforts of other European countries, the US, the British colonies, and China and Japan to feed their peoples during the war. A concluding chapter examines current trends in agriculture whose roots developed during WW II. Among others, these trends include industrialization and mechanization of farming, the rise in use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, and new techniques in food processing. Summing Up: Recommended. All levels/libraries. D. M. Gilbert Maine Maritime Academy
Kirkus Review
Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerers, 2006, etc.), a government had to control the food supply. This was equally true of Britain, Germany, Japan and the U.S., though it played out very differently during World War II. Creating a National Socialist empire relied on becoming self-sufficient, especially after the legacy of hunger and defeat wrought by World War I. According to Herbert Backe's Hunger Plan, occupation of the Ukrainian breadbasket would deliver the resources to Germany only if the flow of food could be shut down to Russian cities, thus starving 30 million Soviet citizens (also Jews, indigenous inhabitants and prisoners of war). In the throes of an agricultural crisis, Japan was more reliant on imports from its colonies Formosa and Korea and later suffered starvation during the American blockade; moreover, the white-ricebased diet provided insufficient protein for the Japanese troops, and a more Chinese and Western diet was adopted. Britain relied heavily on its colonies to feed the wartime appetite, as well as on U.S. lend-lease supplies, only suffering from want during the winter of 194041 because of the U-boat blockade. Indeed, American farmers supplied the bounty of global wartime needs and also offered ample food at home. Collingham study casts a staggeringly large net. She examines terrible famines in Bengal and Greece, the Soviet ability to withstand starvation, the role of the black market and how nutritional science reshaped the diet of soldiers and civilians. A definitive work of World War II scholarship.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Neither a work of revisionism nor an example of a too-focused academic specialty, this is that rarest of works: one that is scholarly, entertaining, and actually provides new insight into World War II. U.K. historian Collingham (Imperial Bodies: The Physical Experience of the Raj) shows how the food policies of Germany, Japan, the British Empire, and the United States were developed from experiences in World War I or during industrialization and how those policies impacted the way these nations fought World War II. From autarky (i.e., self-sufficiency) to over-reliance on global food markets, the combatant countries all had different policies for feeding their populations, both those in the armed forces and those on the home front. The impact of these policies would lead directly and indirectly to the deaths of 20 million people, a number equal to the combat deaths in this war. VERDICT In this era, in which little arable land is likely to open up, Collingham's work is relevant for the future as well for historical study. Highly recommended for all who study World War II history, as well as those specializing in the study of food production and food security. [See Prepub Alert, 9/29/11.]-Brian K. DeLuca, Enoch Pratt Free Lib., Baltimore (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
