7 Things German Soldiers Found Strange About American Rations

Picture a small waxed box lying in an abandoned pack at the side of a road. Inside there's a tin of meat and eggs, some crackers, four cigarettes, a stick of gum, a square of toilet paper, a few matches, a water tablet, a tiny folded piece of metal, and a chocolate bar that tastes nothing like chocolate should. No single item in it is strange. The strange part is that the box was exactly the same in North Africa, in a Normandy hedgerow and in the Huertgen Forest. The German soldiers who opened it took a long time to understand what that meant. To be fair to the other side, the German system was not foolish. The Gulaschkanone, the wheeled field kitchen the soldiers called the goulash cannon, fed men well in France in 1940, when the campaign was short and the roads held. Living off the land was old doctrine, and it made sense for a continental army with limited resources. The trouble came when the chain broke, and by 1944 it was broken nearly everywhere. The American answer started from the opposite assumption. The kitchen might never arrive, so the kitchen had to fit in a coat pocket. Everything a man needed to eat, start a fire, drink safe water and open a tin had to be on him before anything else failed. The oddest proof of that is the chocolate. In 1937 the Quartermaster Corps asked Hershey for a four ounce bar with six hundred calories that would not melt at 120 degrees. It also had to taste only a little better than a boiled potato. That was the actual wording of the specification. Why would an army order chocolate that tastes bad on purpose? In this video: Dr. Ancel Keys and the three-box K-ration built to keep a paratrooper going for twenty-four hours · Verpflegungssatz ration scales and the Iron Ration that needed an officer's permission to open · Why the waxed cardboard burned long enough to heat a tin · Four cigarettes per meal, and morale treated as a supply problem · A stick of Wrigley's with no calories and no tactical purpose · The Logan Bar, or D-Bar, and the three billion Hershey made · Instant soluble coffee against Ersatzkaffee brewed from chicory, barley and acorns · Hot coffee in under a minute in the Huertgen mud · The P-38 can opener, small enough to hang on a dog tag chain · 105 million K-rations in 1944 alone · Fuel, rail yards and a German supply chain being taken apart from the air · How America turned its food industry into a military supply system without shutting down the food industry · What German prisoners told their interrogators about the gap Here are the numbers plainly. In 1944 alone, 105 million boxes meant 105 million water tablets, 105 million sticks of gum, 105 million can openers and 420 million cigarettes. Every item went into every box and was shipped to the Pacific, the Mediterranean, Northwest Europe and the China-Burma-India theater at the same time. None of it was generosity. It was a theory of war, and you could fit it in your hand. Next time you see an old P-38 on somebody's key ring, remember it was part of a single plan that ran from a planning room in Washington to a wet foxhole at two in the morning. Tell me in the comments whether anyone in your family came home from the war with one of these can openers. And tell me this: which item in the box would have surprised you most? #WW2 #KRation #WW2History #DBar #P38CanOpener #MilitaryHistory #Logistics #USArmy #Wehrmacht #HuertgenForest #Hershey #MilitaryRations #WorldWar2 #HistoryDocumentary #SupplyChain