The Nazi press chief Otto Dietrich also picked up on the US Army’s obsession with Coca-Cola, telling the German people that “America never contributed anything to world civilization but chewing gum and Coca-Cola.” But while he painted Coca-Cola as a symbol of America, Coca-Cola was still very much alive in Nazi Germany.
The outbreak of war had left Max Keith isolated. The German Coke chief could no longer communicate with the Atlanta head office, and supplies of the Coca-Cola concentrate that were needed to make the drink had dried up. To add to his woes the Nazis issued a decree in January 1940 allowing the government to seize control of any “enemy-owned” business. Keith needed solutions and fast.
The first problem he tackled was the drink. With no Coca-Cola left to sell he began looking for a new drink to produce, but with ingredients in short supply there wasn’t much to work with. The lack of materials had already resulted in Sinalco ceasing production, but Keith was determined to keep the business going. He eventually came up with a soda made out of fruit waste that would otherwise end up in trash heaps, such as the apple pulp from cider presses. A drink made from “the leftovers of the leftovers” as he later called it. Coca-Cola Germany named it Fanta, and it saved the business. In 1940 the company sold 186,000 cases of Fanta. The next year 1,268,000, and sales kept rising, pushing toward three million cases a year in 1943.
With a new drink in place and the business saved, Keith persuaded the Nazi authorities to put him in charge of every Coca-Cola operation in occupied Europe. Keith used his new position as the Coca-Cola chief of the Third Reich to keep Coca-Cola’s European operations alive. He spread Fanta across Europe, saving the Coca-Cola branches that were on the verge of shutting down due to a lack of Coca-Cola syrup. He also used his position to protect Coca-Cola employees from the Nazis—including Carl West, the Coca-Cola Belgium boss who had unsuccessfully tried to escape the German army back in May 1940. “One of Carl West’s employees in Brussels went to the occupation authorities saying that West hoarded sugar, which actually should be reported to the food office for distribution,” said Keith. “He was in a bad spot and I had to go there and see that it was straightened out. Fortunately I could do it. Then there were many other instances of that sort, because disloyalty during war time was quite a regular occurrence.”
Schweppes’s surviving factories were up to similar tricks in occupied France. After the manager of the company’s plant in Gonesse fled south to join the Resistance, the task of running the business fell to Arthur Corthals, the factory’s Belgium-born accountant. Shortly after conquering France, the Germans issued orders for all supplies of fruit juice to be handed over. Eager not to help the occupiers, Corthals rented space in a small store, gathered up the fifteen thousand cans of fruit juice stored on the Schweppes premises, and hid them beneath sacks of potatoes. When the Nazis questioned him about the juice, he said it had fermented so he threw it away. He then started selling the canned juice on the black market so he had enough money to buy the equipment he needed to keep the Schweppes plant going.
Back in Germany, Keith also began setting up “siding plants” in response to the British air raids that were devastating Essen and other German cities in early 1942. Based in barns on isolated farms, these back-up plants ensured that Coca-Cola Germany could keep producing Fanta even when its factories were destroyed, as a great many of them were. But in January 1945, as the German army found itself being squeezed by the Allies from all sides, Keith’s luck ran out. The general in charge of the Ministry of Commerce summoned him to his office. The general told Keith he must nationalize the company and drop the Coca-Cola name. Failure to do so, the general added, would result in him being sent to a concentration camp. Frightened, Keith contacted a friendly official in the Ministry of Justice, but he refused to help for fear of also being imprisoned. Unwilling to bow down, Keith braced himself for the worst, only to be saved when an Allied bomb hit the ministry and took out the general. Against the odds, Coca-Cola Germany had survived yet again.
Three months later on April 10, 1945, the Allied forces captured Essen. A few weeks later Hitler committed suicide and Germany surrendered. Japan followed suit in August. The war was over and the spoils of war were Coca-Cola’s to reap.
7
Cola-Colonization
In the summer of 1971 Coca-Cola unveiled one of the most successful TV ads ever made. It opened with a close-up of a fresh-faced young woman shrouded in golden sunlight gently mouthing the words “I’d like to buy the world a home and furnish it with love,” and ended with a helicopter panorama of two hundred teenagers from across the world standing on an Italian hilltop, Coca-Cola bottles in hand, singing, in perfect harmony, “I’d like to buy the world a Coke and keep it company.”
The ad’s feel-good message of peace, love, and Coca-Cola offered a vision of hope in a turbulent world. War was raging in Vietnam, America’s oil wells were running dry, and the news was filled with nightmarish visions of nuclear and ecological apocalypse, but Coke’s mawkish appeal for sales offered an alternative—a happy world where the answers to the complexities of Cold War geopolitics could be found in a bottle of soda pop. Naive maybe, but convincing enough for millions to buy into its message. Thousands of thankful letters poured into Coca-Cola’s Atlanta headquarters, and the vinyl record of the advertising jingle soared to the upper reaches of the Billboard Hot 100 chart. As Bill Backer, the McCann-Erickson ad man who created the ad, told the Coca-Cola Company’s YouTube channel in 2011, “It was a product saying we could be a little social catalyst that can bring people together.”
Thirty years earlier the idea of Coca-Cola presenting itself as some kind of international glue uniting people in a divided world would have been laughable. After all, hardly anyone outside North America had heard of the drink, let alone tasted it. But a lot had changed since Coca-Cola boss Robert Woodruff promised to do whatever it took to get Coke into the hands of the US troops fighting World War II.
As much by accident as by design, Woodruff’s expensive gesture paved the way for Coca-Cola to conquer the world. When the conflict ended, the wartime bottling plants the company built with Pentagon dollars stood amid the ruins of Europe and Asia, poised to unleash a flood of Coca-Cola on an unsuspecting world. More important, the American GIs with their Coca-Colas had made a lasting impression on the minds of millions. In a Europe scarred by war and malnourished by food shortages, the sight of the well-fed, smiling, handsome American heroes with their supplies of cigarettes and Coke were Hollywood brought to life. Women swooned. Children aspired to be them.
Austrians looked on in envy and admiration at the US occupiers with their daily rations of ice cream and sprawling Coca-Cola plant in Lambach, out of which twenty-four thousand cases of Coke flowed every day just to refresh the American troops, while most of the country’s factories lay in ruins. In Germany women gossiped about the sexy American soldiers sipping their colas in the cafés, and in Britain thirty-eight thousand women became GI brides and left for a new life in the New World. And when the troops began heading home, it was like a light going out. “It was so drab when they had gone,” mourned one English woman when the US forces departed. “The whole world had been opened up to me and then it was closed down again.”
Even in places far removed from the fighting, the sight of the US soldiers and their Coca-Colas left an indelible impression. During the war America sent twenty thousand troops to the British island of Trinidad to protect it from Nazi attack. The sight of the troops with their Cokes and their womanizing ways inspired local calypso singer Lord Invader to respond to what he called an “American social invasion” with a song called “Rum and Coca-Cola.” “When the Yankees first went to Trinidad, some of the young girls were more than glad,” Lord Invader sang over a sunny calypso melody. “They said that the Yankees treat them nice, and they give them a better price. They buy rum and Coca-Cola, when down Point Cumana. Both mother and daughter, working for the Yankee dollar.” The song’s dig against swaggering troops an
d its allusions to prostitution and liquor kept “Rum and Coca-Cola” off US radio, but when the Andrews Sisters reworked it, Lord Invader’s calypso protest song became America’s biggest-selling record of 1945.
By the time the troops began returning home in earnest, they had helped Coca-Cola become more than a drink. More, even, than a brand. Coca-Cola had become an icon, a symbol of America and freedom. It was not so much a product of the American Dream as the American Dream in liquid form. Sales soared across the world. In 1936 the company sold just over 150,000 gallons of Coke syrup outside North America, but in 1950 it was exporting almost seven million gallons a year. Yet even as the world turned Coca-Cola red, the company found not everyone was willing to buy into its soda pop dream, especially not America’s defeated wartime enemy Japan.
Coke landed in Japan in 1946 to supply the US occupation forces, but the company’s hopes of using this as the first step in its ultimate goal of refreshing the former Axis power were quickly quashed. Japan’s government didn’t want this American beverage conquering the nation’s taste buds, so it made it a fineable offense for Japanese nationals to buy so much as a single bottle of Coca-Cola. The ban was still in force in 1952, when the US military left Japan.
With no troops to sell to and no access to Japanese consumers, Coke needed the law to change if it was to survive in Japan. But Coca-Cola’s attempts to persuade the Japanese government to let it in prompted a powerful counteroffensive by Japan’s beverage companies. This anti-Coke coalition brought together thousands of tiny domestic soda firms, but at its core were Japan’s biggest brewers: Asahi, Kirin, and Sapporo. All three had thriving soft drink divisions, not least Asahi, which owned Japan’s number-one soda: Mitsuya Cider, a clear, lemonade-like nonalcoholic fizz.
Mitsuya Cider’s origins can be traced back to the tenth century, when, according to legend, Minamoto Mitsunaka—the Lord of Settsu—attended the Sumiyoshi Grand Shrine in Osaka. After consulting the shrine’s oracles, Minamoto decided he would fire a kabura-ya, a special type of arrow used in prebattle rituals that made a whistling sound as it cut through the air, and set up his home wherever it landed. The arrow whizzed through the air, cleared the Satsuki Yama mountain, and came down in a lake surrounded by mountains. Minamoto followed the arrow’s path, and on reaching the lake discovered that it had struck Kuzuryu, a nine-headed dragon that lived in the water. The warrior cut off the dragon’s heads, and as the beast writhed in agony, it smashed through the mountains, revealing a hot spring of carbonated water. Victorious, Minamoto established his castle by the lake in what is now part of the city of Kawanishi.
While the dragon was a myth, the Hirano spring it supposedly exposed wasn’t. Over the centuries the spring became a popular destination for bathers hoping to reap health benefits from its unusual waters. While its attractions as a spa resort were strong enough to support numerous hotels, interest in drinking the water of Hirano only caught on in the late 1800s, when Japan’s push for modernization led the country to embrace more ideas from overseas, including the concept of imbibing carbonated water for health reasons. In 1884 a group of Japanese businessmen, inspired by this European custom, formed the Imperial Mineral Water Company and built Japan’s first soft drink factory to bottle the spring’s legendary water. As well as selling the water under the name Hirano-sui, the company also launched Mitsuya Cider, which combined the naturally carbonated spring water with a sweet syrup to create Japan’s first branded soda. Other homegrown sodas followed, among them the lemony Ribbon Citron, which launched in 1909 and eventually ended up in Sapporo’s hands, and 1928’s Kirin Lemon.
By the early 1950s these three brands and their owners dominated the Japanese soda market, and they didn’t want Coca-Cola crashing their pop party. So when, after intensive lobbying, Coca-Cola convinced the Japanese legislature to consider lifting the Coke ban in 1953, the trio used their considerable influence to ensure the measure was shot down in flames. With hope of removing the ban gone, Coca-Cola Japan crumbled. By 1956 Coke Japan had shriveled to a single bottling plant in Yokohama and six employees. It needed a white knight and eventually found one in Mitsubishi, the Japanese industrial giant that supplied equipment to its bottling plant.
Mitsubishi persuaded the Japanese government to relax the controls on Coca-Cola so that it could be sold to civilians in designated shops. But even this concession came with plenty of strings attached, including a ban on advertising, limits on the amount of Coke that could be produced each year, and a minimum price that ensured Coca-Cola would be significantly more expensive than any Japanese-made drink. Restrictive as these rules were, it was a start, and in 1960 Mitsubishi and Coca-Cola finished the job by fracturing the anti-Coke forces. Kirin belonged to the Mitsubishi keiretsu, a complex web of independent corporations bound together by tradition, shareholdings, and business relationships. Mitsubishi used its position as the head of the keiretsu to broker a deal. Kirin would drop its opposition to Coca-Cola in return for the right to bottle the drink in Japan.
The deal, signed in August 1960, shattered the Japanese anti-Coke coalition. By the year’s end the last restrictions on Coca-Cola had fallen. Unshackled at last, Coca-Cola quickly confirmed the fears of Japan’s domestic soft drink industry by stomping over local rivals like a carbonated Godzilla. By 1965 Coke sales in Japan passed the 480 million bottles a year mark and Mitsuya Cider was displaced as Japan’s favorite soda after almost eighty years at the top. More than five hundred of the thirty-five hundred Japanese soft drink manufacturers that existed before the restrictions were lifted were gone by 1968, a figure the country’s soft drink association blamed entirely on Coca-Cola. Ten years later, Coke was so big in Japan that the country accounted for 18 percent of the company’s global profits, enough for Coca-Cola president Paul Austin to wonder how he could maintain growth when he was “fresh out of Japans.”
For Japanese nationalists, Coca-Cola’s runaway success symbolized all that was wrong with post-war Japan. Yukio Mishima, the Nobel Prize-nominated author who advocated a return to the ways of imperial Japan and the samurai, was among those horrified by Coca-Cola’s rise. In his Sea of Fertility tetralogy of novels, Mishima painted a vivid picture of a nation in decline, and in the concluding book, The Decay of the Angel, he cast Coca-Cola as a symbol of Japan’s downfall. When the main character Shigekuni Honda visits Komagoé Beach, he finds sands covered in “empty Coca-Cola bottles, food cans, paint cans, nonperishable plastic bags, detergent boxes, bricks, bones.” In the former imperial capital of Kyoto, Honda encounters “a clutter of all the dreary details of new construction, to be seen throughout Japan: raw building materials and blue-tiled roofs, television towers and power lines, Coca-Cola advertisements and drive-in snack bars.”
On completing The Decay of the Angel, Mishima decided to stage a coup to restore the emperor’s powers. On the morning of November 25, 1970 he and four loyal followers headed from his suburban home in a Toyota Corona to the military headquarters in Ichigaya for a seemingly innocent meeting with the army general. On reaching the general’s office they took him hostage and barricaded the doors, and Mishima headed for the balcony to deliver a speech to the troops assembled below, hoping to inspire a revolution. The soldiers merely laughed at the pompous novelist, so he retreated inside and, in keeping with his belief in the customs of the samurai, committed ritual suicide by slicing open his own abdomen with a dagger before being clumsily beheaded by one of his followers. If it was a choice between a Japan of Coca-Cola and a Japan of Mishima’s beloved samurai, the Japanese clearly preferred the Real Thing.
It wasn’t just right-wing nationalists who saw Coca-Cola as a threat. In the ideological clash of the Cold War between the free and Communist worlds, a brand as synonymous with America as Coca-Cola became a target for Communists everywhere. When Mao Tse-tung took over China in October 1949, he banned Coca-Cola from the country. The Soviets refused to let Coca-Cola through the Iron Curtain and ordered Cominform, the Kremlin-controlled agency that coordinated Europe�
��s Communist parties, to stoke opposition to the American drink. As Communist sentiment against Coca-Cola hardened, the company found its operations under fire across Europe. In Italy the Communist paper L’Unità claimed that the drink would turn children’s hair white. In Vienna Communist activists turned words into action by tracking down the local Coca-Cola boss, pulling him from his car, and beating him in the street.
The French Communist party went even further than its Austrian and Italian peers. It forged an unlikely but highly effective alliance with the country’s winemakers and launched a campaign to drive Coke out of France. The winemakers were more concerned about protecting their profits than about Marxism, but in Coca-Cola they and the Communists found a common enemy. By late 1949 their anti-Coke movement had won over the French media and political establishment. The weekly news magazine Paris Match reported that “the foreboding noises of the tom-tom of Coca-Cola are already being heard in France.” The daily newspaper Le Monde called the drink a threat to French civilization. And the Communist newspaper L’Humanité summed up the nation’s fears with the rhetorical question: “Are we being Coca-Colonized?” Across Paris, Coca-Cola ads were vandalized with graffiti of skull and crossbones signs, while customs officials repeatedly refused to let Coca-Cola import the ingredients it needed to make its drink.
To try to calm the situation, Coca-Cola sent in Alexander Makinsky. Born into a Russian aristocrat family in 1900 and raised by a British nanny in the city of Baku on the shore of the Caspian Sea, Makinsky grew up surrounded by wealth and power. When the Communists took over Russia, he fled to America and became an international political representative for the Rockefeller Foundation. A lover of intrigue and the machinations of power, Makinsky networked his way around the world sipping champagne with presidents and using his aristocratic charm and high-powered connections to steer decision makers around to his employers’ way of thinking. In 1946, as Coca-Cola began its rapid global expansion, the company realized it needed to be better plugged into world politics if it was going to deal with the challenges of operating internationally, and it recruited the tall, elegant Russian to be its eyes, ears, and voice in the smoky corridors of power.
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