The Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food

by Lizzie Collingham

  However, when war broke out in 1939 food was certainly not seen as the most important contribution Australia could make to the war. Unable to ship all but the most concentrated foods to the country’s main market, in Britain, Australians were faced with gluts of unwanted wheat and apples. Scientists desperately searched for new ways of protecting large stores of grain from weevils and mice.158 Agricultural machinery plants converted to munitions production.159 Farm workers hurried to join up or left the countryside for better-paid jobs in industry. The number of people employed in agriculture fell by 120,000.160 By the time the United States and Japan entered the war in December 1941 Australian agriculture was in decline.

  From January 1942 the Americans began to build up troops in Australia in preparation for military action against Japan. The United States divided the Pacific war zone into two military domains: the South-West Pacific under the army command of General Douglas MacArthur, with his base in Australia, and the South and Central Pacific under the naval command of Admiral Chester Nimitz, based in New Zealand. As well as feeding its own civilians and military forces, Australia now had to supply Britain with as much frozen meat as possible, feed the 100,000 US troops stationed in Australia and the 1 million US servicemen fighting on Pacific islands, as well as tens of thousands of Japanese prisoners of war. This amounted to an additional 5 million hungry mouths.161 The economy was turned on its head and the food industry, which had been neglected, was now of the utmost importance. Agricultural machinery plants were converted back to producing tractors and other agricultural devices and men were called back from the army to fight on the wheat and vegetable fields, rather than in the jungles of the Pacific and deserts of the Middle East.

  The US army authorities discovered that the Australian food industry was antiquated, and vegetable production barely mechanized.162 It was clear that it would be unable to cope with feeding hundreds of thousands of soldiers. The US military responded by bringing in a division of experts, hastily promoted into the army for the duration. One of them was Major Belford Seabrook from the pioneering Seabrook Farms in New Jersey, who set about teaching the Australians the art of agribusiness. He introduced new varieties of vegetables which were more amenable to mechanized harvesting such as ‘tomatoes with fruit that grew on accessible parts of the plant, [and] stringless beans’.163 Farmers were taught how to stagger the planting of peas so that as each successive field matured they could be fed through the canning factory.164 Seabrook introduced scientific methods for testing the starch content of the vegetables, to predict precisely when the crop should be picked for processing.165 Factories were sent pattern machines from America so that they could manufacture power-operated potato diggers, rotary weeders, and bean and pea harvesters.166 Using a pea harvester, a crop which used to take 1,500 pickers two weeks to harvest could be processed by fifteen men in days.167 Major Seabrook was praised by one contemporary historian for having ‘effected an agricultural revolution in this land’, without which ‘Australia could not have met the demands made upon her’.168

  To complement the introduction of new vegetable-growing techniques, American experts overhauled the canning industry. Faulty end and side seams on the Australian cans had a tendency to let in bacteria. In May 1942 the GI Stan Tutt was horrified by the tins of tomatoes he had to unload in northern Queensland. The tomatoes were ‘so fermented the contents were trickling from the cases – vile’.169 The revolting brew had spoiled the bags of flour placed underneath the tins. In November that year thirty-two US airmen developed botulism as a result of eating Australian canned beetroot. Eight of them died.170 Major C. R. Fellers, head of the Department of Food Technology of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, was drafted in to improve canning technology. He set up the US Quartermaster’s Laboratory in Tooth’s Brewery, Sydney, which tested the quality and safety of food supplied to the army. A Captain C. E. Norton used lend-lease money to build four factories to supply the equipment for can-making and he and his team visited the canning factories to make sure that the sealing equipment was working and that the cans were heated up long enough to kill bacteria.171 The American team of skilled management and technicians accomplished in months what might have taken years without the stimulus of the war.172

  The amount of land used to grow vegetables doubled. By 1944 Australia was producing more than a million tons of vegetables and 50 million pounds of them disappeared into cans destined for US service-men on Pacific islands.173 Seventeen newly constructed dehydration plants around the country transformed much of the rest of the crop into dried vegetables. Despite being far less palatable, they were invaluable for transporting to troops along lengthy supply chains as they weighed only one-eighth of their original weight. In addition they did not require valuable tinplate, which had to be imported from the States. Dried potato soon became a staple of both American and Australian servicemen in the Pacific. Australia produced over 21 million pounds in 1945 alone.174

  Australian farming’s efforts were impressive. The only problem was that Australian and American tastes differed greatly. When US servicemen lived on Australian military rations they were horrified. Thomas St George, stationed in South Australia, was expecting ham and eggs for breakfast. He was disgusted by the mutton stew which he was served out of an oil drum, ‘like cold glue full of unidentifiable vegetables, and with all the delicious appeal of a soggy snow bank’.175 The stewed coffee made with chicory which arrived in the other oil drum was equally unpleasant. What was more, the garbage was carried away in the same drums that brought the food. American annual consumption of mutton was a mere 6.5 pounds per head. It was regarded as a poor man’s meat. But it was an Australian staple, each Australian consuming a substantial 70 pounds of mutton per person per year.176

  Moreover, there was a discrepancy between the ration for the Australian troops which was made up of only twenty-four basic items, while the GIs were used to thirty-nine staple items and 814 more calories per day. The US army quickly took over the provisioning of its troops within Australia and fed them according to US ration scales. The Americans were provided with fresh eggs, macaroni, spaghetti, rice and coffee, all of which were denied Australian soldiers. An extra sixpence per man per day for their maintenance supplied their canteens with fresh fruit, fruit juices, vegetables, breakfast cereals, saltines, cocoa, baking-soda, cornflour and cornmeal, and an extra four ounces of beef and three ounces of bacon a week per man.177 Given that virtually all this extra food was grown and processed in Australia, this seemed doubly unfair. The inequality was replicated in the field. R. Palmer, who served in the Australian navy, once made a trip on an American supply ship from Port Moresby to Milne Bay, New Guinea. Stowed away below the hatches were ‘crates of fresh apples and there was butter, boxes and boxes of butter, and there was beef hanging up … All come from Australia you see … The supply ship used to come up from Australia with all this fresh fruit on and fresh food which we never got.’178 The Australians on New Guinea used to joke that US amphibious operations were carried out in two waves: first the marines, then a consignment of refrigerators.179

  By September 1942 ordinary Australians were feeling the effect of feeding the Americans and the resentment among Australian troops was matched by some civilian bitterness. Wartime prosperity meant that Australians, like the Americans, had more money to spend on better-quality food and they resented shortages, especially given that the American servicemen seemed to ‘eat about three times as much as the average Australian in a day’.180 In particular, the Australians could not get over the fact that grown men chose to drink milk. A mother in Brisbane complained sourly to the Brisbane Courier Mail that her two small children could not get a taste of ice cream because the milk bars reserved their supplies for GIs, who would also drink several milk shakes at one sitting. Although their official allowance was 8 ounces (which was already double the Australian), it was estimated that GIs drank about 24 ounces of milk a day.181 The Americans’ taste for fried chicken had made poultry unaffordable
and eggs were scarce.182 Tinned foods, especially canned meat, had just about disappeared from the shops. Virtually all the biscuits produced in the Perth area went to Western Command. Only a small supply of milk and arrowroot biscuits was set aside for small children.183 Rationing was gradually extended to cover tea (½ pound for five weeks from July 1942), sugar (1 pound a week from October 1942), butter (8 ounces, reduced to 6 ounces a week in 1944) and meat (2¼ pounds in 1944).184

  Worst hit were the isolated northern towns, closest to large military camps, which were never well supplied with foodstuffs, even in peacetime. In Townsville, northern Queensland, the frustrated inhabitants looked on as all the fresh food, ice and beer disappeared behind the gates of the US army base.185 Marion Houldsworth, a young girl living in Townsville during the war, recalled how ‘milk … became almost unobtainable. Meat was scarce.’186 Toothbrushes, butchers’ wrapping paper and shoes were all in short supply and it became ‘harder and harder to get ice for the kitchen ice-box. Often the ice-works had run out by seven o’clock in the morning.’187 Marion’s brother Barry would set off at five in the morning to queue for ice but ‘the Yanks’ would often drive up and push in ahead of the queue. ‘Without the supply of ice, food went off quickly in the heat.’188 At Christmas in 1943 there were no vegetables or fruit in the shops and even bread could not be bought because the bakeries had run out of flour. The town’s limited water supply was also running very low, unable to cover the needs of both the town and the army base. ‘Sometimes water was only available for two hours a day, and looked like mud.’189 In 1944 typhoid fever broke out in the southern part of the town and Marion’s mother boiled both the drinking water and the milk. The town descended into squalor. There was broken glass everywhere as the ‘troops made a habit of pelting [drinks bottles] out of trucks’.190 When John B. Chandler, Lord Mayor of Brisbane, visited in March 1944 he was horrified to find the place ‘filthy’, and stinking of ‘every imaginable and unimaginable odour’.191

  The Australian government complained that American food demands were unsustainable. MacArthur was implacable. He refused to reduce the American ration or to compromise on quality. He argued that if the government wished to address Australian servicemen’s resentments then it should spend the extra £10 million and upgrade their own troops’ food. In order to prevent the Australians calculating the required supplies according to Australian standards, the United States army representatives would never divulge exactly how many troops they needed to feed in the South-West Pacific, nor how large their reserve food stocks were.192 Canberra grudgingly acknowledged in February 1944 ‘that if the present United States scale is maintained some increase in the Australian scale for forward areas will have to be conceded’.193 The British government met with the same American stubbornness when it came to feeding the 228,000 US troops stationed in Britain. The British mess ration at 3,300 calories a day was considered too meagre for American servicemen and General Somervell refused to countenance the idea that the British should ‘impose their standard of living on our troops’.194 (This was the same man who did everything in his power to prevent Britain from building up what he considered to be excessive stocks of civilian supplies.) Americans stationed in Britain received an extra 600 calories a day and, although they were fed by the US supply services, the fresh food such as meat, dairy products, fruit and vegetables all had to be procured locally and this put a strain on the British food supply system. It seemed unfair that US soldiers should scoff 12 ounces of meat per day, while British soldiers ate half this amount and civilians only one-third.195 But British protests were in vain. Although Marshall admitted that the meat ration was excessive, he was not willing to face the negative publicity in the United States if cuts were made in the men’s ration. The only concession which the British were able to wring from the US supply services was that the GIs’ bread should be made with British national wholemeal flour. This was unpopular, but here the British government also played the card of public opinion and argued that British civilian morale would be too adversely affected if the US troops received crusty white rolls as well as the lion’s share of meat.196

  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.197 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.198 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.199

  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’.200 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.’201

  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.202 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’.203

  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. A
merican 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.204 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.205

  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.206 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.207 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’.208