Home Front
IN GERMANY, the war had descended on the Third Reich like a shroud. The campaign in Poland had been brought to a swift and decisive conclusion but by Christmas any hopes that the West could be brought to the peace table seemed to have evaporated. For the fifteen-year-old Margarete Dos, war had already changed her life irrevocably. A keen athlete, she had dreamed of representing Germany in the 1940 Olympiad, but that would never happen; there could be no Olympic Games now that war had broken out.
Margarete lived in Charlottenburg in Berlin with her mother, younger brother, Dieter, and her stepfather, Karl Spaeth, a veteran of the last war and now a staff officer at Kriegsmarine headquarters. Despite his position, one of the first direct effects of the war was the requisitioning of their family car – Oberst Adolf von Schell needed it for the war effort. Some men from the SS came to collect it, and while they offered compensation, the men pointed out that since the family would no longer be able to purchase fuel, there was no point in keeping it in any case.
A blackout had been imposed immediately and everywhere were posters saying ‘THE ENEMY SEES YOU. PUT OUT YOUR LIGHT.’ In their home, Margarete and her family put up blackout curtains and blinds across all the windows. Even along Unter den Linden, the most famous thoroughfare in Berlin, camouflage netting was now spread from one side of the street to the other, so that they seemed to be walking the length of a huge tent.
Margarete did not mind so much about the car – she had her bicycle and there were the U-Bahn and S-Bahn in any case – and nor was she so bothered about the blackout. She did mind, however, about the rationing, which was severe and had begun in August. They were allowed margarine but not butter, meat was rationed and so too was bread, that most basic staple. All cereals, fats, cheese, milk, sugar and eggs were rationed. Thin tasteless broth became a staple. Ration cards with tear-off coupons called Essensmarken were not just for meat and bread, but also for soap and clothing. They were colour-coded – such as red for bread – and valid for twenty-eight days, which meant the authorities could alter the rations from month to month. Rationing of clothes, with further different-coloured cards, was also quite stringent – Germany produced no cotton, while wool was scarce and there were still incredibly elaborate military uniforms to make. For a beautiful young girl like Margarete, just emerging into young womanhood, clothes rationing was depressing. ‘Our clothes were always too small or too large, or very ragged,’ she noted, ‘and our shoes never fit . . . my toes grew crooked, my feet always hurt.’ And almost everything was brown – her pullovers, her skirts, her shoes.
Margarete found it all unsettling, not just because food and other items were rationed, but rather because it was often inconsistent. Sometimes there was almost nothing even with the ration coupons, then there would suddenly be plenty of a particular type of fruit. Bread changed too – other ingredients were added. Sometimes there would be no bread either. Coffee also vanished and was replaced by Ersatzkaffee, made from chicory and burnt wheat grains. ‘Muckefuck’ was the name it was given. Margarete hated it.
In fact, the Nazis had tried to prepare for the twin problems of fighting a war and still feeding the nation adequately. State agriculture was run by the Department of Food and Agriculture – the Reichsnährstand, or RNS – and led by Walther Darré, an early Nazi and friend of Hitler’s. In many ways, the origins of the Nazi fantasy of a ‘master race’ came from Darré, who was obsessed not only with agriculture but also with selective breeding. Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, was particularly taken with Darré’s philosophy of ‘blood and soil’ and looking after the German farmer, whom he viewed as being the essence of the Nordic race; Himmler himself had dabbled at being a chicken farmer after taking a degree in agriculture.
The Nazis had realized they needed to deal with agriculture and the potential problems of feeding both the nation and armed services from the outset, although this was just another of the economic headaches facing them. The big problem was that balance of payments continually plagued them. To rearm, they had to import raw materials because they lacked their own. However, because those arms were for their own use they could not then be exported, which would have provided them with much-needed foreign cash. In other words, lots of German money was going out, but not much was coming in. One way of keeping the amount of overseas spending down was to import less food and depend more heavily on home production. Consequently, to the Nazis, the German farmer had a critical role to play in aiding rearmament.
The Germans liked to give many of their state projects martial overtones. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, there had been the ‘war on nature’ in which Germany had battled to straighten untidy rivers like the Rhine or improve the flow of water to growing industrial conurbations with huge dam projects. In November 1934, Herbert Backe, a Nazi agrarian technocrat, launched the ‘Battle of Production’ (Erzeugungsschlacht). While there was never any question of becoming entirely self-sufficient, the Battle of Production was designed to maximize domestic output and certainly greatly improve what was being achieved at the time.
The big areas for improvement were not in cereals, in which Germany was already self-sufficient, but in animal feedstuffs and fats, as well as some raw materials, which led to an increase in fibre-bearing plants. The Battle of Production was launched with a massive PR campaign – German farmers were to be persuaded not compelled; Darré was convinced that appealing to German honour and national pride was the way to go. Unfortunately for Darré and Backe, however, the Battle of Production could hardly have got off to a worse start. Two bad harvests in a row meant an increase not a decrease in food imports, while other measures mismanaged by the RNS compounded the problems. One was asking farmers to surrender 70 per cent of their rye harvest, which would normally be used for animal feed, in return for imported barley. Most farmers understandably thought it was a whole load of unnecessary hassle to give up one crop in return for another that was meant for the same purpose. The net result was a bad shortage of domestic fodder. The Battle of Production had not gained very much ground.
Supervision of farmers became tighter again with the start of the Four-Year Plan in 1936. From then on, every farmer with a farm of 12.5 acres or more had to have a record card. Recording and issuing these was an exhausting process because there were more than two million farm holdings that fell into this category, accounting for 90 per cent of all farmland in Germany. In other words, there were way too many farms to ever make German agriculture truly efficient. The size of these small farms made the introduction of mechanization quite difficult – although another problem was the decidedly small motor industry in Germany. By 1939, Germany had just one tractor for every 1,000 acres; in Britain, that figure was just over 300 acres. In truth, there wasn’t much the Nazis could do without investing heavily in farm machinery – which was out of the question – or without radically altering the nature of German farming from lots of small-scale holdings to much larger enterprises. This would have gone against Nazi ideology, and in any case would have taken too long to implement, so it was equally a non-starter. So food production was going to continue to be a problem, with no obvious major solution in sight other than creating Lebensraum – living space. Another term for it was colonization, or territorial expansion.
In fact, rather than gaining extra farmland, rural Germany lost some one million acres due to the construction of the Siegfried Line along the country’s western border, and further land was lost to the autobahn project that involved the construction of dual-lane roadways linking the major cities; by 1939, there were 3,500 kilometres of autobahns, most of which passed through agricultural land. Since the Germans had very few cars and most military traffic travelled by rail, they were rather pointless, although they had been designed originally with the idea of transporting some 300,000 troops from east to west Germany in forty-eight hours. Nor were they particularly an answer to unemployment since rearmament had taken care of that already. They were opened, however, with another major PR drive and certainly made Germany appear very modern and forward-thinking.
Yet more farmland was taken away by state requisition for both military training areas and for the growth of industry. This loss of land, of course, had an effect on production. It was one of the ironies of Nazi Germany that the Battle of Production on the land was, above all, designed to help rearmament, and yet rearmament was now hindering the farmers’ ability to provide that help.
The only real way, then, to improve production within Germany itself was to use more fertilizers. This the RNS managed to implement fairly successfully, largely by making prices cheaper; between 1933 and 1939, fertilizer use rose by a third and home production did rise, albeit not substantially. As it happened, Germany was already 81 per cent self-sufficient by 1936, and this rose to 83 per cent by 1939. However, imports had also grown in that time, by about a quarter, which meant that overall, since the Nazis had come to power in 1933, self-sufficiency had risen by only 3 per cent, which was clearly not a huge amount. The other big problem that had not been addressed was fodder for animals. Germany ate proportionally more pork than any other country, but the problem with pigs was that they competed with humans for foodstuffs, in contrast to sheep, which ate grass.
The solution was to reduce the number of pigs, but that then meant less fat was available, which in turn meant people ate more sugar beet and potatoes; this in turn led to less fodder for what pigs there were. British people, on the other hand, ate a higher proportion of mutton, which was a more practical meat source because sheep only required grass and their wool could be made into uniforms. In fact, the figures for pigs and sheep were almost mirror opposites of those in Britain: Germany had 4 million sheep in 1937; Britain had 4 million pigs; Germany had 23 million pigs, Britain 24.5 million sheep. But national eating characteristics cannot be easily changed.
With the outbreak of war and the immediate imposition of a blockade by Britain and France, maximizing the home production of food was now even more essential. Even so, there were some reasonable grain reserves, ration cards had already been printed back in 1937, yields were on the up, and the country was virtually self-sufficient in grain, potatoes and sugar. Margarete Dos may have found the onset of rationing discomforting, and may have spent days at a time feeling hungry, but no one in Germany was starving yet, despite these hardships.
However, even though the current food situation was reasonably satisfactory, it didn’t take much to realize that ahead lay trouble, as Walter Darré was all too aware. Wartime conscription and rearmament were taking men from the land, while fuel would be in shorter supply, as would the chemicals to make fertilizers – chemicals that were also used in military production. Back in February, Darré told a group of troop commanders that food was the most urgent problem facing Germany. He had a point.
Food, then – that essential component of war – was just one more of the many factors informing Hitler’s war plans, and, as with everything else, it pointed to one thing: the need for a short, sharp and decisive battle with the Western powers. There really was no alternative with Hitler and the Nazis in power. The West would never trust them and nor would the USSR, mutually beneficial pacts notwithstanding. Yet nor could Nazi Germany solve those shortages of resources – those barriers to rising German strength – without military conquest. Clearly, wars of plunder could, in theory, kill two birds with one stone: by taking land by force, the Reich could grab the resources it needed while at the same time neutralizing the threat from its neighbours. It was, of course, a high-risk strategy, but one that slotted in neatly with Hitler’s mindset as the arch-gambler. If it worked, and the German nation rose to the challenge, then there would be a Thousand-Year Reich. If it failed, then Germany did not deserve to rise again.
Just when Hitler realized a European war was inevitable is not clear, although he had certainly begun to shape his plans several years earlier. Back in November 1937, at a meeting called to discuss Raeder’s complaints that the Kriegsmarine was not getting a large enough share of steel and other raw-material allocations, the Führer had decided instead to outline his expansionist policies to Raeder, Göring, General Werner von Fritsch and Baron Konstantin von Neurath, the last two being chief of the Army and the Foreign Minister at the time. He pointed out that Germany had neither enough food nor a strong enough economy as things stood, and that therefore they would have to plunder what they lacked by force – and sooner rather than later before France and Britain became too strong militarily. ‘German policy,’ noted Oberst Friedrich Hossbach, writing the minutes of the meeting, ‘had to reckon with two hate-inspired antagonists, Britain and France, to whom a German colossus in the centre of Europe was a thorn in the flesh.’
It was with this in mind that Hitler had marched into Austria and then Czechoslovakia, overrunning potential enemies and absorbing both territory and resources into the Greater Reich. Poland had been part of the same plan. Britain and France had declared war, but that was fine by Hitler: soon would come the moment of truth. He would turn his armies on both and defeat them both, and then his hand would be free to build up Germany’s strength further, enriched as the Reich would be by European space and plunder. And then, with the West subdued and Germany’s neighbours vanquished, he could turn East.
That was all very well, but in the meantime Berliners like Margarete Dos and her family were hoping – and believing – the war would be over soon. Christmas had lacked its normal magic as dancing halls had been shut down, bars and restaurants were no longer allowed to stay open late, and while shop windows were still twinkling with an array of tantalizing goods, most of it was just for show rather than for sale.
Coal, too, was rationed – needed for industrial processes and for running the trains rather than people’s homes, and it was a particularly cold winter – the coldest in decades right across Europe. Margarete had heard that a man had been found frozen to death in the street. On New Year’s Eve, her mother had sent her to see Herr Strichler, who owned a restaurant with a Biergarten across the street. Wrapping up as warmly as she could, she headed out into the snow. She liked Herr Strichler, who always seemed cheery and liked to talk. He pointed out one of the many placards that had been put up around the city: ‘NO ONE SHALL BE HUNGRY. NO ONE SHALL FREEZE.’ ‘Now we’re not even allowed to be hungry any more!’ he told her.
In France, despite the cold, they were not going hungry, even though farming was as troubled in France as elsewhere in Europe. The tradition of the French peasant farmer was, as in Germany, deeply rooted, but agriculture and its farming community had taken a battering during the 1930s. Thanks to Napoleonic inheritance laws, the majority of farms were small family affairs that had embraced neither investment nor modern technology. France as a whole may have been highly automotive, but farmers tended not to be. There were exceptions, however. Around the Paris basin and the wide, open arable land of the north, large, modern and vibrant farms produced large amounts of wheat. The battlefields of the last war, for example, had received massive reinvestment and had become more productive than ever. The problem was that throughout the 1930s wheat prices tumbled, partly because of the wider global depression and partly because as other foods became more accessible, so the French were eating less bread. The harvests of 1932 and 1933 were the best ever, yet rather than being good news for farmers, this was a disaster, even with a protected home market. France simply had too much grain. It was drowning in it. Farm spokesmen – and farmers were always volubly represented – reckoned that wheat should be sold at no less than 300 francs per quintal (100 kilograms). By 1930, they were getting just 147 francs, and by 1935 it had plummeted to 70 francs.
Most other farm products suffered similarly. Wine sales dropped drastically. It was both economically and emotionally a key product, yet American prohibition, cheap Algerian wine and an earlier Phylloxera epidemic had hit the industry very hard indeed, so that wine producers could not even benefit from one of the most perfect ever grape harvests in 1933. The meat market also suffered thanks to cheaper refrigerated imports and an outbreak of bovine TB, which prompted the lucrative British market to stop all French imports. Milk prices also collapsed. Seventy-eight per cent of French milk came from small producers, but consumption by the mid-thirties was 75 per cent lower than it had been before the last war.
Many farmers believed their way of life was dying out. Successive governments – and there were a staggering thirteen between 1930 and 1934 alone – tried to help ameliorate this agrarian collapse but if anything made the situation worse. Another factor in the malaise was that proportionally more young French farmers had been killed in the last war than any other part of the population.
Thus by the outbreak of war French farming appeared to be in terminal decline. War, however, promised to change that. Food imports were reduced and both the nation as a whole and its armed services needed feeding. In times of war, an abundance of grain and milk – which also provided fats – was just what was needed. Henri Queuille, the Minister for Agriculture, made considerable play of not introducing rationing – unlike both Britain and Germany. In this, Queuille had Daladier’s backing, but there were plenty in the government who disagreed with the policy, and not least the Finance Minister, Paul Reynaud, who thought it a highly dangerous policy. In a long war, he argued, stocks needed to be preserved, not frittered on peacetime levels of consumption; he had a point.
None the less, few of the population were complaining. In the freezing cold of winter, most were grateful there was at least food on the table.
On the Normandy coast at Deauville, the beautiful French film star Corinne Luchaire had been sitting out the autumn and onset of winter. Still only eighteen, she was one of the most famous women in France, but after making two films earlier in the year she had been invited by her father to join him in the fashionable Normandy resort. Throughout much of August, she had partied hard, making friendships with English peers, having an affair with the Aga Khan’s son, Ali Khan, and living the gay, carefree life of the rich. Even with the declaration of war, it seemed initially as though not much would change. ‘War was just an accident,’ she wrote. ‘Everybody thought it was going to be very short.’ Restaurants, dancing clubs and the casinos all stayed open. The biggest change was the requisitioning of her hotel, the Normandy, to become a hospital. Corinne and her father moved into an empty villa with some friends and spent the next few weeks smoking, drinking and playing cards. There was no mobilization for them.
Corinne had been born to artistic, socially well-connected parents. Her mother was a painter, while her father, Jean Luchaire, was a successful political journalist and editor of a weekly newspaper, Notre Temps, and her grandfather was an acclaimed playwright. But although her first years were spent in bohemian Parisian society, she had also spent time in Germany as a young girl when her mother began an affair with a German politician, Gustav Stresemann. There were also visits to Florence, where her grandfather had a house, and throughout her childhood she constantly met a large number of artists, politicians and writers – men like Kurt Freiherr von Schröder, the German financier, and Otto Abetz, the German Ambassador to France and later secretary to von Ribbentrop. She was also well acquainted with Paul Reynaud and the right-wing Pierre Laval. Otto Abetz had married her father’s secretary, but to Corinne they were just friends of her parents – friends that gave her dolls or puppets. She was particularly close to her father (who had only been seventeen himself when she had been born), and he liked to take her with him whenever he could. Once he had taken her along to a conference with President Poincaré. When the President arrived earlier than expected, Corinne’s father hid her under the conference table. All had been well until Corinne had become bored and grasped the President’s leg, thinking it was her father’s. Poincaré had not been amused.
Beautiful and precocious, and given excessive freedom by her parents, she had left school at fourteen and enrolled in Raymond Rouleau’s School of Dramatic Art, and although she was not much good as an actress to begin with, she persevered and after doing well in a stage performance of one of her grandfather’s plays, she was cast in her first film at just fifteen. It was the movie Prison sans barreaux, filmed a year later, that made her a star, however. ‘At that time,’ she noted, ‘I didn’t question the easy life I had thanks to money and fame. I was fully confident in my future. Nothing could happen to me but happiness.’
A couple of years later, a string of failed affairs behind her and with war grinding the French movie industry to a temporary halt, life wasn’t quite so blissful as it had been. By Christmas, she was finally back in Paris, doing her bit for the war by holding parties for British and French pilots and taking them out to nightclubs; in the French capital, there may have been a blackout, but the champagne still flowed, cars still ran, and there was no sign yet of any rationing.
In Britain, food production was an equally pressing problem, not least because British agriculture was in apparently terminal decline and because more than 70 per cent of all food was imported, whether it be for human or animal consumption. In effect, an industrial nation that had neglected its countryside had to be saved from possible famine. Britain was not preparing for a short, sharp war but, rather, a long battle of attrition and in that scenario shipping was going to be at a premium and needed for transporting crucial war materiel rather than food. Somehow, some way, British farmers needed to pull their collective fingers out and create a very dramatic farming revolution – one which meant that much food for consumption became home-reared rather than imported from overseas. A figure of between 80 and 90 per cent home-produced food – like Germany – was needed and in swift order. It was a massive challenge.
‘So once again in a time of national danger,’ scribbled Arthur ‘A. G.’ Street, on 8 September 1940, ‘our industry of farming is to be transformed from Cinderella, not into a fairy queen, but into Britain’s fourth line of defence.’ He was aware that the BBC had started referring to the Air Raid Precautions, or ARP, as Britain’s fourth line of defence after the Army, Navy and Air Force, but A. G. was insistent that it was farming which deserved that moniker. ‘After all,’ he added, ‘what is the good of starving to death in an air raid shelter? Better to die outside with a full belly.’
British farming had been in the doldrums since the 1870s as Britain’s global reach extended further with the advent of free trade; the policy had been to export high-end goods in return for cheap food and raw materials. Suddenly, wheat was flooding into Britain, grown more cheaply in the wide expanses of North America, while refrigeration meant meat could be sailed from the Argentine and even New Zealand on the far side of the world. Since the 1890s, the worst of the decline was past, but there had been only a temporary recovery during the last war when, as food imports had fallen, so agricultural prices at home had risen. A poor harvest in 1916 and the German policy of unrestricted submarine warfare meant the new Lloyd George government had needed to act swiftly. County Agricultural Executive Committees had been established to oversee the ploughing up of grassland and take possession of poorly run farms. Guaranteed prices had been set for cereals and potatoes.
It did not last, however, and by 1921 guaranteed fixed prices were dropped and farmers were once again left to fend for themselves. With livestock sold, cereal prices falling, losses in the workforce and the break-up of many country estates, farming declined once more. By the late 1930s, British farming had reached its nadir. Hedgerows had grown wild, large parts of the landscape lay fallow and had reverted to scrub, decrepit barns dotted farmsteads, and yards were filled with abandoned carts and agricultural equipment. Large numbers of estates had been sold during the twenties and thirties, tenant farmers were disappearing, and owner-occupiers were going bust on an almost weekly basis. Those that remained were feeling besieged, unwanted and increasingly bitter. By 1939, the amount of land under the plough had been reduced to two-thirds of what it had been in 1801 and there were 25 per cent fewer farm workers.
Most farms were less than a hundred acres and were livestock rather than arable. Nor was there much sign of modernization. Despite the advent of tractors and other modern machinery, fewer than one in six farms had a single tractor by 1939. While this was a far higher figure than that of Germany, it was none the less considerably below Britain’s potential levels of agricultural mechanization. Crop yields were much the same as they had been fifty years earlier. This meant that by 1939 just 12 per cent of wheat and flour was home-grown, while just 16 per cent of sugar, oils and fats, and 9 per cent of butter came from British farms. Admittedly, 50 per cent of meat was home-reared, but 8.75 million tons of feedstuffs were imported to feed British livestock. In all, around a third of all imports were food. And that was way too high a figure now that Britain was at war.
Of course, it wasn’t doom and gloom for all British farmers, and some regions had done better than others. The biggest single agricultural product consumed at home was milk – some 94 per cent was home-produced – so the dairy farmers of the south-west were doing better than most. A. G. Street, who had a farm at Wilton in south-west Wiltshire, was a progressive farmer always on the look-out for new schemes and farming methods, and had adopted the Hosier milking system. This was a mobile milking unit that enabled seventy cows to be milked at once out in the open air. It was a great success, but rather depended on the better southern climate. Even so, A. G. supplemented his income not only by writing books, but also by running his own milk-round in Salisbury throughout much of the 1930s. Like most farmers, he worked nearly all day, every day of the week.
And Street was a success, the more so after his first book, Farmer’s Glory, published in 1932, had become an overnight hit. More tomes had followed, and with them came demands to lecture and speak and even advise on rural matters. Despite all this, the Streets were never more than comfortable; his daughter, Pamela, went to a local private school, but it was a struggle to pay the fees. Ditchampton Farm was a lovely spot, but the farmhouse was hardly a mansion and there were few luxuries. Farming was tough, even when you were doing well.
Admiral Dönitz was fully aware of how dependent Britain was on imported food, and had assessed that his U-boats needed to sink around half a million tonnes of shipping per month. If they were successful, within a year, he reckoned, Britain would be brought to the point of starvation. ‘No weapon ever invented,’ wrote the author and poet Laurie Lee, ‘is more deadly than hunger.’ It was all very well Britain rearming and having access to resources from all around the globe, but if the British people could not be fed, it was all for naught, as farmers like A. G. Street were all too aware.
But so too was the government, and despite the rural decline, considerable thought had been given to this potential problem should war erupt once more. In 1935, the then Minister of Agriculture, Walter Elliott, had set up a committee to investigate how farming might be organized in the event of war. Among its recommendations were the reconstitution of the County Agricultural Committees. These had worked well in the last war, and were based on the principle that local farmers were best placed to implement state directives in their regions as they not only knew the soils and best local farming practices, but invariably knew the other farmers in the region too. The following year, a provisional list of chairmen, executive officers and secretaries was agreed should the War Executive Agricultural Committees – as they were to be called – need to be enacted.
Further steps were taken. A new Agricultural Act was passed in 1937, offering grants to farmers to buy crucial fertilizers such as lime and basic slag and to invest in land drainage; it was part of an effort to increase the badly neglected fertility of the land. By the spring of 1939, the new Minister for Agriculture, Sir Reginald Dorman-Smith, was buying large stockpiles of phosphates, oil seeds, cereal feeds and even tractors. Stocks of other foodstuffs were also built up, and Dorman-Smith instigated a renewed ploughing-up campaign with an incentive of £2 for every acre of permanent pasture turned over to arable, a sum in 1939 that was not to be sniffed at. There were also financial incentives for growing barley and oats to replace imported animal feed. Manpower was also protected as farming was considered a reserve occupation.
In addition to these measures, at the end of August 1939, the Minister of Agriculture was given full powers to control and direct food production, including, most controversially, the authority to requisition any farm or terminate any tenancy where land was being neglected or farming practices were unnecessarily poor. The Ministry was also attempting to dramatically increase mechanization on farms, not least with a big rise in the number of tractors. The American company Ford had opened a 66-acre site in Dagenham in Essex back in 1932. Six years later, Ford offered to increase production to eighty tractors a day within three months with the help of government financing. This was initially turned down, but as other measures were being put in place a deal was struck, with Ford agreeing to increase production and to keep 3,000 in reserve should war break out. The Fordson Model N was not the best tractor around, but it was the only one being mass-produced, and in the government’s new drive to increase food production that was what mattered.
The War Agricultural Executive Committees were also enabled and could begin their work immediately, as those on each of the county committees had already been appointed and begun work in readiness. Wiltshire’s War Ag – as they immediately became known – was made up of highly respectable farmers, squires and yeomen. A. G. Street broadly approved of the choice and certainly the principle – he thought it made perfect sense that those who knew the local conditions and capabilities of the land were best placed to prepare Wiltshire for the 1940 harvest. ‘In this instance,’ he noted, ‘decentralisation has already scored a notable triumph.’
With the outbreak of war, Britain did at least, then, have measures in place to attempt the dramatic increase in home food production that was urgently needed. Now that war had come, farmers were asked to plough up a further million acres of grassland. It had to be this way. During peacetime, people wanted fresh meat, fresh milk, fresh eggs, fresh vegetables and fresh fruit. Now, however, what was needed above all was grain and potatoes – after all, it was possible to feed a great deal more on bread than on the eggs produced by feeding that same grain to hens.
Britain was fortunate to have so much grassland that could be ploughed up. None the less, A. G. Street was conscious that this was asking a lot of many farmers, who would now have to alter farming systems and reduce livestock, which would add a significant layer of work and worry. Many still did not have the mechanical equipment, horses or labour to tackle this sudden demand for more acreage. Street himself had lost his foreman, Charlie Noble, who, as a territorial, had answered the call to arms, while at the same time his family was suddenly inundated with evacuees. All across Britain, between the end of June and the first week of September, some 3.5 million had left the cities for the countryside, most of whom were children and young mothers; the Streets were now looking after three girls from Portsmouth, which required quite some adjusting, not least because none of them had ever seen plumbing and running water before let alone had any experience of country life. Soon after, the mother of one of the girls also arrived, carrying a baby. Most hosts had little choice in taking on evacuees, although who was sent where tended to be a little less haphazard; billeting officers were always local figures who knew the potential bedroom space their neighbours had. Needless to say, this enormous evacuation put a huge strain on many families, schools and local facilities.
A. G. was, however, philosophical. A passionate champion of British farming but also a patriot, he believed that whatever hardships stood at his door or lay before him in the future would prove a small sacrifice. It was essential, he believed, that the countryside, collectively, show the towns and cities that without their farms they could not hope to survive the war. But more than that, it was a matter of conscience. ‘Whenever I see an aeroplane performing its dangerous evolutions above my farm,’ he noted late one evening at his desk, ‘I realise that youth is taking the dangerous share, and that middle-aged countryfolk should be only too glad to toil in safety on the fields below.’
Despite the seriousness of the potential food production crisis in Britain, there was, however, no panic yet as the country entered the first winter of war. For sailors like Vere Wight-Boycott, out on the North Sea, the weather was an enemy more savage than any German. In London, Jock Colville was getting fed up with walking through endless snow and slush, while in her flat in West Hampstead, Gwladys Cox was finding the cold quite debilitating. ‘Colder than ever!’ she noted on 20 January. ‘24 degrees of frost on Hampstead Heath. Pipes in bathroom frozen, milk solid in larder.’ When the milk boy came he looked so numb with cold she sat him down by the kitchen fire and plied him with hot coffee.
But for farmers like A. G. Street, who always liked to look on the bright side, there were benefits; cold it may have been, but it was at least dry, and that meant he could get on with threshing the previous summer’s harvest. He had also made silage for the first time the previous autumn – high-moisture, fermented and stored hay – so was feeding his dairy cows with that rather than hay, as he had done all his previous farming years. He had become an immediate convert: silage could be fed to his cows out of doors even if it was raining and didn’t blow about in the wind either.
He had also converted his tractor to pneumatic tyres, which made beetling about the farm in the snow much easier and had enabled him to lay up his farm van for the time being. Also put away in one of the sheds was his big car, leaving just an old Austin Seven for him and his wife. In the big scheme of things, however, Street, like many farmers, was finding it easier to get around than most in Europe at this time. Petrol rationing had been introduced from the outset of war, with non-essential users limited to 1,800 miles per year and essential users given an annual allowance of 9,000 miles. Farmers with mechanical machinery were also given concessions against the petrol ration.
Food rationing, however, had been repeatedly postponed. The Government had been worried about public opinion and so, although it had been preparing for it, did not actually bring it in until the New Year. Gwladys Cox in north London had been issued her ration books in November and had promptly left them with ‘the butcher, Atkinson, grocer Dimmer, and milkman, Limited Dairies’. On 8 January, she jotted in her diary, ‘Today, butter, sugar and bacon rationing starts. ¼ lb butter, ¾ lb sugar per head.’ In March all meat was rationed. Gwladys Cox was not grumbling and, although there were plenty who were, it was not especially severe – not to begin with at any rate – and in addition people were encouraged to produce their own food, whether it be growing vegetables or rearing rabbits. Early in the New Year, this scheme had been given a catchy name, coined by one of the national newspapers: ‘Dig for Victory’. Flower beds gave way to vegetable patches, while public parks, railway embankments, school playing fields and recreation grounds were dug up for new allotments. The Prime Minister let it be known he was growing potatoes, and King George VI that potatoes, cabbages and other vegetables were replacing the flower beds around the Queen Victoria Memorial opposite Buckingham Palace. The Dig for Victory campaign successfully killed two birds with one stone: it would provide a not insignificant amount of extra food and also gave Britons a useful sense of unity of purpose.
But while British people of all ages and classes were now united in growing vegetables, that same unity of purpose was not shared by the War Cabinet, the Chiefs of Staff or even their French allies. At the end of November, the Soviet Union had invaded Finland. This followed on from their invasion of east Poland in September, as agreed in the German–Soviet Pact, and then by the absorption of the Baltic States through a series of ‘mutual-assistance pacts’. It then tried to secure the Gulf of Finland, demanding the Finns hand over a number of ports, including those to the north touching the Barents Sea. When the Finns refused, the Red Army attacked.
This prompted a crisis of future strategy in London and Paris. The long, hard winter may have provided Allied factories with an essential chance to increase armaments, but the inactivity on the ground had caused problems. At a crucial moment, prevarication was replacing decisiveness . . .