I read this over a period of many months, so I apologize if my memory for details is sketchy. Collingham looks at all the major players in the war and examines their agricultural and food distribution situations both before and during the war, and the impact these had on the war's outcome. She makes the case that the effects were enormous, and after reading her careful, massively researched work, I have to agree.
On the one hand, this is a tedious read. Each chapter takes us through the dry bones of climate and soil conditions around the globe, and how government bureaucrats everywhere decided what to keep for their populations, what to export, and how to balance the needs of hungry armies against hungrier and potentially restive civilian populations. (The Nazis, for example, were deeply determined not to repeat Germany's WWI mistake of allowing the German people to starve while that war dragged on, badly weakening civilian morale.) We learn how many daily calories a front-line soldier needs compared to the requirements of a munitions worker who must walk miles back and forth to work; the detail I'll never forget is how to avoid scurvy during the lean times: boil pine needles and drink the resulting tea. It will taste bad, but you'll get your vitamin C (and keep your teeth, presumably).
Impossible to summarize, but in spite of its repetitive narrative structure, this was an outstanding work. The Russians earned Collingham's respect, appearing to achieve the most while making do with very little, their earlier experiences with deprivation having taught them survival tricks such as the pine needle tea. The section on the Japanese was most interesting to me. The emperor and his military brass sent their soldiers to remote islands all over the Pacific, with no supply lines or concrete plans to get the poor men provisions. They were meant to survive, instead, through their special Japanese warrior spirit, which would enable them to live off the land and keep fighting with nothing but grass to eat. It didn't work, of course, and the number of Japanese soldiers who starved in comparison to the combat death toll is truly disgraceful. Ultimately everything you've learned about the war sounds a little different once you've read this work.
