Yeah the key point is the GIs were usually given enough calories by other means, so they had the “luxury” of complaining about the chocolate (particularly as when they had to rely on the chocolate alone, it typically meant they were in action and had lots to complain about)
The kids were not given enough calories by other means so “crappy” chocolate tasted amazing.
Or even other chocolate that the soldiers had available was pretty good. The US soldier was well equiped and most served behind the battle lines the majority of the time and had time to interact with the local population. Occupied Germany and Japan were devastated compared to say France, standard commercial chocolate was readily available at the PX along with coca cola and cigarettes. So no real need to dig into your supply of doomsday chocolate to give to the locals.
If by ‘phased out’ you mean stopped production, yeah, but like you, during a typhoon on Okinawa in 1975 I was eating C rations produced in 1948.
According to this history, MCIs --Meal Combat Individual – with their M, B, and D cans started production in 1958, doubtless when there were plenty of war-produced C-rations still available plus I’d bet the two were difficult to tell apart.
Yeah, I found it interesting that the date was stamped right on the boxes. I used to take a few cans of chili with me on field exercises, as ptomaine was not on my wish list.
We didn’t have any issues with the canned goods – none of them were swollen – but after the typhoon was over we got the word to not use the cocoa powder.
Gee, thanks for telling us now.
Biggest problem we had were the knuckleheads who thought it was a good idea to heat the cans of food without opening them first. Incoming!
24:47 mark:
I’ve heard that the Tootsie Roll originated as an early attempt at emergency-ration chocolate, but failed by virtue of being too tasty.
And heating sealed cans is fine, as long as you do it in boiling water, and make sure not to let the boiler run dry. That’s one way to make dulce de leche.
And to a starving body, the ration chocolate might have similar gastro-intestinal effects as the chocolate Ex-Lax.
There’s a big difference between “not being on the literal verge of starvation” and “never being hungry enough to appreciate a crappy chocolate bar”
Even if the kids of formerly occupied Europe were not literally starving that doesn’t mean they were not short of of food (particularly in comparison with the GI who were guaranteed to be supplied with adequate calories)
My parents generation (who grew up in immediately post war Britain) still treated glucose tablets as the first line of defenses against illness.
When I first started backpacking in the Sierras during the mid-1960s, we took along Hershey Tropical chocolate bars. They weren’t WWII surplus, they were of contemporary manufacture, but I don’t think they were any different from those supplied during wartime. They were hard, with a somewhat dry texture. But they didn’t taste bad, and definitely tasted like chocolate. The bad rap was undeserved.
This sounds similar to sweetened baking chocolate, which most larger supermarkets carry. It’s not milk chocolate so it’s harder and has a higher melting point.
In 1957, the bar’s formula was changed to make it more appetizing. The unpopular oat flour was removed, non-fat milk solids replaced skim milk powder, cocoa powder replaced cacao fat, and artificial vanilla flavoring was added. It was added with the help of sugar. It greatly improved the flavor of the bar, but it was still difficult to chew.
Military chocolate (United States) - Wikipedia
This has always been a problem, I expect. In the Army at least, the doctrine was that MRE rations were temporary - just like K rations or C rations or MCI - to be issued for no longer than a week or two for continuous consumption. The idea in theory was that the mess or field kitchens and personnel would soon catch up to advancing units to supply “Hot A’s” or A rations - prepared mess hall chow basically, to include breakfast, salads, desserts, fresh Milk, baked items and the rest of it.
In practice, not so much. Isolated units and far flung deployments were routinely supplied nothing but MREs for months at a time. In some of the units I saw, the mess hall folks never did deploy, after 6 months to a year or so commercial contracts were bid on for everything including barracks and mess hall construction. The food wasn’t bad, but it must have cost a fortune.
This article reports no problems having nothing but MREs for 21 days. The study was concentrating on gut flora.
I ate one of the improved “desert camo” bars, purchased at Hershey’s shop. It wasn’t a pleasure, but apparently was more pleasant than earlier military chocolate.
Right, but 3 or 6 months is a different matter. What I noticed is they are loaded with “pogue bait” (candy) and junk and short on protein. The initial problem was a lack of variety. By the 1990s they had expanded the menu to 24 different meals. They are definitely an improvement over earlier rations in terms of variety.
I attempted to reverse-engineer the D ration bar, because I have childhood memories of eating one (my dad was in the RAF and brought home a bar of what I recall being described to me and my sister as ‘survival chocolate’. It was rock hard and sort of crumbly and didn’t melt.
I think the bar I ate must have been in storage for a couple of decades, because it was the early 1970s and the D ration went out of production quite a long time before that. It wasn’t the ‘tropical bar’ - it was dry and crumbly in texture, not waxy.
Vintage rations have become collectible, if you can believe that. I used to buy MCI rations for camping and general hiking use from Army/Navy shops. They were getting a bit long in the tooth, though still perfectly edible. Or at least as edible as they ever were. Meat protein, fat, and carbs - with a dessert, and smokes, pretty much everything ya need, and nothin’ ya don’t, for a single feller.
I’ve thought that the B-unit - crackers, cheese spread, peanut butter, candy, sealed in a small can would be marketable if updated. Some of the “survival food” firms sell something close. I used to buy Pilot Bread crackers for backpacking. These are large, dense, durable saltines or crackers now favored by Alaskans. They don’t have a lot of flavor by themselves but keep pretty much indefinitely.
By way of comparison, does anyone know what WW II Soviet rations were like?