This was the war that was to be over by Christmas 1914.
Well, here it’s Christmas 1916 and no end in sight, and those nations that went to war
two and a half years ago did not plan for such a long war.
And you know what happens when you have a long war you didn’t plan for?
You starve.
I’m Indy Neidell; welcome to a Great War special episode about the Turnip Winter.
When you look back, by this time 100 years ago the Central Powers had a lot to gain by
seeing that the war came to a swift conclusion.
The situation was a lot worse than it had been just last year for them.
Sure, all four had done well in Romania, but Russia’s Brusilov Offensive over the summer
and the repeated Italian offensives had ground down the Austro-Hungarian armies dangerously.
Germany was exhausted from the Somme and Verdun, and if you look at those two Central Powers,
you can see that they were beginning to fall apart from within; their children were starving.
By now the war was of course affecting civilian populations everywhere, but the British Naval
Blockade had taken suffering in central Europe to new levels.
The French civilians, on the other hand, sacrificed less materially than any of their enemies
or allies.
Their government never imposed real controls on food production and distribution because
it never had to.
In fact, consumption there increased during the war.
Their Atlantic and Mediterranean ports were easily accessible and the government gave
priority to food imports as a means of limiting popular discontent.
There was a shortage of coal there, sure, since the Germans occupied the main coal-producing
region, but even that was eventually sorted out.
Inducting a quarter of France’s agricultural workers into the army and requisitioning tens
of thousands of their horses had also caused problems, but they too were at least manageable.
By this winter, there was still as much butter in France as there was at the beginning of
the war and its price was still the same.
By contrast, butter in Germany and Austria was pretty much unobtainable at any price,
and only expecting mothers and small children got even a tiny ration of milk.
Britain had it pretty bad but it wasn’t desperate.
They had a good centralized administration that was able to impose controls on the whole
system by which the nation was fed.
There had been food shortages in 1916 - bad harvest, U-boats - but rationing and increased
agricultural production eventually spared them the worst.
You could still see the effects of the decline in nutrition there, though; infant mortality
was way up and tuberculosis deaths rose by a 25%.
Russia produced more than enough food for its people throughout the war, but in terms
of food management, it absolutely failed.
Russia had a huge problem getting food to the cities, which were by now crowded with
millions of refugees.
A big chunk of the railway system was given over to the military, and the rest was in
disarray.
Food prices in cities increased much faster than wages did.
G.J. Meyer says this in “A World Undone”, “The infant mortality rate doubled in Petrograd
from 1914 to 1917, and by 1917 women working ten hour days in factories were also spending
forty hours weekly standing in line to get fuel and food for their children.
Riots and strikes began to break out... even in 1916 troops sent to suppress disturbances
refused to do so.
By early 1917 the capital had only a few days’ supply of grain in reserve and was a tinderbox
ready to ignite.”
But in Germany and Austria it wasn’t just urban centers that were in trouble.
There were some problems with bad management, but by this time there was an absence everywhere
of the basic necessities of life because neither empire had done anything to prepare for a
long war.
They were both basically under a state of siege, right?
And had been for two years.
And they had already started having food shortages near the beginning of the war.
In October 1914, 10,000 horses were slaughtered for food in Vienna.
In spring 1915, when German farmers refused to stop feeding potatoes and grain to their
pigs, Berlin ordered the butchering of all of them.
Nine million animals died in the Schweinemord and you can guess the consequences; pork prices
collapsed briefly and then skyrocketed permanently and there was no longer enough breeding stock
to replenish the supply.
The naval blockade was made worse by interior problems as well.
Those empires had cut and paste political structures that made central control pretty
impossible.
Bavaria would not export to other parts of Germany; Hungary would sell its produce to
Germany instead of other parts of its own empire.
Pre-war, Germany imported six million tons of grain a year, but also a million seasonal
farm workers and millions of tons of fertilizer.
Now unable to get that, grain production was cut in half by 1917.
Of course the needs of the army came first, but those numbers were mind-boggling, 60 million
pounds of bread and 130 million pounds of potatoes each and every week.
Yep, that’s what?
Nearly 60 million kilos of potatoes per week.
Staggering.
Heavy rains, an early frost, and labor shortages made the 1916 harvest a failure and by the
winter of 1916, true famine had hit.
As meat and dairy became unobtainable, potatoes were relied on more and more, but the potato
crop fell by more than half this year in Germany and Austria.
But they were out of everything; shoes were being made of paper and wood, coffee from
tree bark.
The German diet by now was of black war bread that contained little grain, fatless sausage,
and three pounds of potatoes and one egg per week.
Germany relied more and more on the king of least popular vegetables, the turnip.
And this winter, the coldest of the war, became known ever after as the turnip winter.
Turnips were usually used to feed livestock and they don’t have the nutrition of potatoes,
so malnutrition became endemic.
And of course crime rose to unprecedented levels as desperate people tried to survive.
Berlin reported that 80,000 German children had starved to death in 1916.
In Austria, you were only allowed to heat one room of your house.
Even in agriculturally rich Hungary, people were eating dogs and horses.
Schools were closed since they couldn’t be heated.
(A World Undone) “One of the most terrible of our sufferings was having to sit in the
dark.
It became dark at four in the winter.
It was not light until eight.
Even the children could not sleep all that time... and when they had gone to bed we were
left shivering with the chill that comes from semi-starvation and which no additional clothing
seems to alleviate, to sit thinking, thinking.”
The fall of Romania was expected to provide much needed grain, but it only raised German
and Austrian grain stocks by 6%.
City dwellers went to the country to swap jewelry and wool clothes for whatever food
they could get; tens of thousands of women in Vienna turned to prostitution for survival.
Mobs of women looted stores; there were strikes by workers who were working overtime but still
not earning enough to feed their families.
This was desperation.
And it was the background to one of the most fateful decisions of the war.
The decision to re-introduce unrestricted submarine warfare.
Where every ship is a target.
German Chief of Staff Paul von Hindenburg and his number two Erich Ludendorff were convinced
that stalemate would continue on the Western Front, and the only way to win the war before
Germany starved to death was to try to starve Britain out of the war by sinking millions
of tons of shipping bound for Britain with food and supplies.
German Naval Chief of Staff Henning von Holtzendorff believed this could be accomplished in six
months.
We’ll talk about this in more detail when it happens, but it’s the truth - the war
would become even more and more inhumane in 1917, and thousands of civilians and sailors
would drown, for the Central Powers’ hope of mere survival.
Modern war is total war and it is indeed hell.
I know that the past two Christmases we had specials that were more upbeat or even light-hearted,
but not this year.
This year, if you’re celebrating, take a few moments to think of the millions of starving
and freezing people 100 years ago throughout Europe, and hope that it’s possible for
us to never allow it to happen again.