Chapter 12
The Civilian War
In This Chapter
Drawing the line between soldiers and civilians
Restructuring factories and farms to aid the war effort
Conscripting Britons into the army
Listening to rumours and propaganda
Protecting the food supply
When past wars had broken out, they’d been fought by armies; ordinary civilians were only involved if they got caught up in the actual fighting. The First World War was different. For the first time in history, everyone in the combatant countries was involved in the war effort. No one could just stand by and watch.
From the start, it was clear that the First World War was going to be a much bigger conflict than any previous war. The armies were huge and they made use of all the very latest technology, but no one was prepared for the scale of the fighting. For example, each country went to war in 1914 thinking it had enough shells to last until the end of the war, which they all thought would be in a few months’ time. But the war didn’t end in 1914, and by the spring of 1915 all the major countries were beginning to run out of shells. This meant that industry at home had to be reorganised to completely support the war effort, at the expense of domestic needs. Other changes were needed too. Because each country was doing all it could to starve its enemies out, grocers’ shops and kitchens suddenly became vital to winning the war.
No part of ordinary life, from workplaces to the shops and right into the home itself, could escape the reach of the First World War. This was to be the world’s first experience of total war, and the different countries took to this new experience in varied ways, some with more success than others. This chapter shows you how they fared.
Blurring the Lines between Soldiers and Civilians
In past wars the difference between soldiers and civilians had been quite obvious, but in the First World War the distinctions began to get very blurred. In many countries, some people who were civilians when the war broke out found that they weren’t civilians after all, because they were part-time reservists and they were being called back into the army. In Britain, which didn’t have conscription in 1914, civilians were queuing up to join the army. This wasn’t necessarily the good idea that it seems, because some of the men who worked in vital industries (such as coal mining, engineering and shipbuilding) but joined the army or were called up as reservists could contribute far more to the war effort by staying at work than by sitting in a trench. The Austrians made the mistake of drafting so many of their key industrial workers into the army that their war production fell disastrously, and they had to un-enlist them and send them back to work.
As the war went on, the question of who was a soldier and who wasn’t became more deadly. When the Germans started bombing civilian areas in England (see Figure 12-1), they justified their action by saying that people working in munitions factories were just as much their enemy as the soldiers who were firing the shells produced by the factories. And if it was acceptable for the British to blockade German ports to stop food supplies getting in, surely it was acceptable for the Germans to sink merchant ships carrying food to Britain? That was how the Germans justified their U-boat campaigns (see Chapter 8).
© Imperial War Museums (Q 53484)
Figure 12-1: German shell damage to a family home in Scarborough.
The First World War was the first conflict in which people started to talk about a home front. That phrase meant that people living and working at home were just as important to the war effort as the men fighting at the actual front.
Taking on Special Powers
When the war started, the governments of the combatant countries started to take on special powers to take over the resources they’d need and to deal with any trouble or opposition they might encounter. Some governments, such as those of Russia and Germany, already possessed very extensive powers, and extending them further to meet the demands of the war wasn’t too difficult. The German government, for example, took over Germany’s mines and heavy industry and just shut down any industry it deemed non-essential. In Russia, the tsar gave the army complete control over the civil authorities in the war zone in the western part of the country, while the government took over all essential industries. And in Austria-Hungary, any factory workers who went on strike were drafted into the army and sent off to the front.
The switch to wartime powers was much harder for countries with a strong tradition of civil liberty, such as Britain and France.
Meeting DORA
Only four days after declaring war on Germany, the British Parliament passed the Defence of the Realm Act, known as DORA. DORA overturned the normal workings of the British parliamentary system and enabled the government to rule by decree, without having to pass laws through Parliament at all. The government promptly used DORA to bring in a series of rules that took away people’s normal freedoms:
- No talking about military matters in public or spreading rumours.
- No trespassing on bridges or railway lines.
- No purchasing binoculars (because you might be a spy), using invisible ink to write abroad (ditto – though how would they know?), feeding bread to animals (it was a waste of food that humans could eat), flying kites or lighting bonfires (they might be used to guide Zeppelins to their targets).
- No buying rounds of drinks in pubs (factory workers needed to stay sober at all times) and no afternoon drinking. (The government used DORA to force pubs to close in the afternoon, to make sure workers were back at work after lunch sober and in good time. Mind you, DORA made the breweries water the beer down in any case.)
In 1916, the government even changed time itself. Following a move by the Germans, it introduced what’s still known as British Summer Time, moving the clocks forward an hour in the spring and back an hour in the autumn, in order to get maximum use of daylight in the different seasons.
Although people could be prosecuted for breaching the rules, these changes were irritating rather than a major change to their civil liberties. However, DORA also enabled the government to take on much more extensive powers. From now on, the government would
- Take over any factory or industrial plant deemed essential for the war effort, and changing its production processes and patterns to meet the demands of the military
- Take over any land needed for the war effort, whether for military training or for growing food
- Censor the press and other publications, especially to stop secret information leaking out or to suppress criticism of the war
- Prosecute offenders against any of these rules
These changes represented major extensions to the government’s power and they seemed to overturn every liberty the British had always claimed they stood for. The Victorians had believed passionately in free trade and free enterprise, but now the government was nationalising large parts of industry, turning them over to war production and introducing its own rules, quotas and working practices. In some areas, such as the coalfields of South Wales, industry was even taken over by the military. Huge areas of unused agricultural land were taken over for food production. Even more startling was the clampdown on free speech. In theory, Britain still allowed people to express their views freely, just as long as doing so didn’t undermine public morale or harm the war effort. However, because in practice the courts would be deciding what did or didn’t constitute harming the war effort, DORA had in fact suspended Britain’s long tradition of free speech.
Across the Channel in France, the French government brought in similar controls and restrictions on its citizens’ freedoms. The government censored the press, banning anyone from criticising the war or the way it was being run. The censorship was so heavy that one newspaper changed its name from The Free Man to The Man in Chains. The French government took control of food prices and rents and even forbade people to own radio receivers so they couldn’t get information from anyone except the government.
Taking forced labour
Right at the start of the war, many governments – not just the British – started taking over the running of essential industries. But in some areas this process of government control of industry had a more sinister meaning: forced labour. In areas the Germans had taken over, such as Belgium and Poland, working people were taken by force, or were tricked with false promises of good wages, and sent to Germany to work as forced labour. On one occasion in Poland, the Germans announced free entertainment at the local theatre and then grabbed all the men who turned up to see it.
Forced labourers had no rights and had to live on the tiny pay that farmers or factory workers gave them. If they caused trouble, the German military authorities could punish them by taking away blankets or lights, or cutting their already meagre rations.
Although Germany was desperate for people to work in its factories and farms, forced labour turned out not to be the most sensible way to get it. The people they took were often badly suited to the work and they certainly didn’t work willingly.
Dealing with strikes and soldiers
Each country tried to ensure that industry produced the necessary goods with as little trouble as possible from the workers. In Austria-Hungary strikes were banned, and when workers came out on strike anyway in 1917 the army simply took over the factories and forced the workers to go back to work. In Germany, the army took over the running of the country’s industry and brought in compulsory labour service for all men aged 16 to 60. Doing this didn’t work: by 1918 Germany was paralysed by workers striking for food and better wages.
The Allied countries managed a little better, though they too had problems. In France, the government created a special government department to run French industry, under the socialist minister Albert Thomas. By and large he did a good job, but even so in 1917 French industry was hit by a wave of strikes. In Britain, the government agreed to a truce with the trade unions at the start of the war, even though the unions were very suspicious of plans to ‘dilute’ their work by bringing women into the factories (you can read more about women’s role in the war in Chapter 13). The British minister of munitions was the dynamic David Lloyd George, who completely reorganised the armaments industry to increase shell production massively. Even so, in 1917 the miners of South Wales came out on strike.
The South Wales strike was different from other strikes. The men weren’t protesting against shortages or low wages: they were angry that some of the rich were making a profit from the war and not making the sort of sacrifices that others were having to make. ‘Profiteering’ was one of the main working-class complaints in Britain about the way the government was running the war.
Conscription Comes to Britain
All the major European powers conscripted men into their militaries – other than Britain. The answer to why Britain was different lies deep in British history and in the national characteristics the British thought they were fighting to protect.
Britain’s constitution was (and still is) a balance between the monarchy and Parliament that had been established back at the time of the English Civil War in the 17th century. Back then, the main charge against King Charles I was that he was trying to rule through military force instead of through Parliament and he paid for this fault in full: Parliament put him on trial and cut off his head. But after the civil war, Oliver Cromwell ruled England directly through the army – the whole country was governed by a group of major generals. The British had never allowed themselves to forget how Cromwell had closed theatres, banned dancing and even abolished Christmas – and how it was his military power that enabled him to do it.
Ever since Cromwell’s day, the British had kept to a set of strict rules about their military:
- Political power stays in civilian, not military hands. Generals and admirals took their orders from the government of the day, and never vice-versa.
- Britain should have no, repeat no, standing (that is, peacetime) army. Obviously, Britain did have an army, but Parliament had to pass a law every year to legalise it for the following 12 months, otherwise the army was an illegal organisation. Moreover, all soldiers, even the highest ranking, remained subject to the ordinary laws of the land.
- The army should consist of volunteers only – no one should be forced to join. The navy used to use press gangs to force men into service, but that had been in wartime only and had long been outlawed. The redcoats who’d fought Britain’s wars in the 19th century had all been volunteers.
This suspicion of standing armies was shared by the British colonists in America and survived in the United States after they won their independence. This fact explains why the United States was the only other major power that didn’t have a peacetime conscription system before the First World War. (Chapter 11 looks at how the United States handled the challenge of getting their army up to strength to fight in the war.)
Britain’s overseas dominions shared its suspicions of conscription. Like Britain, Canada, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand all relied entirely on volunteers for their armed forces.
Let’s try volunteers first
When the war broke out in 1914, Lord Kitchener, the British Secretary of State for war, warned that it would be very long and costly and that Britain would need a much larger army. However, instead of moving for conscription, the British government opted for a mass appeal for volunteers: this was the recruiting drive that produced the famous poster with Lord Kitchener’s picture on it. Even in wartime, the British remained committed to their principles about avoiding compulsory military service.
The volunteering appeal was phenomenally successful, and it brought in some 2.5 million men in the first two years of the war. Like the other combatant countries, Britain was swamped by a wave of patriotic fervor. (Chapter 4 tells you a bit more about the reasons why young British men rushed to join the army in 1914.) So many men volunteered that the army couldn’t cope: it didn’t have anything like enough equipment, arms or uniforms for these new recruits. Yet still they came, in their thousands. All through the autumn and winter of 1914 and right through 1915 they kept coming forward to volunteer to fight for king and country. They were so numerous that these volunteers became known as Kitchener’s New Army.
All right, conscription it is, then
Despite the surge in numbers that the recruitment drive had brought about, it still wasn’t enough. The big offensives of 1915 failed and it became clear that the war was going to stretch into 1916. The commanders had learned that attacks would only succeed if the attackers had huge numbers of men. Then the Battle of the Somme in 1916 taught them that even overwhelming numbers couldn’t guarantee success if you didn’t properly prepare the attack (you can pick up the same lesson in Chapter 6). So by 1916 the British government had to face up to the need for some form of conscription.
Plenty of people, both in the government and outside, were profoundly unhappy about this idea. The Labour Party and the trade unions opposed conscription, and Sir John Simon, the Home Secretary, resigned in protest against it. Their opposition was in vain: the demand for men at the front was too great and conscription was coming in whether they liked the idea or not.
Britain introduced conscription in several phases:
- Derby Scheme (July 1915): A voluntary registration scheme suggested by Lord Derby. Men could place themselves on the register and wait to be called up. Single men would usually be called up first. Results: disappointing.
- Military Service Act No.1 (February 1916): All single men aged 18 to 41 were made liable for military service.
- Military Service Act No.2 (May 1916): All single men aged 18 to 41 were called up for military service, as were married men and widowers. Full conscription had arrived.
After the heavy battlefield losses of 1916, the governments of Australia, New Zealand and Canada all did the same as Britain and introduced conscription measures into their parliaments. The parliaments of New Zealand and Canada both passed conscription (though French Canadians protested), but in Australia, where the Irish settlers and trade unions opposed it, the government had to put the issue to a referendum, which narrowly rejected the proposal (see Chapter 10).
Introducing conscription was a massive change in British society. For the first time, the whole of the population was engaged in one massive enterprise: either men were away at the front, or men and women were working at home in industry to produce the materials to supply them with. To win the war, the British were accepting huge limitations on everyone’s individual freedom to work, speak and act as they chose. Only two groups of people were allowed to opt out of conscription. The first group was the Irish. The British had a very good reason for not enforcing conscription in Ireland. It was only a month since the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin (Chapter 10 has the lowdown) and anti-British feelings in Ireland were running very high. Forcing Irishmen to join the British army would be asking for a lot of trouble, so the government simply avoided doing so. Dealing with the second group – conscientious objectors – was much trickier.
Conscientious objectors
Some people continued to oppose conscription on grounds of conscience: they were known as conscientious objectors (COs). COs had varied reasons for their opposition: some had a political objection to the state taking on so much power over individuals; some had a moral objection to fighting and killing; and some were morally opposed to war itself and would do nothing whatsoever to contribute to it.
Few people had much respect for COs. They were often nicknamed ‘conchies’ and insulted or abused in the street.
People who registered their objection to military service had to explain their objection to a local military tribunal. The tribunal had to decide:
- Did the CO only object to fighting and killing, but not to war itself? If so, it was usually possible for him to serve in a non-combatant role such as stretcher-bearer or ambulance driver.
- Did the CO have a moral objection to all war or only to this war?Pacifism was an acceptable reason for not fighting, if it was genuine, but political opposition to the war wasn’t – it was regarded as almost as bad as treason.
- Was the CO’s pacifism genuine? If the tribunal thought the CO wasn’t genuinely opposed to all forms of violence then it could judge that his objection wasn’t real and enlist him into the army by force.
Tribunals usually regarded the cases brought before them with utter contempt: they simply saw COs as cowards. Tribunals tried asking all sorts of questions to trick COs into admitting that in some circumstances they would fight, such as ‘What would you do if a German assaulted your sister?’ or ‘What would you do if the Germans invaded England?’. If they weren’t convinced that a man’s objection was serious, they could order him to be enlisted into the army. After a man accepted a shilling’s pay or put on a uniform, he was deemed to have enlisted and he was then subject to military discipline, which meant that a man who refused to obey orders could be shot.
Some COs who hadn’t managed to convince the tribunal of their sincerity had their clothes taken from them and had only a military uniform to put on; some were even taken by force to the front and then court-martialled for disobeying military orders.
Even if a CO was accepted as genuine, he wasn’t free to go home. Conscientious objection was still regarded as a breach of the law, so most COs were sent to prison with hard labour, which usually consisted of breaking rocks. The British had come a very long way from the time when the army itself was an illegal organisation: now it was opposition to the army that was illegal.
Did conscription work?
Ironically, conscription actually brought in fewer men than volunteering did!
These are the numbers of men who joined the British army during the years of the First World War:
- 1914: 1,180,000
- 1915: 1,280,000
- 1916 (conscription introduced here!): 1,190,000
- 1917: 820,000
- 1918: 493,000
Nevertheless, conscription did help to keep the size of the British army up and ensured that by 1918 it was larger than it had ever been.
Round ’Em Up and Drive ’Em Out!
It was probably inevitable in the circumstances, but the war provoked a very ugly wave of anti-German feeling in Britain, especially after the Germans started their bombing raids on British cities. Britain was unused to war damage, so attacks like these fuelled anti-German sentiment. Angry crowds attacked any shop or business with a German-sounding name, even when it turned out the owners were in fact Russians or Poles. Under the Aliens Restriction Act, enemy aliens were rounded up and put into internment camps on the Isle of Man, in the middle of the Irish Sea.
Even dogs suffered from this anti-German hysteria. Reports suggested that people had started kicking dachshunds (also known as ‘German sausage dogs’) in the street, and in Britain the German Shepherd dog was quickly rechristened the Alsatian, which means ‘from Alsace’, one of the areas the Germans had taken from the French. So overnight a suspiciously German mutt became a patriot!
Not surprisingly, this lashing-out at foreigners wasn’t confined to Britain. Canada experienced a similar wave of anti-German feeling: a Canadian town called Berlin was even renamed Kitchener after the British military hero! Similar outbreaks of anti-German violence happened in France, as the Germans advanced through the country. In Moscow in 1915, violent mobs attacked foreign-owned houses and shops; many Russians blamed the Jews for their country’s problems and 1915 saw some violent attacks on Russia’s large Jewish population.
Propagating racial hatred and rumour
All countries involved in fighting wars use propaganda to stir up public support for a war by portraying the enemy in the worst possible light, and the First World War was no exception. Each side accused the other of committing terrible atrocities. Sometimes the stories were based on truth, but sometimes they were made up (see Figure 16 in the insert section).
Allied propaganda posters showed the Germans as a heartless and cruel race of people who weren’t to be trusted. ‘Once a German, always a German,’ said one poster, showing a German soldier burning cities and bayoneting babies, and then turning up in civilian clothes after the war to sell German goods (see Figure 12-2). Another showed a German nurse heartlessly pouring water on the ground in front of a wounded British prisoner, desperate with thirst. Fearing your enemies in wartime is quite normal, but First World War propaganda was something new: it was fostering genuine racial hatred.
© Imperial War Museums (Q 80141)
Figure 12-2: British anti-German propaganda portraying Germans as inhumane and suggesting that they’ll remain the same after the war.
Some of the fiercest racial stereotyping was to be found in recruiting posters, because it helped persuade recruits of what they’d be fighting against. After Britain introduced conscription in 1916, fewer of these posters were needed, but Australia narrowly rejected conscription in its referendum on the subject. As a result, Australian recruiting posters used increasingly extreme racial caricatures in an increased effort to persuade men to join up to fight the Germans and their allies, even despite the heavy Australian losses that were being reported from the Western Front.
Rumours also played an important role in determining how the people on both sides of the war thought about their enemies. These are a few of the best-known examples of rumours and propaganda stories from the First World War:
- Germans cutting off Belgian girls’ hands and bayoneting babies: When the Germans invaded Belgium, stories of atrocities committed against the civilian population quickly began to circulate and these were two of the most common. In 1915 a British government committee looked into the stories and concluded they were true.
Verdict: The stories were completely untrue. The Germans did shoot civilians, but no evidence has ever emerged that they bayoneted babies or cut off people’s hands. The British government report had simply accepted hearsay with no evidence whatsoever to support it.
- Melting corpses down for glycerine: It was widely reported in Britain that the Germans ran ‘corpse factories’ that melted down human corpses and turned them into glycerine. The story was run in the international press and debated in Parliament and the German government had to issue stringent denials.
Verdict: The British may have mistranslated the German for dead horses (which were commonly melted down in all countries), but it’s much more likely that the story was a deliberate British fabrication.
- The crucified Canadian: The Germans were supposed to have nailed (or maybe tied) a captured Canadian sergeant (though some said he was a Highlander) to a cross (or maybe a gate, or a fence, or a tree, or a door, depending on which version of the story you heard) and then thrust bayonets into him. No one could ever give the man’s name or come up with any eye-witnesses, but that didn’t stop the story being widely repeated (though the Canadians themselves were sceptical and the Germans angrily denied it).
Verdict: The story was almost certainly invented to build on international outrage after the Lusitania was sunk by a German U-boat (see Chapter 8). The Canadians investigated after the war and found one Canadian soldier had indeed been tied up and killed – by some Belgian farmers.
Spies R (all around) Us
All countries in the First World War were fearful of enemy spies and sometimes this fear tipped over into genuine hysteria. Anything that went wrong was blamed on spies. In Britain, ‘German spies’ were blamed for a stampede by 300 cavalry horses at a depot in Essex (it was probably started deliberately but not by German spies) and for a spate of reported attacks on policemen by armed men on motorbikes – though not one case turned out to be genuine.
People in Britain could be arrested for all sorts of activities that suggested they were spies, such as the following:
- Handing out sweets (everyone knew the Germans poisoned sweets to kill British children)
- Wearing a flamboyant or wide-brimmed hat (‘If he’s not a spy, why does he wear a hat like that?’ asked one local schoolmistress after denouncing an innocent visitor to the police)
- Having an American accent (this got the American poet Robert Frost into trouble)
- Having a German chauffeur (a Cabinet minister was accused of this – and it’s true: he had one)
- Having (or, worse, building) a concrete-bottomed tennis court or ornamental lake (which was clearly intended as a secret gun platform for the Germans, of course)
Fighting the War for Food
One of the most important weapons in any war is food. Armies, cities and even nations can’t continue a war without enough food. Not only do the soldiers at the front need to keep their strength up to fight, but so do all those people working on the home front. Children’s nourishment too needs to be maintained. Moreover, food shortages often lead to protests, riots and mutiny.
With food being such an important weapon, armies often seek to starve their opponents out by destroying crops or cutting off food supplies. All things considered, in all countries, the outcome of the First World War would depend upon who was able to retain control of the food supply. That meant
- Taking action against food hoarders, to ensure that what food was available got spread around to those who needed it
- Growing as much food as possible at home and finding ways to replace food that used to be imported, so that stocks could be maintained
- Introducing rationing, so that governments could control the supply and demand of the available food
To make the food situation even more difficult to manage, many factors, even the weather, sometimes got in the way of governments’ attempts to keep their people fed. The food situation became so serious that it unquestionably determined the final outcome of the war.
Britain: Relying on the merchant navy
As an island, Britain was reliant on merchant vessels bringing in food. In 1917 German U-boats were sinking so many British merchant ships that at one point Britain had only enough food to sustain the country for six weeks (see Chapter 8). If it hadn’t been for the new convoy system hampering U-boat efforts to find the merchant ships, Britain simply couldn’t have continued in the war. Nevertheless, the British did run an efficient system of rationing and they made good use of all available land for growing food. The government was even able to offer meals to schoolchildren in the school holidays.
France: Coping with less
France wasn’t as dependent on food imports as Britain was, but a fifth of its national food supplies were lost when the Germans occupied the northern part of the country. The French had long-established practices for governing the food supply in wartime, which they’d been implementing ever since the French Revolution: they laid down rigid controls on mills and bakeries and fixed the price of bread by law. Anyone charging too much could be arrested. Doing that put bakers out of business, but it usually went down well with the voters.
Germany: Focusing on the military
Germany’s supply of food was hampered by the British blockade of the country’s ports, which meant that no imports could arrive by sea, and its internal system for distributing and selling food was chronically inefficient. The German government was spending so much on war production that it never managed to devise a proper system of rationing and food distribution. It rationed bread and then had to steadily reduce the ration until 1917, when it was halved. The winter of 1916–17, when the potato crop failed, was a terrible time, known as the ‘Turnip Winter’, because that was about all that people could find to eat, and thousands died from the effects of malnutrition. In response, the Germans put their chemicals industry to work developing substitutes (ersatz) for essentials such as coffee and butter.
By 1918 the Germans were suffering badly from hunger and were staging protests demanding food in the shops and an end to the war.
Russia: Heading for a fall
The Russian government was so incompetent that by 1916 almost no food was on sale in the shops. This severe food crisis led almost directly to the Russian Revolution.
Russia’s system of food distribution was even worse run than Austria-Hungary’s (and that’s saying something). By 1916 Russia was suffering from serious food shortages and riots were breaking out in the streets. Then strict food rationing brought in at the start of 1917 sparked off panic buying and further rioting, followed by strikes, which turned into a revolution that overthrew the whole tsarist regime.
You can find out more on how the war sparked off the Russian Revolution in Chapter 15.
Austria-Hungary: (Not) helping your neighbours
The food situation in Austria-Hungary was desperate. Austria-Hungary lost a third of its arable land when the Russians invaded in 1914, and the Hungarians, faced with their own food shortages, refused to export grain to Austria, even though they were both meant to be part of the same empire.
Such was the situation in Austria-Hungary that horses were killed for their meat (which hit the war effort, because the military needed horses) and bread had to be filled out with barley or potato – it was called war bread, and it was strictly rationed. Coffee, milk, sugar and fats were all rationed too, and Austrians had to go without meat for two days a week. To make matters worse, the 1916 harvest was a disaster and those people who had any bread started hoarding it. Result: rations had to be cut even further.
By 1917 Austria-Hungary was gripped by food riots and the government was desperate to get out of the war – at almost any price. They even risked war with their German allies when they seized a grain shipment from Romania to Germany as it passed through Austria. It’s fair to say that Austria-Hungary was defeated as much by the food crisis as it was by the Allies.
United States: Helping your allies
Because the United States was so big, the Germans couldn’t use their U-boats to starve the country out, as they were trying to do to Britain (see Chapter 8), but after the United States joined the war it needed to export food to its allies, including Russia, so food production was vital.
With so many young men leaving home for the war, farming was bound to suffer. That meant women would have to help out on the farms; it also meant the United States had to organise its food supply efficiently. The man put in charge of this was Herbert Hoover. He supervised food exports and encouraged Americans to do their bit for victory by cultivating special gardens, known as victory gardens, where they could grow their own vegetables. Hoover’s work helped to give all Americans a sense that they were making an important contribution to the outcome of the war.