Battlefield Rations: The Food Given to the British Soldier For Marching and Fighting 1900-2011 by Clayton Anthony

Author:Clayton, Anthony [Clayton, Anthony]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HISTORY / Reference
ISBN: 9781910294284
Publisher: Casemate Publishers & Book Distributors, LLC
Published: 2013-11-18T22:00:00+00:00

A Chindit and mule, 211 Column, 2nd Battalion the King’s Own Royal Regiment, April 1944. The cardboard boxes to the soldier’s right contain American K rations. Behind him is one of the tin boxes containing a seven day ration pack. (Regimental museum, King’s Own Royal Regiment)

Food for the British soldier became simply what was to hand or possible at any one time, generally far from the official 1942 scale of tinned meat, usually bully beef, and vegetables, dried fruit, biscuits, tea, condensed milk and sugar all in a 24 hour waterproof pack. This pack was replaced in 1945 by a new ‘Pacific’24 hour pack of low weight and high nutrition comprising packaged ham and an egg, a midday chocolate or other biscuit snack, tea and an evening ham and beef pack meal. Attempts in 1943 to bring fresh meat to India largely failed, the journey being too long. Frozen mutton from Australia in 1944 was more successful, conditions permitting reaching soldiers three times a week. Heating and cooking was generally mess-tins over Tommy cookers or small fires of bamboo, in static periods regimental and company cookers could be set up. In small section outposts tea would be brewed up over a punctured biscuit tin or compo tin burner with a handle made of signal wire and strained through a mosquito net or someone’s sock. The tea leaves would then be dried, soaked in rum and used as tobacco. Water was a problem throughout the campaign, local water being exceedingly dangerous to drink unless purified by tablets issued and carried by all soldiers. The worst danger from polluted water was leptospirosis, a life-threatening disease of the kidneys. At Imphal a rough and ready airstrip enabled some food to be flown in, supplies were also dropped by air, some consignments were parachuted, a locally made ‘parajute’ being used, others were dropped with varying accuracy in boxes. In Kohima the dangers from Japanese snipers made it necessary for regimental non-commissioned officers to crawl forward in the cold mud and darkness of night, pushing big dishes of stew and dehydrated potatoes mixed with margarine towards soldiers in slit trenches. There mess-tins would appear above ground level, two per man one for stew and one for two mouthfuls of water for tea, if the soldiers still had tea packets, if not tea itself. Both stew and water were no longer hot by the time the last trench was reached. Cooking fires were not allowed, their smoke being a give-away, but at least one unit dug a deep trench, covered it with branches and lit a fire at dusk when the smoke would not be conspicuous. By the last days of the siege at Kohima soldiers were reduced to half a tin of bully beef with perhaps for some a small tin of pilchards, five biscuits, small portions of butter, tinned cheese and jam and tea limited to the half pint ration of water per day. The terrain at Kohima was so difficult that no airstrip was possible and all supplies had to be dropped.

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