ESSENTIAL MORALE-BUILDING FOR THE BOYS
Shortly after Pearl Harbor, Robert Woodruff issued an extraordinary order: “We will see that every man in uniform gets a bottle of Coca-Cola for five cents, wherever he is and whatever it costs our company.” Woodruff’s gesture was undoubtedly a genuine act of patriotism, but his shrewd business sense and eye for publicity also prompted his magnanimity. Certainly he was aware that young soldiers had an unquenchable thirst for beer and Coke. Well before Pearl Harbor, he had assigned George Downing (later to set up bottling plants in Europe behind the lines) to supply Coca-Cola to troops in the United States during war games. Late in that summer before Pearl Harbor, during sweltering Army maneuvers in Louisiana, Coca-Cola proved predictably popular. “One military unit came right into a small local bottling plant to get some Coke,” Downing recalled. “Their supply was gone, so the soldiers literally bought the bottles off the line before they were capped.” Requests for Coca-Cola from the military were urgent, even before America’s entry into World War II, as demonstrated by rafts of letters in the Coca-Cola archives. In September of 1941, for instance, a base surgeon begged for adequate provisions, explaining that “I cannot conceive of any greater calamity than a loss of the base supply of Coke.”*
After Pearl Harbor, the trickle of letters swelled to a deluge, pouring into Coca-Cola’s mailroom in response to sugar rationing. In January of 1942, an exchange officer wrote to his local bottler:
Very few people ever stopped to consider the great part Coca-Cola plays in the building and the maintenance of morale among military personnel. Frankly speaking, we would be at a loss to find as satisfying and as refreshing a beverage to replace Coca-Cola. Accordingly, we sincerely hope that your Company will be able to continue supplying us during this emergency. In our opinion, Coca-Cola could be classified as one of the essential morale-building products for the boys in the Service.
Ben Oehlert shifted into high gear as Coca-Cola’s Washington lobbyist. Already sophisticated in weaving his way through the halls of Congress and the FDA, Oehlert now moved effortlessly through the political jungle, unctuously and persistently presenting the case for Coca-Cola. He urged the Company to sell its twenty-three thousand bags of stockpiled sugar to the military as a goodwill gesture that would put the Company in “a better psychological and public relations position.” At the same time, Oehlert offered to “aid the policymaking” of the War Production Board’s Sugar Section, helping it to “formulate the proper orders” in administering the available supply. He forwarded market surveys showing the flood of Coca-Cola drunk on military bases, following up with a hundred sample letters from Army and Navy units, USO branches, Red Cross chapters, and defense industries, all “stressing the importance to them of our product.” Oehlert added that “there may be a thoughtless tendency . . . to regard the soft drink industry as being somewhat non-essential in a period such as this.” Nothing could be further from the truth!
To prove it, Oehlert and the D’Arcy agency created a 1942 masterpiece of pseudo-science entitled “Importance of the Rest-Pause in Maximum War Effort.” The first eight pages, simply quoting various authorities to show that factory workers and military men performed better if given periodic breaks, didn’t mention Coca-Cola. Then the ninth page revealed a huge illustration of a tilted Coke bottle with a pointed text: “Men work better refreshed. Time rules the present as never before. A nation at war strains forward in productive effort in a new tempo. . . . In times like these Coca-Cola is doing a necessary job for workers.”
As part of his “aid,” Oehlert managed to get Coca-Cola executive Ed Forio appointed to the sugar rationing board; the Company granted the soft drink executive an extended leave so that he could serve his country’s sweet tooth. Meanwhile, James Farley, new head of The Coca-Cola Export Corporation, engaged in his special variety of quiet back-room politicking, along with Washington tax lawyer Max Gardner, who was urged to render the bureaucrats “docile, receptive, tractable, malleable.”*
All of the lobbying paid off. By the beginning of 1942, Coca-Cola was exempted from sugar rationing when sold to the military or retailers serving soldiers. Finally, in June, Brehon Somervell, the Army’s quartermaster general, asked the head of the Sugar Board for an extension of the exemption, specifically naming Coca-Cola. The Army’s attitude toward the soft drink had dramatically shifted since it banned Coca-Cola on its bases thirty-five years before. Harrison Jones, who had burst into creative obscenities when sugar rationing commenced, was ecstatic. While the rest of the soft drink industry suffered from an 80 percent quota (based on prewar figures), Coca-Cola readied for an all-out effort to send its sweet beverage fizzing down as many GI throats as possible. At its worst, U.S. sugar rationing dipped to 50 percent, but only domestic Coca-Cola bottlers unfortunate enough not to have any military base nearby were ever seriously affected.
COCA-COLA COLONELS
At first, the Company attempted to ship already-bottled Coca-Cola abroad. But, despite its privileged status, Coca-Cola ran afoul of military shipping priorities. In a 1942 NBC radio broadcast, Martin Agronsky criticized a massive Coke transport to Australia when there was a critical need for guns and planes. With logistics and the media against them, Company officials devised another plan, copying the Army’s use of dehydrated food. Why not ship only Coca-Cola concentrate and bottle the stuff overseas? And where a bottling plant wasn’t feasible, why not import portable soda fountains to the front lines?
The Company began experimenting with these ideas only a month or so after Pearl Harbor, sending Albert “Red” Davis to Reykjavik, Iceland, to bottle Coke for the air base under construction. Using sign language, Davis demonstrated the clunky mysteries of an antiquated Dixie unit, and the local bottler sold his first carbonated drinks to the military in May of 1942, the same month Agronsky’s complaint aired on NBC. Nazi sympathizers and locals were initially skeptical of the American drink, since they resented the sexual exploits of the occupying GIs, but Coca-Cola quickly demonstrated its universal appeal. Previously unknown in Iceland, the drink achieved such popularity that the prime minister demanded that half of the sugar ration sweeten beverages for civilians, who agreed that Coke was “Heilnaemt og Hressandi” (delicious and refreshing).
Davis was the first of 248 Coca-Cola employees who followed the soldiers, serving them ten billion Cokes in the process, from the jungles of New Guinea to officers’ clubs on the Riviera. During the war, sixty-four bottling plants were established on every continent except Antarctica—largely at government expense. The adventures of the overseas Coca-Cola men would become legendary within the Company, while the fruits of their labor would yield a postwar Coke marketing explosion.
In a remarkably cozy arrangement, the U.S. Army gave the Coca-Cola representatives the pseudo-military status of “technical observers,” a designation invented during World War I for civilians needed in the war effort—those servicing military machinery, for instance. Charles Lindbergh for a time served as a technical observer during World War II for United Aircraft Corporation. Incredibly, it appears that technicians who installed Coca-Cola plants behind the front lines were deemed as vital as those who fixed tanks or airplanes. The Coke representatives wore Army uniforms with “T.O.” as a shoulder patch. Each Coke man received military rank commensurate with his Company salary, leading some wags to nickname them “Coca-Cola Colonels.”
Though the Coca-Cola Technical Observers were exempt from the draft, rarely were in any real physical danger, and often led soft lives compared with the common soldier, no one resented them or the profits they garnered from a captive market. Rather, the soldiers were grateful that The Coca-Cola Company cared enough to send representatives to bring them a taste of home in the midst of the hell of war. An anecdote related by T.O. Quint Adams illustrates how they were treated. North of Naples, Adams and an officer were stopped by a guard who demanded to see a Fifth Army pass, which they hadn’t brought. The guard was insistent. The officer obediently backed up,
telling Adams that the bottling plant would have to wait. “Why the hell didn’t you say he was a Coca-Cola man?” the guard complained, stepping aside to let them proceed.
A GENERAL FONDNESS
It was not only common soldiers who liked Coca-Cola: generals seemed particularly fond of the drink. Patton reputedly regarded a cache of Coke as a necessity, making sure the T.O.s transported a bottling plant wherever he went, perhaps because of his well-known thirst for rum and Coke. He once suggested, not altogether facetiously, a way to end the war more quickly: “Hell, we ought to send the Coke in first, then we wouldn’t have to fight the bastards.” MacArthur autographed the first bottle of Coke produced in the Philippines after his famous return. General Wainwright, the hero of Bataan, combined three American symbols when photographed after the war at Yankee Stadium: baseball, a half-eaten hot dog, and an uplifted bottle of Coke.
General Omar Bradley suffered from a double weakness: ice cream and Coca-Cola. “Even in Britain, where the climate encourages the drinking of more warming beverages, the general keeps a case of Coca-Cola in his office,” a journalist reported. Even Filipino General Carlos Romulo wrote “with trembling hands” of the important day during the Battle of the Philippines when he had a Coke. He added, apparently without a trace of irony: “That day I had seen men blown to shreds; I had seen white-faced nurses drag themselves from the bloody debris of a bombed hospital. All this paled and was forgotten before the miracle of a five-cent drink any American can buy at his corner store.”
But the real Coca-Cola addict was Eisenhower, who would become a close personal friend and golfing buddy of Robert Woodruff after the war. “MILLIONS CHEER IKE AT PARADE HERE,” a Washington, D.C., paper headlined its front page of June 19, 1945, while commenting on the hero’s taste in beverages:
After feasting copiously at the Statler luncheon yesterday, Gen. Eisenhower was asked if he wished anything else.
“Could somebody get me a Coke?” he asked.
After polishing off the soft drink, the General said he had one more request. Asked what he wanted, he answered:
“Another Coke.”
It is not surprising, then, that Eisenhower sent an urgent cablegram from North Africa on June 29, 1943, which threw the T.O. program into high gear:
On early convoy request shipment three million bottled Coca-Cola (filled) and complete equipment for bottling, washing, capping same quantity twice monthly.
Preference as to equipment is 10 separate machines for installation in different localities, each complete for bottling twenty thousand bottles per day. Also sufficient syrup and caps for 6 million refills. Syrup, caps and sixty thousand bottles monthly should be an automatic supply. Monthly shipment bottles is to cover estimated breakage and losses. Estimate ship tons initial shipment 5 thousand. Ship without displacing other military cargo. Data available here very meager as to these installations and operations. Request they be checked by fully qualified sources and this Headquarters advised promptly recommended installation to meet the two hundred thousand bottle daily demand and when same can be shipped.
Eisenhower’s request that the plants arrive “without displacing other military cargo” was clearly intended to placate anyone who might object, though certainly no one was going to countermand the general. And so the man who years later was to warn the American public of the dangers of the “military-industrial complex” implemented an openly cooperative arrangement between the U.S. Army and The Coca-Cola Company.
Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall quickly validated the Eisenhower telegram in an innocuously worded War Department order: “Articles of necessity and convenience will be made available to troops overseas in adequate quantities.” Early in 1944, after Company lobbying for stronger language, Marshall issued Circular No. 51, specifically allowing commanders to requisition Coca-Cola plants by name, along with the Technical Observers to install and operate them.
RIDING THE RED BALL EXPRESS
Woodruff hurriedly dispatched T.O. Albert Thomforde to Africa by high-priority military air transport to satisfy Ike’s troops. Thomforde arrived ahead of his supplies and encountered the same difficulties that most T.O.s would confront: antiquated native bottling plants, polluted water, and a frustrating relationship with the Army Exchange Service. Nonetheless, by Christmas of 1943, the first Coke was rolling off the line in Oran. Once Coke had established a beachhead, the Company quickly mobilized its bottling forces for every available front. Thomforde flew to Italy to commence bottling there, followed by other Observers shadowing the U.S. military up the Italian boot. From England, they crossed the Channel just after D-Day.* T.O. Paul Bacon rode in the first “red ball express” (an open Army jeep) that jounced into Paris after its liberation. As the Allied forces pushed the Germans back toward Berlin, the Coca-Cola men surged into Germany along with their bottling plants, refurbishing European mineral water operations and continuing to serve the troops their favorite beverage.
Meanwhile, T.O.s were also flooding into the Pacific theater, but because of the war’s geography and the quickly shifting front, bottling was not nearly as feasible as in Africa or Europe. Consequently, thirsty Pacific troops drank cups of Coke dispensed from portable “jungle fountain units.” In the wilds of New Guinea, black and white soldiers were at least temporarily integrated, drinking from the same Coke fountain, unlike the segregated soft drink spigots on American bases.
“THE TECHNICAL OBSERVERS ARE WINNING THE WAR”
By and large, the Technical Observers took their jobs seriously, attempting to produce an adequate supply of their drink under difficult circumstances. Some of their exploits were truly Herculean, such as John Talley’s retrieval of a filler dropped into the Le-Havre harbor, or Fred Cooke’s 1,300-mile trip “over the Hump” of the Himalayas to bring a bottling plant to China. The day-to-day life of the T.O. involved more prosaic battles with Rube Goldberg contraptions. “It will long be a mystery to me,” wrote one Coke man of another, “how Bill Musselman keeps that hunk of junk he calls a bottling machine in continuous operation a full seventeen hours a day. Bailing wire seems to be his main support plus weld upon weld for practically every moving part.”
Military personnel supplied most of those welds, as well as other repairs. The line between private industry and government forces was, to say the least, blurred during the war, so that T.O. Gene Braendle could write from New Guinea that “the one most important thing in our favor is the fact that everyone from the Base Commander down to the lowly private are vitally concerned in the Coke situation and go all out to help us all they possibly can.” Another Observer happily remembered that “the first thing we did [at a new location] was make friends with either a port construction battalion or the Seabees. You could get anything done with those fellows. They would forge a new piece of machinery or do anything else.” GIs also worked in bottling plants, presumably on Army rather than Coke pay. One T.O. bragged of his eighteen-hour work days, explaining that “both the Quartermaster and the Army Exchange Service were kind enough to furnish the night labor gang for this work. All of the Army personnel assigned to the plant have been very cooperative.”
If they hadn’t been cooperative, they would have been in deep trouble, according to war correspondent Howard Fast, who nearly died as a result of a pilot’s fear of offending Coca-Cola. At first, Fast couldn’t fathom why his transport plane landed at a remote Saudi Arabian Army outpost where the thermometer read 157 degrees Fahrenheit. They were there to pick up thousands of empty Coca-Cola bottles. When the overloaded C46 lumbered off the desert runway, it failed to gain altitude, barely clearing the sand dunes. The writer logically suggested jettisoning bottles. That, he was told, was impossible. “Guns they could dump, jeeps, ammo, even a howitzer . . . but Coca-Cola bottles? No way. Not if you wanted to keep your points and not become a PFC again.” The pilot summarized the well-learned moral: “You don’t fuck with Cola-Cola.”
Prisoners of war were also assigned to work in Coke plants. The Coca-Col
a men preferred diligent Germans and Japanese POWs to locals whose work ethic was not so strong. One Observer complained that French workers had “very little conception of what is meant by the words cleanliness and sanitation. They are not too much concerned whether they work or not, and when they work they are indifferent, to put it mildly, toward the kind of work they do.” On the other hand, the German POWs “make very good labor and are easy to handle. When you show them what you want done, they go ahead and do it, and do it well.”
Just as the soldier’s life consisted of danger, fear of death, long periods of boredom, and occasional binges, the Coca-Cola T.O. led a roller-coaster existence, a mixture of harsh conditions and a life of ease. In the unpublished Company history of the period, James Kahn waxed poetic about the hard life of the T.O., who often suffered from poor, inadequate rations and uncomfortable sleeping arrangements. “They got malaria and frostbite and jungle rot,” he wrote, “and came home yellow from the endless capsules of atabrine they took.” Three of them, he concluded, never returned, “killed in plane crashes as they made their determined rounds.”
While Kahn’s account may be overdramatized, it is essentially true, as far as it goes. He neglected, however, to mention the soft side of the Coca-Cola men’s overseas life. T.O.s reported game hunting, sitting around in officers’ clubs drinking and playing poker, buying sailboats, and spending weekends in the Alps with Red Cross nurses. “You express solicitations for my personal comfort,” one Observer wrote from Italy. “In this regard I am almost ashamed to report.” He went on to describe his luxurious Mediterranean villa, complete with servants’ quarters.
For God, Country, and Coca-Cola Page 31
