Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food (75 page)

The advertising images generated during the war created an image of the meaning of victory as the freedom to indulge in all those luxuries which Americans had been denied during the war. In 1943 Norman Rockwell in the
Saturday Evening Post
illustrated the four freedoms which Roosevelt stated that he hoped the war would achieve for the world in his State of the Union address to Congress on 6 January 1941. Rockwell depicted the freedom from fear, freedom of speech, freedom of worship, and freedom from want, with images of ordinary Americans going about their everyday lives: parents checking on their sleeping children, a man speaking at a town meeting, a congregation at prayer in a church and a family seated around a table laden with food. The private, homely nature of the paintings reinforced the widespread notion that the grand ideals of freedom and democracy which Americans were fighting to defend were embodied in the details of the American way of life.
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Most particularly they appeared to be symbolized by an American family sitting down to eat a huge Thanksgiving turkey. Rockwell noted in his autobiography that this picture of abundance caused a certain amount of resentment among Europeans living in conditions of austerity, who were able to read the message of American superiority encoded in the image of plentiful food.
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That these ideas and images were internalized by ordinary Americans is illustrated by a letter Phil Aquila wrote to his sister in October 1944. Posted to Kentucky during the war, Phil kept in touch with his family in Buffalo. His family, of Italian descent, was poor, and every summer his mother used to take all nine children out to the farms around New York to work in the seasonal harvesting of the vegetable crop. ‘I hope by now Ma’s finished canning,’ he wrote, ‘although she still can buy a lot of stuff at the market of Bailey & Clinton Streets to can if she feels
she needs more food for this winter. Yep, people in this country are sure lucky, to be able to stock up as much food as they want. That’s what us guys are fighting for, so tell Ma to stock up.’
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During the Depression years the idea emerged of the consumer as the saviour of the American economy. The working man who bought himself goods such as radios and refrigerators by means of hire purchase was the key to generating industrial production. Not only was he improving his standard of living but the demand for consumables would increase productivity and keep working men in jobs.
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At the end of the war, the government returned to this argument and encouraged purchasing without restraint as a way of preventing the expected post-war economic slump. The ‘former head of the Office of Price Administration, Chester Bowles, told his former colleagues in advertising, the resulting mass markets, where “the janitor’s appetite for a sirloin steak is as profitable as the banker’s,” would democratize the benefits of prosperity’.
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Consumerism was the American answer to Britain’s Beveridge Report which symbolized the hope for a better world to be achieved through the creation of a welfare state. Americans believed that if the masses were able to gain access to the fruits of economic abundance, political and economic equality would follow.
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TROOP WELFARE

The daily meals of American soldiers revealed the influence of the Food and Nutrition Board’s overly generous recommended daily allowances. The standard ration provided on military bases contained a staggering 4,300 calories, about 800 calories more than is strictly necessary for a soldier in training.
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Men at the front were allocated 4,758 calories a day, and American soldiers were fortunate to receive sufficient food to sustain a man in combat in cold or tropical conditions. The German combat rations at 4,000 calories came close to competing with American standards but the Japanese opposing them in the tropical conditions of the Pacific were fighting on an official ration which contained fewer than half this number of calories, and the soldiers rarely received their full allocation.
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The United States military zealously applied the new knowledge of
protective foods to the meals of the armed forces. Every meal contained meat and each serviceman ate a gargantuan 234 pounds per year, just under double the 140 pounds per head for civilians. This was the main cause of red meat shortages in American butchers’ shops.
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In December 1940 R. B. Buckle, a nineteen-year-old British brewery worker from Norfolk, found himself living at an American navy receiving station in Seattle, waiting to board the battleship
Warspite
. He was amazed by the food: ‘We sat down in a huge dining hall and were waited on by coloured sailors who wore dazzling white uniforms … The meal was excellent. Steak, mark you! Real steak with onions, creamed and French fried potatoes, green beans and a delicious sauce. Sweet was apple crumble and cream. A huge mug of coffee completed the meal.’
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When Buckle was savouring American food, it would still be another year before the United States joined the war. Even once America had been drawn into the conflict the boom in agriculture meant that the armed forces were always well supplied. Indeed, in terms of food, the United States armed forces were in a league of their own. As one British officer commented, their rations were ‘lavish to the point of extravagance’.
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Generous meals were one of General George Marshall’s strategies for dealing with an army of drafted men who preserved a strong civilian mentality. Few American recruits felt they were under an obligation to serve their country. On the contrary, they felt that while they sacrificed their liberty and possibly their lives, their country was under a powerful debt of obligation to them.
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They expected to be well looked after in the armed forces, and soldiers and their families formed a powerful pressure group within the United States. Even minor expressions of discontent over rations led to outspoken criticism in the forces’ newspaper, the
Stars and Stripes
.
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The military was so sensitive to discontent among the new recruits that it set up a polling organization specifically to track the mood among its soldiers. The polls found that the men chafed a great deal against the conformity and petty restrictions of army life but their biggest gripes were food and pay.
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In response Marshall adopted a placatory policy which made ‘troop welfare … an essential part of modern warfare’.
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The result was that the United States military went to great lengths to ensure that soldiers in the field had the means to wash, good-quality field hospitals backed
up by an efficient evacuation system, regular mail deliveries, recreation facilities and, most importantly, good food.
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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.
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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.
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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’.
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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.
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Despite vigorous training, the airmen at Randolph Field found themselves gaining 10 or 20 pounds (4–9 kilograms) in weight each month.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.’
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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.
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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.
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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’.
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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.
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Like American schoolchildren, the recruits from diverse regional, religious and ethnic backgrounds found themselves eating the innocuous food of demo-cracy.
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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.
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