World War II; A War for Resources: Crash Course World History #220 Video Lecture | A Complete Guide to World History : 2 - World Knowledge

Hi, I’m John Green and this is Crash Course
World History and today we’re going to talk
about World War II.
But we’re not going to look at it as a battle
between good and evil, but instead as a war
for resources, particularly a war for food.
Wait, Mr. Green, Mr. Green, what about like Rosie the
Riveter and Pearl Harbor and Nazis and Hitler?
Yeah, Me From the Past, I mean if the question is was
Hitler evil? Then, yeah.
But evil people generally can’t, like, cause
massive world wars on their own. So instead of talking
about, uh, you know, the personality driven model
of history, I want to talk about resources,
specifically my favorite resource: food.
So the story of World War 2 is commonly told
as a narrative of good vs. evil, and it is.
But we can also look at the second world war
through the lens of resource allocation, and
I think if we do it tells a story of both
causes of the war and one of the ways that
it impacted both soldiers and civilians.
The presence or absence of food affected everyone
involved in World War II. In the most stark
terms, the absence of food led to the deaths,
directly or indirectly, of at least 20 million
people during those years, as compared to
19.5 million military deaths.
Now, of course, both the Nazis and the Japanese
were militaristic and expansionist in the
1930s.
And they were both definitely motivated by
nationalism, but they were also seeking something
called autarky.
You can remember this term by conjuring the
feeling one gets near Thanksgiving: “Aw,
turkey”.
You can also remember it when thinking about
the collapse of the Ottoman Empire: “Aw,
Turkey”.
Anyway, autarky is a form of self sufficiency
in a world where, increasingly, people were
reliant on world trade, and that made nations
more and more dependent upon each other to
meet basic needs.
Both Germany and Japan lacked the resources
within their borders that they needed to build
their growing industrial states, and the resource
that concerned them most was food.
And this was a big part of what motivated
their imperialist expansionism.
Like, Hitler talked all the time about expanding
German territory to acquire “lebensraum,”
or living space.
But what this meant, of course, was agricultural
land to feed Germans, that’s what living
space is really about on Earth.
And most Germans of the time remembered the
blockade during World War I, which had led
to acute food shortages.
For the Nazis, to quote Collingham, “Lebensraum
would make Germany truly self-sufficient and
immune to blockade and this would eventually
enable Germany to challenge British and American
hegemony.”
Meanwhile, in Japan the need for food was
also spurring imperial ambitions. If anything,
Japan’s limited space created a sense of
crisis and made colonies seem necessary.
Like Japanese colonies in Korea and Formosa,
taken in the Sino-Japanese war of 1894-1895,
provided 20% of the Japanese domestic rice
crop by 1935.
And then the Great Depression and Japan’s
growing population made the situation appear
even worse and probably led to the decision
to annex Manchuria after 1931.
So the Germans’ plan was to open up Poland,
and eventually parts of Russia, to German
farmers. The Japanese plan was to resettle
farmers in Manchuria to provide food for the
homeland.
So if the desire for more food was one of
the initial causes of World War 2, it also
shaped the actual strategy of the war.
This was especially true with one of the stupidest
decisions of the war, Hitler’s decision
to invade the Soviet Union.
A German agronomist named Hans Backe put forth
something called “the Hunger Plan”, and
in doing so convinced Hitler that in order
to become self-sufficient, Germany had to
invade the Soviet Union.
And everyone knows that you cannot successfully
invade Russia unless you are the Mongols.
Anyway, the plan was the Ukraine and western
Russia would be transformed into a huge breadbasket
that would feed both the German armies and
German civilians. This was never fully implemented,
because, you know, the Nazi’s could never
successfully nail down all of the territory,
but Collingham argues that it was a primary
motive for Hitler’s disastrous invasion of the USSR.
And then on the Western front, the so called
“Battle of the Atlantic” was largely about
shipping arms, material, and food from the
U.S. to Britain.
This was incredibly important in the opening
years of World War 2. Like, Winston Churchill
once said that “the Battle of the Atlantic
was the dominating factor all through the
war. Never for one moment could we forget
that everything happening elsewhere, on land,
at sea or in the air, depended ultimately
on its outcome.”
In short, it was Britain’s dependence upon
other parts of the world that ultimately made
it stronger than Germany’s attempts at self-sufficiency.
Starvation never became an issue for the Brits,
but fear of running out of food, especially
of running out of food for the troops, led
to policies that made starvation a reality
for many people in British colonies.
In British Africa, for instance, colonial
policy forcing production for the war instead
of for domestic food consumption meant shortages
that were only made worse by wartime inflation.
Crop failure in Rhodesia in 1942 meant widespread
hunger and famine.
And, in an echo of what happened at the end
of the 19th century, World War II and British
colonial policy spelled disaster for India.
Japan had seized Burma in early 1942, cutting
off 15% of Bengal’s rice supply.
And when harvests failed later that year,
hunger turned to famine. Now, the British
could have alleviated the suffering but they were
afraid to use supply ships that might be needed
for the war effort to bring food to starving
people in India.
When you take into account hunger-associated
diseases, between 1.5 and 3 million Indian
civilians died, more than the total number
of Indian combatants killed in World War 1
AND World War 2 combined.
In the United States, meanwhile, there was
no starvation, but there was some rationing.
And this was, especially relative to most
recent American wars, some shared sacrifice.
Americans gave up coffee and chocolate so
that the troops could be well fed.
So Americans and Britons hardly suffered from
hunger. Neither did the Germans, actually,
where memories of World War I made feeding
the civilian population a top priority.
Of course, millions of civilians weren’t
being fed because they were being murdered
or worked to death in concentration camps.
But in Britain, World War II might have actually
improved people’s diets. Now, Britons largely
despised the whole-meal National Loaf of bread,
but it was more nutritious than white bread
and its flour took up less cargo space.
It’s amazing to think that British people
would dislike good food when there’s so
much of it in their country.
Stan, this is the part where in the comments
all the British people say, “We are not
a country, we’re four separate countries!”
The “dig for victory” campaign encouraged
ordinary people to plant gardens, and so they
ate more vegetables. Full employment and higher
wages meant that working class people also
had more access to nutritious foods.
Also, you know, they had the benefit of Canada
growing like, a gajillion acres of wheat.
Although both the British and the Germans saw
an overall reduction in caloric intake, it
was nothing compared with what was happening
in the USSR, Japan and China. In Russia, daily
caloric intake by the end of the war was half
of what it had been in 1940.
And I will remind you that things were not
great in 1940 in Russia, because Stalin.
The daily caloric ration for Japanese women
workers fell to 1476 calories, which was bad,
but in China, where the corrupt Nationalist army
was known to sell rice to the Japanese for
profit, a famine in Guangdong claimed the
lives of as many as 1.5 million peasants.
And without doubt, much of the civilian suffering
in the war was related to the massive amounts
of food needed to keep soldiers fighting.
Let’s go to the Thought Bubble.
In World War 2, the US and Britain made a
massive effort to make sure that their soldiers
were well fed, and for the most part it paid
off, even though the food that they got was
sometimes pretty gross. The British World
War I diet of biscuits and bully beef eventually
gave way to the appetizingly named “composite
ration.” American soldiers may have complained
a lot about their infamous C and K rations, but
they were the best fed soldiers in the world, receiving
a whopping 4,758 calories per day, including
meat at every meal, because, you know… America.
As you can probably guess, Soviet soldiers
did not fare so well, especially when the
Germans invaded because it was their policy
to live off the land, which meant scrounging
as much food from the Russian countryside
as they could. German troops weren’t as
well fed as Americans or the Brits, but they
still managed to scarf down a respectable
4000 calories per day.
No combat soldiers were as consistently hungry,
however, as the Japanese. Japanese soldiers
were expected to feed themselves and were
not provided with field kitchens. Often this
meant that Japanese soldiers were fueled by
little more than rice. And as the war turned
against them it became more and more difficult
for Japanese troops to feed themselves.
On Guadalcanal the Japanese attempted to re-supply
their troops with floating barrels dropped
from passing ships, but by December 1942 between
120 and 130 soldiers were dying of starvation
every day. The Japanese commander there estimated
that while 5000 of his soldiers died in combat,
15,000 starved to death. Overall, it’s estimated
that more than 1 million of the 1.74 million
Japanese military deaths were caused by starvation
or malnutrition.
Thanks Thought Bubble. So, a quick look at
the history section in your local bookstore
or an IMDB search will tell you that there
are hundreds if not thousands of ways to tell
the story of World War II.
And this is just one history of the war, certainly
not a definitive one.
But examining the role of resources, especially
food, in the second world war tells a story
that has at least one advantage over the narrative
of the triumph of Allied good over Axis evil.
Because it helps us to see that the war was
not only about the soldiers fighting, and
it gives us a window into the way the war
affected everyone who lived at the time.
It also allows us to see World War II from
a global perspective in a way that focusing
on strategy or tactics or pivotal battles
doesn’t.
Like very little fighting went on in Sub-Saharan
Africa or most of India, but these places
were deeply affected by the war in ways that
don’t often make it into history books.
Also, we live today in a thoroughly globalized
world, but so did the people of the 1930s,
and it’s very interesting to see some of
their responses to it.
That hyper nationalist idea, that we can take
care of ourselves and don’t need help from
outside, as long as we annex a lot of territory
that’s currently outside of us - that idea
is a response to globalization.
But I think history shows us that it’s a
horrible response.
It’s a dangerous business when humans imagine
others as less, when they think their land
needs to become our land so we can feed our
people.
And in that sense at least, you can’t separate
ideology from resource allocation, and as
long as we live in a world of finite resources,
the potential for conflict will always be
there. Knowing that, hopefully, will help
us to avoid it. Thanks for watching. I’ll
see you next week.
Crash Course is filmed here in the Chad and
Stacey Emigholz studio and it's made with the
help of all of these nice people and also
with the help of our Subbable subscribers.
Subbable is a voluntary subscription service
that allows you to contribute directly to
Crash Course so we can continue its mission
of keeping it free for everyone forever. So
thank you for making Crash Course possible,
thanks for watching, and as we say in my hometown,
don’t forget to be awesome.