All Hell Let Loose_ The World at War 1939-1945 - Max Hastings [221]
Though the Allies were not responsible for anything like the human toll exacted by the Axis, their policies displayed a harsh nationalistic selfishness. The United States insisted that both its people at home and its armed forces abroad should receive fantastically generous allocations of food, even when shipping space was at a premium. For every pound of supplies the Japanese transported to their island garrisons, many of whom – at Rabaul, for instance – spent the second half of the war engaged in subsistence vegetable gardening rather than combat operations, the US shipped two tons to its own forces. American reluctance to feed their men on local supplies was increased by the shortcomings of some nations’ canning processes: eight US airmen died in an outbreak of botulism after eating Australian tinned beetroot. American specialists were thereupon dispatched to raise local standards. Major Belford Seabrook, of the famous New Jersey agribusiness, introduced its principles to Australia. Coca-Cola established forty-four bottling plants in theatres of war, which produced 95 per cent of all soft drinks sold in camp PXs. The United States reduced agreed allocations of meat to Britain to maintain supplies to its own civilians and soldiers; Gen. Brehon Somervell, a notorious anglophobe, supported his transportation chief’s 1943 assertion that the British people ‘were still living “soft” and could easily stand further reductions’.
For Italians, hunger was a persistent reality from the moment the country became a battlefield in 1943. ‘My father had no steady income,’ recalled the daughter of a once-rich Rome publisher. ‘Our savings were spent, we were many in the house, including two brothers in hiding. I went with my father to the [public] soup kitchen because my mother was ashamed to do so. We made our own soup from broad-bean skins. We had no olive oil … A flask of oil cost 2,000 lire when our entire house had cost only 70,000. We bought whatever was available on the black market, bartering with silver, sheets, embroidered linen. Silver was worth less than flour; even our daughters’ dowries were exchanged for meat or eggs. Then in November with the cold weather we had to exchange goods for coal: the longest queues formed at the coal merchants. We carried the sacks back on our own, because it was better that no man showed his face [lest he should be conscripted for forced labour].’
‘Hunger governed all,’ Australian correspondent Alan Moorehead wrote from Italy. ‘We were witnessing the moral collapse of a people. They had no pride any more, or dignity. The animal struggle for existence governed everything. Food. That was the only thing that mattered. Food for the children. Food for yourself. Food at the cost of any debasement or depravity.’ Prostitution alone enabled some mothers to feed their families, as British Sergeant Norman Lewis witnessed in 1944. At a municipal building in the outskirts of Naples, he encountered a crowd of soldiers surrounding a group of women who were dressed in their street clothes,
and had the ordinary well-washed, respectable shopping and gossiping faces of working-class housewives. By the side of each woman stood a small pile of tins, and it soon became clear that it was possible to make love to any one of them in this very public place by adding another tin to the pile. The women kept absolutely still, they said nothing and their faces were as empty of expression as graven images. They might have been selling fish, except that this place lacked the excitement of a fish market. There was no solicitation, no suggestion, no enticement, not even the discreetest and most accidental display of flesh … One soldier, a little tipsy,