Potato?
In liquid form.
Spam.
American government sent so much Spam over there, I bet there are still a few pallets of it in a warehouse somewhere.
Great episode in a great book. To refresh your memory, Zamperini’s plane–a clunker called Green Hornet that had already been raided for parts–had faltered and crashed in the Pacific. McNamara didn’t eat the chocolate because he assumed Zamperini and Phillips, the pilot, wouldn’t want it or because he thought they’d be rescued quickly. He knew the chocolate was all the food they had and that rescue could be a long time coming. He did it in a panic in the middle of the night and seemed wracked with guilt afterward.
I don’t think the poor guy was quite himself. Though McNamara had been a gregarious party boy, Zamperini said he seemed lost in a dream world and was very quiet. He died about a month later. Zamperini and Philips buried him at sea.
Somewhere in the past I remember vets talking about candy in gift packages and something else, I don’t know what, but I was left with the impression they had more than enough candy from multiple sources.
@CalMeacham 's cites aren’t very strong support for chocolate as a specific type of candy given to children, one just mentions candy, the other mentions candy in general and refers once to chocolates and chocolate cookies. I recall seeing this depicted in at least one WWII movie, so maybe the specifics of chocolate from ration kits have just been emphasized there and GIs gave kids whatever food they could.
I had an uncle who served in North Africa and he said they were fed so much Spam they flat out refused to eat it any more so caches by the ton were abandoned in the desert. When he told me this in the mid-60s his attitude was, “Good riddance.”
Dr. Gordon Seagrave’s “Burma Surgeon” series was a big best-seller in the late 1940s. In one book, he tells about an airdrop that included pallets of SPAM, and several soldiers vomited upon seeing the cans; they were THAT sick and tired of eating it.
There’s an old joke about a WWII soldier coming out of the jungle, rail thin and starving after a month of surviving on bugs and snails, being offered spam, and promptly turning around and going back in.
Meat and meat animals in World War II (usda.gov)
Looks like they ate a lot of Tushonka (search the PDF for the word, and you’ll get a lot of detail)
And similarly, a cartoon circa 1945 showing starving Japanese troops finally negotiating to surrender- provided that they won’t have to eat Spam.
When he got married, my father told my mother, “Don’t ever serve me corned beef in this house”, having had to eat it so often during the war, even in the Far East they got it, and it poured out of the can as an oily liquid …
I remember as a little kid one of my friends all excited “we’re gonna have shit on a shingle tonite!”;
I then repeated this phrase at the dinner table. Mom was Not Amused, Dad probably had to ‘splain what it actually was, being a Navy veteran, and not crack up too much in the process.