Just What Does a "War Footing" Mean?

Unlike Guelph, various levels of government around the world have recently proclaimed that we are facing a "climate emergency". While our Council recently voted against doing this, I thought it might be useful for readers to understand what might actually happen if a government passed such a resolution and really lived up to the rhetoric. Luckily, we have an excellent analogy to a genuine "all hands on deck" response to the climate emergency. And that was the decision of various Allied powers to change their economies to a "war footing" in WWII. By looking at that, I think we begin to see what a real commitment to averting a climate disaster might actually look like.

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Let's start with Great Britain. Almost as soon as the war began, German U-boats started sinking British shipping. The British government was absolutely terrified about this, because the country was so dependent on trade. Here's a quote from a Wikipedia article:

At the start of the Second World War in 1939, the United Kingdom was importing 20,000,000 long tons of food per year, including about 70% of its cheese and sugar, nearly 80% of fruits and about 70% of cereals and fats. The UK also imported more than half of its meat, and relied on imported feed to support its domestic meat production. The civilian population of the country was about 50 million. It was one of the principal strategies of the Germans in the Battle of the Atlantic to attack shipping bound for Britain, restricting British industry and potentially starving the nation into submission.

Rationing in the United Kingdom 

It wasn't just a matter of British ships being sunk by the NAZIs, it was also a question of increased demand for shipping in general. Ships were needed to bring in weapons and raw materials too. Moreover, they would also be needed to send supplies to allies---such as those horrific convoys through the Arctic to the Soviet Union or through the Mediterranean to Malta. 

And it was also an economic issue too. Britain needed it's foreign currency reserves to buy hardware from other countries---especially the USA. For example, in 1939 the British realized that they didn't make any submachine guns, but that the army desperately needed them. The only one they could find to buy was the Thompson (the "Tommy Gun" used by gangsters), which cost an astounding $209/per unit in 1939. (It came down in price pretty dramatically as production went onto a war footing. And the British eventually designed and built the STEN gun---which only cost $11. But both of these facts "buttered no parsnips" in 1939.) When you are throwing away your gold reserves on tanks, ships, guns, and, planes, any money you can save by growing your own food is going to be tremendously important.

What the government decided to do was two-pronged. First, they introduced rationing to control what people ate, and, they put a lot of energy into agricultural outreach to dramatically increase domestic food production.

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The key thing I want readers to understand about food rationing in Great Britain was how incredibly all-pervasive it was. For example, you were not allowed to shop at any business you wanted. Instead, you had to register with the ones you used regularly and never go anywhere else. To a large extent, this was to allow grocers to exert some control over supplies in order to divide up scarce resources fairly. For example, if a shipment of something rare came in---for example, fresh apples---they could be limited to so many per customer. The business could do this because it could judge how many customers it had. And being able to limit in-demand items, the grocers could stop hoarding. In exchange, the average customer wouldn't have to kill herself in order to get to the store first---before the good stuff got all sold out.

Another example was that bakers were only allowed to make one particular type of bread, the "National Loaf". This was brown bread---which was more nutritious, more filling, and, wasted less flour. For similar reasons the only cheese produced was cheddar.

Luckily, there is a series of excellent YouTube videos that explains the British rationing experience by having a fellow "eat his way through" a week of war time rationing. (You can see it here.  If you are getting the email version of this blog, it strips out the YouTube videos.)

You might think that cutting people's access to food would damage their health, but the government put into practice some pretty effective "safety valves", to prevent what could have been "inevitable" problems. 

For example, as far as people who ate there, restaurants were exempt from the standard rationing regime. This didn't mean that the wealthy ate like kings and the poor starved, however. This is because the restaurants were forbidden to charge above a certain price for food. This meant that they could only purchase and sell food that was cheap and in relatively good supply (think bread, potatoes, common veggies, etc.) This meant that while there might still be food to put on the table, it would only be made from ingredients that were plentiful enough to still be cheap.

What this meant in practice was that at the most swanky restaurants the wealthy gentry got into of bringing in rabbits, pigeons, deer, trout, etc, to the restaurant and having the chefs there cook it for them. (Any wild game you caught yourself was exempt from rationing.) Everyone else learned to eat things like the National Loaf, potato soup, and, Woolton pie.

This last item was a concoction that was a "pseudo meat pie" that was concocted mostly of root vegetables, baked in a potato pastry crust, and, flavoured with imitation meat gravy. (I've heard it wasn't too bad but terribly bland---the British had yet to discover spices and it's cuisine had relied heavily on meat to add flavour.)

Woolton pie, image used under the Fair Use rule, from the Love Food recipe site.

The government was concerned about workers and the poor "falling through the cracks" of rationing, and, also the extra burden they were putting on households by mobilizing the entire population into the workforce. (When mom comes back from a hard day building Wellington bombers, I doubt if she's going to be too interested in slaving over a hot stove.) So they set up "British Restaurants" where a filling, nutritious (if often bland and boring) meal could be provided for a trivial amount of money---and no ration coupons. In effect, if you ate at a British restaurant or a workplace canteen (these were much the same), you could double your rations. As you might imagine, they were immensely popular.

Working stiffs at a British Restaurant in 1943.
Photo by Jack Smith for the British Ministry of Information.
Image c/o Wiki Commons.

One of the amazing things about this system was how incredibly effective it was. Not only did it prevent the sort of starvation that was common in Europe and Asia, it actually improved the health statistics for the average British citizen!

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The other side of the equation was food production. And again, the striking thing about this was how tremendously intrusive the government was in the farming sector. For example, they set up a system of what we would call "Agricultural Extention Officers" but they called "War Ags". But unlike ours, which merely give suggestions to farmers. In WWII Great Britain, these "Ags" would mark you according to certain criteria. And if you got a failing grade they'd take your farm away from you and give it to someone else that they thought would be more productive! That was the "stick" that made farmers pay attention to these government officials and actually do what they were told. 

And what they told people to do was increase the production of things like wheat, potatoes, sugar beets, milk, and, flax. They expected farmers to plough down their pastures, get rid of most of their livestock (the govt wanted dairy cows---for children's milk, but not sheep, pigs, or, beef cows.) They also wanted farmers to use new "modern" technology---like silage, combine harvesters, balers, various types of tractors (often rented to the farmer on a per-day basis by the Ministry of Agriculture), etc, in order to save manpower, and, cut down on feed grown for horses. The pressure that the War Ags put on farmers got to the point where they used every scrap of land available---growing hay on the sides of roads, in cemeteries, collecting nettles and cutting down tree branches to feed dairy cows ("pollarding"), etc.

Again, if you have the time and are interested, there is an excellent series of YouTube videos about the British Agricultural system in WWII. (Here's the link for email subscribers.)

Food production wasn't just left up to farmers. People were encouraged to grow as much of their own food as possible. 

Londoners growing vegetables in Kensington Gardens during the Second World War.
Public Domain Image, c/o the UK National Archives.
Original photo from Imperial War Museum, item D8334.

This went beyond growing veggies. For example, people were encouraged to form a a "pig club".

The idea was that while it made no sense for farmers to grow feed specifically to raise pigs, it was reasonable for households to pool their kitchen scraps and weeds from the garden to feed just one hog. The government encouraged this behaviour, but they brought in specific regulations. For example, the government specifically declared that it owned half the pig, which meant that the members of the club got only half of the pig they raised. Moreover, the pig could not be slaughtered unless a police officer was present to ensure that things were all done on the "up and up". (These rules didn't cause as much upset as you might imagine, as the government's half of the pig was specifically set aside for the people who'd been displaced by bombing---especially the children.)

As with food rationing, these Draconian policies proved tremendously effective in boosting wartime production. Wheat boomed to the point where by 1943 50% of wheat for bread was produced locally and potatoes increased by 87%---a tremendous improvement over pre-war levels. Unfortunately, however, the UK was still dependent on imports of food from Commonwealth and Empire nations. And because Britain was assigned top priority over Empire nations, some of colonies in Asia, Africa, and, various islands suffered starvation because they were denied imports that they had become dependent on because of colonial trade patterns. As many as 3 million subjects in places like East Africa and the Bengal died of starvation because of a decision to ship food to the UK instead of using it to deal with local shortages. 

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"Wartime footing" didn't just apply to "little people" like workers or farmers, either. The government also stepped in and bossed around big business too. In 1939 Canada created the "Department of Munitions and Supply", which was put under the control of C. D. Howe. Just to give you an inkling of how all-powerful this department became, Minister Howe became known as "the Minister of Everything".

C. D. Howe---"the Minister of Everything".
Public domain image, c/o the Vancouver Archive.

Howe had a history of knowing how to "build things from scratch", as he'd started both the CBC and Air Canada before the war.

The way he managed the Canadian economy was by tapping into what he considered the best business managers in the nation and having them agree to become "dollar a year men". That is to say, they were loaned to the nation by their businesses (which continued to pay their previous salary), and the government paid them one dollar a year---just to get them officially on the payroll. They were then used to create an integrated, centrally-controlled economic system that was designed to do three things:  produce war materials, dramatically grow Canadian manufacturing capacity, and, do it without creating inflation or war profiteering.

His ministry did this by creating 28 Crown corporations that "filled the holes" in Canadian industry. Howe was given enormous power by Parliament to

“mobilize, control, restrict or regulate to such extent as the Minister may, in his absolute discretion, deem necessary, any branch or trade or industry in Canada or any munitions of war or supplies.”

Arming the Nation, by Dr. Jack Granatstein, p-5.

And he did. Howe created things like artificial rubber plants and machine tool factories so it could supply industry with things that the Canadian economy had never made before. This allowed the government to create whole new production lines for things that had always been imported before. The results were impressive. There were a few "home runs"---it's been said that the British army ran on "Canadian Military Pattern" trucks, and, Canada built 122 anti-submarine Corvettes and 410 merchant ships. (Pretty astounding numbers given that there was almost no ship building industry at all in 1939.)

There were also a few "base hits". Canada tried to build it's own tanks---the "Ram"---but they weren't really able to compete with the American Sherman in either quality or price. But the Ram was re-purposed into the "Kangaroo", which became a very successful armoured troop carrier. When Howe saw his first Lancaster bomber on a trip to Britain, he insisted that Canada should build them too. He gave the contract to the Hamilton National Steel Car plant, but there were problems with production. Howe had the management changed and it became "Victory Aircraft" for the duration of the war. Only 430 Lancasters were produced---most too late in the war to be of much use. But they did build almost 3200 Avro Ansons. (A training and "communication" {cargo and transportation} aircraft based on a pre-war airliner.)

Much of this production came about because the "dollar a year" executives developed a "sub-contracting" production system. This involved splitting a project into bits and pieces which were then subcontracted to smaller firms spread all over the country.  (It also had political advantage of ensuring that the entire country---not just Central Canada---benefited from the war-time boom.) This was a considerable increase in organizational complexity because it required strict quality control (to make sure that the subcontracted parts actually fit together as designed) and co-ordination (to make sure that giant, complex machines didn't sit half-built because a specific part hadn't shown up on time.) This is where the expertise and authority invested in Howe and his executives were essential---the war simply could not allow major projects to become tangled up in "red tape" or Parliamentary wrangling. 

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None of this tremendous intrusion into people's lives would have been possible if people weren't willing to make the personal sacrifices. This didn't "just happen", but was the result of two things: a commitment to make sure no one profited unduly from the war, and, a massive public education campaign.

WWI political cartoon.  Public domain image c/o BBC News.

The conventional wisdom about WWI was that a lot of money was siphoned off due to profiteering. And in 1938 there had been the so-called "Bren gun scandal" that involved the Ministry of Defense being involved in helping the Inglis company of Toronto secure what we would call a "no-bid contract" to build BREN light machine guns for both the British and Canadian military. The Conservatives whipped up people's concerns to the point where the then Minister of Defense, Ian Alistair Mackenzie, resigned. In response, the Liberal government passed the "Defense Purchases, Profits Control, and, Financing Act" which created a clear chain of command and set out guidelines to prevent profiteering. Which, in turn, created the "Minister of Everything". (Once Germany invaded Poland it became clear to all and sundry that it was a very good idea to have a factory building machine guns in Toronto, so the "Bren Gun Scandal" quickly fizzled out.)

Another part of this "we're all in this together" campaign was the creation of wage and price control mechanisms aimed at making sure that inflation was kept to a minimum. Wages were relatively easy to regulate, but prices were a different matter as a lot of the "day-to-day" stuff was locally produced and hard to keep an eye on. To this end, the government mobilized customers to keep an eye on the businesses they dealt with in order to keep them "on the up-and-up". 

An advertisement by the Canadian government advising consumers that they should
now be paying less for milk than before. From the website "Life as a Retailer".

This helped control inflation but it also told the average citizen that the government was keeping an eye on business so it wouldn't jerk them around. This sort of thing does an enormous amount to get the ordinary person supportive of the common project. 

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This raises another important issue. As is abundantly clear from the recent sleazy campaigns to spread fake news over social media, propaganda works incredibly well to mold public opinion. The difference between the war years and today is that the government was then using it to get people "pulling together" in a common cause, whereas now we have a wide variety of players---including White Nationalists, Incels, Climate Change Deniers, Anti-vaccers, and, various foreign secret services---who are using it to divide people and whip them up into a frenzy against one another. 

These positive and unifying messages ranged from the merely practical. 

To support to specific campaigns like car pooling and scrap drives.

To the genuinely inspirational. 

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This last image of Winston Churchill pointing at the viewer, telling her that it isn't enough to just want to win the war, but that she needs to work at being a good enough person to actually deserve to win really strikes home to me. Doing all this research about the the WWII home front, I was deeply impressed about how much the British people actually deserved to win the war. Almost the entire nation pulled together in a level of deep, selfless commitment that seems almost impossible to believe nowadays. Almost everyone pitched in and did their bit, really. 

Without this incredible mobilization of the entire people, it's easy to believe that there would have been mass starvation in Great Britain and their war effort would have fallen to pieces. But it didn't, and to use another phrase from Churchill, it really seems to have been their "finest hour". Contrasting it nowadays with many people's almost total indifference to the public weal literally brings tears to my eyes. 

But there is a side to this tremendous mobilization that we also need to remember. There were legal sanctions against people who fought against the public good---and they were enforced. As I mentioned above, if you wouldn't "get with the program" you would have your farm or business taken away from you. Moreover, if you aided and abetted the enemy or its agenda, you would be arrested and put in jail. 

A rally in Great Britain with Oswald Mosley inspecting some of his
para-military "black shirts". Public domain photo c/o The History Press.

Sir Oswald Mosley was a ex-elected member of Parliament who was leader of the British Union of Fascists. He had good connections with European Fascists---he and his second wife married in Germany, with Hitler as a guest---and supported a corporatist economic and social policy. In practice, his party went out of its way to bait Jewish people and progressive organizations, which led to the "Battle of Cable Street".  (Some AntiFas of today cite that as an inspiration for their activities.) When war broke out, he was loudly in support in a peace deal with Hitler. British intelligence considered this a threat to the war effort, so his party was outlawed and he was put in prison under the War Measures Act.

This might seem draconian to modern ears. But at the time it made a lot of sense. In country after country small fascist parties had offered significant support to the invading Germans. For example, in Norway a collaborator government under Vidkun Quisling  became the Norwegian voice for German policy. And in France a local, Fascist paramilitary group "the Milice" helped round up resistance members and Jews in aid of the NAZIs. All over Europe local Fascists recruited members to join local SS regiments that fought and committed atrocities for the Germans. The UK was concerned that at least some of the British black shirts would be willing to offer similar "aid and comfort to the enemy".

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What can we learn from the above history lesson? 

First, I'd suggest that contrary to what a lot of people have said over, and over, and over, and over, and over, again---it is possible to mobilize the citizenry to do great things. "Human nature" doesn't make it physically impossible for society to quickly self-organize so we can collectively prevent or deal with massive problems. So it is totally possible for the nations of the world to declare a climate emergency and go on a war footing in order to quickly decarbonize the economy and retrofit our society in order to deal with the effects of climate change. It all comes down to a question of political will. 

Second, this mobilization can't be done without the government really stepping in and intervening in people's lives. It is possible to get most people "with the program", but there have to be real consequences for people who simply refuse to do their bit. I suspect that this isn't just a case of catching the odd individual who is sabotaging the work of everyone else, but probably more a case of people being not willing to pitch in if they can see others getting away with being "free riders". If the government creates negative consequences for people who won't do their share---and is seen to be doing so---then people will be more willing to participate because it is "fair". 

Here's a YouTube video that illustrates this problem very well. 

As I mentioned above, the British "War Ags" can and did take away farms from people who wouldn't listen to advice about how to expand production; C. D. Howe took away a factory from executives who were doing a crappy job building airplanes; and; British Intelligence put local Fascist sympathizers in prison. Moreover, the government let people know how much they should be paying for necessities---like milk---and wanted to hear from them if they saw businesses charging more. 

If we want people to really pull together about climate change then the government is going to have to step in and motivate people to all work together in order to get rid of fossil fuels and deal with the natural disasters that come from climate change. That could mean rationing gasoline and jet fuel so we can "ratchet down its use". It could also mean banning the importation of products that use too much carbon to import---we might have to get used to not having out-of-season fruit and veggies that were trucked thousands of miles to the grocery store.

It could also involve a new "Minister of Everything" getting a crew of "dollar a year people" to "rejig" the auto industry away from building cars and instead building a comprehensive public transit system. They could also work to build the new industries that will produce the solar panels, windmills, and, super-efficient machinery that will be needed to build a truly sustainable economy. We could also see a massive public works campaign that aimed to insulate every building up to a certain minimum standard of efficiency within a short period of time. We would also need to create enormous public works programs to protect coastal cities from flooding, and, to relocate people and industries from areas that will flood or burn out on a regular basis as the climate changes. Moreover, we will need an absolutely enormous amount of effort aimed at restoring devastated ecosystems in order to rebuild the carbon sinks and ecological resilience that has been badly damaged by hundreds of years of allowing "the invisible hand" of the marketplace squeeze the life out of Mother Nature.

I have mentioned this idea to several friends and some of them replied "Well, that was possible then---but it's impossible now because things are so much more complicated." It's true that we live in a more complicated world, but we also have computerized tools that will make some things just as more easy to do than they used to be. For example, if we were to seriously ration gasoline to cut down on emissions as a transitional measure, then it would be so much easier to organize car pools nowadays due to the use of cell phones. The same thing could be said about quickly introducing bus-based public transit between cities once people found that they had to leave their cars in the driveway much more often.

The point to remember is that each individual person doesn't have to know how each element of the economy is going to change. No one can. But if we unleash the intelligence and creativity of hundreds of thousands of people united in this one goal, we will find that we can accomplish amazing things---just like the way our parents and grandparents turned enormous, complex societies on a dime during WWII.

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In the climate emergency context, I would suggest that the closest analogy to locking-up Oswald Mosely and the Union of British Fascists might involve going after some of the social media companies that have allowed climate change deniers, anti-vaccers, white nationalists, and other malefactors free reign to lie to the general public. The recent meeting in Ottawa of The International Grand Committee on Disinformation and ‘Fake News’ is an excellent first step.

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Great Britain was put on "war rations" and lived with a planned economy for all of the Second World War. You might be excused for thinking that people would be in a huge rush to get rid of all that once the war was over. The Conservative party campaigned on that. But oddly enough, Labour ran on the opposite. They said that people still needed to pull together to "win the peace" just as they'd won the war. They said that the country needed to keep rationing and using a controlled economy to build a new world that included things like a national health service. 

Indeed, there was a lot of truth to this. The UK was effectively bankrupt after the war, as the United States almost immediately started demanding repayment of the loans it had given to Britain to fund its war effort. Moreover, the Allied powers who were now occupying Western Europe and large parts of Asia had the responsibility of feeding millions of people---many of whom were displaced people living in refugee or POW camps. Agriculture and industry were both destroyed anywhere the Axis had held power. Britain now not only had to feed it self, but also many other people too! 

Ordinary voters understood this, and Labour won a smashing victory over the Conservatives even though they were led by the immensely popular Winston Churchill. As a result, the "war footing" and rationing continued for years after the war, with the final ration regulations disappearing in 1954.

Canada didn't have anywhere near the problems that the UK did. We weren't an occupying power, so we had no similar huge obligations. In addition, all those nations of the world with wrecked industry and agriculture were over-joyed to buy stuff from us. This meant that all those war industries set up by C. D. Howe were able to quickly transition to making consumer goods. John Inglis and Company in Toronto stopped making Bren guns and products for domestic use. (I own an Inglis washing machine.) The Victory aircraft factory in Hamilton went back to being the "National Steel Car" plant, which is now a tremendously successful business that sells freight cars to railways all over North America. And those factories in Ontario that had built the trucks that the British army had ridden to victory formed the basis for the car industry that has provided good paying jobs for generations of workers.

In much the same way, I think that a successful "War Footing" to deal with the climate emergency would only last a few years. But once we had made the transition to a sustainable world, I'd suspect that we would find that a lot of things had changed for the better in ways that most of us couldn't imagine before we started the process. If you'd told the average worker in Great Britain during the Great Depression that in 20 years the UK would have a universal, free healthcare for everyone---plus a lot of other significant social programs---he'd have thought you were dreaming in technicolour. And if you'd told Canadians who grew up in a country where most people really were just lumber jacks, miners, or, farmers that after only six years of planned economic growth that we'd be a major manufacturing powerhouse---and eventually get all the same significant social programs as the UK---they'd had laughed in your face.

But the facts speak for themselves. There's no reason at all---except a failure of vision---that we cannot do much the same thing with regard to the climate emergency. It just comes down to a question of political will.  

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Furthermore, I say to you---climate change must be dealt with!