Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food (78 page)

On the one hand Australia felt that US demands were excessive, on the other the Americans were often unhappy with the foodstuffs which the Australians supplied. In August 1942 the British and the Americans reached an agreement that Australia would divert its meat exports to feed the US forces in the south-west Pacific. America would compensate for Britain’s loss by increasing the amount of frozen meat it exported across the Atlantic. This turned out to be an unsatisfactory arrangement for all sides. The Americans failed to fulfil their quotas to Britain while the Australians were not forthcoming with the types of supplies which the Americans favoured. Boneless beef was an ingenious invention which saved shipping but Australian meat packers did not want to invest in the new equipment they needed to produce it and were never able to fill the quotas the Americans set for this product.
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Consequently, the American field kitchens had to use canned rather than fresh meat and even the canned meat was unsatisfactory. Major George
Hallman, head of the meat section of the Food Production Division of the Subsistence Depot, showed Australian canners how to make American dishes such as chilli con carne, luncheon meat (Spam), Vienna sausage, pork sausage, pork and beans, and roast beef with gravy. But the canners were hampered by the small scale of pork farming in Australia and reluctant to branch out into lines which would surely decline as soon as the war was over. To the annoyance of the American troops, Australian meat canners continued to churn out corned beef, corned mutton and minced beef loaf, all of which the GIs loathed.
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American and Australian tastes in vegetables also differed greatly. The Americans preferred tinned tomatoes, peas, corn, string beans and asparagus, and they hated the canned beets, carrots, cabbage, parsnips and pumpkins that prevailed in Australia. To the US quartermaster’s disgust, 40 per cent of the canned vegetables the US supply services received in 1943 were beets, cabbages and carrots: double the amount agreed.
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It was extremely difficult for the quartermaster to sustain a ‘subsistence philosophy’ in the circumstances which prevailed in the Pacific combat arena. On their base island of Pavuvu in the Solomon Islands, E. B. Sledge and his companions from the 1st Marines Division lived on a diet of ‘dehydrated eggs, dehydrated potatoes, and that detestable canned meat Spam’.
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Even the fresh bread was ‘so heavy that when you held a slice by one side, the rest of the slice broke away of its own weight. The flour was so massively infested with weevils that each slice of bread had more of the little beetles than there are seeds in a slice of rye bread.’
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Storage proved an enormous headache in the Pacific islands. By 1944 MacArthur’s troops had leapfrogged their way along the northern coast of New Guinea and supply bases had been established at Port Moresby, Milne Bay, Oro Bay, Finschhafen and, after MacArthur’s 900-kilometre leapfrog in April 1944, at Hollandia. At each of these bases the service corps had to carve a port and storage space out of virgin jungle.
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There was no time to create proper warehouses. Food and equipment containers were simply stacked, often directly on to the mud, and covered with canvas. Tents or shacks were sometimes available but the protection they afforded was minimal. The heat, humidity and torrential rain took a heavy toll. The corrugated cardboard which packaged
much of the food disintegrated, and flimsy wooden food cases fell apart under the heavy and frequent handling they experienced along the way. Food in cloth bags spoiled very quickly, but even tin cans went rusty or were punctured and the contents festered. In 1942 and 1943 it was estimated that 40 per cent of the rations in the South-West Pacific Area were spoilt or rotten by the time they reached the field kitchens. At Port Moresby one inspection of the stores found that more than half the cans of food inspected were ‘unsuitable for issue’.
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In response the quartermaster research laboratories devised special bags, which had an asphalt moisture barrier integrated into the cloth, for dry goods such as flour, salt, sugar, powdered milk, rice, dry beans and peas. American companies invented a new sort of cardboard called V-Board made out of fibre and sisal, and Australian food processors began to package dry as well as wet goods in specially lacquered cans.
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By 1944 wastage of food was down to about 13.6 per cent but it was never as low as in Europe, where wastage from all sources was in the region of 9.5 per cent.
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The result was that in the Pacific the US troops went through frustrating cycles of feast and ‘famine’. Rather than following the carefully balanced menus sent out by the Surgeon-General’s headquarters, in New Guinea as soon as a reefer arrived with fresh food the cooks allowed the men to gorge themselves. For two days in November the troops at Oro Bay each ate nineteen eggs a day as well as mounds of butter and beef. The cooks argued that the reason for their failure to behave responsibly and carefully husband these foods was the lack of refrigerated storage.
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However, once the fresh supplies were consumed the men were forced to revert to a diet of corned beef hash and dehydrated vegetables. In March 1944 the quartermasters at Lae complained that they had twenty-six days’ worth of the detested corned beef and corned beef hash and plenty of canned carrots, cabbage and beets but no one wanted to eat them. In contrast, their canned fruit supply was down to one day’s worth, and their canned milk would only last another two days. Milne Bay was in a similar situation with a ‘hopeless excess’ of corned beef and C ration tins of meat, but no dehydrated potatoes and onions, coffee, sugar or cheese.
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Major-General Innis P. Swift, commander of the 1st Cavalry Division on New Guinea, reported that his men were ‘sick and tired of corned beef and … say
that dehydrated foods are all right for about a week, but after that they are nauseating’.
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If the American troops got fed up with their cans of stew, at least they still had plenty to eat, in contrast to their Japanese opponents. ‘For every
four tons
of supplies the United States shipped to its ground forces in the Pacific, Japan was able to transport to its own men just
two pounds
.’
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Onoda Hiroo, holding out against the Americans on the Philippines in 1945, found discarded chewing gum on one of the leaves which he had picked for his dinner. ‘Here we were holding on for dear life,’ he commented, ‘and these characters were chewing gum while they fought!’
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Ogawa Tamotsu, a doctor on New Britain, retreating through the jungle suffering from dysentery and starvation recalled that ‘sometimes at night a smell of coffee drifted through the jungle. That was a scent I will never forget. The enemy sentries having coffee from some kind of portable coffee pot.’
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Sergeant Funasaka Hiroshi, stuck in a cave on the island of Palau, observed the American camp below him. ‘I could imagine the Americans sleeping soundly inside those tents … And in the morning, they’d rise leisurely, shave, eat a hearty breakfast, then come after us again as usual. That sea of shining electric lights was a powerful, silent commentary on their “battle of abundance” … I had an image of the island divided in half with heaven and hell lying next to each other, separated by only a few hundred metres.’
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FEEDING PACIFIC ISLANDERS

Early in the morning of 2 October 1942 the islanders on the atoll of Funafuti in the British colony of the Ellice Islands
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spotted what looked to them like ‘a huge group of crabs … crawling across the ocean towards us’.
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By 8 a.m. the convoy of two cruisers, five destroyers, a cargo ship, three supply ships and at least three other large vessels was lined up, waiting to sail into the lagoon. Seaplanes were busily flying around, dropping smoke bombs to indicate the dangerous reefs. Once inside the shelter of the lagoon, barges and landing craft were unloaded
and the sea was soon full of vessels, bringing 853 marines, 122 naval construction personnel and 113 miscellaneous medical, aviation and administrative staff up on to the tiny island of a few square kilometres, along with a mountain of stores, trucks, bulldozers, mobile cranes, dozens of freezer containers, guns and artillery shells, water desalinators, and more than 4,000 drums of gasoline. One hundred kilometres away the coast-watchers on the island of Nukufetau observed a black cloud of exhaust fumes rising up into the sky and sent a coded message inquiring what was happening. They received no reply so as not to alert the Japanese to the covert American activity.
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Although Admiral Nimitz used New Zealand as his main regional base, the US navy also built a chain of airfields and naval bases across the south and central Pacific. Until the Second World War Pacific islands were ‘isolated on the colonial fringe’.
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Their experience of westerners was limited to contact with traders, missionaries, planters and colonial officials. By the middle of 1942 there were tens of thousands of Americans stationed across the islands from Fiji and Samoa to New Caledonia. Three of the Ellice Islands’ six atolls were transformed into ‘anchored aircraft carriers’ and sheltered harbours for ships and seaplanes.
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From here the Americans launched their central Pacific offensive towards the Gilbert, Marshall, Mariana and Caroline islands. Western Samoa played host to between 25,000 and 30,000 American troops at any one time. This amounted to the equivalent of about one-third of the entire Western Samoan population. Tongatapu was swamped by around 8,000 soldiers and sailors in contrast to the entire native population of around 35,000 spread across the three Tongan island groups.
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The presence of the Americans had a huge impact on the lives of Pacific islanders. They brought with them military installations, incredible quantities of equipment and plenty of cash. In the Pacific the military power which the Americans employed to dislodge the Japanese from their island strongholds is still recalled with awe but, most of all, the Americans are remembered by Pacific islanders for their food.
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The lives of the approximately 4,000 Ellice Islanders were changed for ever by the arrival of that convoy of ships on the morning of 2 October 1942. Until that date the only ships which had visited the islands had been small, but now the islanders were confronted by the
sight of enormous battleships and a lagoon covered with hundreds of boats. Most of the islanders had never seen a car and for a few days after the American landing they stopped walking along the paths on the island until they overcame their fear of the speed at which the heavy trucks, bulldozers, cranes and graders moved.
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The Americans made no attempt to live off the land on the Ellice Islands as the Japanese might have done. Instead they destroyed the islanders’ means of growing food. In order to make space for an airstrip for fighter aircraft, thousands of food-bearing coconut and bread fruit trees were felled. The islanders’ ancient
pulaka
garden pits, dug by hand over centuries, and painstakingly filled with rich compost, took only five weeks to fill in and level.
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The Tuvaluans were now completely dependent on the stores of rice, biscuits and flour brought in from the United States and sold in a special government store. Those with GI friends also gained access to the foods sold exclusively to the troops in the PX store. Pole O’Brien, a nineteen-year-old nurse at a government clinic, tasted ice cream for the first time at a dance. ‘“Ask for ice cream,” said one of the girls. They had never eaten anything so cold in their lives. I told them, “swallow it, don’t hold it in your mouths like that, the Americans are watching us. Eat it! Finish it!”’
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The Funafutians shared their bounty with friends and relatives. Parcels were sent off regularly on the cargo ships visiting the outer Ellice Islands. In exchange for the Americans’ generosity the Tuvaluans would go fishing and give their catch to Colonel Good, the island’s commander.
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Throughout the Pacific, Japanese and Americans alike employed thousands of islanders as labourers and porters. The Americans fed them more food than they had ever seen before. Isaac Gafu, a Solomon Islander working in a labour gang on Guadalcanal, recalled ‘those big shipments of food, my goodness! The food made us enjoy working very much. Because of the fact that we ate good food, we did not tire easily.’ The only danger was that ‘we might get tired from eating!’
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Another Solomon Islander was delighted when some Americans invited him and his fellow workers inside their tents to sit on their beds and share their food. They even provided their guests with glasses, plates and spoons. ‘That was the first we had seen of that kind of thing.’
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In Pacific island cultures the sharing of food is of immense social importance. The giver demonstrates his ability to command the resources to
acquire food and cements his ties of kinship and community with those with whom he shares.
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Since their first contact with Europeans, Pacific islanders have been interested in western foods. By the 1930s canned meat, usually corned beef, was a normal part of islanders’ diets. But when the Americans arrived Pacific islanders were surprised and pleased by their generosity and open-handedness with food. The Americans’ willingness to share food made the islanders feel as if they were being treated as friends and equals. This unthinking distribution of abundance cast the more distanced colonial authorities in a poor light.
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