THE GERMS OF THE DISEASE
Coca-Cola’s symbolism and its insidious infiltration were not lost on the Axis powers. Otto Dietrich, the Nazis’ press chief, declared in 1942 that “America never contributed anything to world civilization but chewing gum and Coca-Cola.” Japanese radio proclaimed that “with Coca-Cola we imported the germs of the disease of American society. These germs, however, were introduced in such a pleasant way that we failed to realize it.” The “pleasant way” worked all too well, despite the propaganda. German, Japanese, and Italian soldiers all knew and enjoyed the taste of Coca-Cola. A photo of a U.S. captive aboard a German sub showed him drinking—of course—a Coke. Nor were the Japanese immune. When a luxurious Japanese “jungle city” was captured in western New Britain, it disgorged cases of captured Coca-Cola. And on one hot summer day, Italian prisoners of war refused to continue working until they had been given the pause that refreshes. The Technical Observers were well aware of the possible markets they were opening. “I’m sure that many of the smaller children had never tasted Coca-Cola before,” wrote one T.O. from New Guinea, “but they’ll certainly be steady customers from now on.”
Coca-Cola men also discovered a potential market in more primitive cultures, joyfully reporting that Zulus, Bushmen, and Fijians relished the drink. Even making allowances for the time, their attitude was often racist, condescending, and ethnocentric, such as a New Guinea T.O.’s description of a native’s first encounter with a Coke, which he downed too quickly. “Then the fun began. He belched, the gas went up his nose and brought tears to his eyes. He was a scared native for a few minutes. So now it can be said that we have sampled and opened up a new outlet—the Fuzzy Wuzzy market.” Another Coke man snapped a photo of a Polynesian king sitting on a wheelbarrow throne, prophesying that he would soon be sitting “on one of those famous Red Barrels and surrounded by full and ice-cold Coca-Cola bottles, and be wearing crowncorks with the ‘trademark registered’ in his ears.” One soldier, writing home from India to say he was getting Coke at his PX, went on to describe Kayo, a six-year-old Indian boy who had learned the American way—soft drinks, popular tunes, and obsessive hygiene—all too well. “He brushes his teeth three or four times a day and takes showers regularly. They told him that if he washes frequently he will become white like us, and he certainly tries hard.”
PROFITABLE PATRIOTISM
As the war wound to a close, the fervor of the Coca-Cola Technical Observers in selling their product only increased. The T.O. program continued for another three years before a graceful transition to a civilian operation, symbolized by the death in 1948 of one publication, T.O. Digest, and the birth of another, Coca-Cola Overseas. The pseudo-military Coke men were in a delicate position. While they were acutely aware of the potential profits and future markets they were creating, they had to moderate their sales pitch. With selling, sampling techniques, and catchy slogans drilled into their heads, however, they found it difficult to be circumspect about pushing the product. In a series of unpublished notes written while he served as a Technical Observer in Germany in 1946, George Downing explained that “the T.O.’s only merchandising tool was a friendly spoken word. No profit, no increased sales, no rapid turnover, no small investment could be stressed. Ours was to be a giving of service in making Coca-Cola available to GIs wherever they might be.” Then, in two columns, Downing listed the way Coca-Cola language had to be translated for the patriotic war effort:
Regular Coca-Cola Language (accustomed to) Lingo Due to Military Necessity
“If we are gonna make sales rise, boys, we gotta merchandise.” “Fellows, as representatives of the Army Exchange Service in charge of soft drink production and distribution, we would like to help you with any problems that you have.”
“If they are gonna be sold, they gotta be cold.” “We have learned that people prefer their Cokes below 40 degrees and we would like to show you how it can best be done.”
“Mr. Dealer, in order for you to capitalize on advertising, we would like to place this attractive custom built sign to identify your business as one having Coke for sale.” “Fellows, we can make lithography available to you that would add a touch of home to your soda fountain, Coke bar, etc.”
Because Downing and his cohorts had virtually a captive market, the euphemisms and appeals to the “fellows” worked—so much so that, when Jim Farley and other Coke executives came for a tour of inspection, they were embarrassed by the extent of blatant advertising at the PX and urged the T.O.s to “soft pedal it a bit.” Despite Company protestations that the war effort was a purely philanthropic gesture, it was, on the contrary, clearly a profitable operation in the postwar environment. As their wives and children flew over to join them, American servicemen brought home cases of Coke, much to the delight of the T.O.s, who competed fiercely for the highest sales figures.
WHITE COKE FOR A RED RUSSIAN
One of those Technical Observers was Mladin Zarubica, sent to Austria in 1946 to install a gigantic bottling plant. He went at the direct request of President Truman, who was concerned by the number of green troops who were drinking poisonous schnapps and going blind. Zarubica, a wartime PT boat commander, all-American football player from UCLA, and son of a Yugoslav immigrant, threw himself into his new job with exuberance, helping to construct thirty-eight Coke plants in southern Europe within two years. He also purchased as much warehouse space as possible, in part to keep Pepsi out, in part to stockpile materials while the Army was still paying for transportation. His largest plant, in Lambach, Austria, was four city blocks long and ran continuously, bottling twenty-four thousand cases of Coca-Cola every twenty-four hours. “I had a railroad siding that I had midnight requisitioned [i.e., stolen] out of the Russian Zone,” Zarubica recalled. “I even built my own CO2 plant because I couldn’t count on the purity of the local gas.” To protect shipments from black market bandits, five hundred American soldiers guarded his sugar train on its way to Austria.
Zarubica was flying high, with a huge expense account. At James Farley’s suggestion, he refurbished a villa near Berchtesgaden into a hunting lodge for influential visitors from Paris, London, and New York, who were met at the airport and escorted to the beautiful lodge overlooking a mountain lake. “We had waiting lists to come there—senators, potentates, you name it.”
The White Coke episode was, however, the most astonishing coup Mladin Zarubica pulled off. When Dwight Eisenhower introduced the American drink to his new friend General Georgi Konstantinovich Zhukov, head of his country’s occupied zone, the Russian liked it. He asked General Mark Clark, in charge of the American zone, for more, with one proviso: it couldn’t look anything like Coke. As the central Russian war hero, Zhukov knew he couldn’t be seen drinking an American imperialist symbol. Clark passed the request up the line to President Truman, who summoned Jim Farley, and soon the word filtered back to Zarubica, who found a chemist to take out the caramel coloring. Then the Coca-Cola man had the Crown Cork and Seal Company in Brussels make a special straight, clear bottle and a white cap with a red star in the middle. “My first shipment to Zhukov was fifty cases,” Zarubica said. “White Coke for Red Russians. That was a deep, dark secret.” The subterfuge was worthwhile, though. The regular Coke supply from Lambach had to pass through the Russian zone to reach its Vienna warehouse. While others often waited weeks for the Russian bureaucracy to allow them through, the Coke shipment was never stopped.
SWASHBUCKLERS, SAMPLING, AND SEX
Zarubica called the T.O. program “the greatest sampling program in the history of the world,” during which the drink practically sold itself, not only to Americans (and the occasional Russian general), but Germans and Austrians.* The order forbidding GIs to fraternize with frauleins was impossible to enforce. “So every time a soldier would take two cases home, the girl and her kids drank it all up, and they transferred to drinking Coca-Cola without even a blink.”
The soldiers weren’t the only ones fraternizing with frauleins. Some T.O.s to
ok advantage of their position to trade Coca-Cola for sex or money. “Anything with sugar in it was currency on the black market,” recalled one Observer. “It was a joke that you could give a woman a Hershey bar and she was yours. And Coca-Cola was a close second.”
Another T.O., a lover of literature who felt out of place in the world of gung-ho Coke men in postwar Germany, recalled one of his cohorts as “the horniest individual” he ever knew. “I never did understand why they sent over the shabby people they did. The black market was just rampant. The opportunity was almost laid out in front of you.” Zarubica verified that there were some bad apples, hired as friends of friends with little training. “We had a lot of alcoholism there,” he acknowledged. There were also the swashbucklers and soldiers of fortune, as T.O. Don Sisler called them. “I’d say these adventurers made up about 20% of us,” he recalled. “They liked the excitement of being in an unusual place at an unusual time. They had no intention of taking this whole thing seriously. They were great womanizers, but that was just part of the whole stew and added a little spice.”
UNIVERSAL ACCEPTANCE
Swashbucklers and serious Coke men alike could read the writing on the wall by 1947, when the military presence in the occupied zones was dwindling, along with soft drink sales. By the end of the following year, the Technical Observers would hang up their military uniforms, but the plants and goodwill they had established remained. Everyone wanted to try the American soldiers’ soft drink. The GIs were heroes, liberators with seemingly endless supplies of chocolate bars, cigarettes, and Cokes in the midst of a bombed-out world. Admiration was often mixed with envy, but even envy was easily converted to emulation. The world was primed for Coca-Cola. As a postwar Coca-Cola official acknowledged, World War II resulted in “the almost universal acceptance of the goodness of Coca-Cola. . . . Anything the American fighting man wanted and enjoyed was something [others] wanted too.”
And Coca-Cola was even more popular on the home front, where the returning veterans brought a decided preference for the drink that had meant so much to them overseas. This result was anticipated by at least one soldier. “Personally, I think that The Coca-Cola Company’s cooperation with the Army in getting Coca-Cola to the men in the field is the best advertisement that Coca-Cola has ever had,” he wrote to his former Company boss. “The things that are happening to these men now will stick with them for the rest of their life.”
He was right. In a 1948 poll of veterans conducted by American Legion Magazine, 63.67 percent specified Coca-Cola as their preferred soft drink, with Pepsi receiving a lame 7.78 percent of the vote.* In the same year, Coke’s gross profit on sales reached a whopping $126 million, as opposed to Pepsi’s $25 million; the contrast in net after-tax income was even more telling, with Coke’s $35.6 million towering over Pepsi’s pathetic $3.2 million. As the Company’s unpublished history stated, the wartime program “made friends and customers for home consumption of 11,000,000 GIs [and] did [a] sampling and expansion job abroad which would [otherwise] have taken 25 years and millions of dollars.” The war was over, and it appeared, at least for the moment, that Coca-Cola had won it.
__________________
* Shortly before Pearl Harbor, the U.S. Army contacted the Bureau of Narcotics to ask about research on chewing coca leaves or making coca tea. “I suppose the future will find each soldier chewing a wad of coca leaves as he repulses the attack of the invading hordes,” joked a narcotics bureaucrat, but soldiers got Coca-Cola instead.
* At the same time, former Coca-Cola advertising director Price Gilbert joined the Office of War Information (OWI) along with a swarm of other ad men who were soon “happily painting the war in glowing terms,” according to Henry Pringle, whose parting shot upon his departure from the OWI was a mock poster of a Coca-Cola bottle wrapped in the American flag, with the legend: “Step right up and get your four delicious freedoms. It’s a refreshing war.” Another jaded journalist inquired, “What do they think this war is—the cause that refreshes?”
* Coke didn’t actually hit the beaches with the boys, though shortly after the Normandy invasion, GI Mike Barry wrote a humorous letter to his sister about “the most important question in amphibious landings: Does the Coke machine go ashore in the first or second wave? I’ve told you before what a problem this is. If you send the Coke machine in with the first wave, future waves come pouring in without enough nickels. Obviously, getting change for a dime or a quarter on an enemy beach is quite difficult. On the other hand, if you hold the Coke machine up until the second wave, the men of the first wave wait on the beach for it to come in, instead of driving forward to attack the enemy.”
* When Downey was considering the $3,500-a-week offer from Coca-Cola, his friend Joe Kennedy advised him to take $500 in cash and $3,000 in Coca-Cola stock options. As a result, when Downey stopped singing for Coke ten years later, he was a major shareholder and held bottling interests in Australia, Chile, Uruguay, Argentina, Brazil, and Connecticut.
* Walter Mack tried to exert his own political influence by persuading the president’s son, Jimmy Roosevelt, to become a Pepsi bottler. In the meantime, Joseph Kennedy negotiated with Woodruff to spend $5 million on Coke bottling plants. “He has a number of sons,” Archie Lee explained in 1942. The elder Kennedy wanted to lay the “foundation for jobs for them.” The deal fell through, however, and the boys had to go into politics instead.
* The Japanese also presented a gigantic potential market. “We are casting covetous eyes towards the civilian population out here—some 18 million potential Coca-Cola customers on Kyushu alone,” wrote one T.O. “The transition period from a Military to a Civilian market will be very interesting.” In this instance, however, Coke would be frustrated by governmental regulations that effectively prevented the sale of the drink to the Japanese until the early 1960s.
* Soon after the war, when the Army quizzed 650 recruits, 21 had never drunk milk, but only 1 soldier had never sampled a Coke.
~ 13 ~
Coca-Cola Über Alles
Ein Führer [ist] ein Mann, der Anhänger hat. Ein Führer verdient, dass er Anhänger hat. Er hat sich Anerkennung erworben. . . . Ein Führer vervielfacht sich in anderen. Er ist ein Menschenbildner. . . . Er ist ein Mann des Geistes und der Tat—Sinnender und Schaffender zugleich.
[Translation] A leader is a man who has followers. The leader deserves to have followers; he has earned recognition. . . . The leader duplicates himself in others. He is a manbuilder. . . . He is a man of thought and a man of action—both dreamer and doer.
—1963 Tribute to Max Keith
One man must step forward in order to form, with apodictic force, out of the wavering world of imagination of the great masses, granite principles, and to take up the fight for their sole correctness.
—Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf
In early 1945, a group of German prisoners of war debarked in Hoboken, New Jersey, apprehensive and lonely in a foreign land. When one of them pointed to a Coca-Cola sign on a nearby building, the prisoners began excitedly gesticulating and talking among themselves. Taken aback, the guard yelled for order, demanding an explanation from a prisoner who spoke English. “We are surprised,” he answered, “that you have Coca-Cola here too.”
Coca-Cola executives loved to retell this anecdote as proof that Coke is a native product wherever it goes, but the story’s real significance can only be understood in the context of Hitler’s Third Reich. In order to thrive inside Nazi Germany, its Coca-Cola franchises had waged a rigorous campaign to disassociate themselves from their American roots. While the soft drink came to symbolize American freedom—all of the good things back home the GI was fighting for—the same Coca-Cola logo rested comfortably next to the swastika. The drama of German Coke’s survival before, during, and after World War II swirls around one central figure—Max Keith, at once the quintessential Coca-Cola man and Nazi collaborator.
In 1933, the same year that Hitler came to power, thirty-year-old Keith (pronounced “Kite”) wen
t to work for Coca-Cola GmbH. Like many Germans, Keith desperately sought financial security as well as something to believe in. Whereas others embraced the Fatherland and Aryan supremacy, Max Keith found Coca-Cola. “I was full of activity and enthusiasm,” he recalled thirty years later, “and the thing which then took possession of all that was in me and which . . . has never lost its hold on me, was Coca-Cola. From then on, and to all eternity, I was tied to this product for better or for worse.”
The German soft drink business was in its infancy. Ray Rivington Powers, an American expatriate, had started bottling German Coca-Cola in 1929 after a colorful, if shady, career in post–World War I Europe. A huge man—almost six and a half feet tall and nearly as wide, with a personality to match—he enjoyed playing the part of the American buffoon, speaking tortured German mixed with English, even though he was perfectly fluent in German. But Ray Powers had the gift of creating believers through his hyperbole. “One day,” he would tell prospective Coca-Cola men, “you will have a villa in Florida and you will be one of the richest men in the world.”* During the first four years of the business, he boosted Coca-Cola sales from just under six thousand cases to over one hundred thousand in 1933.
A great salesman but a terrible manager who couldn’t be bothered with financial details, Powers had just persuaded Woodruff to give him the franchise for the entire country when his German partner pulled out, demanding his money back late in 1929. Frantic, the American fled to New York in a vain attempt to raise capital, then tapped Woodruff for over $100,000. There ensued a tangle of incorporations and mergers in an attempt to replicate the structure of the American business. The auditors sent to examine the Essen books found them “in a state of chaos,” according to an internal memo by Hamilton Horsey. The auditors and lawyers, wrote Horsey, “advised us to have nothing to do with Mr. Powers’ company in Essen,” so an entirely new corporation was formed to purchase its assets.
For God, Country, and Coca-Cola Page 33