Category: This great Nation & Its People
Ancel Keys was a polymath who, among many other things,
personally developed the US Army’s K-rations.
Fair use.
It is a soldier’s lot to gripe about his food. That has been the case since well before Hannibal’s hordes coaxed their elephants across the Alps. For literally millennia, those were pretty reasonable gripes. Then America happened.
Ours is the best-equipped, most powerful military in all of human history. In addition to $13 billion aircraft carriers and $600 toilet seats, Uncle Sam invests breathtaking amounts of effort and treasure in feeding our boys and girls serving downrange. I can attest from personal experience that he’s pretty darn good at that nowadays.
T-ration is short for Tray Ration. These are pre-cooked group meals sealed in big tins. To prepare them, you simply dunk the sealed can in boiling water for a while. Think Chef Boyardee on steroids. That stuff was actually quite good.
We used to refer to MREs as “Meals Refused by Ethiopians.” That’s not really fair. MREs are quite tasty these days. Additionally, every meal includes a flameless ration heater that offers a hot meal almost anywhere on Planet Earth under almost any circumstances. All that really began back in 1941 when a University of Minnesota physiologist named Ancel Keys developed the U.S. Army’s first K-rations.
The US Army’s K-rations helped keep American troops healthy and fed in some of the world’s worst places. Public domain.
Food of the Gods
With World War II just beginning to conflagrate around the globe, American troops needed a compact, lightweight meal that could be eaten with minimal preparation. This ration needed to be palatable and nutritious. It also had to be shelf-stable and amenable to mass production. With all this in mind, Keys hit the local supermarket to do some research.
Keys started out with dry sausages, hard biscuits, candy, and chocolate bars. The resulting DIY field ration weighed 28 ounces and provided 3,200 kilocalories. He divided everything into thirds and christened it breakfast, dinner, and supper. He field-tested the resulting amalgam on six soldiers at a nearby Army base. They rated the meals as “palatable” and “better than nothing.” It was a start.
The Army called this new field food K-rations. Uncle Sam already fielded A-rations, B-rations, C-rations, and D-rations. While the military claimed that K was simply an easily recognizable letter, it was widely understood to have been chosen in homage to Dr. Keys.
Each ration contained a breakfast, dinner, and supper.
K-rations were never intended for long-term use.
Some of the K-ration’s contents were downright nasty.
Details
Army grunts soon referred to K-rations as “Paratrooper Rations.” The boxes and contents were standardized. The fatigue pants pockets of the standard M1943 uniform were specifically designed to carry them.
K-rations were never intended for long-term use. The original stipulation was a maximum of 15 days, but this was later reduced to 10. Issue versions provided some 2,830 kilocalories, which really wasn’t adequate to support a soldier for an entire day if he was operating in hostile environments or engaging in heavy physical work. However, K-rats were portable, filling, and tolerable. Troops in austere environments subsisting solely on K-rations predictably lost weight over time, but they didn’t starve.
Some of the K-ration’s contents were downright nasty. The lemon powder was designed to be dissolved into water to make lemonade. However, it was so acidic as to be unpleasant. Additionally, the pork loaf was heavy on fat and tough to get down. As a result, troops oftentimes discarded these components, further reducing the calorie content.
Weapons, vehicles, and equipment are important, but an Army really does run on its stomach. Public domain.
The Gift That Keeps on Giving
Nicotine is a shockingly effective anxiety drug, and back then nobody knew how horrible smoking was on the human body. Each K-ration included a total of 12 cigarettes divided into three 4-cig packets. The really popular brands were represented, including Chesterfield, Camel, Lucky Strike, Pall Mall, and others. A dozen coffin nails a day lays the foundation for a proper smoking habit. Millions of GIs came home hopelessly addicted to cigarettes as a result.
While cigarettes served as a welcome diversion for troops stuck in some of the world’s most horrible places, they were actually much more than that. Troops hoarded their cigarettes and then used them to barter for local goods and services. Across both theaters of war, American cigarettes became a sort of ad hoc currency.
Ruminations
Early K-rations were short of ascorbic acid or Vitamin C. Troops feeding too long from K-rats alone began to show signs of scurvy. Subsequent upgrades fortified the drink powders with Vitamin C and rectified that problem.
Untold millions of K-rations were produced, but the Army tired of them soon after the war. They were replaced by C-rations, the famous canned ration packs of the Vietnam War era, starting in 1948. Remaining stocks of K-rations were distributed to U.S. Aid programs in recovering war zones overseas.
Each ration contained a breakfast, dinner, and supper. Twelve rations came to a case. Three cases made up a crate made of either wood or fiberboard. With a total of 36 daily rations per crate, a single crate would usually support a platoon in the field for a day.
K-rations included such sketchy stuff as chopped ham and eggs, canned pork luncheon meat, cervelat sausage, beef or pork loaf, and a nearly inedible hard D-ration emergency chocolate bar. The menu was upgraded over time and also included such stuff as chewing gum, matches, a bouillon packet, toilet paper, halazone water purification tablets, a simple flat wooden spoon, and fifteen dextrose sugar pills. The end result supported literally countless GIs.
Food in the Army evolves over time. Modern stuff is diverse, well-reasoned, nutritious, and packable. WW2-vintage K-rats were much less so but still kept a little meat on a guy’s bones no matter where he served. The humble K-ration likely did more to win World War II than all of the Navy’s battleships combined. It has been said that an Army marches on its stomach, and Ancel Key’s K-rations kept those stomachs filled.
Sixteen million Americans served in uniform during World War 2; 418,500 perished. One in every 38 American servicemen gave their lives for their country.
Our flight crews had it the worst: 44.4% of all RAF bomber crewmen died in the rarefied skies above Europe. However, that pales in comparison to the German U-boats.
In the opening salvoes of the Battle of the Atlantic, U-boat wolf packs wreaked unmitigated havoc on Allied transport ships. Over time, however, improvements in countermeasures as well as the breaking of the Enigma code fundamentally changed that calculus. By war’s end, three out of every four German submariners had been killed in combat.
Occurring as it did in the middle of vast oceans, WW2 naval combat was pitiless. The winners might go home to fight another day. The losers almost invariably slipped beneath the waves to either drown or be mercilessly crushed by the weight of the sea. Such stakes ensured that all involved fought like Norse berserkers.
The Players
The night May 5, 1943 was clear with a bright moon. U-66, a Type IXC German U-boat under the command of Oberleutnant Gehard Seehausen, was cruising along the surface recharging its batteries off of the Cape Verde Islands. U-66 was Hitler’s seventh-most successful German submarine now on her ninth war cruise. Her tally included some 33 Allied ships. U-66 had been at sea for four months and was desperately low on fuel.
As luck would have it, a U.S. Navy TBM Avenger launched from the American escort carrier U.S.S. Block Island picked up U-66 on radar some 20 miles from the U.S.S. Buckley, a compact American destroyer escort that was just itching for a fight. The Buckley’s skipper was Lt. Cmdr. Brent Able. In the dim light, the captain of U-66 mistook the Buckley for a German resupply submarine.
The Fight
By the time Seehausen realized his mistake, the two warships were only 4,000 yards apart. The German skipper ordered a snap torpedo shot that passed harmlessly off the Buckley’s starboard side. Lieutenant Cmdr. Able opened fire with everything that would shoot.
The Buckley ravaged the trapped U-boat for the next two minutes with her 3-inch deck guns, 40mm Bofors, 20mm Oerlikons, and sundry .50-caliber machine guns. High-explosive rounds ripped into the submarine’s conning tower and superstructure. Seehausen fired another ineffectual torpedo. Then Lt. Cmdr. Able then gave his ship hard right rudder and drove the nimble vessel up onto the deck of the U-boat.
In desperation, the Seehausen ordered his men topside. Some attempted to surrender. Others fought like Dervishes.
The crew of the Buckley had emptied their small arms lockers. First Officer Klaus Herbig led a German boarding party onto the forecastle of the destroyer escort. American sailors with Thompsons and .50-caliber machine guns tore them to pieces.
To say this was a desperate fight just doesn’t do it justice. Two of the attacking Kriegsmariners were struck in the head with coffee mugs. Gun crews unable to depress their weapons sufficiently began throwing empty ammunition cases down on the advancing Germans. Several enemy sailors still managed to board the American vessel.
The boatswain’s mate pulled his 1911 pistol and shot the first man dead. The Chief Fire Controlman swept the deck of the German boat with his Thompson. Lt. Cmdr. Able later said he enjoyed, “Excellent results.”
One enemy sailor managed to make it into the wardroom where a ship’s cook doused him in hot coffee before pummeling him into submission with the coffee pot. Five Germans were captured alive onboard the Buckley and escorted below by a sailor armed with a hammer. Meanwhile, the German deck gun crew literally disintegrated when struck by a burst of four 40mm high-explosive rounds.
As the U-boat scraped along the Buckley’s starboard side, an American torpedoman tossed a hand grenade through the open hatch to the U-boat’s conning tower. The dying U-boat then veered into the Buckley near the stern, tearing a hole in the engine room and shearing off the starboard screw. However, U-66 was done. The entire fight had spanned a mere 16 minutes.
The Aftermath
The crew of the Buckley expended 300 rounds of .45 ACP, 60 rounds of .30-06, 30 rounds of 12-gauge buckshot, and a pair of fragmentation grenades along with the aforementioned dinnerware and coffeepot. Roughly half of the U-boat’s crew survived. Oberleutnant Seehausen went down with his boat. He was 26.
The Buckley returned to Boston under her own power. Lieutenant Cmdr. Brent Able was awarded the Navy Cross, the Navy’s second-highest award for valor. His crew was authorized to wear a combat star on their European-African Theater ribbons.
The sinking of U-66 was the last close quarters ship-to-ship combat in U.S. Naval history. What a bunch of freaking studs.
Depending upon how you count them, there are between 193 and 195 recognized countries in the world today. The Vatican and Palestine are the two most ambiguous examples. Nowadays, nations go to war over the most trivial geographical infractions. However, the world was once a much more rollicking, less regimented space.
This fetching lad is the esteemed Christopher Columbus. Depending upon your perspective, he was either a valiant explorer or a bloodthirsty imperialist.
The Guy
In fourteen hundred ninety-two
Columbus sailed the ocean blue.
He had three ships
The Nina, The Pinta and the Santa Maria, too.
He left from Spain;
He sailed through sunshine, wind and rain.
Most everybody knows that Christopher Columbus was the first European to explore the Americas. There is controversy and ambiguity, because there will forever be controversy and ambiguity. Leif Erikson the Viking just popped over for a visit but didn’t stick around some 500 years earlier.
And there is the Native American perspective that they didn’t really need exploring at all and would sooner have simply been left alone. Regardless, 534 years ago, Chris and his mates were poking around Hispaniola (modern-day Haiti) when rank laziness conspired to shape the affairs of men.
This is a reproduction of the Santa Maria, Columbus’ flagship. Considering what was being asked of it, she wasn’t much of a boat.
The Ship
Columbus’ flagship was the Santa María. She was a 15th-century carrack that had been previously christened La Gallega. It was a long time ago, and the specific dimensions are in dispute. Most historians agree that the Santa Maria was about 62 feet long on deck and displaced some 125 tons. She was crewed by between 40 and 45 sailors.
62 feet is not a terribly big boat to be traversing the entire breadth of the Atlantic Ocean. And that was the largest of his three. Columbus’ expedition was indeed a fairly bold enterprise.
On Christmas Day 1492, Columbus and his buddies had just killed an eventful few days navigating around the northern coast of Hispaniola, avoiding obstacles and trading with the local Taino people.
They had gone two nights without sleep and were all fairly spanked. With the sea a dead calm (“like water in a bowl” per his later description), Columbus retired to his cabin for a little shut-eye. He left the ship in the hands of his capable but equally exhausted helmsman.
At around 11 pm, the helmsman, feeling like there really wasn’t much untoward that could occur in seas this smooth, passed the reins off to a grumete or cabin boy and hit the rack himself. Columbus had specific standing orders never to do this. However, when the cat’s away …
The Accident
As everybody else on the Santa Maria slept soundly, this poor, inexperienced kid just held the course. Without anyone being the wiser, prevailing currents pushed the heavy vessel toward a sandbar. The first inkling that something was amiss occurred when the rudder scraped the sand.
The poor kid screamed like he was being skinned. Columbus and the ship’s master, Juan de la Cosa, rushed to the deck. However, by then it was too late. The ship was most thoroughly grounded.
This was bad, but it wasn’t the end of the world. These were experienced sailors. Columbus directed De la Cosa to launch a small boat, secure an anchor, and then winch the Santa Maria backward off of the sandbar. However, the tide was going out. The clock was ticking.
The Coward
There was no Coast Guard cutter or rescue helicopter standing by. They were a zillion miles from home, surrounded by unexplored territory and a bunch of sketchy natives. If they screwed this up, these guys were done. As such, when De la Cosa got out in his small boat, he just scuppered off to the nearby Nina and left Columbus to fend for himself.
The Nina’s skipper wisely refused to allow the coward De la Cosa to board, so he returned to the Santa Maria a humble and broken man. However, by then the damage was done. The Santa Maria was doomed.
The Catastrophe
These big wooden ships looked substantial, but they weren’t designed to support their own mass outside the water. As the sea receded, the ship’s seams split. The Santa Maria was irretrievably ruined. As the tide came back in, she filled with water.
A local Taíno chief named Guacanagaríx paddled out to help along with some of his mates. The crew salvaged the cargo and harvested as much of the ship’s timber as possible. However, the remaining crew members would not all fit aboard the remaining ships.
Columbus used the salvaged materials from the Santa Maria to construct a fortified settlement, the first of its kind in the Americas. He named it La Navidad (Christmas) because the accident occurred on Christmas Day. Necessity forced him to leave behind thirty-nine of his men.
So the first official European settlement in the New World was the result of a sleepy helmsman, a cowardly ship’s master, and a cabin boy who was just doing the very best he could.
I still say that the 1950’s were a mighty weird time! Grumpy
When the M1 Carbine (officially the United States Carbine, Caliber .30, M1) began to reach American combat units in late 1942, the handy little rifle quickly gained a reputation as the “soldier’s pet”.
And why not? The little M1 Carbine weighed just 5.8 pounds (loaded with a 15-round magazine) and was only 35.6” long. By 1942 standards, it was a semi-automatic sweetheart.
Consequently, as the Carbine quickly made its way from its intended role as a weapon for officers and specialist troops (like artillerymen, tankers, and paratroops) into the hands of the long-suffering infantrymen, the G.I.’s penchant for customization created some interesting field modifications for their new favorite rifle.
They had plenty of opportunities — there were 6.1 million carbines made during World War II, and they were issued in every combat theatre.
Bayonets
M1 Carbines equipped with a bayonet lug did not appear until the final weeks of the war, but that doesn’t mean that American troops weren’t creating their own bayonets for the Carbine in the field.
Ultimately, the M3 fighting knife was transformed into the M4 bayonet for use on the M1 Carbine. The official design appears to follow along with improvised bayonets created in the field.
Flash Hiders
During the war, the T23 (later designated M3) flash hider was developed for use with the M3 Carbine and its infrared sniperscope. Only a handful of the M3 Carbines saw service by the war’s end, and consequently few of the M3 flash hiders were in use until the Korean War.
Even so, I managed to find a pair of photos of a field-made flash hider from an Army unit in the Philippines. Different units experimented with flash hider/compensator combinations for their carbines, the flash hider for use in close-quarters night fighting, and the compensator for Carbines field-modified for fully automatic fire.
The Clip Carrier
By late 1944, the twin-magazine “stock pouch” was fitted to many carbines — giving troops quick access to three 15-round magazines without using an ammunition belt. In the spring of 1945, a semi-official “clip carrier” was introduced in small numbers in Germany.
The unusual ammunition clip carrier allowed three additional 15-round magazines to be carried forward of the normal 15-round magazine in the mag-well (60 rounds total).
he U.S. War Department’s “Combat Lessons No. 8” describes the device:
This ammunition clip carrier was designed by T/4 Pierce S. Priest, for use with the .30 caliber carbine M1. When the carrier is fully loaded, the exhausted clip is removed in the usual manner and a fresh clip placed in position for insertion by pressure exerted with fingers of the left hand at the front of the carrier. When the carrier is partially loaded, operation is the same except that the fingers of the left hand are inserted at the side of the carrier.
Cut-Down Carbine
Units with access to tools often experimented with converting an M1 Carbine to full-auto fire. Likewise, the already small carbine was sometimes cut down even further to create an oversized pistol, or machine-pistol.
During the 1960s, both Iver Johnson and Universal created commercial variants of the M1 Carbine cut down to pistol length for sale in the USA. It seems likely that the G.I. field modifications were popular enough for postwar manufacturers to “productize” them.
Bandolier-Sling
As a photo researcher, I can tell you that I often find interesting images of firearms modifications or adaptations that ask more questions than they answer. Back in 2006, I published a photo study of the M1 Carbine in action. In that book, I included a couple of photos that showed Marines on Okinawa with a unique sling that doubled as a bandolier for their Carbines. I didn’t say much about it in the captions, as I had no reference to describe specifically what it was.
In the summer of that year, I sat down with renowned gun researcher Dolf Goldsmith. Dolf looked at those images, and quickly asked that a box of .30 Carbine cartridges along with the web ammunition belt for a Browning M1917 .30 caliber machine gun be brought to him. With both of those in hand and an M1 Carbine on the table, Dolf broke down the “mystery sling”.
The Marines had used a web ammo belt (for the .30 cal M1917 machine gun), and the .30 Carbine rounds held in there perfectly. The newly made sling did the same job as the standard type, while providing the user with about 30 rounds of loose ammunition. All of the materials were readily available, and the conversion was relatively simple to complete.
The next expert I talked to took in all the available information, and then shot back some questions that I could not answer. I reviewed the bandolier-sling photos with the leading M1 Carbine expert, the late Larry Ruth. After a little thought, Larry had this to say: “I think you and Dolf have figured out what it is and how it was made. That makes perfect sense. But I wonder why it exists at all?”
Solving the Mystery
Apparently, the bandolier-sling concept intersected with some research that Larry was conducting on M1 Carbine magazines. Then he hit me with another question: “In all your photo research and collecting, have you found any images that show empty carbine magazines laying discarded on the battlefield?” I thought about it a bit and concluded that I had not.
Larry went on to explain that although there were millions of spare magazines made for the Carbine during the war — enough that individual magazines should have been expendable. Even today, you can find examples of 15-round magazines that are still unopened in their factory wraps. Larry went on to say that he had not seen images that showed discarded carbines mags, and furthermore, he had no anecdotal evidence of empty Carbine magazines treated as disposable by Marines, or G.I.s, or anyone. I asked several WWII combat veterans that used the M1 Carbine, and all that any of them could remember was that when a carbine magazine was empty, they put it in their pocket to eventually reload and use it again.
It was the mathematics of production and distribution of M1 Carbine magazines that wasn’t adding up for Larry. The fact that U.S. combat troops went to the time and trouble to create a sling that doubled as an ammunition bandolier (particularly late in the war when production was at its peak) appeared to be a symptom of a U.S. Ordnance problem with distribution.
The concept of a bandolier-sling would never have come up if American combat troops had enough Carbine magazines that they could confidently discard the empties in a firefight. It seems like a minor point, but it was next-level thinking on Larry’s part, and it also showed that American troops could invent tactical-level solutions for strategic-level problems. Also — spoiler alert — we won the war, so it is unlikely that anyone bothered to investigate it after August of 1945.
In the years after, I have found more images of the carbine bandolier-sling, and while all of them are shown on rifles in the Pacific Theater of the war, not all of them were taken by Marines. Army units used the same modification. This modification may have been used in the ETO or MTO, but I have no photographs to prove it.
Conclusion
So there you have it, a round-up of some of the more interesting adaptations applied to the M1 Carbine by troops in the field. Necessity is truly the mother of invention, and Americans have always acquitted themselves well when it comes to creativity in times of need.