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

by Lizzie Collingham

  A book for worried mothers entitled When Your Son Goes to War (1943) assured anxious women that the army was aware that ‘this generation of boys had been brought up on milk as a definite item of diet’, and men in the armed forces were plied with the liquid.111 In army camps ‘each soldier has a separate half-pint bottle [of milk]; or [a] one quart bottle is placed on the table for each four or five men’. As a consequence, civilians living near military bases suffered from milk shortages.112 Besides meat and milk, draftees were provided with a surfeit of vitamin-rich vegetables. After a breakfast of ‘fruit, dry cereals, broiled bacon, eggs, French toast and syrup, toast and butter, coffee or milk’, the trainees at Randolph Field air base in Texas were given for lunch ‘heart of celery, green olives, head of lettuce, roast turkey and cranberry jam, mashed potatoes, raisin dressing, giblet gravy, buttered jumbo asparagus tips, creamed cauliflower, lemon custard or ice cream, rolls and butter, layer cake, preserves, coffee or tea’. If the men were still hungry, at supper time they could round off their day with ‘fresh celery, smothered round steak, escalloped potatoes, frosted peas, strawberry ice cream, layer cake, bread and butter, coffee or milk’.113 The idea that most recruits were used to this quality and quantity of food in their own homes was absurd. Draftees, particularly in the infantry, which was disproportionately made up of ‘the depression drop outs, the slum kids, the backwoods boys from Appalachia and the deep South’, had never eaten so well.114 Despite vigorous training, the airmen at Randolph Field found themselves gaining 10 or 20 pounds (4–9 kilograms) in weight each month.115

  In the US army, as in the British and Commonwealth armies, medical officers and quartermasters were beginning to liaise and pay greater attention to standards of nutrition as a means to maintain soldiers’ health. But the American policy of maintaining morale through welfare gave extra impetus to the new awareness of the need to supply soldiers, at their bases and on the front line, with nutritious food. The US Surgeon-General’s office made every effort to ensure that field rations were the next best thing to a proper mess meal. A director of nutrition was employed to devise a balanced B ration for field kitchens. The B ration aimed to include three different sorts of meat, four vegetables, a dessert and canned fruit or fruit juice in the five pounds of food allocated to each man for a day.116 If the B ration could be prepared with fresh food this was ideal but many field kitchens had to rely on canned meat and dehydrated vegetables. However, it was possible to liven these up with the wide range of supplementary ingredients and condiments which were provided with the B ration (in theory it consisted of 100 different elements), such as rice, macaroni, oats, jam, syrup, peanut butter, pickles, pepper, vinegar, tomato sauce and a variety of flavourings.117 From this range of ingredients the director of nutrition created dietician-formulated master menus which were sent out to all army cooks. This, the Surgeon-General claimed, ensured that wherever they were in the world, in ‘England, Italy, North Africa, Egypt, Persia, India and China’, all United States troops were eating the same nutritionally balanced meals.118

  B ration meals were far superior to anything produced in the field by the US military’s allies or enemies. Stan Tutt, part of an Australian air maintenance crew at Milne Bay on New Guinea, felt like a second-class soldier in comparison with the Americans who lived in a camp across the road. They had proper beds, a mosquito-proof recreation hut, regular deliveries of mail, and oranges which they generously shared with their Australian neighbours. Stan and his fellow soldiers felt bitter as, with empty stomachs, they unloaded trucks one December morning, tantalized by the aroma of bacon and eggs frying in the American camp across the road. ‘We [had] not eaten a fresh egg since coming to New Guinea.’119 The components of the German field ration were much more basic, centred on rye bread, meat, fat and vegetables, with pudding powder, condensed milk and a few spices to add a little variety and flavour.120 The Gulaschkanone, as the Wehrmacht’s field kitchens were known, provided simple meals of soup or stew. The Soviets’ field kitchens were even more elementary, producing meals out of buckwheat, dried fish, potatoes and as much fat as possible, as this helped to keep out the cold. In the first years of the war it was rare for Red Army soldiers to be supplied with hot meals from a field kitchen and many survived on dry rations of bread and dried fish for weeks on end.121 The Japanese, at the other end of the spectrum, dispensed with the bother of field kitchens and left their troops to cook their own rice.

  The menus devised for the US military followed the same principle as that applied to school lunches, in that they sought to avoid offending regional or ethnic tastes. Rather than acting as a forum for learning about the culinary diversity of the United States, army canteens acted as a powerful homogenizing force. Many young recruits had little experience of other Americans outside their own region, or of their different food habits. William Bauer, an aviation cadet from New Jersey, recalled ‘how provincial we were, how provincial all of us were … I had only been to New York, Pennsylvania and Delaware.’ During his training in the south he discovered fried chicken and soft ice cream and he felt that his experiences of other parts of America and the world made him ‘a much broader person and a much better person’.122 But it was not in army messes that he found out about other Americans’ food habits. The bland (if filling) canteen meals were based on the Anglo-Saxon model of meat and two vegetables.123 Like American schoolchildren, the recruits from diverse regional, religious and ethnic backgrounds found themselves eating the innocuous food of demo-cracy.124 Their taste buds were moulded into conformity, and Margaret Mead and the other members of the Committee on Food Habits would have been delighted by a post-war poll in which the majority of Americans described their perfect meal as an elaborate version of one of their menus: a fruit or shrimp cocktail followed by vegetable or chicken soup, a steak for the main course with mashed potatoes or chips and peas, with a side salad, roll and butter, and apple pie for dessert followed by hot coffee.125

  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.126 The Quartermaster-General, Somervell, was persuaded, and in 1942 Coca-Cola was exempted from sugar rationing when supplying military bases.127 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.128 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.129 Advertisements back in the United States proclaimed that Coca-Cola had become a ‘symbol of our way of living’.130 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.131 ‘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.’132 Another claimed that he was fighting ‘as much to help keep the custom of drinkin
g Cokes as I am to help preserve the million other benefits our country blesses its citizens with’.133 Once the war was over Coca-Cola was firmly established as ‘a sublimated essence of all that America stands for’.134

  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.’135 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.136 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.137 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’.138 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.139 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.140

  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.141

  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.142 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.143 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.144

  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.’145 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.146 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.147 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.148

  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.149 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 prepa
ration and delivery of freshly prepared hot food to men in combat.150 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.151 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.152 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.153

  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.154 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.155 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’.156 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.157 During the war Australia was transformed into a vast food-processing plant for the United States army.