The starvation blockade of the First Lord Winston Churchill, writes historian Ralph Raico, “was probably the most effective weapon employed on either side in the conflict.… About 750,000 Germancivilians succumbed to hunger and diseases caused by malnutrition.”141 That is almost a hundred times the number of civilian dead attributed to German atrocities in Belgium. As to the purpose of the hunger blockade, Churchill was direct: “to starve the whole population—men, women, and children, old and young, wounded and sound—into submission.”
