World War II famines in Southeast Asia

From The Great Second World War Vietnam and Java Famines by Gregg Huff.  From the Abstract:

This article provides quantitative assessments of the great famines that occurred in Vietnam and Java in 1944–1945, which together claimed the lives of some 3.4 million people. It shows that in both Vietnam and Java, harvest shortfalls, in which weather figured prominently, were so large that insufficient food was available to feed everyone. Nevertheless, in both instances, even with the pressures of war and weather, governments could have acted differently and largely, perhaps even wholly, prevented famine. Although Java's famine had few political repercussions, Vietnam's was instrumental in the August 1945 Viet Minh and communist revolution.

This fills in a gap I had not recognized in my knowledge.

During World War II there was a famine in India which cost the lives of some 800,000 to 3.8 million Indians.  Whether the famine was induced by weather, bad labor policies, the shock of war to global commerce, land ownership patterns, etc, has been the subject of great academic and ideological debate post war and is something near and dear to the hard left.  

Regardless of culpability and what might have been done differently, the famine was real and tragic and also impinged on the war with Imperial Japan in 1943-4.  Japan had managed to push their territorial occupation right up to the Indian frontier with their occupation of Burma in May 1942.  

If you read much Pacific war history, one of the themes you come across again and again is that of hunger and the dearth of food.  The Japanese civilian population, the Japanese troops, the civilian populations in occupied nations, the Allied prisoners of war - everyone was starving by the end of the war.

The most brutal, perhaps, are the accounts of the battles between the Allied armies (British, American, Australian, and Chinese) and the Japanese in the Burmese theater.  All hungered but the Japanese troops simply could not get food at all.  Whether you read accounts from the Allies or from Japanese sources - starvation was the biggest enemy of the Japanese.  

There has always been a ready explanation for this and that was that the shock of war reduces agricultural productivity in combination with the destruction of the Japanese maritime fleet.  Food simply could not be moved to where it was needed.

What I had not appreciated was that the Indian famine, with which I am pretty familiar, was mirrored in 1944-5 in Java and Vietnam.  The Japanese were managing weather famine as well as war famine.  

I find that an interesting additional piece of information.  The British have been deeply criticized for the alleged inadequacy of their response to the Bengal famine.  That has always struck me as Monday morning quarterbacking in combination with ideological zealotry.  Further, it is simply hard to reconstruct the terrible trade-off decisions that they faced in fighting a local famine, a local war (Burma), and a global war all at the same time.  

Was there a tragedy?  Certainly.  I think it is unclear just how different or better decisions might have been made that might have made a difference.

It is interesting to see now that the Japanese were equally ineffective in dealing with their drought-driven famine which recasts, in my mind, the quality of arguments made against Britain.  Still a tragedy but even less reason to believe that the outcome could have been materially different.