Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food (69 page)

HEALTH AND MORALE – THE ARMY CATERING CORPS

The stimulus for the British army to improve military catering was the negative impact that dismal food had upon the morale of the troops. ‘When it started out the food was good … by the time it reached us it was not very appetising. To anyone nurtured in comparative comfort … the conditions, particularly in the mess, were appalling.’
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This was the opinion of R. P. Evans, a Bren-gun operator in the 8th Battalion Worcestershire Regiment. Military cooks took little pride in their work, which was hardly surprising given that they were poorly paid and allocating kitchen duty to an ordinary private was used as a mild form of punishment. Having agreed to train as a navy cook in 1940, the nineteen-year-old brewery worker R. B. Buckle was indignant to discover that the instruction consisted of being used as a dogsbody, peeling potatoes and cleaning up the kitchens. When he came to take his cook’s examination he still had no idea how to make Yorkshire pudding or pastry for an apple pie. An obliging Wren
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made most of his meal for him. As the paymaster tasted ‘a small spoonful from my plates and pronounced me a cook it crossed my mind, if this was how other departments were trained I wondered how we expected to win the war’.
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In the first years of the war the dreadful army food was a major
source of discontent among servicemen stationed in Britain. After the British army was driven out of France in June 1940, well over half of the 3 million strong British armed forces were stationed in the home country. In theory this should have made it easier to feed them, but the miserable food situation in the winter of 1940–41 was reflected in the military rations. In his Mass Observation diary for 9 February 1941, the reluctant recruit Edward Stebbing complained: ‘Tea today: one piece of bread and jam, a piece of cake and a cup of tea.’
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A typical day’s fare would be, for breakfast, a small piece of bacon or liver, porridge and two slices of bread. Lunch at noon would be meat, potatoes, cabbage and carrots, followed by semolina. Spotted dick (a suet pudding with currants) and custard was more popular but less frequently served. Tea was bread and butter, cheese, and possibly a slice of cake, followed by a supper of cold pudding or bread and butter and cocoa.
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It was recognized that hard physical training meant that soldiers required extra meat, but the home service ration of 3,300 calories allocated British soldiers only 6 ounces a day.
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Canadian troops stationed in Britain, used to far higher standards at home, were horrified by the British army food. It was one of the main topics in letters home, and in two Canadian camps in August 1941 there were sit-down strikes over the fact that there were only two cooked meals a day.
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For the British soldiers the food was one among many discontents. The army was made up of conscripts who saw themselves not as soldiers but as civilians in uniform. In contrast to the conscript army of the First World War, which was mainly made up of men who had been servants and farm labourers and who were accustomed to a culture of deference, the conscripts in the Second World War were better educated and less deferential towards the upper classes.
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These men resented high-handed upper-class officers, chafed against what they saw as pointless army discipline, the low pay, the sack-like uniforms and the public’s low regard for the ordinary squaddie. Leaky tents and damp barracks, disagreeable food, cheerless NAAFI
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canteens serving revolting tea, all took their toll on morale.
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Stebbing reported, ‘All the time one hears grumbles about the stupidity of the military authorities,
the red tape, the habit of doing things in the most awkward and roundabout way, the silly trivial things we are made to do, the shortage of food’.
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The army realized that something would have to be done. Ordinary men who had been called upon to risk sacrificing their lives for their country had a right to expect a decent level of care in return. In the sphere of food, in 1938 the army had already appointed Isidore Salmon of the J. Lyons Company to advise the quartermaster. He initiated the building of a new army cookery school at Aldershot and lobbied hard for the creation of a new catering corps. He pointed out that unless the cooks were better paid and properly trained they could hardly be expected to take pride in their work and produce appetizing meals. An Army Catering Corps was set up in March 1941 with Richard Byford, catering manager of Trust Houses, as its director. Byford put together a team of managers from the catering industry and the food in army messes gradually improved.
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The level of improvement can be seen in the cookery notebook which Fusilier H. Simons kept while attending his course at Aldershot in 1944. He was taught how to use a variety of different field ovens and how to build one out of scrap if no oven was available. The cookery lessons gave instructions on how to make a roux, salmon and potato cakes, a variety of stews and hotpots and how to prepare dehydrated foods so that they would at least be edible.
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By mid-1943 food seems to have faded as a source of discontent in the army stationed in Britain.
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The men who supervised food reform within the British army were drawn from the catering industry, and their focus was on improving the standard of cookery. In the Australian army the man appointed to shake up the army messes was Cedric Stanton Hicks, Professor of Physiology and Pharmacology at the University of Adelaide and one of the growing body of new scientists of nutrition. Hicks had supervised the South Australian League of Nations’ nutritional survey and was, therefore, very much alive to the issue of nutritional deficiencies in the Australian diet. He brought a quite different quality of commitment – it might be described as a crusading zeal – to the effort to improve not only the taste but also the nutritional value of army meals.

During his tour of inspection as the newly appointed catering adviser to the Australian army, Hicks found the cooks as incompetent and
uninterested in their job as the ones in the British army. He was astonished to discover that they were still cooking with Soyer stoves, invented by the famous Victorian chef Alexis Soyer during the Crimean war (1853–56). The stoves routinely burned the porridge, soups and stews and they reduced cabbage to a sludge-like mush. Hicks claimed that the local farmers were benefiting greatly because the soldiers left most of their food on their plates uneaten and he calculated that about 40 per cent of the army food supply ended up as pig slops.
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Not only did the Soyer stoves produce inedible food, they were, Hicks expostulated, ‘the most efficient destructor of Vitamin C that could be devised’.
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He began a concerted campaign to outlaw the stoves and eventually persuaded the Australian army to adopt the Wiles’ steam cooker, a mobile oven which could cook a meal in twenty minutes while a convoy was on the move. It used less fuel than the Soyer stove and Hicks was later to demonstrate, with the help of a scientist from CSIRO
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that vegetables steamed in this way retained 75 per cent of their vitamins, a huge improvement on the 80–85 per cent vitamin depletion rate in a Soyer stove. When the 4th Military District tried out the new stoves Hicks’s efforts were vindicated as the troops actually returned for second helpings of their vegetables.
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These mobile steam cookers were eventually adopted by the British army in 1944, to much praise.

Having installed better ovens Hicks devised a balanced mess ration which contained a generous 3,944 calories, but he thought it likely that the existing cooks would continue to ruin the food. His ‘growing realisation that food might well be a deciding factor’ in determining the performance of troops fortified his resolve, and ‘at fever heat’ he pushed for the better instruction of army cooks. ‘“Fighting with food” became our slogan.’
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Hicks pulled in First World War veterans who were now in the catering trade managing hotels and restaurants and set them to work reforming army cookery. In March 1943 Hicks finally won his battle to set up an Australian Army Catering Corps. By this time the main focus of Australian fighting was on New Guinea, and Major N. M. Gutteridge was appointed as the liaison officer between the Medical Directorate and the Quartermaster Nutrition Branch on the island. From then on medical officers were in constant contact with
the catering advisory staff and a process was set in motion whereby continuous inquiries about food and health in the field were relayed back to nutritional headquarters, which then adjusted methods and supplies. This system worked well in improving the skills of the cooks and raising awareness among the troops as to the benefits of eating the right sorts of food.

FIGHTING ON BULLY BEEF AND BISCUITS

The influence of the new army catering corps on field rations was not to be felt until well into the conflict. In the early campaigns the food rations received by the British empire’s combat troops were little different from those the soldiers ate in the trenches during the First World War. In 1941 the British 8th Army in Egypt was one-quarter British and three-quarters imperial. Three Australian divisions, as well as Australian Air Force squadrons, were joined by the Indian army and a huge force of pioneer soldiers mainly drawn from the African colonies, who dug tank traps, manned anti-aircraft batteries, constructed railways, put up telegraph lines and loaded and unloaded the ships bringing supplies into the Red Sea ports.
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The staple diet of all of these soldiers was bully beef and hard biscuits. Gerald Page, an army cook who served in the North African desert, described these biscuits as ‘a cross between Cream Crackers and Dog Biscuits’ – the ones made in Australia were reputed to taste like ‘dry, solid, soap’.
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In his diary in September 1941, R. L. Crimp, a soldier in a British motorized platoon, described the process of distributing desert rations. ‘At 6 o’clock, armed with sacks, canisters and empty water cans, we accompany the corporal to platoon HQ for rations. The sergeant’s already built “basic” piles on the ground – four cans of bully, a tin of milk, a tin of cheese, and six oranges – for each section [of half a dozen men] … Jam and margarine, in 7 lb tins, come once a week and go round in rotation.’ The men fought over the tinned potatoes as they particularly disliked the yellow sweet potatoes grown in Egypt. ‘For once, the fresh is not preferred.’
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The monotonous and unpalatable diet was made worse by the quality of the water, heavily chlorinated and so saline that the tea curdled. The troops in North Africa created
a brew known as ‘char’, very strong tea drunk with condensed milk and as much sugar as possible.
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Crimp described how brewing ‘desert char’ was a consoling ritual. The ‘desert army [was made up of] thousands and thousands of little groups whose very core was a fire tin and a brew can’. The men would gather around, the ‘section mugs … marshalled on the ground’ ready with tinned milk and sugar already added.
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The German troops fighting in the desert subsisted on an equally unimaginative diet of canned sausage meat, cream cheese in tubes, sardines, dried peas, salted vegetables, greasy margarine and jam and a moist black rye bread known as
Dauerbrot
(long-lasting bread). This was washed down with ersatz coffee, which the soldiers thought was execrable.
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It was joked that it was this heavy diet, inappropriate for the climate, that defeated Rommel’s troops in North Africa, but the joke would have held for either side.
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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.
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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.
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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’.
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The army also set up special vegetable farms, cultivated by African pioneer troops.
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