Chapter 6 focuses on individual and household coping strategies, and investigates important famine markers such as crime, black-market trade, food expeditions, and the hunt for fuel. It explains how the severe food and fuel deprivation during the final months of war prompted urban dwellers in the occupied west to take matters into their own hands. Because of the transportation difficulties, urban black-market prices rose astronomically. Since most households did not have the means to purchase or barter on black markets regularly, anyone socially and physically capable ventured out into the countryside in search for food. Overall, the strategies pursued clearly demonstrate that the crisis was essentially a transportation problem, and not the result of actual food availability decline.

Chapter 7 provides a detailed account of social self-organisation at the local level, the constitution of the main NGO during the famine, local child-feeding initiatives, as well as women’s food protests. This chapter demonstrates that the final months of war presented a period of declining legitimacy of state authority in the food system, which led to the rise of new types of organisations: local self-organised relief and self-help entities. Emerging from existing networks, these civil society organisations occupied a central position between the household and state levels and effectively took over care and relief responsibilities. These community efforts can be qualified as a great success and are crucial to explaining why certain groups – children in particular – fared better during the famine than others.

Chapter 2 explains how the famine, which arose in the still-occupied western Netherlands after the Allies had liberated the southern part of the country, was caused and exacerbated by a complex culmination of various transportation and distribution problems. Interestingly, for the larger part it was not the overarching conflict between German and Dutch-Allied administrations, but a series of internal disputes and negotiations that influenced the course of the famine.

Chapter 1 situates the famine in its historical context and elaborates on other defining moments of the German occupation of the Netherlands. It explains how lessons learned from the First World War motivated the Dutch to prepare carefully for a new wartime food system. These preparations ensured that the agricultural transition to self-sufficiency was achieved in an orderly manner once the Netherlands was occupied. The new rationing apparatus and the Dutch bureaucrats involved were largely a continuation of the pre-war organisation of food supply and their adequate food governance prevented a serious shortage of food until September 1944.

Chapter 4 focuses on the strategies and policies of Dutch national food officials and the German civil authorities. While literature has traditionally focused on centralising attempts and the adverse effects of individual coping strategies on collective food security, this chapter demonstrates that the crisis also caused the Dutch and German authorities to act against their usual policies by consciously decentralising and delegating tasks to non-governmental agencies, as well as allowing certain forms of self-help.

In words both emotional and emphatic, Dutch historian Ernst Kossmann concluded the following about the Hunger Winter: ‘Never in its history did Holland have to consider the downfall of its people and the destruction of its civilization as seriously as it had during the final months before May 1945.’1 Over the last 75 years, both popular and scholarly discourses have cultivated powerful myths about the Hunger Winter, the most important ones being the brutal policy of starvation by the German occupier and the miraculous rescue by the Allied food drops. In literature, these myths seem informed by the assumption that the Dutch Hunger Winter is comparable to other food crises and famines caused by Nazi hunger politics. At the national level, the perseverance of these misconceptions stems from a long process of delegitimisation of the German occupier on the one hand, and the internalisation of gratitude towards the Allies on the other – processes that started right after liberation and became a central foundation for nation-building in Dutch post-war society. Through mutual influences, over time these dominant narratives have become aligned with both individual and collective memories of the German occupation in an attempt to give meaning to experiences of war, occupation, and hunger.

Chapter 5 explores the politics and practices of Allied relief, which were characterised by continuous tensions between military strategies and humanitarian concerns. The British War Cabinet openly prioritised maintenance of the economic blockade, deferring all civilian relief until after the ultimate defeat of Nazi Germany. Eventually, the Allies and Germans agreed to allow limited relief supplies from neutral resources but only under conditions that would not upset military operations for either side. Throughout the crisis, political and military considerations determined the parameters of food relief. Due to the lengthy and detailed negotiation process, the main impact of the Allied contribution to famine relief took place only after hostilities had ended.

This chapter highlights the impact of the war on women’s private everyday lives and explores how the wartime state increasingly reached into the home. It demonstrates how previously personal issues became political as women were urged to express their patriotism through their careful household management and by maintaining model homes and families for their absent husbands. The chapter also assesses the impact of the war on the standard of living of women in Ireland, interrogating previous interpretations of wartime prosperity and contrasting the urban and rural experiences. It explores the impact of the war on maternal and infant health, and the consequences of the 1918–19 influenza pandemic for women in Ireland. The chapter argues that the war resulted in much greater intervention of the state in women’s everyday and personal lives and brought significant hardship to many women. Far more women became reliant on governmental welfare through separation allowances, pensions and initiatives under the Prince of Wales National Relief Fund. Memoirs, diaries and letters are used to explore the experience of separated couples during the war and how women coped with the emotional hardship of the soldiers’ war service.

This chapter explores social morality on the home front focusing on the commentary about the public behaviour of soldiers’ wives, anxiety about a supposed increase in incidences of female drunkenness, and concern about prostitution and the spread of venereal disease. It tracks the number of wartime arrests of women for drunkenness and child neglect. The chapter argues that the hostility to separation women transcended the nationalist movement, and that while there were many incidences of soldiers’ wives arrested for drunken behaviour, the rhetoric exaggerated the reality with total convictions for drunkenness declining in wartime Ireland after the first year of the war.The chapter further explores concern with sexual immorality in wartime, focusing on venereal disease and illegitimate births. It also examines the women’s patrols established to limit the public interaction between working-class women and the soldiers. The chapter concludes that the public behaviour of working-class women in Ireland altered little as a consequence of the war, but there was nevertheless greater censure of problems evident before 1914. While the separation allowances brought women greater control over their domestic spaces, the surveillance of state and society confined women to narrowly defined codes of behaviour.