Inferno - Max Hastings [216]
Even those Russians who did not suffer siege or bombardment spent the war labouring in conditions of extreme privation: they received 500 calories a day less nourishment than their British or German counterparts, a thousand fewer than Americans. Some 2 million perished of hunger in territories under Soviet control, while a further 13 million died under bombardment or in German-occupied regions; prisoners in the gulag’s labour camps occupied the lowest place in the hierarchy of priority for rations, and one in four of them died in each of the war years. Russians suffered widespread scurvy as a consequence of vitamin deficiency, together with many other conditions associated with hunger and overwork. “We had no life of our own outside the factory,” said Moscow woman Klavdia Leonova, who worked in a textile plant making army tunics and camouflage netting.
Throughout the war, her production line operated around the clock, its workers organised in two twelve-hour shifts. They were fed badly baked bread and kasha—a porridge made with burned wheat—distributed at the work benches. “We did not starve, but we were always very hungry and often ate potato peelings … Sunday was in theory a day off, but the factory Party Committee often called on us for outside work, such as digging trenches or bringing in timber from the forests around Moscow. We had to load lorries with pitprops which were so heavy they would have been a burden even for a professional weightlifter … We lived with the peasants … the women regularly abused the regime. They abused us too, because we collected berries and mushrooms in the woods which they had hoped to sell to us.”
In the unoccupied Western nations, some people prospered: criminals exploited demand for prostitution, black-market goods and stolen military fuel and supplies; industrialists made enormous profits, many of which somehow evaded windfall taxes; farmers, especially in the United States, where incomes rose by 156 percent, experienced greater prosperity than they had ever known. “Farm times became good times,” said Laura Briggs, daughter of an Idaho smallholder. “Dad started having his land improved … We and most other farmers went from a tarpaper shack to a new frame house with indoor plumbing. Now we had an electric stove instead of a woodburning one, and running water at the sink where we could do the dishes; and a hot water heater; and nice linoleum.”
But far more people hated it all. Lt. David Fraser, a Grenadier Guardsman, identified an important truth about the circumstances of millions, soldiers and civilians alike: “People were not where they belonged, so that the effect was of a dream from which one hoped one day to awake.” In April 1941, Edward McCormick wrote to his son David, who had enlisted with his brother Anthony, and was now embarked with an artillery regiment for the Middle East. “To Mummy, in particular,” their father said,
the whole war centres round you and Anthony. The chief motivating force in her life, ever since you were born, has been your health, happiness and safety. These are still her instinctive thoughts, and you don’t need me to tell you therefore how devastating this parting with you both has been to her. I feel it too, and it appals me to think of the hardship, danger and filth which will probably be your experience. There is no doubt whatever, in my mind, that this war had to come. A Nazi victory can only mean the enjoyment of life by a very small number of chosen Germans, and the souls of all people under them will be engulfed. You and Anthony are helping to rid the world of this plague and, while personal feelings make me wish you were far away from it all, I am filled with pride