All Hell Let Loose_ The World at War 1939-1945 - Max Hastings [222]
In December 1944, when there was hunger verging upon starvation in Italy and indeed all Europe, a British Embassy official in Washington visited assistant secretary of war John J. McCloy to protest against the policy of shipping extravagant quantities of supplies to US forces overseas, while liberated civilians were in desperate straits: ‘“In order to win the war,”’ he demanded of McCloy, ‘“were we not imperilling the political and social fabric of European civilization on which the future peace of the world depended?”’ This drew from Mr McCloy the immediate rejoinder ‘that it was a British interest to remember that, as a result of the complete change in the economic and financial position of the British Commonwealth which the war had brought about, we, in the U.K., depended at least as much upon the U.S. as we did upon Europe. Was it wise to risk losing the support of the U.S. in seeking the support of Western Europe? This was what was involved.’ The shocked British official persisted in pressing the case for feeding Europe’s civilians. McCloy stuck to his guns, asserting that it would be fatal for Britain ‘to argue that the war in the Pacific should be retarded in order that the civilian population of Europe should be fed’.
The Foreign Office in London professed acute dismay on receiving the minute of this meeting, but British impotence in the face of US dominance remained a towering reality. That only a relatively small number of Italians died of starvation between 1943 and 1945 was due first to the illicit diversion of vast quantities of American rations to the black market, and thereafter to the people – much to the private enrichment of some US service personnel; and second to the political influence of Italian-Americans, which belatedly persuaded Washington of the case for averting mass starvation.
The British government, in its turn, imposed extreme privation on some of the peoples of its empire, to maintain the much higher standard of nourishment it deemed appropriate at home. In 1943, allocations of shipping to Indian Ocean destinations were slashed, for good strategic reasons but at deplorable humanitarian cost. Mauritius suffered shocking hardships, as did some East African countries where white settlers made fortunes from wartime agricultural production, exploiting conscripted native labour paid derisory wages.
The 1943–44 Bengal famine, of which more will be said below, prompted a brutally callous response from Britain’s prime minister. When Wavell, then Viceroy, heard of the massive British 1945 airlift to Holland, where people had been reduced to eating tulip bulbs, he noted bitterly: ‘A very different attitude [exists] towards feeding a starving population when the starvation is in Europe.’ Greeks also suffered from the British blockade of Hitler’s empire – at least half a million died of hunger. Churchill was assuredly right, that concessions to allow food imports into Greece and other occupied nations would have served the Wehrmacht. But a fundamental reality persists: the Allied powers provided for their own peoples levels of nourishment which they denied to others, including societies notionally under their protection.
3 A WOMAN’S PLACE
The mobilisation of women was a critical social phenomenon of the war, most comprehensive in the Soviet Union and Britain, though Adam Tooze has shown that Germany also used female workers more widely than formerly supposed. The Japanese social ethos precluded the elevation of women to positions of responsibility, but they played a critical role in factories, and by 1944 provided half of Japan’s agricultural labour force. Pre-war Britain used women workers much