The Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food

by Lizzie Collingham

  The men were supposed to live on such basic rations for only short periods of time. But in Egypt the supply of fresh foods was extremely limited, and without fresh meat or vegetables the troops fell ill. Julius Segano, a recruit from Bechuanaland, recalled that constant bully beef and biscuits caused chronic constipation. His anti-aircraft unit was issued with purgatives to alleviate the problem but these did little to get their stomachs moving. They discovered that the best remedy was the fear induced by a German aerial bombing raid.97 More seriously, the troops began to suffer from vitamin deficiency diseases, and Axis and Allied troops alike fell ill with jaundice and dysentery. Gerald Page recalled that huge consignments of tinned fruit were brought up from South Africa to provide the soldiers with much-needed vitamins and fibre.98 Similarly, the Wehrmacht brought in shipments of fresh fruit and vegetables from Italy and Greece even while the famine in Athens was at its height. In Egypt, Palestine, Cyprus, Syria and Iraq the British army started potato-growing schemes. It provided the farmers with the seed potatoes and guaranteed the price at which they would buy back the potato crop. Merchant seaman Roy Bayly recalled bringing in a shipment of seed potatoes for the scheme. They were a tricky cargo, as the potatoes required ventilation or they began to rot. Potato growing continued after the war in Egypt, Palestine, Syria and Cyprus, where they became a staple crop. Bayly liked to ‘think that the potatoes imported from Egypt today are the direct descendants of “my” potatoes of 1943’.99 The army also set up special vegetable farms, cultivated by African pioneer troops.100

  These measures alleviated the health problems of men stationed behind the front line, but for those in combat a prolonged period on bully beef and biscuits caused debilitating side-effects which affected their ability to fight. In January 1942, after seven weeks of fighting around Benghazi, Allied troops began to show signs of serious ill-health. The limited transport capacity of the supply lines and the absolute priority placed on petrol to sustain the campaign, meant that it was out of the question to send up bulky fresh meat and vegetables. The men were urged to take their vitamin B and C tablets along with the salt pills which were issued to counteract the effects of the heat. More condensed margarine, bacon and oatmeal were supplied with onions and chutney to add some flavour to the food.101 It was situations such as this which stimulated the British army quartermaster to research new ways of feeding front-line troops with nutritious food. Towards the end of the North African campaign the quartermaster came up with a marked improvement on the endless bully beef and biscuits: the composite ration. This was rations for fourteen men for a day, packed into one box. According to Gerald Page, ‘we all thought they were very good’. Inside the box were ‘Tinned Steak and Kidney Puddings, Steam Puddings, Soup, Chocolate, Sweets and English Brand Cigarettes and Tobacco … luxuries we had forgotten about in the desert.’102 The composite ration packs provided variety and more nutritious meals, and ‘compo rations’, as they were known, became standard British issue during the campaigns in Italy and north-west Europe. Nevertheless, there was no substitute for fresh food, and once the Allies captured parts of Italy in 1943 they were able, like the Germans before them, to supplement their tins with fresh fruit and vegetables. ‘Grapes were issued, and we were able to gather tomatoes from the fields and buy eggs from the local farmers.’103

  PORRIDGE, PEAS AND VITAMINS

  The impact of a bully beef and biscuit diet on the health of troops fighting in the tropics was far worse than it was in North Africa. In this climate vitamin deficiencies made the men susceptible to a host of unpleasant tropical diseases from skin rashes and ulcers to malaria. This could seriously impact on the fighting capacity of an army. When the Australians on New Guinea began to push the Japanese back along the Kokoda Trail towards their bridgehead at Buna they crossed the Owen Stanley range of mountains and entered the malarial zone of the island. For every man who was wounded, seven were incapacitated by sickness.104 The response of the Australian army medical corps and quartermaster to the problems of ill-health and malnutrition faced by the troops on New Guinea provides a case study of the way in which attitudes towards the health and diet of soldiers within the armies of the British Commonwealth changed during the Second World War.

  On the Kokoda Trail the Australian army ran into the same problems as the Japanese. The Australian high command appear to have been almost as ill informed about conditions on New Guinea as were the Japanese generals. Lieutenant H. T. Kienzle was detailed to build a supply road along the trail. He replied to the commanding officer, Major-General Basil Morris, in Port Moresby that this was utterly implausible. He went on to warn Morris that in the eight days it took for the native porters to walk the track to the front-line troops, they consumed more than half the food they could carry. He outlined that simply bringing in sufficient food supplies left no room for arms, ammunition, medical supplies or any other of the dozens of ‘items needed to wage war … the maintenance of supplies is a physical impossibility without large-scale co-operation of plane droppings’.105 But Morris did not have sufficient air capacity to use planes to bring in supplies and for months all the Australians had to rely on were native carriers.

  Conditions on the Kokoda Trail were exhausting. The jungle was like a second enemy, ‘a constant, wet, muddy, malarial and thoroughly dis-agreeable presence’.106 It always seemed to be raining and at night the Australians stood in their weapon pits, soaked to the skin, shivering but awake, silent and struggling to stay alert. Their feet turned pulpy and began to rot in their boots.107 The supply problems meant that, like the Japanese, the Australians were soon very hungry.108 Lieutenant Hugh Dalby recounted, ‘Once you get up into the high altitudes, it’s cold, it’s enervating; you have a tin of bully a day. Sometimes if you were lucky you might get a tin of peaches between about ten. We later got some rice at Isurava. I had a batman called Kennedy. He was a wizard … he cooked the rice. We all got a Dixie full of it. By the Lord living Moses! … I was the last one to get fed. I could have eaten twice the quantity. A solid something in your stomach!’109 Eventually the United States air force began to make air drops of food but their aim was not always accurate. Warrant Officer Wilkinson described how when their supply plane missed its target his unit was forced to raid the Japanese lines to reclaim their supplies of food. He cut his tongue licking out a tin of salmon. ‘Hell, I was hungry.’110 Medical reports noted that the men who returned from fighting on the trail were ‘not only fatigued and worn out by the hard conditions and disease, but by subnutrition as well’.111

  At the beginning of 1943 the Japanese were dug in at Buna in heavily fortified bunkers made out of coconut logs and oil drums. The Australians were unable to skirt round them because of ‘neck-deep swamps of black, sucking mud’.112 Although the Japanese were suffering from night blindness caused by vitamin deficiencies, dysentery and malaria, the Australians had to oust them one by one from their strongholds.113 The medics reported that the Australian troops fighting in these difficult circumstances were showing signs of avitaminosis, including weight loss, muscular weakness, sensory disturbances, oedema of the extremities of the body and lesions on their mouths, lips and tongues.114 Army medics complained that the troops’ diet did not contain enough of vitamins B and C.

  During the course of 1943 Australian and American infantrymen, with US air support, forced the Japanese back along the coast and into the valleys of the northern part of the island. As the battle for New Guinea progressed, Australian rations slowly improved. The food situation improved, firstly because it was possible to bring supplies into the northern coast of the island by boat. A cold store was built at Finschhafen which meant that the quartermaster was able to bring in more frozen food, although quantities were always limited by the shortage of refrigerated ships.115 While the logistics of supply became easier, the quartermaster nevertheless acknowledged the deficiencies of the basic ration based on six items – tinned meat, salt, biscuit, tea, sugar and dried milk. It was abundantly clear that this provided an insuffi
ciently nutritious diet and the number of basic items in the field ration was raised to thirty-three, including dehydrated and tinned vegetables.116 At first the vegetables did little to improve the men’s health, as the system of blanching the produce before it was canned or dried destroyed its vitamin C content. It was Hicks who introduced a new method by which the vegetables were soaked in a sodium sulphite bath before they were processed. This preserved the vitamin C, and the nutritional value of canned and dehydrated vegetables increased.117

  Meanwhile Hicks had come up with two simple ways of remedying the lack of vitamins in the ration: the addition of porridge and peas, both easily transportable. His solution was born out of experiments conducted with the Northern Observation Force on patrol in the Kimberleys region west of Darwin in northern Australia. These men suffered from sores known as Barcoo Rot which was a sign of vitamin deficiencies. Hicks persuaded the men on patrol to take packages of wheat with them into the outback. They ground the wheat themselves and made porridge, eaten with dried milk. This, along with dried yeast and dried apricots, substantially increased the men’s vitamin B intake. When the dried milk cans were empty they were tied to the soldiers’ belts and filled with a little water and a handful of Tasmanian field peas, which grew shoots within twenty-four hours. The shoots were then transferred to muslin bags, the tins were scalded and the process begun again. The pea sprouts were high in vitamin C and could be eaten raw if necessary. The men came back from their six-week patrol fit and healthy. Hicks was vindicated and wheat porridge and Tasmanian field peas were incorporated into field rations.118

  The porridge element of his campaign to improve army nutrition was largely unsuccessful. Men in the tropics did not want to eat a hot and stodgy breakfast and the portable wheat gristers, which were supplied to the soldiers on New Guinea, tended to break. The catering adviser on the island, Lieutenant W. H. M. Schultze, surveying the eating habits of the 7th and 9th Divisions at the end of 1943 found the gristers to be useless.119 However, the doctors did agree that wheatmeal greatly improved the vitamin B intake of the men and it was incorporated into the bread flour.120 Schultze was also critical of the Tasmanian peas, complaining that many arrived mouldy and fermenting.121 The Quartermaster-General anticipated a lack of enthusiasm for the peas, and a note was sent out to the units explaining that they provided ‘in a convenient and transportable form’ the vitamins normally found in vegetables. It was stressed that, in order to be effective, the peas had to be germinated and an explanation was given of how this was to be achieved between layers of sacking. Knowing that cooks would be reluctant to take on such a laborious task, the memo warned that ‘wastage of this special ration issue will be regarded as a serious breach of discipline’.122

  Confronted with the difficulties of actually preparing the peas in field kitchens the cooks naturally found inventive shortcuts. G. T. Martin, cooking for the 2nd/6th Australian Field Ambulance in New Guinea, never had time to soak any of the dehydrated vegetables before cooking them. ‘With those big four gallon dixies and up the Ramu Valley, we were cooking for about 800 men … what we found out was to get the water boiling and put all these dehydrated vegetables in them, without soaking them and boiling them for three or four minutes. And then put the lid on them and put the fire out and let it steam and they went alright then … And just before you were ready to serve you put on the butter, salt and pepper, milk or whatever you had in with it.’123 Martin applied his boiling technique to the ‘rock hard’ peas and when Hicks paid a visit to Martin’s unit ‘he saw what we were doing and oh Jesus, he played up merry hell!! … We said to him, “Are you stopping for dinner?” and he said “Yeh”. “Well pass us your remarks then.” And he came back after dinner and he said they are very good – and the next thing we get is a big screed on how to cook! Oh after he tasted it, tried what we were doing, he went back to headquarters somewhere and put out this big screed on how to cook dehydrated vegetables.’124 Hicks was undoubtedly concerned that Martin’s rather aggressive cooking method was reducing the vitamin content. His screed was part of an on-going educational offensive: the catering advisory staff constantly reiterated that more needed to be done to teach the cooks how to prepare the field ration properly.

  Reception of the peas was mixed. At an army hospital one cook went to a great deal of trouble to sprout the peas in order to provide the invalided soldiers with vitamins. But the soldiers mistook the bean sprouts for maggots and could not be induced to eat the stew.125 However, the 7th Division in New Guinea appear to have been better informed about the reasons for issuing the special rations and the soldiers actually went to the trouble of sprouting the peas themselves and ate them raw. The 2/6th Cavalry Commando Squadron even adopted the Northern Territory technique of sprouting the peas in tins while they were on the move.126

  One of the unqualified successes of Hicks’s newly created Army Catering Corps was its special field bakery units. The bakers proved ingenious in difficult circumstances and improvised ovens out of old oil drums and, despite difficulties with waterlogged fuel, they were able to produce 1,450 rolls in two hours. They also baked an array of tempting treats such as jam puffs and cream horns. The soldiers were appreciative and would even eat mouldy week-old bread in preference to the despised ‘dog’ biscuits.127

  The work of the Army Catering Corps undoubtedly improved the taste and nutritional value of the food provided in the base areas. But the complexities of jungle warfare, where lines of communication were difficult, meant that the forward troops on the front line were still eating poorly for weeks at a time. Hicks and his team responded by developing the operational ration. A tin of meat and vegetables, a pack of biscuits, dried egg, oatmeal, a bar of fortified chocolate and tea and cocoa provided 4,000 calories’ worth of energy and a dose of vitamins D and B. This was supplemented by an emergency ration which squeezed 3,900 calories into a fruit bar, a pack of dried meat and vegetables and milk tablets.128 From mid-1943, an Australian infantryman carried an emergency ration in the left pocket of his uniform, and the operational ration in his haversack.129 G. C. Lloyd remembered getting operational rations for the first time in the Finisterre Ranges of New Guinea. ‘We thought they were marvellous when we first got them.’130 But after seven days on patrol Lloyd and his companions found that they ‘could hardly look at … [the] little packets full of lollies and chewing gum and dried fruit bars and chocolate and also stuff like Maggi soups and that sort of thing.’131 However, exhausted and tense, soldiers quickly tire of any food and men in combat routinely grouch about their rations no matter what their quality. Although sweetness was the element in the operational and emergency rations which the men complained about the most, it had been introduced in response to oft-repeated requests from the soldiers.132 On the whole, Schultze found that once the men had been educated in the correct use of the operational ration it worked well, and allowed for the ‘economical use of the regular standard ration, avoided monotony, and prevented wastage’.133 The fortified chocolate was found to be a real ‘morale builder’.134

  When Lieutenant H. E. Young, a field research officer in nutrition attached to the Medical Directorate, carried out nutritional surveys of the 7th and 9th Divisions in New Guinea at the beginning of 1944, he found that the ‘hard work [which] had been put into the question of feeding the soldier’, and the co-operation between medics, quartermasters and nutritional advisers, had produced a better, more balanced and also more palatable ration. In addition, the effort to transport these rations to troops in combat had improved.135 Although the men hated the tinned cabbage, they liked the dehydrated carrots and onions. They were eating the Tasmanian pea sprouts raw and greatly enjoying the three bread rolls issued to them daily. The nutritional value of the bread had been improved by the addition of 6 per cent wheatgerm to the flour. The men were drinking their supplies of fruit juice and enjoyed the chocolate bars in the operational ration. Even though native porters were scarce, the field kitchens were managing to take two hot meals a day up to
the forward troops on the front line.136 The troops continued to show signs of mild vitamin deficiencies, but the experience of contemporary soldiers shows that, no matter how high the quality of the rations, this is a normal by-product of living on dried food fortified with artificial vitamins. Ration packs can never act as a completely satisfactory substitute for fresh food, and Australian soldiers today suffer a decline in their immune status and lower vitamin levels in their blood when performing manoeuvres while subsisting on today’s more sophisticated ration packs.137 While their Japanese opponents on the other side of the front line had been abandoned to hunger by their high command, by 1944 Australian sick rates in New Guinea had fallen and the morale of the troops had greatly improved.138