—
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.
—
—
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
00:04
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
00:24
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
01:21
1930s. And they were both definitely motivated by
01:24
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
01:33
the collapse of the Ottoman Empire: “Aw, Turkey”.
01:36
Anyway, autarky is a form of self sufficiency in a world where, increasingly, people were
01:41
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
01:58
their imperialist expansionism. Like, Hitler talked all the time about expanding
02:02
German territory to acquire “lebensraum,” or living space.
02:06
But what this meant, of course, was agricultural land to feed Germans, that’s what living
02:11
space is really about on Earth. And most Germans of the time remembered the
02:15
blockade during World War I, which had led to acute food shortages.
02:18
For the Nazis, to quote Collingham, “Lebensraum would make Germany truly self-sufficient and
02:23
immune to blockade and this would eventually enable Germany to challenge British and American
02:28
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,
02:40
taken in the Sino-Japanese war of 1894-1895, provided 20% of the Japanese domestic rice
02:46
crop by 1935. And then the Great Depression and Japan’s
02:49
growing population made the situation appear even worse and probably led to the decision
02:54
to annex Manchuria after 1931. So the Germans’ plan was to open up Poland,
02:58
and eventually parts of Russia, to German farmers. The Japanese plan was to resettle
03:03
farmers in Manchuria to provide food for the homeland.
03:06
So if the desire for more food was one of the initial causes of World War 2, it also
03:09
shaped the actual strategy of the war. This was especially true with one of the stupidest
03:14
decisions of the war, Hitler’s decision to invade the Soviet Union.
03:17
A German agronomist named Hans Backe put forth something called “the Hunger Plan”, and
03:21
in doing so convinced Hitler that in order to become self-sufficient, Germany had to
03:26
invade the Soviet Union. And everyone knows that you cannot successfully
03:31
invade Russia unless you are the Mongols.
03:37
Anyway, the plan was the Ukraine and western Russia would be transformed into a huge breadbasket
03:42
that would feed both the German armies and German civilians. This was never fully implemented,
03:47
because, you know, the Nazi’s could never successfully nail down all of the territory,
03:51
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
04:00
shipping arms, material, and food from the U.S. to Britain.
04:03
This was incredibly important in the opening years of World War 2. Like, Winston Churchill
04:07
once said that “the Battle of the Atlantic was the dominating factor all through the
04:11
war. Never for one moment could we forget that everything happening elsewhere, on land,
04:16
at sea or in the air, depended ultimately on its outcome.”
04:21
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,
04:30
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.
04:39
In British Africa, for instance, colonial policy forcing production for the war instead
04:43
of for domestic food consumption meant shortages that were only made worse by wartime inflation.
04:48
Crop failure in Rhodesia in 1942 meant widespread hunger and famine.
04:53
And, in an echo of what happened at the end of the 19th century, World War II and British
04:56
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,
05:06
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
05:15
people in India. When you take into account hunger-associated
05:18
diseases, between 1.5 and 3 million Indian civilians died, more than the total number
05:24
of Indian combatants killed in World War 1 AND World War 2 combined.
05:28
In the United States, meanwhile, there was no starvation, but there was some rationing.
05:33
And this was, especially relative to most recent American wars, some shared sacrifice.
05:37
Americans gave up coffee and chocolate so that the troops could be well fed.
05:41
So Americans and Britons hardly suffered from hunger. Neither did the Germans, actually,
05:45
where memories of World War I made feeding the civilian population a top priority.
05:49
Of course, millions of civilians weren’t being fed because they were being murdered
05:53
or worked to death in concentration camps. But in Britain, World War II might have actually
05:57
improved people’s diets. Now, Britons largely despised the whole-meal National Loaf of bread,
06:02
but it was more nutritious than white bread and its flour took up less cargo space.
06:06
It’s amazing to think that British people would dislike good food when there’s so
06:10
much of it in their country. Stan, this is the part where in the comments
06:12
all the British people say, “We are not a country, we’re four separate countries!”
06:16
The “dig for victory” campaign encouraged ordinary people to plant gardens, and so they
06:20
ate more vegetables. Full employment and higher wages meant that working class people also
06:24
had more access to nutritious foods. Also, you know, they had the benefit of Canada
06:28
growing like, a gajillion acres of wheat. Although both the British and the Germans saw
06:32
an overall reduction in caloric intake, it was nothing compared with what was happening
06:36
in the USSR, Japan and China. In Russia, daily caloric intake by the end of the war was half
06:43
of what it had been in 1940. And I will remind you that things were not
06:46
great in 1940 in Russia, because Stalin. The daily caloric ration for Japanese women
06:52
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.
07:12
Let’s go to the Thought Bubble.
07:14
In World War 2, the US and Britain made a massive effort to make sure that their soldiers
07:17
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
07:26
gave way to the appetizingly named “composite ration.” American soldiers may have complained
07:31
a lot about their infamous C and K rations, but they were the best fed soldiers in the world, receiving
07:36
a whopping 4,758 calories per day, including meat at every meal, because, you know… America.
07:45
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
07:52
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.
08:02
No combat soldiers were as consistently hungry, however, as the Japanese. Japanese soldiers
08:07
were expected to feed themselves and were not provided with field kitchens. Often this
08:11
meant that Japanese soldiers were fueled by little more than rice. And as the war turned
08:15
against them it became more and more difficult for Japanese troops to feed themselves.
08:19
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
08:29
every day. The Japanese commander there estimated that while 5000 of his soldiers died in combat,
08:35
15,000 starved to death. Overall, it’s estimated that more than 1 million of the 1.74 million
08:41
Japanese military deaths were caused by starvation or malnutrition.
08:45
Thanks Thought Bubble. So, a quick look at the history section in your local bookstore
08:49
or an IMDB search will tell you that there are hundreds if not thousands of ways to tell
08:54
the story of World War II. And this is just one history of the war, certainly
08:57
not a definitive one. But examining the role of resources, especially
09:01
food, in the second world war tells a story that has at least one advantage over the narrative
09:05
of the triumph of Allied good over Axis evil. Because it helps us to see that the war was
09:10
not only about the soldiers fighting, and it gives us a window into the way the war
09:14
affected everyone who lived at the time.
09:16
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.
09:23
Like very little fighting went on in Sub-Saharan Africa or most of India, but these places
09:28
were deeply affected by the war in ways that don’t often make it into history books.
09:32
Also, we live today in a thoroughly globalized world, but so did the people of the 1930s,
09:37
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
09:54
horrible response. It’s a dangerous business when humans imagine
09:57
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
10:06
ideology from resource allocation, and as long as we live in a world of finite resources,
10:11
the potential for conflict will always be there. Knowing that, hopefully, will help
10:16
us to avoid it. Thanks for watching. I’ll see you next week.
10:19
Crash Course is filmed here in the Chad and Stacey Emigholz studio and it’s made with the
10:23
help of all of these nice people and also with the help of our Subbable subscribers.
10:27
Subbable is a voluntary subscription service that allows you to contribute directly to
10:31
Crash Course so we can continue its mission of keeping it free for everyone forever. So
10:36
thank you for making Crash Course possible, thanks for watching, and as we say in my hometown,
10:40
don’t forget to be awesome.
—
This post was previously published on YouTube.
—
Photo credit: Screenshot from video.