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In which John Green teaches you about World War II, and some of the causes behind the war. In a lot of ways, WWII was about resources, and especially about food. The expansionist aggression of both Germany and Japan were in a lot of ways about resources. There were other reasons, to be sure, but the idea that the Axis needed more food can’t be ignored.
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Transcript Provided by YouTube:
00:00
Hi, I’m John Green and this is Crash Course World History and today we’re going to talk
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about World War II. But we’re not going to look at it as a battle
00:06
between good and evil, but instead as a war for resources, particularly a war for food.
00:12
Wait, Mr. Green, Mr. Green, what about like Rosie the Riveter and Pearl Harbor and Nazis and Hitler?
00:16
Yeah, Me From the Past, I mean if the question is was
00:18
Hitler evil? Then, yeah. But evil people generally can’t, like, cause
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massive world wars on their own. So instead of talking about, uh, you know, the personality driven model
00:30
of history, I want to talk about resources, specifically my favorite resource: food.
00:44
So the story of World War 2 is commonly told as a narrative of good vs. evil, and it is.
00:49
But we can also look at the second world war through the lens of resource allocation, and
00:54
I think if we do it tells a story of both causes of the war and one of the ways that
00:58
it impacted both soldiers and civilians. The presence or absence of food affected everyone
01:04
involved in World War II. In the most stark terms, the absence of food led to the deaths,
01:09
directly or indirectly, of at least 20 million people during those years, as compared to
01:15
19.5 million military deaths.
01:17
Now, of course, both the Nazis and the Japanese were militaristic and expansionist in the
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1930s. And they were both definitely motivated by
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nationalism, but they were also seeking something called autarky.
01:27
You can remember this term by conjuring the feeling one gets near Thanksgiving: “Aw,
01:31
turkey”. You can also remember it when thinking about
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the collapse of the Ottoman Empire: “Aw, Turkey”.
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Anyway, autarky is a form of self sufficiency in a world where, increasingly, people were
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reliant on world trade, and that made nations more and more dependent upon each other to
01:46
meet basic needs. Both Germany and Japan lacked the resources
01:49
within their borders that they needed to build their growing industrial states, and the resource
01:54
that concerned them most was food. And this was a big part of what motivated
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their imperialist expansionism. Like, Hitler talked all the time about expanding
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German territory to acquire “lebensraum,” or living space.
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But what this meant, of course, was agricultural land to feed Germans, that’s what living
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space is really about on Earth. And most Germans of the time remembered the
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blockade during World War I, which had led to acute food shortages.
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For the Nazis, to quote Collingham, “Lebensraum would make Germany truly self-sufficient and
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immune to blockade and this would eventually enable Germany to challenge British and American
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hegemony.” Meanwhile, in Japan the need for food was
02:30
also spurring imperial ambitions. If anything, Japan’s limited space created a sense of
02:35
crisis and made colonies seem necessary. Like Japanese colonies in Korea and Formosa,
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taken in the Sino-Japanese war of 1894-1895, provided 20% of the Japanese domestic rice
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crop by 1935. And then the Great Depression and Japan’s
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growing population made the situation appear even worse and probably led to the decision
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to annex Manchuria after 1931. So the Germans’ plan was to open up Poland,
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and eventually parts of Russia, to German farmers. The Japanese plan was to resettle
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farmers in Manchuria to provide food for the homeland.
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So if the desire for more food was one of the initial causes of World War 2, it also
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shaped the actual strategy of the war. This was especially true with one of the stupidest
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decisions of the war, Hitler’s decision to invade the Soviet Union.
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A German agronomist named Hans Backe put forth something called “the Hunger Plan”, and
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in doing so convinced Hitler that in order to become self-sufficient, Germany had to
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invade the Soviet Union. And everyone knows that you cannot successfully
03:31
invade Russia unless you are the Mongols.
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Anyway, the plan was the Ukraine and western Russia would be transformed into a huge breadbasket
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that would feed both the German armies and German civilians. This was never fully implemented,
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because, you know, the Nazi’s could never successfully nail down all of the territory,
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but Collingham argues that it was a primary motive for Hitler’s disastrous invasion of the USSR.
03:56
And then on the Western front, the so called “Battle of the Atlantic” was largely about
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shipping arms, material, and food from the U.S. to Britain.
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This was incredibly important in the opening years of World War 2. Like, Winston Churchill
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once said that “the Battle of the Atlantic was the dominating factor all through the
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war. Never for one moment could we forget that everything happening elsewhere, on land,
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at sea or in the air, depended ultimately on its outcome.”
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In short, it was Britain’s dependence upon other parts of the world that ultimately made
04:25
it stronger than Germany’s attempts at self-sufficiency. Starvation never became an issue for the Brits,
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but fear of running out of food, especially of running out of food for the troops, led
04:34
to policies that made starvation a reality for many people in British colonies.
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In British Africa, for instance, colonial policy forcing production for the war instead
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of for domestic food consumption meant shortages that were only made worse by wartime inflation.
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Crop failure in Rhodesia in 1942 meant widespread hunger and famine.
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And, in an echo of what happened at the end of the 19th century, World War II and British
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colonial policy spelled disaster for India. Japan had seized Burma in early 1942, cutting
05:02
off 15% of Bengal’s rice supply. And when harvests failed later that year,
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hunger turned to famine. Now, the British could have alleviated the suffering but they were
05:11
afraid to use supply ships that might be needed for the war effort to bring food to starving
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people in India. When you take into account hunger-associated
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diseases, between 1.5 and 3 million Indian civilians died, more than the total number
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of Indian combatants killed in World War 1 AND World War 2 combined.
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In the United States, meanwhile, there was no starvation, but there was some rationing.
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And this was, especially relative to most recent American wars, some shared sacrifice.
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Americans gave up coffee and chocolate so that the troops could be well fed.
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So Americans and Britons hardly suffered from hunger. Neither did the Germans, actually,
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where memories of World War I made feeding the civilian population a top priority.
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Of course, millions of civilians weren’t being fed because they were being murdered
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or worked to death in concentration camps. But in Britain, World War II might have actually
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improved people’s diets. Now, Britons largely despised the whole-meal National Loaf of bread,
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but it was more nutritious than white bread and its flour took up less cargo space.
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It’s amazing to think that British people would dislike good food when there’s so
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much of it in their country. Stan, this is the part where in the comments
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all the British people say, “We are not a country, we’re four separate countries!”
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The “dig for victory” campaign encouraged ordinary people to plant gardens, and so they
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ate more vegetables. Full employment and higher wages meant that working class people also
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had more access to nutritious foods. Also, you know, they had the benefit of Canada
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growing like, a gajillion acres of wheat. Although both the British and the Germans saw
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an overall reduction in caloric intake, it was nothing compared with what was happening
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in the USSR, Japan and China. In Russia, daily caloric intake by the end of the war was half
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of what it had been in 1940. And I will remind you that things were not
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great in 1940 in Russia, because Stalin. The daily caloric ration for Japanese women
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workers fell to 1476 calories, which was bad, but in China, where the corrupt Nationalist army
06:57
was known to sell rice to the Japanese for profit, a famine in Guangdong claimed the
07:02
lives of as many as 1.5 million peasants. And without doubt, much of the civilian suffering
07:07
in the war was related to the massive amounts of food needed to keep soldiers fighting.
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Let’s go to the Thought Bubble.
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In World War 2, the US and Britain made a massive effort to make sure that their soldiers
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were well fed, and for the most part it paid off, even though the food that they got was
07:22
sometimes pretty gross. The British World War I diet of biscuits and bully beef eventually
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gave way to the appetizingly named “composite ration.” American soldiers may have complained
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a lot about their infamous C and K rations, but they were the best fed soldiers in the world, receiving
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a whopping 4,758 calories per day, including meat at every meal, because, you know… America.
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As you can probably guess, Soviet soldiers did not fare so well, especially when the
07:48
Germans invaded because it was their policy to live off the land, which meant scrounging
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as much food from the Russian countryside as they could. German troops weren’t as
07:56
well fed as Americans or the Brits, but they still managed to scarf down a respectable
08:00
4000 calories per day.
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No combat soldiers were as consistently hungry, however, as the Japanese. Japanese soldiers
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were expected to feed themselves and were not provided with field kitchens. Often this
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meant that Japanese soldiers were fueled by little more than rice. And as the war turned
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against them it became more and more difficult for Japanese troops to feed themselves.
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On Guadalcanal the Japanese attempted to re-supply their troops with floating barrels dropped
08:23
from passing ships, but by December 1942 between 120 and 130 soldiers were dying of starvation
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every day. The Japanese commander there estimated that while 5000 of his soldiers died in combat,
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15,000 starved to death. Overall, it’s estimated that more than 1 million of the 1.74 million
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Japanese military deaths were caused by starvation or malnutrition.
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Thanks Thought Bubble. So, a quick look at the history section in your local bookstore
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or an IMDB search will tell you that there are hundreds if not thousands of ways to tell
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the story of World War II. And this is just one history of the war, certainly
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not a definitive one. But examining the role of resources, especially
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food, in the second world war tells a story that has at least one advantage over the narrative
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of the triumph of Allied good over Axis evil. Because it helps us to see that the war was
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not only about the soldiers fighting, and it gives us a window into the way the war
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affected everyone who lived at the time.
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It also allows us to see World War II from a global perspective in a way that focusing
09:20
on strategy or tactics or pivotal battles doesn’t.
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Like very little fighting went on in Sub-Saharan Africa or most of India, but these places
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were deeply affected by the war in ways that don’t often make it into history books.
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Also, we live today in a thoroughly globalized world, but so did the people of the 1930s,
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and it’s very interesting to see some of their responses to it.
09:41
That hyper nationalist idea, that we can take care of ourselves and don’t need help from
09:45
outside, as long as we annex a lot of territory that’s currently outside of us – that idea
09:50
is a response to globalization. But I think history shows us that it’s a
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horrible response. It’s a dangerous business when humans imagine
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others as less, when they think their land needs to become our land so we can feed our
10:03
people. And in that sense at least, you can’t separate
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ideology from resource allocation, and as long as we live in a world of finite resources,
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the potential for conflict will always be there. Knowing that, hopefully, will help
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us to avoid it. Thanks for watching. I’ll see you next week.
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Crash Course is filmed here in the Chad and Stacey Emigholz studio and it’s made with the
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Crash Course so we can continue its mission of keeping it free for everyone forever. So
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thank you for making Crash Course possible, thanks for watching, and as we say in my hometown,
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don’t forget to be awesome.
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This post was previously published on YouTube.
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Photo credit: Screenshot from video.
