Voices from the War

Rushed and untimely is how British correspondent A.D. Divine characterized his first supper in North Africa on Sunday, 8 November 1942. Accompanying elements of the U.S. 1st Infantry and 1st Armored Divisions, he had come ashore that morning on a stretch of red sand near Arzew, Algeria, some twenty miles east of Oran. Vichy French resistance in the sector had been mercifully light. Within nine and a half hours of the initial dawn assault by Darby’s Rangers, the beachhead was secure, and supply ships of various types began disgorging their cargo. Divine, for his part, spent the afternoon hiking and hitchhiking, typewriter in hand, the three miles to the Terry Allen’s forward command post at a schoolhouse in Tourville, a city quarter he condemned as a slum of the slum that was Arzew. Once there, he and several other combat journalists sat down to draft their accounts of the invasion. Thoughts eventually turned to food. “We ate our supper hurriedly and early,” Divine wrote; “hurriedly because of the sense of urgency that was upon us all; early because after blackout—after sundown—not even a “C” ration could be heated.” There was something about the meal that was almost macabre. Half-darkness was on us before it was all ready, and we moved awkwardly among stacks of building stone and piles of lumber, amongst wireless sets and camera kits, stretchers and ammunition and tommy guns and rifles. We sat on stones to attack our ration cans, and we ate in the end not seeing our food. But “we ate [the C-rations] gratefully,” he added, “being, I think, something exhausted with unfamiliar emotions.” Compact and reasonably nutritious, perhaps C-rations were, as Divine asserts, “a small masterpiece in emergency feeding,” yet it is safe to say that before long, the vast majority of GIs in North Africa would no doubt have preferred to eat them in the dark. Verily, day after day, the sight of canned pork and beans or beef and vegetable hash or meat and vegetable stew grew tiresome, if not downright revolting. Speaking from experience, Ernie Pyle declared that “the C-ration had so little variety that after three meals a man could hardly look a C can in the face.” Fortunately, other types of government-issued rations were often available, and locally-produced options, limited though they may have been, existed as well. The output of field kitchens was certainly preferable to congealed muck in a tin can heated over a sand and gasoline fire. If nothing else, army cooks could take the very same muck, doctor it a bit, and make it somewhat more tolerable. But the field kitchen pantry usually boasted at least a modicum of raw material diversity. In 1942-43, standard breakfast fare consisted of eggs or pancakes, canned apricots or prunes for a touch of fiber, crackers, coffee and condensed milk. The eggs were powdered and therefore always scrambled—or rather almost always. The cook for Company A of the 1st Engineer Battalion once informed his commanding officer that he had been “attempting an omelette, sir, but the experiment has not yet been a success.” For lunch and supper, the ravenous GI might get Vienna sausages and baked beans, fried Spam and canned succotash, or as Ralph Ingersoll reported If he was lucky, he would also get freshly baked bread, but this hinged upon the weather and the availability of time to bake it. Whatever the menu, the entirety was slopped into the soldier’s mess kit, one dish layered over another; Newsweek’s Kenneth G. Crawford found the presentation, as he put it, “a little disconcerting.” After bolting down the amalgam, the GI either scoured his kit in a tub of hot water, if provided, or he scrubbed it with sand and polished up with toilet paper. In mess kit cleanliness he had to be fastidious. Otherwise the results of his next meal might be acute food poisoning or even life-threatening dysentery. The palatability of the carte du jour was, of course, to some extent a reflection of the culinary talent of the mess sergeant. Engineer Company A’s cook was a master of his craft, the omelette episode notwithstanding. His skill, so Ingersoll was informed, was a military secret. “If the battalion ever found out what he could make Spam taste like,” one of the men said, “[the cook] would be transferred and then the war would not be worth going on with.” At the other end of the spectrum was a battalion cook in the 1st Infantry Division, whom the suffering troops simply nicknamed “Hitler.” Enough said. But good food doctors could sometimes work wonders with the limited ingredients at hand. The best were the French. Soon after the capitulation and side-switching of Vichy forces in North Africa, Fox Company of the 4th Rangers was bivouacked with a Legionnaire outfit at Fort du Nord near Arzew. Ranger James Altieri claimed the French cooks “wrought true miracles,” even with C-rations. “They took our tasteless hash, flavored it generously with spices, herbs, garlic and onion and served us a repast that made our mouths water for more.” The feast was washed down with a bold red, deep in body and flavor. Later, Ernie Pyle had the opportunity to dine with French officers in Tunisia. There was no wine, for which they apologized, but the meal was splendid, an omelette (a real one) followed by a vegetable stew larded with mystery meat, which Pyle narrowed down to either goat or camel. “The French,” he affirmed, “can make anything taste good.” When circumstances prevented on-sight dining at field kitchens, kitchen trucks would deliver hot food to the troops. However, during times of rapid deployment, bad weather, logistical breakdown, or battle, the GIs would have to make do with the provisions they carried, supplemented by whatever they could forage. Omnipresent in their packs were C-rations from the USA, but the Yanks also had numerous opportunities to feed at the Tommy trough. Throughout Operation Torch and the subsequent Tunisian Campaign, the British supplied many elements of the Allied diet, and often U.S. troops in the field subsisted exclusively on UK-issued fare. In fact, they preferred it. The British “Compo” ration offered considerably more variety than its American “C” counterpart. Packed in a wooden crate, the Compo provided three meals for fourteen men for one day, and it came in seven different types. The cornucopia included chocolate, jam, marmalade, margarine, salt, sugar, biscuits, cheese, bacon, sausages, treacle puddings, hard candy, tea, and cigarettes. Among the main meals afforded were Irish stew, stewed steak and vegetables, bone-in oxtail stew, and the classic steak and kidney pie. A.D. Divine proclaimed that “no ration more compact, more adapted to diet over a long period, has ever been devised for army use.” The U.S. War Department took notice. As the Allies closed in on the remnants of the Afrika Korps in the spring of 1943, the socalled U-ration made its appearance in American supply depots. Coming in two varieties and containing a number of new offerings, such as roast beef, instant rice, root beer, and whole-wheat cereal, the U-ration could feed four or five men for one day. But the “U” was a late-comer, leaving the Compo as the field ration of choice along most of the run to Tunis. The GIs may have favored British rations, but as was their nature, they grumbled persistently all the same. The canned stew and biscuits they came to call “donkey dung” and “armored plating.” One chorus that made the rounds went We’ve eaten British compo We like the meat the best We know the cow has kidney, But where the hell’s the rest? Pfc. J. Murphey (unit unidentified) penned a more menacing piece of gastro-poetry, which appeared in Yank in July 1943: Come landlord, fill the festive bowl Yet harken before you do By the hilt of my knife, you forfeit your life If you fill it with mutton stew. O give me a home where the buffalo roam And give me a six gun true Then dig a ditch for the sonuvabitch Who offers me mutton stew. Reviewing a predominantly British breakfast he received with American grunts on a cold Tunisian morning in January 1943, renowned gourmand A.J. Liebling, correspondent for The New Yorker, was somewhat less critical. The tea, which came prepackaged with sugar and powdered milk, he despised, but the rest was not so bad. Incidentally, he recognized the bacon “as the fat kind the English get from America.” “By some miracle of lend-lease,” Liebling posited, “they had now succeeded in delivering it back to us; the background of the bookkeeping staggered the imagination.” NBC reporter John MacVane also found an American product in his British Compo, in this case sardines from his home state of Maine: “The names on the cans—Northeast Harbor, Eastport, and Boothbay Harbor—gave me a strange feeling of nostalgia. Here in the Tunisian desert I was eating fish that had been caught off my own coast so many thousands of miles away.” Improvisation at the front was often the key to an acceptable repast, “acceptable” being a relative term. One American recipe for foxhole gruel called for a combination of cracked wheat and two rolls of lifesavers boiled in condensed milk. The flavor of the lifesavers was not specified, but the formula suggests the gusto of hot mushy Froot Loops. Despite the possibility of such horrors, some, it seems, actually welcomed the culinary freedom of the combat zone. “Cooking— and scrounging—talent would be discovered and allowed to develop,” wrote A.B. Austin of London’s Daily Herald on his experience with British troops in Tunisia. The old dull days of lining up with your mess-tin to draw your dinner were gone. If there was time, everyone could sit around watching the preparation of the day’s dinner— and making suggestions. Fishcakes grew out of tinned salmon and biscuit, jam roll from biscuit crumbs. “The brittle, tasteless biscuit of the compo ration . . .,” his passage concludes, “was transformed in a dozen ways.” Scrounging could truly make the meal. Compared to future battlefields such as Normandy, Burgundy and the Côte d’Azur, North Africa was not exactly a locavore’s paradise, but the GIs did eat their way through the limited resources available. Oranges and tangerines, which grew in abundance along the coast, were a highly prized. Some troops ate so many that they were stricken with diarrhea or broke out in a rash. Undeterred, Ernie Pyle claimed he ate tangerines by the daily dozen as long as they remained in season, asserting they “were one of the pleasantest things of our war over here.” Olive picking, however, proved a major disappointment. Though they were “black and beautiful on the trees,” the Americans did not realize olives had to undergo a brine cure before they were edible. The initial bite, Pyle said, was followed by “the most violent spitting, sputtering and face-making you ever saw.” An olive fix, therefore, required trading with the Arab natives, and through trade, the GIs acquired other items as well, like almonds, dates, turnips, carrots, cabbages and the occasional chicken, but far and away the most sought-after staple of all was eggs. Fresh eggs were handson the favorite food of U.S. troops, as they were, Kenneth Crawford observed, “the one North African delicacy which came wrapped in a more or less sanitary package by nature itself.” The demand was so great that within weeks of the American arrival, prices sky-rocketed from about two cents per egg to ten cents apiece. Then again, the method of exchange preferred by the Arabs was bartering, as they were decidedly skeptical about the value of currency. Cigarettes, chocolate, tea, or chewing gum could secure a man an egg or two for dinner. Anything made of cloth, which was rationed and in very short supply, could secure far more. Torn fatigues and old socks were a hot commodity. A pair of GI boots once went for sixty eggs. Mattress covers, according to A.D. Divine, “did a roaring trade at three dozen or so,” and “shirt prices ranged all round the scale as the glad news travelled from mountaintop to mountaintop.” The North African egg was always white—“Arab hens never lay brown ones, it seems,” one correspondent noted — and the North African egg peddler could be found almost anywhere. Along any road, even in the remotest regions of the high Atlas or the wastelands of southern Tunisia, the eggman materialized, as if by magic, hawking his wares. AP reporter Wes Gallagher alleged that “no place was too dangerous or too inaccessible” for him to reach: “Doughboys in front-line posts under fire were sometimes startled to discover an Arab in their midst ready to trade oranges for cigarettes or eggs for old clothes.” Divine regarded the Arabs’ ability to surface in the most unlikely of places as utterly miraculous: We could stop in the middle of open wilderness with no more cover on it than would hide a grasshopper. When we stopped, up from the dust spontaneously generated and fully accoutred would rise two Ay-rabs (sic). And in the left hand through a sort of prestidigitatory prescience would appear—les oeufs. “It was magnificent.” When his game was on, the Arab eggman was unsurpassed in the art of the deal. He was an expert salesman, a practiced psychologist, and a consummate actor, all rolled into one. In barter, Divine regarded the Arabs as absolute masters: They amused, irritated, and finally exasperated the dogface. He, being tired of C ration, wanted eggs; eggs therefore were displayed to him; he offered money; it was refused; he became more exasperated; and the wily Ay-rab, smiling secretly in depths of his burnoose, withdrew the eggs. After this had been done two or three times the dog-face was clay in the master’s hands . . . And the Ay-rab, being an artist, always parted in the end with grief and pain, hobbling away bent under the sorrow of the exchange as if his eggs were his own heart’s darlings instead of something his chickens would duplicate on the morrow’s morn. Thus the dogface was convinced that he had had the best in the bargain. To reach such a level of entrepreneurial excellence, the apprenticeship began at a very early age. When not begging chewing gum and chocolate from the GIs, Arab children rehearsed their mercantile chops. Sometimes the excitement of the marketplace made them fairly quake with raw capitalist fervor. Crawford wrote “an Arab boy of 10 is as avaricious as his father and even less artful about covering it up. The youngster becomes so intent in an egg transaction that one half expects him to blow up if he doesn’t skin the stranger by a wide enough margin to satisfy his own standard of shrewdness.” Occasionally U.S. troops proved shrewd in their own right. One soldier on the march from Algiers to Tunis managed to swap “a box of candy, piece by piece, for three bottles of perfume, a dozen eggs, a large portrait of Pétain, and a small burro named ‘Rommel.’” Up the road in Tunisia, an “egg union” emerged in one sector that fixed the price at ten cents apiece. Union-busting GIs managed to break it up by introducing cigarettes as a new medium of exchange. The price soon dropped to one cigarette for one egg. Some even hired Arabs to dig their foxholes at two cigarettes per hole. These affairs, however, pale in comparison to what was perhaps the most famous—though no doubt apocryphal— egg deal of the Second World War, one that involved an Arab, a B-17 Flying Fortress, and up to twenty thousand eggs (depending on the narrator). Ernie Pyle’s account is as follows: On the day before they were to switch bases, a B-17 crew supposedly “sold” their airplane to a local Arab for twenty thousand eggs. “‘Won’t he be surprised when he brings those eggs and finds us gone!,’ said one of the boys.” “Probably not half as surprised as they would have been if he had really brought twenty thousand eggs,” Pyle remarked. Wes Gallagher presents a different version of the story. He reported that at a remote base somewhere in the theater of operations, an Arab egg seller became obsessed with a Flying Fortress, “which he thought a great improvement over the camel.” Pointing to the big four-engined bomber, the sentry said casually, “You like to trade?” The Arab’s eyes widened and then settled into the disinterested traders’ stare. After a good halfhours’ haggling, the price was set—two dozen eggs a day for two moons [i.e. roughly 1,440 eggs— PTR]. Each day the Arab brought the eggs, took a good look at his property and departed. Then one day the Fortress came back from a mission full of bullet holes, and the Arab was furious and called off the deal. These instances of American resourcefulness aside, it was certainly the Arabs who won the trade war in North Africa. Tenderfoot GIs offered no real competition in this centuries-old arena of haggling and hucksterism. But they did get their eggs, and in these they delighted. Axis forces in Tunisia surrendered on 13 May 1943. By then, preparations were already underway for Operation Husky, the invasion of Sicily, which would come in mid-July. More bloodshed— but plenty of wine, wine of far better quality than the Algerian and Tunisian reds of North Africa—awaited the GIs just beyond the blue horizon. They had learned to forage, and they had learned to fight. They had, through trial and error, become an army. In doing so, the Americans had suffered over 19,000 casualties, the Commonwealth over 38,000, and thousands of Allied graves still dot the North African landscape. In May 1943, just days after the Axis capitulation, American combat artist George Biddle, soon to accompany the U.S. 3rd Division through Sicily and into Italy for the second and third courses of the Mediterranean Diet, surveyed the detritus of a British-German engagement near Enfidaville, Tunisia. In his diary, he reflected: The bodies will decompose as peacefully here as among the white birch copses of Silesia or in the cool shadow of a Scotch cemetery. And their dust will finally commingle with the dust of Phoenicians, of Cato’s army that surrendered here to Caesar, of the vandal (sic) conquerors, the Moslems and the French. It is all one to the grapevines of [Tunisia]—the excreta of living bodies or the fertilization of the dead.