"Just How Tough Was World War II Rationing? Very" Topic

"President Franklin Roosevelt created the Office of Price Administration in August 1941. Its main responsibility was to place a ceiling on prices of most goods to prevent wartime price gouging, and to limit consumption by rationing.

Everyone, including children, was issued a ration book, each of which had a certain number of rationing points per week. Meat and processed foods, vital for soldiers abroad, had high points. Fresh fruit and vegetables had no points. It was a complex system that the U.S. drafted cartoonist Chuck Jones to explain on film. Here, this schoolboy had his first experience using War Ration Book Two…"
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Amicalement
Armand

My mother mentioned having to turn in toothpaste tubes for recycling, since they were made of aluminum, and you couldn't get a new tube without turning in the used one.

People were encouraged to turn in pots and pans for melting down.

After the war, things were still tight, and the family cut up Nazi flags captured overseas to make clothing and dresses for the children/family.

My parents talked of how restrictive things were. My Dad did "war work" but still rationing was king. When he went to the Marines he could get soap powder in the PX so he would trade some of his chits with other Marines for their soap ones , pack a box & send it home. My Mom was the most popular woman on the block.

I can understand strategic materials, but I have often wondered how necessary food rationing in the US really was. I get it for Britain, which was dependent on imported food, but the US and Canada were such enormous food producers that there were times in the Depression when government programs actually resulted in the destruction of perfectly good food to keep the supply artificially limited. At war's end, the victorious allies had to sustain the food supplies of German and Japan for probably two or three years, to say nothing of the USSR, but rationing of every food item but sugar was removed in the US by the end of 1945.

I get that it enabled centralized control of food stocks for war purposes, but I wonder to what extent it was a measure designed to ensure that the populace understood what was at stake and shared in the burden of the war.

@ 9-pounder

You could be onto something there with your last point, I think. The 1945 British government wanted to arrange matters such that if sugar was in short supply, everybody should be equally short of it, even those who could afford to pay up for it. Rationing allowed the state to control the selling price and the supply so that all would be equally miserable. So in Britain rationing was still in place in 1951.

The post-war socialist government was simply ideologically hostile to allowing market forces to correct supply shortages. If sugar's £100.00 GBP a pound, then there's money to be made importing it, so people will flock to do so, with the result that it will very quickly be sixpence a pound.

The opposite of the free market is rationing, which is why that particular government liked rationing so much and would probably never have abolished it. It didn't want everybody having as much cheap sugar as they liked; it wanted everybody grateful to the state for letting them queue up to buy a piddling ration amount.

So your conjecture that rationing can come about for reasons unrelated to any genuine supply shortage is empirically correct, I think.

Continuing rationing was probably essential for many reasons beyond ideology.

The UK was bankrupt, having been asset stripped by the US in the early war years and there was significant war damage to repair.

Pretty much everything was still rationed and in short supply.

Sugar is a bad example, since less sugar would have been better for everyone! There were certainly more important things to use scarce foreign exchange and shipping capacity on.

The Tory opposition attacked the Labour government on rationing – about their only effective line of attack at the time – and won the election in 1951, but rationing continued until 1954 anyway!

My opinion is rationing was inevitable in the chaos after WW2. Others can disagree if they wish.

My grandfather started a small restaurant down the street from the Cessna plant. Being new, they had no history of meat use to justify large allocations of meat. The Cessna people were working long hours overtime and wanted meat when they came in for lunch. So-o-o-o, every once in a while, a cow would just wander in the back door, and not come out. And everyone was happy: the farmer was paid more than he would have been under government price controls, my grandfather made money and kept his customers, the Cessna people got their burgers. "Care for a hamburger, Sheriff Smith? It's on the house."

Meanwhile, out on the farm, my mom and her family were doing a booming business selling chickens, which apparently weren't covered by wartime rationing.

Grelber

Yep, from what I've heard and read, there was a pretty substantial black market for needed items that helped keep things going in the tough times.

Rationing had little impact on Americans outside of the big city. To many the gas rationing was the biggest.
My grand parents and parents lived in very rural parts of Alabama as did my wife's parents.
My mother's dad raised cows and my fathers hogs and cows. Fishing was another way to avoid the meat rationing issues. Of course they really did not know much of a difference from the Depression which was still going on in 1941. I had one uncle working for the CCC in Oregon and sending money home between 1939-41.
Gas was not a real issue. No one travelled long distances. Local travel was by horse.
My grandmother rode in a bus every day to the gunpowder plant where she sowed powder filled bags.
So the rationing did not have an impact on rural Americans.

The post-war socialist government was simply ideologically hostile to allowing market forces to correct supply shortages.

That's a bizarre and unsubstantiated comment. The Labour government was not socialist and believed in market forces. It certainly had a manifesto for greater social equality, which is of course why they won such a comprehensive election victory in 1945, garnering the majority of the soldiers' votes. Churchill and the Conservative party were not trusted to win the peace, bitter experience post WWI had forced the citizen army of WWII to want a better peace than that of their fathers.

The release of the Beveridge report in 1942 became a major talking point for soldiers. This was the sort of future Britain they felt worth fighting for and this viewpoint was picked up in all the censors reports on attitudes expressed in soldiers mail (well worth reading Fighting the People's War by Jonathon Fennel, which explains all this in great detail).

My father, a veteran of the war and conservative in his politics was always immensely proud of the establishment of the welfare state which he believed redressed many of the stark inequality he had seen first hand growing up in an industrial working class city, the son of a WWI veteran. It was possible to have a capitalist economy and social policy that provided universal health care and education. It wasn't one or the other, but perhaps most significant it was the post war world that a large majority of soldiers were fighting for. I've heard that expressed first hand and the broad scope of recent scholarship like Fennel's book confirms was widespread. Don't forget that the Labour government won a stunning electoral victory in 1945 and the influence of those serving in the military had a large impact on that outcome.

Britain was also adjusting to being a poorer country with the retreat from the Empire.

If we can return to the OP point – how bad was rationing in the UK during WW2?

I suspect much harsher than we are led to believe. Most still believe the WW2 propaganda – the British were the very best at this – and think people had all the food they really needed and the system was fair.

I'm skeptical about this. My father who grew up during WW2 [born 1929 I think] said his family were often short of food and basic clothing. I'm curious if there has been proper research about the effectiveness of rationing and whether children especially got the nutrition they needed.

It had been far worse in the 1930s, due to the depression but that's another issue.

I don't think the depression is another issue, all those who experienced the war and rationing had lived through the depression. It left bitter memories and one of the issues the government faced in raising a citizen army was the bitterness lingering from the depression. When the government appealed for men to fight for their country many felt that was a bit rich given how little the ‘country' had done for them in their hour of need.

The British citizen army of WWII entered into a form of social contract with the government where they were prepared to make great personal sacrifice but expected to see the country reciprocate and look after them post war. To its credit both the wartime coalition government and the post war Labour government adhered to that ‘contract'. Rationing and ensuring the fair distribution of goods was part of the deal. Was it perfect? Unlikely, but it strived to be equitable.

Tires in the USA were not available in the war, neither were cars. Due to wartime wages (1940 on), the general public probably ate better during the war , in spite of shortages, than in the 1930s. These comments are for the USA only. Germany ate better during the War than prior to the war at the cost of the occupied countries facing starvation. Goring said "I dont know who is going hungry this war but it wont be the German people." He remembered the food shortage and starvation in 1919 due to the allied blockade. The allies learned from the mistakes of WWI and post war Germany were on very tight rationing post war but not actual starvation.(1700 calories a day) I dont know how long the post war lasted in Germany however.

The OP covered food rationing in the US.

From around the time of the fall of France to Pearl Harbor, the US moved, gradually but very definitely, onto a war footing. Initially, terms such as "hemispheric defense" were used so that Roosevelt wouldn't run afoul of the isolationists (the fact that 1940 was a presidential election year further complicated this, but his opponent, Wilkie, was not an isolationist, so he didn't have to trim his sails quite as much as he might otherwise have done). Major defense programs such as the Two Ocean Navy Act and the peacetime draft were passed, and once the election was behind, Lend-Lease was initiated and the Navy was authorized to do convoy escorts in the Western Atlantic.

The domestic opposition to those programs was substantial; the bill to extend the draft passed one a one vote margin, and the America First movement had a lot of popular support. Even incidents like the sinking of the "Reuben James" by a U-boat provoked outcry from both supporters or detractors of the policy. It was a weird situation, where it was increasingly obvious that the country was gearing up for a war the population wasn't sure it wanted. By the fall of 1941, a lot of the managerial machinery for war had been geared up, and the military leadership was aware that the Japanese were likely to move into the South Pacific, but it was by no means apparent how or why the country would enter the war, or whether it would enter it united. WWI had not been popular, and the repressive measures that the Wilson Administration had used to tamp down dissent had done a lot to fuel the isolationist movement in the 1930s. A lot of the measures that were adopted were designed specifically to eliminate WWI -era measures that were deemed abuses (e.g., the legal recognition of conscientious objection, which wasn't recognized in the 1917 act and led to the mass jailing of Amish and Mennonite farmers in the Midwest). Wilson had faced serious Senatorial opposition to his WWI declaration, and Roosevelt did not want to bring the country into the war without a serious pretext.

Ironically, Admiral Yamamoto came up with the one course of action that guaranteed the country would enter the war not just united, but outraged.

I talked to mother, 86, who remembers those years in detail. I listened to a lot of stories and I will summarize here.
Mild bill is right. Even more than limited gas, the most severe problem was tires. Her father picked up mass food orders for grocery stores, they merged their orders to save gas and tires. He had to drive to a distribution center over state lines in Georgia. My grandfather was able to get discarded tire because he used his truck as a school bus. A wooden box shell which was removed after the route, so he could haul manure. He had done this during the depression as well.

My mother told about my grandmother sewing flour sack into boxer shorts for my uncle. When the other boys saw his boxer shorts at practice, my grandmother had to sew shorts for all of the boys on the football team.

In reference to the cows and hogs, the cows were not killed for meat but used to produce milk. Hogs and chickens were common for meals. A few times ducks would be cooked for holidays.

My grandmother lived long enough to see the first bi-plane land in the county and man land on the moon. I have all of her mail from her sons who served in the war.

Before this thread sinks off the page into oblivion….

When did the idea of reforming Britain into a fairer society post WW2 start? I'm sure it wasn't Churchill's idea [very much not his style].

I guess it started with Labour members of the coalition government and was the cornerstone of their manifesto for the 1945 election. But was there really a 'deal' made earlier than that or was it the realistation that working people were owed a share in the wealth of a country they had fought and sacrificed to defend?

It was probably the Beveridge Report of 1942.

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In the 1945 election campaign Churchill and the Conservatives were against much of the report's recommendations, including the formation of the NHS. Labour was for implementing those same recommendations.

Changes to welfare and working conditions during the war had shown the population what was possible. There was no going back.

I highly recommend Fighting the People's War by Jonathon Fennel. It's one of those game changer books like Tooze's Wages of Destruction that change the way you look at key aspects of the war.

The key was the realisation of appealing to a citizen army to fight for something vague like king, country and empire wasn't going to cut it. What transformed army morale was a shift in focus to fighting for a better future. The Beveridge report was a major influence as it was widely circulated and discussed within the armed forces.

We may have watch out … that we don't end up doing something similar in the near future. During "the Great Chinese COVID WAR of 2021". 😕😖

[Does sound like a good movie title too !] 🎬🎥

I have my views on British WW2 rationing policies, but it is not my country so I will keep them to myself.

In the U.S. I get the impression on foodstuffs there was an active "supplemental economy" that people with close contact to farmers could access. Food that went through processors or officially hit the stores would have been subject to rationing. Among people I knew who were living outside the cities gasoline, tires and auto parts were a problem.

FACTS ABOUT CLOTHES RATIONING IN BRITAIN DURING THE SECOND WORLD WAR

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Armand