If the chocolate was as bad as the articles make it out to be – awful tasting, hard to chew (some people shaved it thin and let it melt in the mouth), and gave people constipation – how much of a treat could it have been?
I see several possibilities
1.) GIs actually hated those kids
2.) The kids were so desperate for treats that even unappealing-as-a-potato chocolate tasted good
3.) They were actually giving away chocolate from some other source, like Red CRoss packages, or something.
The D-Rations were basically a sort of proto energy bar; they were high calorie and dense, so soldiers could keep a few on themselves without adding significantly to their load. They were made with oat flour, which is in keeping with the energy bar concept. They were extremely hard and not the sort of thing they gave out to children.
They also got regular chocolate as part of Red Cross care packages as well. In fact, M&Ms were developed during the war as a sort of chocolate that wouldn’t melt so readily. They also got bubble gum and other candy as well.
Nobody wanted the D Ration bars. Better than starving, but they were aka “Hitler’s Secret Weapon”, apparently the contractors somehow succeeded in making them taste little better than a boiled potato. It is probably a sound strategy to not make survival rations too tasty, lest they be eaten due to boredom or whatever.
In the book “Unbroken”, the author said that those nasty “chocolate bars” were actually included in a pocket on the inflatable rafts that were used when a boat or plane went down.
One of the other sailors ate all of that chocolate on the first night, IIRC because he didn’t think his fellow soldiers would want it anyway, and that they would be rescued quickly.
Plus numerous other instances of people in bombed-out cities lacking access to food, or fleeing refugees lacking food, or people in various camps lacking food…
Literal millions went hungry in WWII, and literal millions actually staved to death. People were eating some pretty unpleasant things to simply survive. Compared to that, chocolate that tasted “slightly better than a boiled potato” would have been heaven-sent and highly desired.
The OP is aware, but the stories I’ve heard didn’t suggest the GIs were treating acute starvation – they said the GIs were ingratiating themselves with the kids. That’s very different.
People on the verge of starvation would often suffer extreme gastrointestinal distress when suddenly ingesting a hefty amount of very rich foods that their systems were not used to.
While there was definitely hunger in the winter of 1944-1945, I’m not convinced that all the tales of friendly GIs giving out chocolate, candy, and gum to local kids in Europe during the war was them giving out unwanted D-rations to starving kids.
If nothing else, I suspect their officers/NCOs would have something to say about them just ditching their emergency rations like that. And I also suspect the narrative would be different. It wouldn’t be friendly GIs giving sweets to local kids, it would have been friendly GIs keeping kids from starving, as they may not have enjoyed the D-rations much. And the whole GIs show up with candy, chocolate, and other stuff narrative was the case when the USAAC showed up in Britain in 1942-1943 as well.
In fact, the ubiquitous C rations of WWII actually had candy and/or chocolate as part of the ration, and not D-ration chocolate. Same for the 5-in-1 ration.
I kind of get the impression that the US military was, if not awash with chocolate of various sorts, at least reasonably well supplied with it, to the point where they weren’t giving out D-rations to starving kids.
There were food shortages in Europe after the Allied invasion, but , for the most part, not outrageous starvation (except in places like the Netherlands, which had suffered for a year before the Allies came). TYhis excerpt from 1944 about France shows that food was short, but effectively rationed
Any real fgood shortages, as in Holland, were taken care of by food brought in by the Allies and outside agencies. They didn’t need GI ration bars to stave off starvation.
So, againm, my point was thazt I’d heard for years about GIs making friends with the local kids by giving them chjocolate. Thisd news about the nature of the chocolate available to them puts a different spin on that.
And that’s all I’m saying. Don’t try to spin this into something else.
Then its more likly you are giving too much weight to the D-ration chocolate bar and not everything else the allied soldiers had access to. The allied supply chain was one of the deciding factors of the war, regular milk chocolate and M&M’s were commmonly availble to soldiers (and plenty of cigarettes).
I beleive in the movie the Longest Day a German General is commiting on how a caputured allied soldier had cake that was shipped from family in the states and that it meant that the allies could supply non-essential items by plane.
The “Candy Bombers” dropped bags of candy on tiny parachutes to children during the Berlin airlift. I imagine GIs had access to other chocolate and were handing out “real” chocolate to children.
I’ve never eaten one but it is my understanding that the tropical chocolate bars were only marginally more popular than the D-bars. The ‘Military Chocolate’ Wiki article contains the sentence,
… nearly all U.S. soldiers found the Tropical Bar tough to chew and unappetizing; reports from countless memoirs and field reports are almost uniformly negative.[citation needed] Instead, the bar was either discarded or traded to unsuspecting Allied troops or civilians for more appetizing foods or goods.
Steve1989MREinfo has an 13-minute video where he gives the history, opens, and samples a genuine 1942 D-bar. He says it’s not bad, tasting like cocoa powder compressed into a brick but he could see why it was unpopular. He mentions a musty taste but that might be because it was 76 years old. He tried the dissolving in hot water trick which improved the experience.
It’s interesting to me that even though C-rations were phased out starting in the late 50s, they were still being issued to us Seabees in the 70s and 80s. Beanie Wienies, ham and motherfuckers, spaghetti and hockey pucks, the whole gamut. I retired in 1990 and never saw an MRE or LRP meal.
The D-bar was supposed to be a last-ditch ration for when no other food of any kind was procurable - not confectionery for grazers.
These things often get misused for purposes other than the ones they were intended for. Bernard Fergusson’s The Wild Green Earth contains a whole chapter on the food they got - its advantages and deficiencies. K Rations were perceived as too saturated with salt and not containing enough nutrition for an extended period on them while doing hard physical labour as well. They were not intended for this purpose.
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