1. Herbert Backe, German Minister for Food and Agriculture and architect of the Hunger Plan. A typical Schreibtischtäter (desk perpetrator).

2. A dispossessed Polish family, some of the thousands who were evicted from their farms to make way for the settlement of ethnic Germans.

3. One of Norman Rockwell’s extremely popular illustrations of Roosevelt’s four freedoms, which reinforced the notion that Americans were fighting to defend their way of life.

4. The British Ministry of Agriculture promoted potatoes as a perfect energy food by using the cheerful cartoon character Potato Pete.

5. The practice of bartering for food in the countryside was endearingly known in German as ‘hamstering’. Severe food shortages in the urban areas meant that hamstering eventually became a vital source of food.

6. For occupying troops in France the Wehrmacht’s policy of living off the land translated into living off the fat of the land. These German soldiers are buying cakes from a street stall in Paris in 1940.

7. The banner on the side of the train reads, ‘First foodstuffs – Ukraine/Berlin’. While food was confiscated from the east, the German blockade of Ukrainian cities and the extermination of Polish Jews was intensified in order to remove ‘useless eaters’ from the food chain.

8. A Jewish man suffering mistreatment from a civilian in the Ukraine, June 1941.

9. All over the Soviet Union hundreds of thousands of peasants and workers were reduced to living in primitive circumstances. This woman is cooking on a makeshift oven in a suburb of Stalingrad.

10. Two Malayan natives at an Australian treatment centre on the island of Balikpapan, Borneo, in July 1945. These Malayans, who had been brought to Borneo as forced labourers by the Japanese, are clearly suffering from severe malnutrition. Millions of south-east Asians died of hunger as a result of Japanese policies.

11. Japanese soldiers cooking their rations on Muchu Island, New Guinea, in September 1945. The Japanese army did not cook for its soldiers in field kitchens; instead each man lit a small fire and prepared his own meal.

12. After having been in action for a few days in the Sanananda area of Papua, during which they survived on a diet of bully beef and biscuits, these US troops are enjoying the opportunity to cook themselves a jungle stew using fresh food.

13. A badly emaciated Japanese soldier on Sandaken, North Borneo, awaiting transportation to a prisoner of war camp in October 1945. The American blockade of Japanese shipping meant that Japanese soldiers throughout the Pacific were left without food supplies, with devastating effect.

14. Japanese civilians approach some GIs who are lunching on K rations in Tokyo in August 1945. By the end of the war the Japanese urban population was teetering on the verge of starvation, and as this picture shows the townspeople grew vegetables amid the ruins in order to survive.

15. Australian naval personnel delighted by the soup, steak and onions, fresh peas, potatoes, bread and butter, strawberry ice cream and coffee piled up on their American mess trays. These Australians were discovering for themselves that the US military was the best fed in the world.