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> it was reasonable in a food shortage It's not like anyone was starving, there were of course shortages of certain products but the daily calorific from rati

by qwytw 3y ago

> it was reasonable in a food shortage It's not like anyone was starving, there were of course shortages of certain products but the daily calorific from rations was 30-50% higher than what is recommended today. I don't think anybody had to resort to eating dog food?

cjrp 3y ago
Indeed, rationing is often seen as people having to cut back on their food intake. In fact, its aim was to guarantee a decent minimum for _everyone_. The people working in factories making vehicles, munitions, ball-bearings, etc. needed to be healthy enough to keep churning them out.
tialaramex 3y ago
At its worst the UK was estimated to be less than one week from being unable to supply the civilian population with their rations. The British mainland isn't anywhere close to self-sufficient on food, and wasn't during WWII. So it needed shipments of food. Literally shipments because it's an island. Now, under ordinary rules of war ("Cruiser rules") you can't just blow up civilian transports moving food, you need to search the ships, find illegal shipments and then you can sink them after making their crews safe. But that's not how you win a war quickly against people with more resources than you, so Hitler ordered instead "Unrestricted submarine warfare" which is if you see a merchant vessel, attack and destroy it, they all drown, too bad. There's a down side to unrestricted submarine warfare of course, unlike wearing badges with skulls on them (like the Mitchell & Webb sketch, but something elite military units on every side in conflicts have tended to do) blowing up unarmed merchant ships and killing their crews in order to starve civilians is clearly something that bad guys do, so, no moral high ground for you. However in terms of starving Britain it was close to success. And the British government of the day assumed that, if starved, the civilians would demand their government surrender to Hitler to receive food. Would that have happened? We don't know. The Japanese experience suggests that civilians might just accept starving to death rather than surrender.

by qwytw 3y ago

cjrp 3y ago

Indeed, rationing is often seen as people having to cut back on their food intake. In fact, its aim was to guarantee a decent minimum for _everyone_. The people working in factories making vehicles, munitions, ball-bearings, etc. needed to be healthy enough to keep churning them out.

tialaramex 3y ago

At its worst the UK was estimated to be less than one week from being unable to supply the civilian population with their rations. The British mainland isn't anywhere close to self-sufficient on food, and wasn't during WWII. So it needed shipments of food. Literally shipments because it's an island. Now, under ordinary rules of war ("Cruiser rules") you can't just blow up civilian transports moving food, you need to search the ships, find illegal shipments and then you can sink them after making their crews safe. But that's not how you win a war quickly against people with more resources than you, so Hitler ordered instead "Unrestricted submarine warfare" which is if you see a merchant vessel, attack and destroy it, they all drown, too bad. There's a down side to unrestricted submarine warfare of course, unlike wearing badges with skulls on them (like the Mitchell & Webb sketch, but something elite military units on every side in conflicts have tended to do) blowing up unarmed merchant ships and killing their crews in order to starve civilians is clearly something that bad guys do, so, no moral high ground for you. However in terms of starving Britain it was close to success. And the British government of the day assumed that, if starved, the civilians would demand their government surrender to Hitler to receive food. Would that have happened? We don't know. The Japanese experience suggests that civilians might just accept starving to death rather than surrender.