March 9, 2020 • 29 mins
It’s called “the deadliest conflict in human history” for a reason. World War II engulfed the lives of soldiers and civilians in a way those in the United States have not experienced in a near capacity since.
In the final episode of our season exploring the experience of service during World War II, authors Myke Cole and Anastacia Marx de Salcedo join to help us make sense of it all: What changed the most when it comes to combat and cuisine? What part did our veterans play in moving the world forward? And where can we most find ourselves in this history?
This episode includes clips from all of the veterans who have shared their stories on Service this season, and direct interviews with Cole and Marx de Salcedo. You can find more about them and links to their work and individual episodes at www.ServicePodcast.org. There, you can also leave messages for all of the veterans you hear on Service. And we’re always sharing extra audio and nerdy food history on social media - we’re @servicepodcast on Instagram and Facebook.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
This episode re enacts scenes of war and includes gunfire.
Listener discretion advised who are tuning into Service Johnny, the
strict private first class that are in stories of hunger
and war. They joined a service Women Pearl Harbor Member
Pearl Harbor, a production from My Heart Radio. We used
(00:22):
to just give these people the food from our miss kits.
You ain't what you could get, and be thankful for
what you were getting. I'm your host, Jacqueline Raposo, Men
and women of the United States. On this day, more
than sixteen million young Americans are surviving. The three hundred
(00:43):
year old American customer of the Musland has it all
times called for the fortitude of women. Meanwhile, the British
government has begun to racition food and Prime Minister Chamber
on Monday from the Thailand and from our Nigi Empa
Mount and the struggle single handed until we went joined
(01:07):
by the minted rate might of set Raka and later
by the overwhelming power and regales of the United States
of America. We must be the great awesenal of democracy.
In the late nineteen thirties, kids going to school, or
(01:28):
working their family farms, or just struggling to find food
outlasted the Great Depression, only to find themselves barreling into
what would become the deadliest conflict in human history. We've
moved through twelve of their individual war and food stories
this season, but honestly, I still find it a little
hard to connect their intimate experiences with what history books
(01:51):
tell us of this overwhelmingly big World War two picture.
And so in our final episode this season, we're going
to compile all some crossovers from our veterans for two
guests who can help us better make sense of things.
What changed the most when it comes to combat and puisine.
What part did these young men and women play in
moving things forward? And where can we most find ourselves
(02:15):
in their stories. It's a completely different type of fighting
or having to go a tree to tree to root
out the Germans. He had to look for the uniform,
what the helmet looked like. Not only that they had
the anti air thrasher Pickadilly circus. That was a code
(02:35):
name on the landing kraft. You were supposed to stop
a coordinates. Who's on the coordinate the infantry of the Marines.
You don't want to hit them, you want head of them.
So with them there are artillery observers on the front
lines listening to the cat with These men are describing
as what we call Class Witsyan war. This is my coal.
(03:00):
It did three tours in Iraq to as a private
contractor and a third as a paramilitary civilian with the
Defense Intelligence Agency while he was also a Coast Guard officer.
He's also authored many fantasy books and two history books
on ancient combat while simultaneously working in law enforcement and
private intelligence. He doesn't specialize in World War two history,
(03:22):
but he has a strong sense of the community our
veterans are a part of, plus a jacked up analytical mind.
Class Witsian war is traditional warfare as we know it
from the Peace of Westphalia up until by argue it's with.
But klass Witzian warfare is also known as trinitarian warfare,
and trinitarian warfare is there's three things you do to
(03:42):
win a war. You destroy your enemy's army, You occupy
his territory. Can you break the will of the military
infrastructure to carry on the contest? Right? That is how
wars have been thought. These are wars of maneuver where
military units at the Regimental Battalion Company level are maneuvering
against one another, we're charging, retreating in set piece battles,
(04:03):
having fos forward, observers calling in fire. None of that
has changed. And was that the same in World War One?
As well as that a strategy the same. I think
they might have had to use signal flags and marker flags,
as matter of fact, I'm almost sure they did, but
the concepts were still basically the same. My point is
is that there isn't that big a difference technologically between
what these men were experiencing what's going on now. B
(04:23):
M one is still my favorite long gun. It's the
same and one that these guys were using, but it's
just got fiberglasses that of would that carried. The nineteen
eleven it's my favorite pistol. It's called the nineteen eleven
because it's from nineteen eleven eight. It is the gun
that the Germans had, the best gun of the whole war.
All of a sudden, right over my head that the
(04:46):
German burp gun, our submachine gun got. We've never seen
it burp gun before. I said, I want to go
with the p key votes so we could go fast
and they could not go fair. The English, the first
people to in radar. They were able to keep the
fighter planes on the ground until the German planes got
close enough than the fighter planes took off, and they
(05:06):
had full fuel tanks. Because it was about le Bretton
wanted the fighter a machine gun, spring even more bullets,
about zooming faster, a plane navigating more precisely, these things
seemed to make a huge difference for the bodies in
the fight. Our being this great arsenal of democracy. Does
(05:26):
technology really not make a difference on a greater scale?
The answer is more complicated. It's rather the interplay of
technology and doctrine, or the interplay of technology and tactics.
I'll give you a perfect case in point. We'll go
all the way back to the American Civil War. There's
a famous truism in military theory that we are always
(05:47):
fighting the last war, and we mean that negatively right.
Napoleonic wars, which was the main experience that most generals
in the American Civil War had, were wars fought largely
with smooth bore muskets. A smooth bore musket means that
the barrel of the musket does not have rifling, which
is to say that I could be aiming straight ahead
of me, and when I pulled that trigger, that ball
(06:08):
could go at a forty five degree angle off to
the right. It's got nothing to do with what I'm
aiming at. By the time the American Civil War was fought,
rifling was standard. Your aiming at that's where your bullet's
gonna go. But you're still using napoleonic tactics designed to
deal with these incredibly inaccurate musket's people lining up present
are and then shooting into a mass. But now you're
(06:30):
doing it with an accurate weapon. So the casualties were extreme,
and it took way too long for the tactical thinking
to match the shift in technology. Trench warfare in the
First World War is another great example. The crew served
tripod fired machine gun was new tech. Those tactics of
trench warfare of going over the top and racing into
(06:51):
the enemy's trenches, going into the teeth of that fire.
Those tactics were designed before you were facing two guys
with a tripod mounta machine go could take out a
tire company just sitting there going left and right. There's
that amazing scene in the beginning of saving Private Ryan,
or the moment that Higgins boats Gangway drops and then
he says, God, the imn beviated dropped the f and
(07:13):
rim and I had no choice. I dropped the rip
and then the scene came into the boat and about
fourteen guys immediately were killed. I'm sure that that occurred,
that doctrine did not shift quickly enough to adapt to
advances in technology, and that that cost lives in extreme cases.
(07:41):
Truman found out that the invasion of Jap band would
have been wished twice the size of Normandy. So this
is when President Drumman says, dropped two bombs. The Japanese
have seen what our atomic bomb can do. They can
foresee what it was. Let's talk about what we mean
(08:02):
when we say the deadliest conflict in human history. The
United States use of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima killed
eighty thou people instantly. Three days later, forty more were
killed by a second bomb on Nagasaki. Imagine how many
more were affected by nuclear fallout. There's the butta On
death March that killed twenty thousand, the one point one
(08:25):
million prisoners murdered in Auschwitz alone. Gross estimates of worldwide
World War two casualties are counted at fifteen million battle deaths,
twenty five million battle wounds, and forty five million civilian deaths.
But those are really gross estimates because reports vary so widely.
Field strategy might not have changed during or because of
(08:48):
this war. But yes, both technology and doctrine worked against
human bodies and cost human lives, and that leads us
to the biggest difference between this war and all others.
December seventh, nineteen one, a date which will live in infamy.
(09:14):
The United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked
by label and their courses of the Empire of Japan.
Three of my classmates and myself, we're going to Long
Beach unless my brother and two of his friends joined
the navy. They were so in demand of nurses that
(09:36):
I said to nursing my girlfriend and I said, let's
go join the army, and we did. My mother had
a very hard time. She had three sons and we
roll in combat. I had seven older brothers. They all
served but two. She had seven sons and they were
all in the service. Keene had a lot of kids
who went in. Ten million, twenty thousand, nine and nine
(10:00):
three that's how many men were inducted into the armed
forces via the draft. Between nineteen forty and ninety six,
another six million would voluntarily join up plus three and
fifty thousand women and millions of others, building ships and
planes and tanks and guns as fast as they could.
This was a massive war. Good evening. Today, our fellow citizens,
(10:38):
our way of life, our very freedom came under attack
in a series of deliberate and deadly terrorist acts. Not
eleven I was galvanized. I think like so many other
people in the United States, I wanted to get in
the fight, and I wanted to get in the fight quickly.
But Not eleven failed to galvanize the rush to recruiting stations.
(10:58):
We might presume it did it. Military personnel numbers grew
by less than thirty thousand between two thousand and one
and two and two, and they've lingered at a total
of less than point five percent of our population over
the last decade. What generation warfare is what a lot
of people call coin counterinsurgency warfare, the notion that mau
(11:19):
Ze Tongue really revolutionized in his famous book Guerilla Warfare.
Do you have hyperpowers at this part? You're not going
to defeat the United States Army. No one is going
to defeat the United States Army in a set piece battle,
even in No. One, not China, not Russia, no One
in a field battle. There's no point in even trying.
We have superior technology, we have superior training. We have
(11:39):
not necessarily more numbers, but the right numbers, the infrastructure
that's required. What Mao hit on is that the way
you beat a hyperpower you have one goal in class.
What's the and trinitarian warfare. Let's break their will to fight,
but class what's is talking about their military? What Mau pioneered,
you break the will of the populace to carry on
the con test. How do you feel like World War
(12:05):
Two shifted a sense of patriotism in the militaria? Oh
my gosh, there's so many things that are different. The
first and most obvious is that World War two is
an existential crisis, not just for the United States but
for the world. The first Great air raid on Paris,
which took place today, evidently had two objectives. It is
(12:25):
reported this morning that German bombers and fighting claims are
again over southeast British coastal towers by Brown. But you're
on the deed and ocean. We're we're growing country and
growing great in the air. The stark contrasts between the
mission of the access Powers and the mission of the
(12:48):
Allied powers. No war sense has had that existential states
Vietnam or Korea for the United States, like, we lost,
So what what is the impact on people living in
the United States? Not my There's another thing. It's really interesting.
If you google this, you can find videos made during
World War Two teaching service members how to behave in
a British public away. And incidentally, the beer isn't cold
(13:13):
in England. No, they don't like it cold and they
have many ice So if you like beer, you better
like it warm. What's that add difference between bitter and mild.
The video keeps synthasizing you're in the uniforming the army,
don't do these things, don't start a fight, don't get drunk.
But with the advent of cell phone technology, anytime you
screw up in uniform, that's going on Facebook. The military
(13:34):
is reacted to that. So we hide our military. Now
we take those uniforms off. You get in trouble if
you're in uniform. No one ever told me that this
was the motive, But the general spirence I got was
they were afraid someone would attack me or hurt me,
which is not true. And they were afraid I would
do something that would bring discredit on the United States
military and it will be caught on a cell phone
and put on Facebook and put on other social media.
(13:56):
That culture of patriotism, it really did go out. And
that's how to real cost In the United States. We
are citizen soldiers, citizens sailors. I always say this when
I talk about the military. We are you and you
are us. We are part of the community. We are
not separate from it. That's one of the great strengths
of the American military. We'll hear more from Mike incoming
(14:21):
seasons as we continue to observe shifting warfare. But in
studying World War Two alone, the only big picture I
can see our humans slaughtering other humans, a very masculine
way of pillaging and ruling the world. This is an
ongoing conversation, but after centuries of warfare, I can't begin
to envision a peaceful world in the end. I am
(14:47):
hoping here, and that really is something that humans have
a unique capacity to do. Hope, because without hope. Why
do anything right? Then you're just completely nihilist. This is
what Obama is constantly pilloried for. But he was absolutely right.
It's the audacity of hope. It's one of the greatest
things humans do. But I think in this case the
hope is supported by some data. We still fight, but
(15:11):
we fight differently and the impact of the fighting, as
horrific as it is, you just can't compare the casualties
in Iraq to the American Civil War. You can't or
the suffering of those people. I don't think it's gonna
happen in our lifetime or our children's lifetime, but it's
gonna happen. Personally, I would not be surprised. The meat
(15:48):
the tame the past of American meat diet by the
time of the war, and for example, there is a
variation of Welsh harshmeat time, which may be prepared in
the following month like extra life boxes. And then that
they had a dried biscuit, they had a little package
of three or four cigarettes or something like. It was
a big opportunity for the tobacco industry because they ended
(16:11):
up sending samples and a lot of the different masses
had four cigarettes Morning went at the Figar makes Water.
Welcome back to service Veteran stories of hunger and war
from my Heart Radio. I'm Jacklin repos O What soldiers
were eating. It's sort of like each war affects the
(16:33):
one that follows it. That's Anastasia Mark stays. I'll say though,
I'm the author of Combat Ready Kitchen, How the US
Military Shapes the way you eat. Anastasia's book dives deep
into military food innovation, covering how soldiers ate from the
first standing Sumerian armies up through how our troops are eating.
M R. E. S feels ready to eat today like Mike,
(16:56):
she said, Placing our veterans stories firmly within history means
remember bring that military innovation is like a game of
leap frog. You jump ahead only to become the hurdle
for those coming up behind you. There was a brief
but disastrous period during the Spanish American War in the
very late nineteenth century where the US military tried to
(17:18):
provide canned meat rations. Those canned meat rations ended up spoiling,
and it created this huge debacle where the military is
basically accused of unintentionally poisoning troops. After that, bad experience,
they pulled back on the canned meat. So in World
War One they did use the canning technology, but what
(17:43):
they put inside it was essentially traditional military rations throughout
not just the last hundred years but millennia. They were
dried preserved foods, hard dried biscuits that had like other
ingredients sometimes added for nutrition, dried meat products, and chocolate.
That was called the iron ration, and then moved to
(18:06):
something called the trench ration, where they introduced something that
was a little wetter in terms of the meat product,
but it was still just basically a clump of meat
in a camp. And then they ended up with something
called the reserve ration, so that would have been taking
you up to World War two. In nine, as Anastasia
explains in her book, three staff and a sleepy Chicago
(18:28):
office started to play around with military cuisine. They didn't
know anything about food science. They started with just a
couple of pots and pans and a budget of only
seven hundred and fifty dollars. But for the first time
in history, the U. S. Army Subsistence School at the
Chicago depot of the Quartermaster Corps had made space for
(18:48):
a few guys to just play around with what military
food could be. So in World War Two you end
up having what I like to think of as being
the first modern fashion, and that you can eat it
out of hand or heat it, and it's actually a meal.
This famous sea rat was basically a stew, and the
(19:09):
idea was as plain as let's try and get something
that looks a little bit more like dinner in the camp.
So that would be meat and vegetables, potatoes, I think
of frank and beans. So it was pretty heavy on
the meat and starch. And if not frozen, we will
get from the unfrozen canned dates by the barrel road. Cornd.
(19:34):
I could say this follow it like food does really
lovely at that beginning, like munth that's awful, Oh taste terrible.
I never want to eat mutton. I get. That actually
intrigued me because it was the first time I had
heard that mutton was used to. Certainly spam and corn
beef were, and I can understand them getting sick of it.
We've heard that the sea rations did improve during the
(19:56):
latter years of the war. Finally play Hamburgs and make
the other care and they started mixing towards the art.
But this still wasn't the home canning of the Great
Depression years or civilians victory gardens. Wartime logistics meant the
military had to prioritize differently. Items were chosen for the
(20:18):
same reason throughout history. Are they portable? Are they durable?
Are they long lasting and safe and nourishing? And then
coming up you know a close fourth or fifth do
people like to eat them? So these two guys and
their assistant invented the basic sea rational idea. Plus helped
with the intentionally uninspiring nutritional chocolate d bar we heard
(20:40):
about from D. D. Army veteran John Vastrica. What was
the biggest problem facing these budding food nerds. The things
that they had invented when they ramped up production and
shipped them around the world did not fare very well
because really they didn't have mastery of the science of
the food or the packaging. The Roosevelt Institute points out
(21:04):
that in June of ninety nine, the roughly one hundred
and eighty thousand man U s Army ranked nineteenth in
the world, smaller than Portugals. This makes me laugh because
half of my family's from Portugal, and I can feel
in my bones how small that country is. By comparison,
by the end of nineteen forty two, there were almost
three million men in the army alone. By v J
(21:26):
Day in ninety five, there were over twelve million active
military personnel between branches one hundred and eighty thousand, twelve million.
Imagine your office manager feeding a company scaling up that quickly.
We will tell all that what we saw were raising.
If they were actually bugs, then the flower that came
(21:48):
over seas to us. Now all those k rations that
I got from the say they were so quinn with
am I had to throw them away, or I was
with no food except the d bar orange maar melade.
It was bitter in August wash so bad. You used
to take the bad out and cut the candle and
pour it on the ground all around where we're gonna eat.
They swarmed her there and leave us all. And I
(22:10):
still can't eat it to this day. The cans in
some cases would rust and fall apart, the labels would
fall off in local conditions, the food would heat up
and spoil inside. Not spoil in the sense of bacterial contamination,
but something that happens just with age with food and
then paper packaging throughout world War two was cellophane, which
(22:34):
is based on cellulose, which is a plant sugar. Like
all plants, it loves water and so it's not a
water barrier. And that meant anything that had been wrapped
in cellophane would get soggy. The military head powdered eggs,
and I hated those powdered eggs. I didn't smoke cigarettes,
(22:55):
so I would take my cigarettes and trade them to
the Italians for eggs. They took me down the hill
in the restaurant and they bought me a breakfast meal
and they told me it wasn't powdered eggs, it was
real legs. So that's the first time I had real eggs.
When I was in England. Got to talking to her
and she could make a darn good breaference. Then force
like an omel or something like that. What a difference.
(23:17):
We would get a ship roll coming in, maybe some
eggs or whatever. It was a big deal. Providing rations
two millions of soldiers took up an incredible amount of
space on ships, so they would try to minimize the
space and the weight of the food. Plants are water
(23:39):
and animals are seventy percent water. One way to do
that is to remove most of the water to dehydrate
the food. So it wasn't only eggs, milk and cheese,
and from that we have to think for cheese powder.
Now eggs are really technically difficult to preserve, and they
still don't do a good job of it. It has
(24:00):
fat in it, and fat goes rantid over time because
of a chemical reaction. And then of course I would say,
eggs just have this really special combination of textures when
they're fresh that's very hard to replicate with a powdered substitute.
For all those reasons, the powdered eggs just have never
really been that great. And even now they have prepared
(24:23):
eggs in the m R, but they just don't end
up being favorites among men and women either. So dehydrated
eggs haven't gotten much better. But one of the idea
sparks for this podcast was hearing both in a Rock
War Army veteran and my World War Two Army veteran
grandfather talking about doctoring up the powdered coffee that came
in their field rations. In the case of the Iraqi
(24:45):
Captain powdered coco too. Have they not improved either. During
World War Two, all these powdered items were mostly just dehydrated.
They wouldn't have been able to get that goo to
Roman taste. We've gotten better at the hydrating things and
better at preserving different elements of the food. Nowadays, they
(25:07):
really perfected the art of freeze dehydrated beverages. They have
these things called micro encapsulation, where they encapsulate the fact
that would go rancid with maybe a protein, so that
it doesn't go rancid. And in the case of coffee,
they actually are able to encapsulate the volatile oil that
makes coffee smell good and taste good inside those little crystals.
(25:31):
Taking a final broad historical perspective, can we pinpoint what
changed the most about these rations in a way that
made a significant difference to the millions of individual humans
eating them at the time. The impact on the ration
itself over the course of the war, it would have
been fairly minimal. They have more to do with the
(25:53):
can than the food. They were understanding how food deteriorated better,
which allowed them to figure out how to keep it
from doing that. But they also developed slightly thicker cans,
a latex lining for cans rather than an enamel one
that they had done using sort of a wax overlay
on top of some of the packagings of that water
(26:14):
couldn't penetrate it. The really big impact was afterwards, in
one there was a sudden realization that they needed to
drastically improve the rations. They took that little laboratory and
they infused it with money and expertise, and this is
really what is the big bang moment of processed food. So,
(26:41):
like Mike said about combat, it seems that not much
changed during the war for those who served, but the
number of those who did made a huge impact on
the experience of service for those coming after them. And
as we move into the Korean War and the Cold
War and Vietnam, we'll hear about things like they wanted
to use plastic, one of the new materials in large
(27:01):
part developed by the military joint world or to hydration
to preserve food that was used to do the famous
space ice cream that astronauts microwave dehydration, which uses microwave
to remove the water molecule. You end up with like
a little mini banana. That can one more thing before
we close out. The Navy had the best food. Of
all branches, we did not hear another branch get nominated
(27:24):
once for this award. Obviously, having electricity and running water
moving from place to place so you can literally make
food helps, but Anastasia offered another reason. I think anyone
who loves to cook can tap into the kitchen onboard
a ship or a submarine is the heart of the
whole endeavor there, and it becomes something that is very
(27:47):
important for morale. So there's almost a contest where the
cooks are trying to outdo each other and preparing delicious food,
including a tradition of making elaborate cakes to your people
up and so an extra nod to those working hard
in kitchens from s to Shining Sea and Woodbine, we
(28:07):
took a lot of pride and how we did the food,
how we presented the food. We were proud of our
contribution to what we were going. Thanks for joining us
in this our first season. Subscribe to Service on your
(28:28):
favorite platform to catch up on episodes you might have missed,
get special extra episodes as we dropped them between seasons,
and for updates on one our Korean War season debuts.
And thanks for dropping a review while you're there. And
don't forget. You can find more about this episode and
every episode we've aired at service podcast dot org, plus
extra clips and nerdy food history stuff on Instagram and Facebook.
(28:51):
We're at Service Podcast. You can drop a note will
pass on to our guests at our web page too.
Service as a production from My Heart Radio with Misty
Bladiger as my assisting producer, Gabrielle Collins as our supervising producer,
and Christopher Hasiotis as our executive producer. I produced this
episode with help from Boston I Heart producer Eric Collins.
And thank you to all the artists and engineers who
(29:13):
have added creativity and skill to our first season. Thank
you for listening, and thank you to those serving and
those who have served
This episode re enacts scenes of war and includes gunfire.
Listener discretion advised who are tuning into Service Johnny, the
strict private first class that are in stories of hunger
and war. They joined a service Women Pearl Harbor Member
Pearl Harbor, a production from My Heart Radio. We used
(00:22):
to just give these people the food from our miss kits.
You ain't what you could get, and be thankful for
what you were getting. I'm your host, Jacqueline Raposo, Men
and women of the United States. On this day, more
than sixteen million young Americans are surviving. The three hundred
(00:43):
year old American customer of the Musland has it all
times called for the fortitude of women. Meanwhile, the British
government has begun to racition food and Prime Minister Chamber
on Monday from the Thailand and from our Nigi Empa
Mount and the struggle single handed until we went joined
(01:07):
by the minted rate might of set Raka and later
by the overwhelming power and regales of the United States
of America. We must be the great awesenal of democracy.
In the late nineteen thirties, kids going to school, or
(01:28):
working their family farms, or just struggling to find food
outlasted the Great Depression, only to find themselves barreling into
what would become the deadliest conflict in human history. We've
moved through twelve of their individual war and food stories
this season, but honestly, I still find it a little
hard to connect their intimate experiences with what history books
(01:51):
tell us of this overwhelmingly big World War two picture.
And so in our final episode this season, we're going
to compile all some crossovers from our veterans for two
guests who can help us better make sense of things.
What changed the most when it comes to combat and puisine.
What part did these young men and women play in
moving things forward? And where can we most find ourselves
(02:15):
in their stories. It's a completely different type of fighting
or having to go a tree to tree to root
out the Germans. He had to look for the uniform,
what the helmet looked like. Not only that they had
the anti air thrasher Pickadilly circus. That was a code
(02:35):
name on the landing kraft. You were supposed to stop
a coordinates. Who's on the coordinate the infantry of the Marines.
You don't want to hit them, you want head of them.
So with them there are artillery observers on the front
lines listening to the cat with These men are describing
as what we call Class Witsyan war. This is my coal.
(03:00):
It did three tours in Iraq to as a private
contractor and a third as a paramilitary civilian with the
Defense Intelligence Agency while he was also a Coast Guard officer.
He's also authored many fantasy books and two history books
on ancient combat while simultaneously working in law enforcement and
private intelligence. He doesn't specialize in World War two history,
(03:22):
but he has a strong sense of the community our
veterans are a part of, plus a jacked up analytical mind.
Class Witsian war is traditional warfare as we know it
from the Peace of Westphalia up until by argue it's with.
But klass Witzian warfare is also known as trinitarian warfare,
and trinitarian warfare is there's three things you do to
(03:42):
win a war. You destroy your enemy's army, You occupy
his territory. Can you break the will of the military
infrastructure to carry on the contest? Right? That is how
wars have been thought. These are wars of maneuver where
military units at the Regimental Battalion Company level are maneuvering
against one another, we're charging, retreating in set piece battles,
(04:03):
having fos forward, observers calling in fire. None of that
has changed. And was that the same in World War One?
As well as that a strategy the same. I think
they might have had to use signal flags and marker flags,
as matter of fact, I'm almost sure they did, but
the concepts were still basically the same. My point is
is that there isn't that big a difference technologically between
what these men were experiencing what's going on now. B
(04:23):
M one is still my favorite long gun. It's the
same and one that these guys were using, but it's
just got fiberglasses that of would that carried. The nineteen
eleven it's my favorite pistol. It's called the nineteen eleven
because it's from nineteen eleven eight. It is the gun
that the Germans had, the best gun of the whole war.
All of a sudden, right over my head that the
(04:46):
German burp gun, our submachine gun got. We've never seen
it burp gun before. I said, I want to go
with the p key votes so we could go fast
and they could not go fair. The English, the first
people to in radar. They were able to keep the
fighter planes on the ground until the German planes got
close enough than the fighter planes took off, and they
(05:06):
had full fuel tanks. Because it was about le Bretton
wanted the fighter a machine gun, spring even more bullets,
about zooming faster, a plane navigating more precisely, these things
seemed to make a huge difference for the bodies in
the fight. Our being this great arsenal of democracy. Does
(05:26):
technology really not make a difference on a greater scale?
The answer is more complicated. It's rather the interplay of
technology and doctrine, or the interplay of technology and tactics.
I'll give you a perfect case in point. We'll go
all the way back to the American Civil War. There's
a famous truism in military theory that we are always
(05:47):
fighting the last war, and we mean that negatively right.
Napoleonic wars, which was the main experience that most generals
in the American Civil War had, were wars fought largely
with smooth bore muskets. A smooth bore musket means that
the barrel of the musket does not have rifling, which
is to say that I could be aiming straight ahead
of me, and when I pulled that trigger, that ball
(06:08):
could go at a forty five degree angle off to
the right. It's got nothing to do with what I'm
aiming at. By the time the American Civil War was fought,
rifling was standard. Your aiming at that's where your bullet's
gonna go. But you're still using napoleonic tactics designed to
deal with these incredibly inaccurate musket's people lining up present
are and then shooting into a mass. But now you're
(06:30):
doing it with an accurate weapon. So the casualties were extreme,
and it took way too long for the tactical thinking
to match the shift in technology. Trench warfare in the
First World War is another great example. The crew served
tripod fired machine gun was new tech. Those tactics of
trench warfare of going over the top and racing into
(06:51):
the enemy's trenches, going into the teeth of that fire.
Those tactics were designed before you were facing two guys
with a tripod mounta machine go could take out a
tire company just sitting there going left and right. There's
that amazing scene in the beginning of saving Private Ryan,
or the moment that Higgins boats Gangway drops and then
he says, God, the imn beviated dropped the f and
(07:13):
rim and I had no choice. I dropped the rip
and then the scene came into the boat and about
fourteen guys immediately were killed. I'm sure that that occurred,
that doctrine did not shift quickly enough to adapt to
advances in technology, and that that cost lives in extreme cases.
(07:41):
Truman found out that the invasion of Jap band would
have been wished twice the size of Normandy. So this
is when President Drumman says, dropped two bombs. The Japanese
have seen what our atomic bomb can do. They can
foresee what it was. Let's talk about what we mean
(08:02):
when we say the deadliest conflict in human history. The
United States use of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima killed
eighty thou people instantly. Three days later, forty more were
killed by a second bomb on Nagasaki. Imagine how many
more were affected by nuclear fallout. There's the butta On
death March that killed twenty thousand, the one point one
(08:25):
million prisoners murdered in Auschwitz alone. Gross estimates of worldwide
World War two casualties are counted at fifteen million battle deaths,
twenty five million battle wounds, and forty five million civilian deaths.
But those are really gross estimates because reports vary so widely.
Field strategy might not have changed during or because of
(08:48):
this war. But yes, both technology and doctrine worked against
human bodies and cost human lives, and that leads us
to the biggest difference between this war and all others.
December seventh, nineteen one, a date which will live in infamy.
(09:14):
The United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked
by label and their courses of the Empire of Japan.
Three of my classmates and myself, we're going to Long
Beach unless my brother and two of his friends joined
the navy. They were so in demand of nurses that
(09:36):
I said to nursing my girlfriend and I said, let's
go join the army, and we did. My mother had
a very hard time. She had three sons and we
roll in combat. I had seven older brothers. They all
served but two. She had seven sons and they were
all in the service. Keene had a lot of kids
who went in. Ten million, twenty thousand, nine and nine
(10:00):
three that's how many men were inducted into the armed
forces via the draft. Between nineteen forty and ninety six,
another six million would voluntarily join up plus three and
fifty thousand women and millions of others, building ships and
planes and tanks and guns as fast as they could.
This was a massive war. Good evening. Today, our fellow citizens,
(10:38):
our way of life, our very freedom came under attack
in a series of deliberate and deadly terrorist acts. Not
eleven I was galvanized. I think like so many other
people in the United States, I wanted to get in
the fight, and I wanted to get in the fight quickly.
But Not eleven failed to galvanize the rush to recruiting stations.
(10:58):
We might presume it did it. Military personnel numbers grew
by less than thirty thousand between two thousand and one
and two and two, and they've lingered at a total
of less than point five percent of our population over
the last decade. What generation warfare is what a lot
of people call coin counterinsurgency warfare, the notion that mau
(11:19):
Ze Tongue really revolutionized in his famous book Guerilla Warfare.
Do you have hyperpowers at this part? You're not going
to defeat the United States Army. No one is going
to defeat the United States Army in a set piece battle,
even in No. One, not China, not Russia, no One
in a field battle. There's no point in even trying.
We have superior technology, we have superior training. We have
(11:39):
not necessarily more numbers, but the right numbers, the infrastructure
that's required. What Mao hit on is that the way
you beat a hyperpower you have one goal in class.
What's the and trinitarian warfare. Let's break their will to fight,
but class what's is talking about their military? What Mau pioneered,
you break the will of the populace to carry on
the con test. How do you feel like World War
(12:05):
Two shifted a sense of patriotism in the militaria? Oh
my gosh, there's so many things that are different. The
first and most obvious is that World War two is
an existential crisis, not just for the United States but
for the world. The first Great air raid on Paris,
which took place today, evidently had two objectives. It is
(12:25):
reported this morning that German bombers and fighting claims are
again over southeast British coastal towers by Brown. But you're
on the deed and ocean. We're we're growing country and
growing great in the air. The stark contrasts between the
mission of the access Powers and the mission of the
(12:48):
Allied powers. No war sense has had that existential states
Vietnam or Korea for the United States, like, we lost,
So what what is the impact on people living in
the United States? Not my There's another thing. It's really interesting.
If you google this, you can find videos made during
World War Two teaching service members how to behave in
a British public away. And incidentally, the beer isn't cold
(13:13):
in England. No, they don't like it cold and they
have many ice So if you like beer, you better
like it warm. What's that add difference between bitter and mild.
The video keeps synthasizing you're in the uniforming the army,
don't do these things, don't start a fight, don't get drunk.
But with the advent of cell phone technology, anytime you
screw up in uniform, that's going on Facebook. The military
(13:34):
is reacted to that. So we hide our military. Now
we take those uniforms off. You get in trouble if
you're in uniform. No one ever told me that this
was the motive, But the general spirence I got was
they were afraid someone would attack me or hurt me,
which is not true. And they were afraid I would
do something that would bring discredit on the United States
military and it will be caught on a cell phone
and put on Facebook and put on other social media.
(13:56):
That culture of patriotism, it really did go out. And
that's how to real cost In the United States. We
are citizen soldiers, citizens sailors. I always say this when
I talk about the military. We are you and you
are us. We are part of the community. We are
not separate from it. That's one of the great strengths
of the American military. We'll hear more from Mike incoming
(14:21):
seasons as we continue to observe shifting warfare. But in
studying World War Two alone, the only big picture I
can see our humans slaughtering other humans, a very masculine
way of pillaging and ruling the world. This is an
ongoing conversation, but after centuries of warfare, I can't begin
to envision a peaceful world in the end. I am
(14:47):
hoping here, and that really is something that humans have
a unique capacity to do. Hope, because without hope. Why
do anything right? Then you're just completely nihilist. This is
what Obama is constantly pilloried for. But he was absolutely right.
It's the audacity of hope. It's one of the greatest
things humans do. But I think in this case the
hope is supported by some data. We still fight, but
(15:11):
we fight differently and the impact of the fighting, as
horrific as it is, you just can't compare the casualties
in Iraq to the American Civil War. You can't or
the suffering of those people. I don't think it's gonna
happen in our lifetime or our children's lifetime, but it's
gonna happen. Personally, I would not be surprised. The meat
(15:48):
the tame the past of American meat diet by the
time of the war, and for example, there is a
variation of Welsh harshmeat time, which may be prepared in
the following month like extra life boxes. And then that
they had a dried biscuit, they had a little package
of three or four cigarettes or something like. It was
a big opportunity for the tobacco industry because they ended
(16:11):
up sending samples and a lot of the different masses
had four cigarettes Morning went at the Figar makes Water.
Welcome back to service Veteran stories of hunger and war
from my Heart Radio. I'm Jacklin repos O What soldiers
were eating. It's sort of like each war affects the
(16:33):
one that follows it. That's Anastasia Mark stays. I'll say though,
I'm the author of Combat Ready Kitchen, How the US
Military Shapes the way you eat. Anastasia's book dives deep
into military food innovation, covering how soldiers ate from the
first standing Sumerian armies up through how our troops are eating.
M R. E. S feels ready to eat today like Mike,
(16:56):
she said, Placing our veterans stories firmly within history means
remember bring that military innovation is like a game of
leap frog. You jump ahead only to become the hurdle
for those coming up behind you. There was a brief
but disastrous period during the Spanish American War in the
very late nineteenth century where the US military tried to
(17:18):
provide canned meat rations. Those canned meat rations ended up spoiling,
and it created this huge debacle where the military is
basically accused of unintentionally poisoning troops. After that, bad experience,
they pulled back on the canned meat. So in World
War One they did use the canning technology, but what
(17:43):
they put inside it was essentially traditional military rations throughout
not just the last hundred years but millennia. They were
dried preserved foods, hard dried biscuits that had like other
ingredients sometimes added for nutrition, dried meat products, and chocolate.
That was called the iron ration, and then moved to
(18:06):
something called the trench ration, where they introduced something that
was a little wetter in terms of the meat product,
but it was still just basically a clump of meat
in a camp. And then they ended up with something
called the reserve ration, so that would have been taking
you up to World War two. In nine, as Anastasia
explains in her book, three staff and a sleepy Chicago
(18:28):
office started to play around with military cuisine. They didn't
know anything about food science. They started with just a
couple of pots and pans and a budget of only
seven hundred and fifty dollars. But for the first time
in history, the U. S. Army Subsistence School at the
Chicago depot of the Quartermaster Corps had made space for
(18:48):
a few guys to just play around with what military
food could be. So in World War Two you end
up having what I like to think of as being
the first modern fashion, and that you can eat it
out of hand or heat it, and it's actually a meal.
This famous sea rat was basically a stew, and the
(19:09):
idea was as plain as let's try and get something
that looks a little bit more like dinner in the camp.
So that would be meat and vegetables, potatoes, I think
of frank and beans. So it was pretty heavy on
the meat and starch. And if not frozen, we will
get from the unfrozen canned dates by the barrel road. Cornd.
(19:34):
I could say this follow it like food does really
lovely at that beginning, like munth that's awful, Oh taste terrible.
I never want to eat mutton. I get. That actually
intrigued me because it was the first time I had
heard that mutton was used to. Certainly spam and corn
beef were, and I can understand them getting sick of it.
We've heard that the sea rations did improve during the
(19:56):
latter years of the war. Finally play Hamburgs and make
the other care and they started mixing towards the art.
But this still wasn't the home canning of the Great
Depression years or civilians victory gardens. Wartime logistics meant the
military had to prioritize differently. Items were chosen for the
(20:18):
same reason throughout history. Are they portable? Are they durable?
Are they long lasting and safe and nourishing? And then
coming up you know a close fourth or fifth do
people like to eat them? So these two guys and
their assistant invented the basic sea rational idea. Plus helped
with the intentionally uninspiring nutritional chocolate d bar we heard
(20:40):
about from D. D. Army veteran John Vastrica. What was
the biggest problem facing these budding food nerds. The things
that they had invented when they ramped up production and
shipped them around the world did not fare very well
because really they didn't have mastery of the science of
the food or the packaging. The Roosevelt Institute points out
(21:04):
that in June of ninety nine, the roughly one hundred
and eighty thousand man U s Army ranked nineteenth in
the world, smaller than Portugals. This makes me laugh because
half of my family's from Portugal, and I can feel
in my bones how small that country is. By comparison,
by the end of nineteen forty two, there were almost
three million men in the army alone. By v J
(21:26):
Day in ninety five, there were over twelve million active
military personnel between branches one hundred and eighty thousand, twelve million.
Imagine your office manager feeding a company scaling up that quickly.
We will tell all that what we saw were raising.
If they were actually bugs, then the flower that came
(21:48):
over seas to us. Now all those k rations that
I got from the say they were so quinn with
am I had to throw them away, or I was
with no food except the d bar orange maar melade.
It was bitter in August wash so bad. You used
to take the bad out and cut the candle and
pour it on the ground all around where we're gonna eat.
They swarmed her there and leave us all. And I
(22:10):
still can't eat it to this day. The cans in
some cases would rust and fall apart, the labels would
fall off in local conditions, the food would heat up
and spoil inside. Not spoil in the sense of bacterial contamination,
but something that happens just with age with food and
then paper packaging throughout world War two was cellophane, which
(22:34):
is based on cellulose, which is a plant sugar. Like
all plants, it loves water and so it's not a
water barrier. And that meant anything that had been wrapped
in cellophane would get soggy. The military head powdered eggs,
and I hated those powdered eggs. I didn't smoke cigarettes,
(22:55):
so I would take my cigarettes and trade them to
the Italians for eggs. They took me down the hill
in the restaurant and they bought me a breakfast meal
and they told me it wasn't powdered eggs, it was
real legs. So that's the first time I had real eggs.
When I was in England. Got to talking to her
and she could make a darn good breaference. Then force
like an omel or something like that. What a difference.
(23:17):
We would get a ship roll coming in, maybe some
eggs or whatever. It was a big deal. Providing rations
two millions of soldiers took up an incredible amount of
space on ships, so they would try to minimize the
space and the weight of the food. Plants are water
(23:39):
and animals are seventy percent water. One way to do
that is to remove most of the water to dehydrate
the food. So it wasn't only eggs, milk and cheese,
and from that we have to think for cheese powder.
Now eggs are really technically difficult to preserve, and they
still don't do a good job of it. It has
(24:00):
fat in it, and fat goes rantid over time because
of a chemical reaction. And then of course I would say,
eggs just have this really special combination of textures when
they're fresh that's very hard to replicate with a powdered substitute.
For all those reasons, the powdered eggs just have never
really been that great. And even now they have prepared
(24:23):
eggs in the m R, but they just don't end
up being favorites among men and women either. So dehydrated
eggs haven't gotten much better. But one of the idea
sparks for this podcast was hearing both in a Rock
War Army veteran and my World War Two Army veteran
grandfather talking about doctoring up the powdered coffee that came
in their field rations. In the case of the Iraqi
(24:45):
Captain powdered coco too. Have they not improved either. During
World War Two, all these powdered items were mostly just dehydrated.
They wouldn't have been able to get that goo to
Roman taste. We've gotten better at the hydrating things and
better at preserving different elements of the food. Nowadays, they
(25:07):
really perfected the art of freeze dehydrated beverages. They have
these things called micro encapsulation, where they encapsulate the fact
that would go rancid with maybe a protein, so that
it doesn't go rancid. And in the case of coffee,
they actually are able to encapsulate the volatile oil that
makes coffee smell good and taste good inside those little crystals.
(25:31):
Taking a final broad historical perspective, can we pinpoint what
changed the most about these rations in a way that
made a significant difference to the millions of individual humans
eating them at the time. The impact on the ration
itself over the course of the war, it would have
been fairly minimal. They have more to do with the
(25:53):
can than the food. They were understanding how food deteriorated better,
which allowed them to figure out how to keep it
from doing that. But they also developed slightly thicker cans,
a latex lining for cans rather than an enamel one
that they had done using sort of a wax overlay
on top of some of the packagings of that water
(26:14):
couldn't penetrate it. The really big impact was afterwards, in
one there was a sudden realization that they needed to
drastically improve the rations. They took that little laboratory and
they infused it with money and expertise, and this is
really what is the big bang moment of processed food. So,
(26:41):
like Mike said about combat, it seems that not much
changed during the war for those who served, but the
number of those who did made a huge impact on
the experience of service for those coming after them. And
as we move into the Korean War and the Cold
War and Vietnam, we'll hear about things like they wanted
to use plastic, one of the new materials in large
(27:01):
part developed by the military joint world or to hydration
to preserve food that was used to do the famous
space ice cream that astronauts microwave dehydration, which uses microwave
to remove the water molecule. You end up with like
a little mini banana. That can one more thing before
we close out. The Navy had the best food. Of
all branches, we did not hear another branch get nominated
(27:24):
once for this award. Obviously, having electricity and running water
moving from place to place so you can literally make
food helps, but Anastasia offered another reason. I think anyone
who loves to cook can tap into the kitchen onboard
a ship or a submarine is the heart of the
whole endeavor there, and it becomes something that is very
(27:47):
important for morale. So there's almost a contest where the
cooks are trying to outdo each other and preparing delicious food,
including a tradition of making elaborate cakes to your people
up and so an extra nod to those working hard
in kitchens from s to Shining Sea and Woodbine, we
(28:07):
took a lot of pride and how we did the food,
how we presented the food. We were proud of our
contribution to what we were going. Thanks for joining us
in this our first season. Subscribe to Service on your
(28:28):
favorite platform to catch up on episodes you might have missed,
get special extra episodes as we dropped them between seasons,
and for updates on one our Korean War season debuts.
And thanks for dropping a review while you're there. And
don't forget. You can find more about this episode and
every episode we've aired at service podcast dot org, plus
extra clips and nerdy food history stuff on Instagram and Facebook.
(28:51):
We're at Service Podcast. You can drop a note will
pass on to our guests at our web page too.
Service as a production from My Heart Radio with Misty
Bladiger as my assisting producer, Gabrielle Collins as our supervising producer,
and Christopher Hasiotis as our executive producer. I produced this
episode with help from Boston I Heart producer Eric Collins.
And thank you to all the artists and engineers who
(29:13):
have added creativity and skill to our first season. Thank
you for listening, and thank you to those serving and
those who have served
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