Every nation with power to do so put its own people first, heedless of the consequences for others at their mercy. The Axis behaved most brutally, and with the direst consequences: Nazi policy in the East was explicitly directed towards starving subject races in order to feed Germans. People in occupied regions displayed extraordinary ingenuity in hiding crops from the occupiers, and clung tenaciously to life in defiance of the predictions of Nazi nutritionists, who anticipated 30-40 million fatalities. But in pursuit of the Wehrmacht’s policy of living off the land, German soldiers in the East consumed an estimated seven million tons of Russian grain, 17 million cattle, 20 million pigs, 27 million sheep and goats and over 100 million domestic fowls- and millions of their lawful owners starved to death in consequence.
The Japanese throughout their empire adopted draconian policies to provide food for their own people, which caused mass starvation in south-east Asia, with one million victims in Vietnam alone. China also suffered appallingly, its peasants despoiled by both the Japanese and Nationalist armies. In Henan province in 1942, when unseasonable frost and hail were followed by a plague of locusts, millions left their land and many perished. Peasants ate elm bark and dried leaves.
Though the allies were not responsible for anything like the human toll inflicted by the Axis, their policies displayed a harsh nationalistic selfishness. The United States insisted that both its people at home and armed forces abroad should receive fantastically generous allocations of food, even when shipping space was at a premium. Meanwhile in Leningrad, in the course of almost three years under siege 800,000 people perished, and some survived only by eating each other. In the first ten days of January 1942, the NKVD reported forty-two cases of cannibalism: corpses were found with thighs and breasts hacked off. Worse, the weak became vulnerable to murder not for their meaningless property, but for their flesh. On 4 February a man visiting a militia office reported seeing twelve women arrested for cannibalism, which they did not deny. He wrote: ‘One woman, utterly worn out and desperate, said that when her husband fainted through exhaustion and lack of food, she hacked off part of his leg to feed herself and her children’. The prisoners sobbed, knowing that they faced execution.
That February, by far the worst month of the siege, twenty thousand people were reported to be dying every day; amid a weakened population, dysentery became a killer. There were queues at street taps for water, and fires burned unchecked for lack of means to extinguish them. Supplies of coffins ran out. Many of those with energy to read turned to War And Peace, the only book which seemed capable of explaining their agony. In the west, British and American infantrymen were appalled by their experiences in the eleven months of the 1944-45 North-West Europe campaign. But Russians and Germans fought each other continuously for almost four years in far worse conditions, and with vastly heavier casualties: the Eastern Front overwhelmingly dominated the struggle against Hitler.
Between 1941 and 1944, British and American sailors and airmen engaged the Axis at sea and in the sky, but relatively small numbers of western allied ground troops took part in the little campaigns in North Africa, Italy, Asia and the Pacific. In July 1943, when almost four million Axis and Soviet troops were locked in bloody combat at Kursk and Orel where half a million Russians died, just eight Anglo-American divisions were fighting in Sicily, scene of the principal Western effort against the Nazis, where they suffered just 6000 dead. Nor was Russia alone in the scale of sufferings far worse than anything Westerners experienced: I have mentioned above China’s ordeal amid Japanese invasion and occupation, which persisted from 1937 to 1945. Yugoslavia, where civil war was overlaid on Axis occupation, lost more than a million dead.
Many people, soldiers and civilians alike, witnessed spectacles comparable with Renaissance painters’ conception of the inferno to which the damned were consigned: human beings torn to fragments of flesh and bone; cities blasted into rubble; ordered communities sundered into dispersed human particles. Almost everything which civilized peoples take for granted in time of peace was swept aside, above all the expectation of being protected from violence.