Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food (76 page)

On American bases throughout the world Post Exchange (PX) stores were kept well supplied with a stock of small treats: American candies, cigarettes and drinks. This was part of Marshall’s troop welfare policy. These supplies of small luxuries were supposed to ensure that the soldiers felt that they had a little piece of home with them in the foreign countries where they were fighting. The PX stores became a powerful force in establishing Coca-Cola as the archetypal American beverage. In the 1920s and 1930s Coca-Cola was not yet established as
the
American drink, although a vigorous advertising campaign had helped to make it popular, especially in the south. But when America entered the war the company saw the conflict as a huge advertising opportunity, and it immediately began to lobby the government to be allowed to
carry on manufacturing the drink. It produced hundreds of letters from military bases and defence plants to prove that there was a bottomless demand for the drink among those who were crucial to the war effort.
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The Quartermaster-General, Somervell, was persuaded, and in 1942 Coca-Cola was exempted from sugar rationing when supplying military bases.
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In all, 148 plant technicians from the company were given the military title of technical observer (TO) and sent out to open sixty-four bottling plants across the world: in North Africa, India, the remote Pacific on the Mariana island group and New Guinea and, after the war, in occupied Germany and Japan.
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Thus, Coca-Cola monopolized the soft drinks market for US servicemen; 95 per cent of all the drinks available in PX stores were made by Coca-Cola and, wherever they were stationed, US troops could be observed drinking the beverage by the local inhabitants.
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Advertisements back in the United States proclaimed that Coca-Cola had become a ‘symbol of our way of living’.
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This was not an idle boast. The drink ‘turned out to be a nearly perfect symbolic repository’ for American culture for both the servicemen and their observers.
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‘To have this drink is just like having home brought nearer to you,’ wrote one homesick soldier. ‘It’s things such as this that all of us are fighting for.’
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Another claimed that he was fighting ‘as much to help keep the custom of drinking Cokes as I am to help preserve the million other benefits our country blesses its citizens with’.
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Once the war was over Coca-Cola was firmly established as ‘a sublimated essence of all that America stands for’.
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The policy of making troop welfare central to the conduct of the war meant that the US army was unusual in that it accorded food virtually equal weight with the rest of the equipment US troops needed in order to fight. In their summary of quartermaster operations in the war against Germany, William Ross and Charles Romanus noted that ‘rations were probably the best-handled category of Quartermaster supplies on the European continent … A food shortage in any US military unit, no matter how small, was regarded as a major emergency, to be corrected by whatever action necessary.’
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Indeed, they argued that by the time the Allies landed in France in June 1944 a ‘subsistence philosophy’
had developed among the US service technicians, who saw it as their duty to ensure that the combat soldiers received hot, tasty and nutritious meals whenever possible. This ‘subsistence philosophy’ gradually developed over the two years of American combat experience in North Africa and Italy, beginning with the Torch landings in North Africa in November 1942.

The US troops who waded ashore in Morocco carried in their rucksacks two awkward cylindrical C ration canisters, each weighing 5 pounds. This contributed greatly to the overall weight of the men’s backpacks, which came to 132 pounds altogether. When waterlogged, the packs became far too heavy and some men drowned trying to wade ashore. As a consequence, the shape and weight of the canisters was altered. Each C ration pack consisted of three tins, containing beef stew, pork and beans and meat hash, an issue of ‘C square biscuits’, coffee and sugar.
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The C rations had been developed in the Subsistence Research Laboratory in Chicago in the 1930s and this was the first time that they were put into use in the field. In theory, the troops were only supposed to live on C rations for a week, at most a month, before the B ration was reintroduced, and after sixty to ninety days the men could expect refrigerated supplies of fresh foods to start arriving.
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However, the logistics of supply were chaotic in North Africa and the troops quite often ended up living on C rations for several weeks at a time. This was unpopular, one commander complaining that after only three or four days of C rations his men ‘suffered spells of nausea and digestive disturbances’.
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This reaction was understandable given that when an exhausted infantryman, nerves stretched to breaking point, opened a C ration tin of meat he was confronted by a layer of reddish grease which tended to collect at the top of the can. Even when field kitchens were eventually set up in North Africa their meat issue was supplied by C ration meat cans and the men began to feel as though they only ever ate stew or hash.
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Although the GIs thought the tins of mutton stew and steak and kidney pie in the British composite ration packs were repulsive, they envied the Tommies the variety. Suggestions were sent back to the Research Laboratory from North Africa. Larger chunks of meat, which could be chewed, were requested, a better opening mechanism for the cans so that the grease gathered at the top did not spill out on to hands and clothes, and, because the C rations were tasteless when eaten cold, a demand for canned heat, from which the British and Germans benefited. This was a can with a wick leading to a heating element in the centre of the tin which heated the food within
seconds. They also asked for a few extras to be added such as chocolate, soap, cigarettes and toilet paper.
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In response, the Subsistence Research Laboratory came up with the five-in-one, which the quartermaster began to issue to troops atthe end of the North African campaign. This provided variety in the canned meat options: roast beef, meatballs and spaghetti, and canned bacon. It also contained dehydrated potatoes, onions and vegetable soups, and dried milk. The GIs did not think much of cabbage flakes, the tomato juice cocktail or the greasy substitute for butter known as Carter’s spread, but they did think the five-in-ones were a huge improvement and in 1943 the ten-in-one, which was similar but for ten men, was added to the ration options at the quartermaster’s disposal.
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The American equivalent of the operational pack which Stanton Hicks developed for soldiers right on the front line was the K ration. It provided 3,000 calories in three meals – veal for breakfast, Spam for lunch and dried sausage for dinner. There was also a fruit bar, crackers, which had a tendency to turn rancid in the tropics, cheese, a bouillon cube, malt-dextrose tablets, and a packet of lemon crystals to dissolve in water; in addition there was chewing gum (the taste of which used to permeate everything else if exposed to heat), cigarettes, toilet paper, soap, water purification tablets and a can opener.
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In comparison, their enemies in the Wehrmacht were still going into battle equipped with an iron ration which had barely changed since the days of the First World War. The German half ‘iron ration’ consisted of a packet of hard biscuits and a can of meat, while the full iron ration included an additional issue of preserved vegetables, coffee and salt.
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The Japanese quartermaster developed impressive emergency ration packs but in practice Japanese soldiers went into battle without such luxuries and were fortunate to be issued with their full allocation of rice before an assault. When they took Americans prisoner they were staggered by the K ration packs, particularly their inclusion of toilet paper and soap. The Japanese only received some low-grade soap, toilet paper and toothpaste once a month in their meagre ‘comfort’ kits.
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Despite the superiority of C and K rations to anything issued to the Axis troops, Allied soldiers complained a great deal about them. British troops were often issued with K rations, and William Woodruff, in a field near Anzio, wrote, ‘Dammit it’s a wonder we haven’t lost the
war eating that Yank stuff. It’s all wrapping and bull. When you’ve swallowed the spearmint and the fags and the glucose candy and dehydrated muck that goes with it, your guts feel empty. Gives you wind it does. It’s got nothing on British treacle and duff.’
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Wherever the Americans fought, they left behind them a trail of discarded ration containers. In Italy enemy reconnaissance planes were sometimes able to spot bivouacs and hideouts by looking for the glint of gold C ration cans catching the sunlight. In order to prevent this, the cans were eventually given a coat of green paint.
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Alongside the cans would be a litter of rejected cabbage flakes and the cellophane packages of lemon crystals, which came with the K ration. The GIs would not touch the crystals, and even the Subsistence Laboratory finally had to admit that they ‘were characterised by a biting acidity’ which could only be countered by vast amounts of sugar.
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The soldiers’ practice of discarding half of their ration packs because they disliked or were simply bored to tears by the food in them frustrated the Subsistence Laboratory researchers, as it meant that the carefully balanced diet and the correct quantities of calories for combat, which the rations were supposed to contain, were not actually consumed by the troops. During the Italian campaign in 1943 surgeons reported that the men lost weight, were physically exhausted and the appearance of ‘skin lesions, lassitude, and neuritis’ indicated vitamin deficiencies in their diet.
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The fatigue and nervous tension of combat are often accompanied by a loss of appetite. Soldiers in stressful situations may force themselves to eat in order to maintain their energy levels. Under these conditions almost any food, no matter how appetizing, tends to induce nausea and revulsion. Soldiers frequently became caught up in a vicious circle of lack of appetite, revulsion in the face of tinned rations, undernourishment, repeated combat and further nervous exhaustion. During the Second World War the new attention paid to health and nutrition meant that medics and quartermasters learned that hunger and exhaustion among the troops would eventually contribute significantly to the development of combat fatigue and that an important contributory factor in all of this was a monotonous and unpalatable diet.
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Although immediately after the war the historians of the quartermaster corps claimed that ‘the development of packaged rations for combat will probably stand as a landmark in the history of food preparation’, the
real lesson the United States army learned during the conflict was to prioritize the preparation and delivery of freshly prepared hot food to men in combat.
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In January 1944 the US army conducted a feeding experiment at Monte Cassino, using equipment borrowed from a battalion bakery. Ham, egg and cheese sandwiches, hamburgers, cakes and cookies were prepared and then delivered to the troops at the front by means of mules and jeeps. These fresh foods supplemented the C rations and were enthusiastically welcomed by the troops.
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Their response confirmed that soldiers needed to be fed freshly prepared food whenever possible and throughout the campaigns in Europe during the summer and winter of 1944 the quartermaster made a determined effort to reduce the use of ration packs wherever possible. Only 21 per cent of all the food provided in western Europe was given out in the form of operational ration packs, while 79 per cent of the soldiers’ meals were cooked in mess and field kitchens.
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This was a lesson which the quartermaster applied during the Americans’ next war, in Korea (1950–53), when as much of the troops’ food as possible was prepared in field kitchens.
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AUSTRALIA – FOOD PROCESSING FOR VICTORY

Histories of Australia’s part in the Second World War focus on its military contribution in Greece, Crete, Syria and North Africa, and the fact that thousands of Australian lives were wasted in ignominious mopping-up operations in New Guinea between 1943 and 1945. No matter how valiant Australian efforts in battle, these campaigns were peripheral in the defeat of both Germany and Japan.
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The more effective, and less publicized, Australian contribution to the war effort was to supply American troops in the Pacific with 420,000 pairs of trousers, well over a million knitted shirts, 270,000 battle jackets, 11 million pairs of socks, 1.5 million blankets and 1.8 million boots and shoes – not to mention vehicles, petrol, building materials for housing, telegraph equipment, ammunition and hospital treatment.
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Most importantly, over half of the supplies the United States took from Australia came in the form of food. In 1943 Australia and New Zealand provided the 1 million US servicemen serving in the Pacific with 95 per
cent of their food: tens of thousands of tons of canned meat and vegetables, biscuits, dehydrated vegetables and processed milk. Indeed, Australia ‘supplied more food per head of population to the Allied larder than did any other country’.
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The United States quartermaster corps referred to Australia ‘as a zone of interior for the South West Pacific’, in other words as an extension of the United States.
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During the war Australia was transformed into a vast food-processing plant for the United States army.