By the First World War (1914-18), Army food was basic, but filling. Each soldier could expect around 4,000 calories a day, with tinned rations and hard biscuits staples once again. But their diet also included vegetables, bread and jam, and boiled plum puddings. This was all washed down by copious amounts of tea.
The First World War not only overwhelmed societies, it also revolutionised the diet of European and North American countries. In 1918, 75 million soldiers of the Entente and the Central Powers had to be fed daily, an unprecedented challenge for armies. On the home front, hundreds of millions of civilians, indispensable to the war effort, had to be fed despite shortages. Food was an essential issue in this total war, as food production and distribution were areas where states intervened massively to provide the food essential to the survival of populations. Cutting off the enemy’s food supplies was one of the objectives of economic warfare fought on a global scale. In 1918, the defeat of the Central Powers, strangled by the food shortages, was also rooted in their approach to wartime supplies and the failures of the policies put in place.
This article examines the civil and military issues of food and nutrition within the Entente and the Central Powers during the Great War in the context of longer-term developments in global food issues, with a particular focus on the countries of Europe and North America. However, the current state of research does not allow us to study the Central Powers as thoroughly as the Entente countries. Over the last ten years, studies on economic warfare, logistics, the feeding of soldiers and food aid have contributed a great deal to our knowledge of food and nutrition issues in different countries at war. But much remains to be done, for example concerning the rural world, food markets or the phenomena of food acculturation. Combining global approaches and local case studies would make it possible to move away from the national approaches that still dominate the field.
Starvation as a Weapon↑
Starving the Enemy↑
By 1914, the economies of Western countries were already largely globalised to different degrees. Nearly two-thirds of the British calories were imported from all over the world, while France and Germany produced most of their food, but bought some from abroad. In 1914, Germany imported about 30 percent of its food, including half of its meat, fertilizers and almost all of its vegetable fats. In Belgium, dependence on foreign foodstuffs rose to 80 percent. Some states, being self-sufficient in basic foodstuffs, had to resort to imports from time to time. Others had great regional disparities, such as the Austro-Hungarian Empire, where the Hungarian agrarian periphery supplied a large proportion of Austria’s food. This interdependence was also evident at the local level in many countries, where city dwellers obtained their food from the nearby suburbs, from increasingly specialized agricultural regions, or from abroad. In the 1910s, food security in Western countries depended on a complex logistical system, combining maritime, rail, river and road transport, whose networks were very diversely developed. The United Kingdom’s economy was already oriented toward the world. Two thirds of Germany’s imports were transported by ship, including grain from Russia, the world’s leading exporter of grain prior to 1914, where the transport network, designed for export, would prove unsuitable to deliver food to domestic markets during the war. The Ottoman Empire was still facing regular food crises before 1914, and lacked road and rail infrastructure. The powers that entered the war in 1914 therefore had very different food situations, with more or less marked dependence on exporting countries, some of which were now in the opposite camp.
Even before 1914, starving the enemy became an explicit strategic objective in the context of economic warfare.Winston Churchill (1874-1965), one of its architects and first lord of the admiralty, wrote after the conflict that the shared aim was to “to starve the whole population – men, women, and children, old and young, wounded and sound – into submission”. The outbreak of war in 1914 immediately disrupted traditional supply channels, which were now aligned with military alliances. Only neutral countries, such as Switzerland, the Netherlands, Sweden, or the United States (U.S.) until 1917, continued to supply both sides before the Allies put in place a concerted strategy to starve the Central Powers: firms suspected of trading with the enemy were blacklisted. The Netherlands and Switzerland gradually reduced their trade with Germany. Access to the Allied market was also a means of pressure in negotiations with the neutrals; the French, for example, having committed themselves to buy part of the production of Italian citrus fruits in exchange for its entry into the war alongside the Entente. The strategy of isolating the Central Powers contributed to intensified mobilisation and to the crystallization of the food crisis in these countries from the winter of 1916-1917. On the contrary, France and Great Britain could count on the enormous resources of their empires, while the Allies as a whole surpassed the Central Powers in their ability to mobilise and transport food on a global scale. The deployment of food globalisation to a previously unknown degree was therefore mainly for the benefit of the Allies and was a central element of the extensive mobilisation characteristic of these countries.
As early as the summer of 1914, British naval power put itself at the service of the blockade led by the Allies, the German naval blockade being unable to compete in the long term. The German cruisers were too few in number and subject to too many constraints in terms of coal supplies to succeed in preventing Allied maritime traffic in the long term. The hundreds of thousands of tons of goods sunk by the Germans – more than 500,000 tons per month from 1917 during unrestricted submarine warfare – were not enough to widen the gap with the Allies’ concerted strategy to eliminate German and Austrian ships from the seas. The Allied Maritime Transport Council (AMTC), set up in early 1918, coordinated resources and effectively compensated for port congestion and ship shortages. By the summer of 1918, the Allies were fully benefiting from the entry of the United States into the war and were able to compensate for the tonnage of sunken ships. They also introduced highly efficient convoy shipping to protect the fleet. Thus, while shipping was very much affected by the military context, the advantage turned in 1918 in favour of the Allies, as they decided to maintain the blockade until the end of the Paris Peace Conference in 1919.
The Politics of Hunger: Welfare and Warfare↑
The First World War threatened the food security of populations at war on an unknown scale. The capacity of states to supply both soldiers and civilians was a central issue, posing particular problems for states – such as the Ottoman Empire – that entered the war in 1914 lacking the capacity to feed their populations, and without having anticipated the food constraints and needs of a large-scale conflict. Access to food resources was immediately marked by increasing inequalities on local and national scales, deepening during the conflict and persisting until the 1920s in some countries. The extension of the war beyond the winter of 1914-1915 imposed new constraints on the societies at war as shortages and logistical issues threatened the victory of their own side. Powers operating on large and mobile fronts and lacking transportation networks adapted to the war effort, such as Russia or the Ottoman Empire, faced massive shortages. The ability of states to supply their populations was therefore put to the test in terms of forecasting and regulating food supply and distribution.
Food was therefore a crucial area of intervention for the belligerent states, which implemented supply regulation through requisitioning, price controls, and rationing targeting basic necessities. In most countries, measures were taken to increase production and decrease food consumption. The design of these regulations, however, followed very different logic on the side of the Entente forces and the Central Powers. Among the Entente powers, particularly in France and Great Britain, an integrated economy was set up which, based on principles of equity, did not sacrifice the needs of civilians to satisfy those of soldiers. This testifies to a better understanding of what was at stake in a total war where victory depended on the global mobilisation of societies. In these countries, avoiding food shortages was one of the explicit objectives of increased and early state intervention in the economy. Feeding civilians, the productive force of the nation, was not neglected and the Allies considered food as an essential factor in maintaining social peace and the Union sacrée.
Most countries set up dedicated committees (food boards) to approach the question of provisioning in a global way and adapt to the challenges of an increasingly total war. Much had to be done to compensate for the deterioration of crops (shortage of male workers, farm animals, fertilizers, machinery) and the disruption of food import networks. In France, a Provisioning Department was created within the Ministry of Trade as early as September 1914 before a dedicated ministry was created in December 1916 (Ministère des Travaux publics, des Transports et du Ravitaillement). The U.S. Food Administration, directed by Herbert Hoover (1874-1964), was one of the most important agencies established by the Wilson administration during World War I. In August 1917, the Lever Food and Fuel Act aimed to ensure adequate production, and control the price and supply of food and agricultural feed in the U.S. during the war. It ensured a major extension of federal authority. The effectiveness of such boards, although imperfect, contrasted nevertheless with the agencies set up within the Central Powers. The Habsburg Monarchy failed to establish a supra-national agency for food distribution with adequate executive power. The Joint Food Committee (Gemeinsamer Ernährungsausschuss), formed in early 1917 to ensure coordination between the two parts of the empire was largely powerless. In Germany, the Kriegsernährungsamt (War Food Office) was created in May 1916, later becoming the Reichsernährungsamt (Reich Food Office). But by 1917, the food allocation aimed only to cover about half the daily calories needed by an adult.
The effectiveness of the Allies was particularly noticeable in price control and more broadly in food distribution, allowing their populations – apart from in Italy – to escape the massive black market faced by the Germans and Austrians. Lacking the resources of extra-European empires and foreign capital, Germany and Austria-Hungary had to rely on intensive mobilisation.[11] The food situation deteriorated more rapidly in these countries and rationing affected essential food items earlier. In Germany, the Imperial Grain Authority issued ration cards for bread as early as January 1915. By the time of the “turnip winter” of 1916-1917, both rations and price controls had been implemented for virtually all food items in Germany, as well as for coal and other fuels. But the rations were often so minimal that it wasn’t even worth picking them up. In comparison, the ration card for bread was only introduced in France in 1918 and it was not until 25 February 1918 that rationing was introduced throughout Britain. The measures implemented by the Supreme Army Command in Germany favoured army supplies to the detriment of civilians.
The pressure of economic warfare, the establishment of a segmented economy, and the lack of anticipation and coordination in supply made the measures ineffective, discouraging producers who sold a large part of their production on the black market. One of the signs of the ineffectiveness of these public policies was the number of parcels sent by German soldiers to their families when they had food to share before 1918. The last two years of the war were also characterized, in Germany, by numerous cases of fraud by merchants or theft by the starving population.On the Allied side, food concerns were the subject of joint discussions and measures. The French Wheat Executive set up in November 1916 rapidly served as a model for the many Allied food committees. An Allied maritime transport pool was established in the spring of 1917, which transported 10 million tons of food from July 1917 to July 1918. Despite their imperfections, these structures supported much higher supply capacities than those of the Central Powers. In the context of increased scarcity due to the economic warfare of the Entente, the economic organisation of the Central Powers was unable to cope with the needs of total war and was already overwhelmed at the very moment when Germany relaunched the war of movement on the Western Front in spring 1918. This offensive required resources, coordination, and logistical performance that Germany was no longer in a position to provide by summer 1918.
The adoption of economic interventionism in the Allied countries was accompanied by a reactivation of the moral economy of the early modern age, which proved effective in mobilising people in the long-running war. Coercion through regulation and volunteerism combined on the Allied side to mobilise the population for the food effort. However, it was often achieved under the banner of volunteerism rather than coercion. The call for civic mobilisation took many forms, with an emphasis on patriotism. In the United States, under Herbert Hoover, control of the food supply depended mostly on food conservation as opposed to direct rationing. Saving food through “wheatless days” and pledge cards signed by consumers, the U.S. government used the same method to conserve food as it did to sell war bonds, and both proved successful. By contrast, the German system was a combination of liberalism through the black market, the most powerful instrument of procurement, and control over consumers. The development of the black market in German and Austrian cities thus highlighted the extreme inequality of access to food and fuelled public anger and public demand for urgent action by the state.
Populations at Risk of Famine and Food Aid↑
The situation of certain groups exemplifies the two extremes of food provision during the First World War: the establishment of food aid structures for some, while other groups were deliberately abandoned by the state or even targeted by intentional starvation.
Food shortages had particularly dramatic consequences for the occupied populations. In the combat zones, agricultural land was devastated and unfit for cultivation. France lost one fifth of its cereal production and more than half of its beet production located in the combat zone on the Western Front. The occupied populations were very exposed to food shortages, as the occupied regions were plundered by the enemy, such as in Galicia (by Russians), Romania (by Austrians) or Ukraine (by Austrians and Germans). The French also faced criticism for their food requisitions of cereals from the Greeks, who saw the Allied presence as an occupation. Belgium, occupied since August 1914, was subjected by the Germans to looting and concerted requisitions, for example of livestock. Isolated by the Allied blockade, 9 million Belgians and people of northern France escaped famine only thanks to the intervention of neutral countries within the framework of the Commission for Relief in Belgium (CRB). The commission operated through international purchases, shipping to Europe and control of distribution by local committees. In Belgium, printed cotton sacks of the CRB’s flour were often turned into everyday items or kept as souvenirs of this difficult period, during which people went hungry and survived on food aid and soup kitchens. After mid-1919, the lifting of the blockade and food aid provided by Germany’s former enemies ameliorated German hunger and is credited with the relatively swift recovery of the most severely affected of German children.
The Ottoman Empire was not able to efficiently supply the populations of its huge territory before 1914 and risked starvation by entering the war in October 1914. In addition to the pressure of the British sea blockade, Mount Lebanon was also subject to a land blockade imposed by the Ottoman governor Ahmet Jamal Pasha (1872-1922), which prohibited the province from obtaining supplies from outside. Between 1915 and 1918, a combination of military requisitions, a locust invasion and blockades caused a famine that killed between 120,000 and 200,000 people, a third of the population. Rare photographs taken secretly in 1915 by Ibrahim Naoum Kanaan (1887-1984), director of Mount Lebanon assistance, testified to the horror of the famine.
The deliberate starvation of civilian populations has also been used in genocidal policies targeting particular groups, as in the genocide of Armenians perpetrated by the Turkish authorities from 1915 to 1923. Deprivation of food and water, whether in concentration camps or during death marches in the desert, was central to the genocide which claimed almost 1.5 million victims.
Food aid initiatives set up during the war, in the form of soup kitchens or direct food distribution, helped the most vulnerable populations – children, refugees, forcibly displaced persons, victims of mass violence – for whom it was sometimes the only chance of survival. It persisted after 1919 in Central and Eastern Europe through the now privately funded American Relief Administration European Children’s Fund (ARAECF). Following the tradition of the American humanitarian commitment during the war, it was now also part of the will to fight against the advance of communism.
Feeding 75 Million Soldiers↑
Providing the Calories↑
In 1914, the armies at war had to feed more than 20 million soldiers. In 1918, this figure had risen to 75 million soldiers who had to be fed on a daily basis. The armies, which had not expected to fight a war on such a scale, faced a tremendous challenge, as past experience showed that the management of food was a crucial factor for a victorious campaign. Both the French and the German armies had learned from the Franco-Prussian War in 1870-1871, when the siege of Paris had been a factor in the Prussian victory over the French. Many armies had also used military campaigns and training since the end of the 19th century to define the best rations suitable for soldiers or to test new equipment. The French, British and German armies had settled for rations providing around 3,200 calories a day, up to 4,000 to 4,400 calories in winter or when soldiers were fighting. These were known as field rations or ration forte. But, while medical studies and military archives define the ideal rations due to the soldiers, it is almost impossible to know what they were actually given, as consumption differed according to rank, local supply conditions on the various fronts, the number of parcels sent by families, and the proximity of a civilian market or military cooperatives. One of the main challenges for the current research in this area is to get closer to what the soldiers actually received in their tins, as soldiers’ food was much more diversified than what was provided by the military rations alone.
Field kitchens are an example of the different approaches to food by the armies in 1914. Their use was considered in the German army in the 19th century, but it was the Russian army that was the first to equip itself with them after 1860. The reports made in the 1900s showed their many advantages: an increase of 20 to 30 percent in the endurance of troops on the march was expected after a hot meal, and a significant decrease in the rates of dysentery. “Go and ask men who have been fighting all day or have walked 30 km with 25 kg of luggage to cook their dinner as well! They will eat half raw vegetables, they don’t care, they want to sleep”, complained a French commander before the war. The benefit of field kitchens was recognized by most armies apart from the French, who were not equipped with one in 1914. German field kitchens would thus be sought after war trophies for the French until they were provided with their own in 1915. Their multiple models illustrated the adaptation of military catering to the constraints of the terrain, and how essential services were brought closer to the front line during the war.
Supplies had to cover one of the soldier’s most basic needs, food, and to support morale in a war whose length had not been anticipated. Soup remained the basic element of military rations, along with bread and drink. In all the armies it was recognised that it was the restorative power of these rations that allowed soldiers to bear the fatigue of their job. In the Entente armies, the soup contained a significant amount of meat, up to 500 grams a day, animal proteins being considered an essential fortifier of the soldiers’ constitution. By contrast, the average meat consumption in European civilian societies before 1914 was 150 grams a day, and up to 210 grams in the United States. Military rations lacked fresh produce such as vegetables, fruit and eggs, leading soldiers to buy them from civilians. Water remained the ordinary drink of the soldiers, even if the consumption of wine or beer had the advantage of protecting them from the epidemiological risk attached to dirty water. Often, water supply was a logistical challenge: transported by camel in Egypt, desalinated in ships on the Gallipoli front, and transformed into mineral water on the Argonne front by the Germans. Low-alcohol fermented drinks which accorded to national pre-war consumption were included in the rations, with beer for the German and British troops and wine for the French. The rations also included spirits such as rum, schnapps or eau-de-vie in small quantities. Both forms of alcohol were recognised for their effect on the endurance and morale of the troops and were either distributed as part of the rations (low alcohol content), as “Dutch courage” before going over the top, or as a reward after the fighting, thus promoting discipline and morale.
The war accelerated the shift in consumption away from traditional products to processed food, as the 19th century food industry had already seen the development of the canning industry, concentrated broths or broths in tablets. Herds were impossible to keep near the front, and meat that was already prepared, boned, refrigerated, or canned was better suited to army logistics. The loading of one ship with frozen meat was then equivalent to the loading of ten ships with live cattle. Canned food and frozen cows, sheep, rabbits, and pigs were imported from the United States, Argentina, Australia, and New Zealand, opening up the European market, and particularly the French, to products that were still expensive or not very widespread. The largest supplier of food to the British armed forces during the First World War was the Aberdeen Machonochie Company, manufacturing the “Meat & Veg” tins. They helped to balance the soldiers’ diet and prevent scurvy, providing an alternative to the ubiquitous “bully beef” rations. The introduction of processed foods into soldiers’ diets was thus an important factor in the change in European consumption habits during and after the war. The war thus led to a significant – albeit temporary – increase in the consumption of meat by soldiers from working-class backgrounds.
The needs of armies in the field, on land or at sea have been major vectors of food innovation. Since the 19th century, technical progress had favoured the diversification of military rations, which were essential to the morale of soldiers fighting far from home. However, it was not until the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871) that the French army adopted canned food, invented as early as 1795. Another example of the innovations promoted by military needs was the Soyer stove, a light field cooker which accompanied the British armies in the First World War. Light, resilient, and easy to clean, it could heat up to 45 litres of soup, cook bread or roast meat. Versatile, it could use coal, wood or camel dung as fuel. The headquarters of the British Royal Logistics Corps still bears the name “Soyer’s house” in memory of his action to improve the soldier’s ordinary life.
To cope with emergencies – disruption of supply lines, distance from logistical bases – soldiers were provided with reserve food, such as canned food, war biscuits, and water flasks. Compact and light, with a long shelf life, hence its nickname “hard tack”, the war biscuit (or war bread) met the practical requirements of field supply. Hundreds of millions of units were produced during the First World War, for example by the London firm Huntley & Palmers for the British Army. Such provisions did not always prevent failures, such as in Mesopotamia, where the local climatic conditions combined with a logistical disaster created a breakdown in the quantity and quality of food supplied to the soldiers. As the British Army failed to provide fresh food, many sepoys suffered from deficiency diseases, such as scurvy. During the siege of Kut-el-Amara from December 1915 to April 1916, the logistical base was 400 kilometres south and both the British and the sepoys were depending on iron rations, made of biscuit and bully beef or mutton. Cases of deficiency diseases rose, exacerbated by the fact that the British had been scrimping on the sepoys’ rations, which represented four times less than those of British soldiers. In six months, 11,000 Indian soldiers, exhausted by deprivation, fell victim to scurvy in Kut-el-Amara. In The Lord of the Rings, the Lembas Elven bread that saved Frodo and Sam from hunger during their trip to Mordor is reminiscent of the role played by war biscuits in the survival of thousands of soldiers during the Great War, as J. R. R. Tolkien (1892-1973) experienced himself.
Army cooks capable of improving the regular diet by cooking rations, especially canned meat, were valuable assets for the units’ morale. Some mastered the use of wild plants or finding rare products. Exchanging recipes, on-the-job training and even cookery competitions allowed many of them to improve their skills as the conflict progressed. Combatants’ testimonies (memoirs, trench newspapers) praised or taunted this figure of front-line food culture, as in the French trench newspaper Rigolboche in February 1917:
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