All about the Beef
Bernard Porter
- The Taste of War: World War Two and the Battle for Food by Lizzie Collingham
Allen Lane, 634 pp, £30.00, January 2011, ISBN 978 0 7139 9964 8
It isn’t true that starvation is just like being hungry, only worse. ‘Victims of starvation die of nutritional dystrophy,’ Lizzie Collingham writes in The Taste of War,
a process whereby, once the body has used up all its fat reserves, the muscles are broken down in order to obtain energy. The small intestine atrophies and it becomes increasingly difficult for the victim to absorb nutrients from what little food he or she is able to obtain. As a defence mechanism the body reduces the activity of the vital organs such as the heart and liver and the victim suffers not only from muscular debility but from a more general and overpowering fatigue … The water content of the body reduces at a slower rate than the wasting of the muscles and tissues and the flaccidity of the body increases. Some victims of starvation develop hunger oedema and swell up with excess water … The skin becomes stretched, shiny and hypersensitive. Blood pressure drops and the victim is plagued by keratitis (redness and soreness of the cornea), sore gums, headaches, pains in the legs, neuralgic pains, tremors and ataxia (a loss of control over the limbs). Just before death the victim veers wildly from depression to irritation and then a profound torpor … Most importantly, the heart atrophies … Organ failure is the final cause of death.
This was the fate of an estimated 20 million people in the Second World War – about the same number as were killed in combat.
Letters
Vol. 33 No. 16 · 25 August 2011
From Alex Lockwood
The phrase ‘useless eaters’, which Bernard Porter highlights as referring to Jews in his review of Lizzie Collingham’s The Taste of War, was first used by German advocates of eugenics in reference to that country’s disabled population (LRB, 14 July). In 1920, Binding and Hoche wrote their manifesto calling for the forced euthanasia of ‘life unworthy of life’, which sowed the seeds for the T-4 programme that resulted in the extermination, by a medical establishment colluding with the Nazis, of at least 70,000 (and perhaps as many as half a million) disabled and ‘feeble-minded’ citizens. The gas chamber method for mass killings was first developed for this purpose, and so while it is true in one way, as Porter says, that ‘the death camps … were a direct result of the unexpected resilience of the Polish Jews in the ghettos’ to the Nazi Hunger Plan, there is another story of how those places came to exist.
Alex Lockwood
Newcastle
Vol. 33 No. 17 · 8 September 2011
From Michael Howard
‘The phrase “useless eaters”,’ according to Alex Lockwood, ‘was first used by German advocates of eugenics’ (Letters, 25 August). But the term ‘bouches inutiles’ was in general use in 18th-century warfare to describe the civilian population of besieged fortresses, and probably goes back a long way before that.
Michael Howard
Eastbury, Berkshire
Vol. 33 No. 19 · 6 October 2011
From John Stephenson
Bernard Porter is correct in expecting an unhappy Australian response to Lizzie Collingham’s assessment of Australia’s contribution to the Allied war effort as principally agricultural (LRB, 14 July). She takes her place in an unpleasant tradition. Winston Churchill, who didn’t like Australia’s wartime Labor government or Australians much in general – apart, that is, from their infantry force at El Alamein, naval units in the Mediterranean, and contingents in RAF Fighter and Bomber Commands (four of the 16 Dambuster aircraft were captained by Australians) – commissioned two confidential reports on Australia’s war effort, hoping to find it lacking, but was disappointed. Australia had one of the highest levels of mobilisation among the Allies. From early 1942 to mid-1944, Australia provided a base for General MacArthur and supplied the majority of his army’s fighting divisions. The New Guinea campaigns were an essential step on the road to the Philippines. Collingham is trapped in the belief that the whole Southwest Pacific theatre was irrelevant.
The massively successful American air campaign against the Japanese was initially based and largely maintained in Queensland, and assisted by Australia’s own air force. Unfortunately, the Pacific RAAF tended to have obsolete aircraft, essentially because Churchill blocked all its attempts, until late in the war, to secure better ones. He did, however, smile on New Zealand, which was never threatened, and allowed it to obtain hundreds of F4U Corsairs, a leading naval fighter, while poor Australia slogged away with Kittyhawks.
John Stephenson
Leura, Australia
