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Don’t let the image fool you — D bars were positively ghastly.
Back when dinosaurs roamed the plains and I flew Army helicopters for Uncle Sam, I was afforded the opportunity to attend the U.S. Air Force Arctic Survival School. The colloquial name was “Cool School.” That sounded pretty awesome. As the big day approached, I actually looked forward to the experience. It seems I was an idiot.
Hard Reality
I discovered later that Cool School was informally called the Air Force Food Appreciation Course. Not only did the average temperature hover around 30 below zero, but there also wasn’t much to eat. The mission was to simulate what it might be like to be a stranded military aviator in the frozen Arctic wastes. We were given the contents of an ejection seat survival kit and a single MRE to last the duration of the course.
After a couple of days, that MRE was but a vague memory. I consumed absolutely everything in that tan plastic pouch. I also ate a boiled rabbit. That was about as awesome as it sounds.
The survival kit included these weird compressed food bars. I would liken them to finely-ground sawdust mixed with a little sugar and pressed into a rock-hard, brick-like cube. It took a little effort to gnaw off the edges. At the end of the exercise, I had licked the cocoa beverage powder and instant coffee clean from my MRE, but I still had two and a half of my three survival food bars intact. Those things were ghastly.
That was most likely by design. If they tasted like Toblerone, you’d be tempted to gobble them up right sharpish. As it was, the consistency and flavor meant you tended to make them last. It turns out there was a WWII-vintage precedent.
The thought of having to survive on a D bar kept troops on full alert.
An Army Marches on Its Stomach
We are all rightfully enamored with the guns, planes, tanks, and ships, but it is really the mundane stuff like food and warm clothing that really drive a combat unit’s success in the field.
U.S. Marine Corps General Robert H. Barrow once famously opined that, “Amateurs study tactics; professionals study logistics.” As such, in 1937, the United States Army approached the Hershey’s Chocolate Company with a most curious request.
Pearl Harbor caught the U.S. military acutely unawares, but there were still plenty of folks who could sense that war was coming. As a result, they began reaching out to American industry to modernize weapons and support gear in anticipation of fielding massive expeditionary armies overseas. As part of that, Uncle Sam needed a new government chocolate bar. However, they wanted it to taste, in the words of the Army Quartermaster, “Only a little better than a boiled potato.”
Before these old heroes could be this awesome, they had to be fed. Public domain.
Origin Story
Hershey’s chief chemist Sam Hinkle and Captain Paul Logan of the U.S. Army Quartermaster General’s office established four criteria for what would eventually become the Field Ration D bar. It had to be energy-dense and weigh no more than four ounces. It had to withstand high temperatures without melting. It also needed to taste bad.
The logic was sound. Like those nasty compressed survival bars in Cool School, if the emergency ration chocolate was tasty, troops would consume it recreationally. They needed to save this thing for actual emergencies. The solution was to make it taste awful.
For starters, the Hershey research team dramatically reduced the sugar. Then they increased the chocolate liquor to make it bitter. After that came oat flour to create a dense, dry texture with a killer aftertaste.
The original concoction was so thick it could not be poured into a mold. Every single bar had to be manually pressed in place. The factory workers at Hershey’s reportedly despised making them. However, the resulting compact bar offered 600 calories in a 4-ounce chunk. Troops claimed it was all but impossible to get into the thing without a knife.
Of course it came with instructions. Troops were supposed to eat the quarter-pound bar slowly over the course of half an hour or dissolve it in water to make a drink. Either way, getting a whole D bar down was a gut check.
Practicalities
The Army ordered the first 90,000-bar lot in 1937 for field testing. Troops predictably despised them, but that was the point. By 1941 Hershey’s was producing D rations at scale. By war’s end, Hersey’s had produced more than three billion of the horrible things.
Troops in theater nicknamed the D bar Germany’s secret weapon. This was partly because of their deleterious effect on the human gut. Additionally, hungry civilians who got the D bars in trade often thought them inedible.
In 1943, Hershey produced a specific version of the D ration for the Pacific Theater called the Tropical Chocolate Bar. This awful comestible was designed to withstand temperatures of up to 120 degrees Fahrenheit without melting. It intentionally tasted slightly better than the standard D ration, but troops nonetheless nicknamed the Tropical Chocolate Bar the “Dysentery Bar.”
Performance
D ration bars were standard issue in aircrew survival kits. In 1943, Army Air Corps Lieutenant Louis Zamperini, the Olympic distance runner featured in Laura Hillenbrand’s 2010 book Unbroken, survived 47 days adrift in a life raft in the Pacific Ocean after his B24 Liberator crashed. He survived in part thanks to the D bars he had on board.
Hershey eventually earned five Army-Navy Excellence in Production awards. Before WWII, chocolate was considered a luxury in post-Depression American society. When the 16 million GIs who deployed to fight WWII returned home, they were all addicted to the stuff.
This seismic shift in American culinary tastes drove the explosion of products like candy bars and Coca-Cola in the 1950s. That’s one of several reasons Americans are so blasted fat today.
I do love me some M&M’s. They resulted from WWII-era research into shelf stable chocolate.
Spin-Off Tech
Not all military chocolate was supposed to be nasty. The confections intended for standard rations needed to be as tasty as possible. This was the stuff American GIs handed out to starving kids in liberated war zones.
When Forest Mars needed a snack that could survive high temperatures in transit, he took little gobbets of chocolate and coated them in hard candy. The result was M&M’s. Mr. Mars secured an exclusive military contract, and M&M’s went to war before they were sold to the general public. GIs came home rabid for the things.
A surprising lot of the modern candy offerings tempting you at the Walmart checkout had their genesis during World War II. Environmental stability and the necessity for maximum caloric density often drove that train. In the case of the ghastly D bar, however, it was also engineered to be gross.