Hi Nick,
Thanks for posting the picture!
That is quite a broad statement to make, and implies that they never stopped having shortages after that?
Troops advancing faster than their supply lines were quite common at the start of the war, with some troops not having mobile kitchens either. But they were allowed to requisition food also. I haven't read about troops going hungry that often at the beginning of the war in the regimental histories.
Hunting was a sport for the elite in Germany, so the opportunity to do that in Belgium / France was certainly taken advantage of, and is not an indication of troops going hungry. The officers that did the shooting are clearly visible in the picture.
Regards,
Lars
Hi Lars
I have read a lot of books translated in the last 10 years or so translated by Michael O'Neill, written by solders at the time and food is the constant topic of conversation. They talk about when they occupied a new area in a matter of days all the local food would be consumed by the soldiers; that was eveyrting from domesticated rabbits to the last potato; this was on top of the field kitchen and food parcels from home.
The Royal Navy blockade of the German ports bit early on, when the Germans invaded most of Belgium in 1914 they sent all the food from the Belgian harvest and all the agriculturl equipment back to Germany so the Belgian people starved and died in droves. The United States fed Belgium for most of the war. The reason that Germany never invaded the Netherlands was to keep a neutral port open in Europe for American trade. the US told the Germany very firmly what would happen if they appropriated the food meant for Belgian civilians.
Certainly by 1916 things were steadily becoming worse, soldiers in Galicia were shooting andeating wild cats, a lot of field kitchen meat was coming from dead horses. The field kitchen was not the most resilient method of food distribution, one shell and the entire company went hungry.
I agree hunting was a sport for the elite, but not shooting rabbits. Wild Boar, Deer, Chamois etc are what the hunters went for, as someone who has had the privilege to hunt in Europe boar are probably the most exciting as in dangerous and taste great.
I need to have a look in one of my many books where a soldier recounts officers shooting rabbits to supplement rations.
Food shortages could also be caused by local difficulties so there was probably never a flat global picture of food supply across all the armed forces on anyone day.
The problems caused by food shortages to the advancing Germans in Operation Michael are well documented, when they came across Allied supply dumps the starving soldiers stopped and ate and drank their fill.
As everyone who took part is now dead all we have are the voices from the past, our own knowledge and our interpretation of those events; food for thought on both sides and one of the reasons I joined this site was for interesting and thought provoking discussions.
All the best
Nick
I would like to discuss thus further if you have the time, it would be interesting to compare regimental histories with the soldiers letters and memoirs to see what the real truth is; I should image it is somewhere between two sources of information it usually is. I haven't got on to Regimental histories yet as my German needs more work, its getting there I can watch WW1 German films and understand them and read all printed text, even the Gothic fonts, but I do struggle with the scrawly handwriting on postcards. Time will fix that
