The famine originated in Japanese seizure of neighbouring Burma, from which much of Bengal’s rice supply traditionally came, and was worsened by crop failure and a cyclone. To the dismay of Wavell, India’s viceroy, Churchill refused to divert shipping to transport food to relieve the needy. The prime minister cited the urgent strategic demands of the war, which were real enough. But Wavell wrote bitterly later, when hundreds of bombers were used to feed Holland: ‘A very different attitude [exists] towards feeding a starving population when the starvation is in Europe’.
More than any other aspect of the war, food or lack of it emphasised the relativity of suffering. Globally, far more people suffered serious hunger, or indeed died of starvation, than in any previous conflict in history including World War I, because an unprecedented range of countries became battlefields, with consequent loss of agricultural production. Even those countries which escaped famine found their diets severely restricted. Britain’s rationing system ensured that no one starved and the poor were better nourished than in peacetime, but few found anything to enjoy about their fare. A landgirl, Joan Ibbertson, wrote: ‘Food was our obsession…We had dried egg once a week for breakfast, but the good lady in charge liked to cook it overnight, so it resembled, and tasted like, sawdust on toast. We had fishpaste on toast, too, some mornings…One Christmas we were allowed to buy a chicken. My bird was so old and tough that we could hardly chew through it’.
Each week a British adult was entitled to 4oz lard or butter; 12oz sugar; 4oz bacon; two eggs; 6oz meat; 2oz tea and unlimited vegetables or home-grown fruit ‘off-ration’, if available. Most households improvised to supplement authorised issues. Derek Lambert, then a small boy, recorded a domestic scene: ‘One morning a jar was put on the breakfast table with supreme nonchalance…My father, an undemonstrative man, spread the nectar on his bread and bit into it. He frowned and said: ‘What was that ?’. ‘Carrot marmalade’, said my mother. With unusual deliberation, he picked up the jar, took it into the garden and poured it onto the compost heap’.
Yet any Russian or Asian peasant or Axis captive would have thought carrot marmalade a luxury. Kenneth Stevens was a prisoner in Singapore’s Changi Jail. He wrote: ‘In this place one’s mind returns continually and dwells longingly on Food…..I think of Duck and Cherry Casserole, Scrambled Eggs, Fish Scallops, Chicken Stanley, Kedgeree, Trifle, Summer Pudding, Fruit Fool, Bread & Butter Pudding- all those lovely things were made just perfectly ‘right’ in my own home’. Stevens died in August 1943 without ever again tasting such delicacies. French girl children shrank by an average of eleven centimetres and boys by seven centimetres between 1935 and 1944. Tuberculosis stimulated by malnutrition increased dramatically in occupied Europe, and by 1943 four-fifths of Belgian children were displaying symptoms of rickets. In most countries city-dwellers suffered more from hunger than country folk, because they had fewer opportunities to supplement their diet by growing their own produce. The poor lacked cash to use the black market which, in all countries, continued to feed those who could pay.
In the matter of diet Canada, Australia and New Zealand escaped lightly, and Americans scarcely suffered at all. Rationing was introduced to Roosevelt’s people only in 1943, and then on a generous scale. Gourmet magazine gushed tastelessly: ‘Imports of European delicacies may dwindle, but America has battalions of good food to rush to appetite’s defence’. Meat was almost the only commodity in short supply, though Americans complained bitterly about that. A housewife named Catherine Renee Young wrote to her husband in May 1943: ‘I’m sick of the same thing…We hardly ever see good steak any more. And steak is the main meat that gives us strength. My Dad just came back from the store and all he could get was blood pudding and how I hate that’. But whatever the shortcomings of wartime quality, American domestic meat consumption fell very little, even when huge quantities were exported to Britain and Russia.