You Will Shoot Your Eye Out

U.S. Army rations in World War II and before

For most of history, the ability of an army to wage war was greatly limited by its ability to feed itself. Meat and fish can last long when salted, and hard tack could be carried around indefinitely (or grain baked into bread at camp); but canned food, most preserves and refrigeration are relatively recent inventions. Another, even harsher limitation stemmed from the inability to actually transport food: food had to be carried by men, pack animals or animal-drawn carts and wagons – and all those porters, animals and their handlers also needed to eat food. The army needed more transport capacity to also carry food and fodder for the transporters – but that extra food, in turn, had to be carried by things that needed to eat. This was a vicious circle which forced armies to rely on raiding and foraging in the field. Foraging, however, greatly limited the length of a military campaign since a single area could only sustain an army for a short while. Campaigns also had to be timed very accurately: you wanted to get to the enemy’s fields when the harvest was already ripe, but before it could be gathered by the locals and safely deposited in the very city or castle you were about to besiege.

The Trench Ration from 1914 onward was designed for frontline troops whose field kitchens were contaminated by a gas attack. One ration contained one of several types of meats (or fish). The pack was heavy and bulky, and the limited menu made it unpopular with troops.

The ration system was revised several times between the world wars, leading to a system based on the local availability of ingredients and facilities. A-rations in World War II were made at garrisons from fresh, refrigerated or frozen food prepared in dining halls and field kitchens. B-rations made from canned, packaged or preserved ingredients were offered when refrigeration and permanent facilities were not available, but a field kitchen and trained cooks were still present.

The C-ration had several problems. Carrying around six cylindrical cans for each day of meals was cumbersome and loud, forcing soldiers to wrap the cans in socks and rags to dampen the noise that might give away their positions. A second problem was that troops in the field often failed to realize that a single day’s worth of food consisted of six cans. Many soldiers were issued only three for a single day, often only M- or only B-units. This was eventually fixed by stencil-painting instructions and a diagram on the wooden crates the cans came in to explain the proper portions.

And then there was the infamous K-ration. Development on the K-ration was begun in 1941 by physiologist Ancel Keys with the goal of creating a small, lightweight ration that could be carried by paratroopers, tank crews and motorbike couriers. Keys started by going to a supermarket and compiling a menu of commercially available hard biscuits, dry sausages, hard candy and chocolate bars in a 28-ounce (800 gram) package that contained 3,200 calories. He tested this on six soldiers who rated it between “palatable” and “better than nothing” – it didn’t taste good, but it was sufficient for providing energy and suppressing hunger.

The first K-rations to actually go into production came in cardboard boxes: three boxes per day, one for each meal. Every meal contained a can of meat, two types of biscuits, some kind of beverage powder, sugar to sweeten the drink, either candy or chocolate that could be carried in the pocket and snacked on between meals, and some miscellaneous items such as chewing gum and cigarettes.

Calory deficiency was also a result of a poor understanding of sugars. It was already known in the 1940s that sugar is 50% glucose and 50% fructose. What physiologists did not yet understand was that muscles can only use glucose as “fuel,” and fructose was useless; this meant that the actual caloric intake from the sugar in the ration was only half of what it was believed to be.

10-in-1 and 5-in-1 rations. These were inspired by the British “Combined 14-in-1 ration” used in North Africa. These large packages could feed either ten or five people for a day (though the 5-in-1 ration actually came in two-day packages). Somewhat similar to K-rations, these were more popular because of a wider menu selection.

M-ration. The appropriately named Mountain Ration was designed to feed four mountain troops in a cold, high-altitude, low-air-pressure environment with 4,800 calories per man per day. Despite being nutritious and relatively lightweight for its caloric content, it was criticized for requiring heating, which was not always available. An even bigger problem was that Quartermaster Command hated it for the same reasons it did the J-ration, and it was happy to terminate the ration in 1943.

The Type X ration is probably the single most mysterious World War II-era ration, its existence only recorded in a single Quartermaster Corps study written after the war. Its components were K-ration biscuits, chocolate or D-bars, bouillon powder, soluble coffee, fruit bars, sugar, gum, hard candy, canned meat, and multi-vitamin tablets. Only two production runs were ordered, one for 600,000 units in late 1943, and one for 250,000 in late 1944. The ration’s most distinguishing feature was that both the package and all of its contents were completely unlabeled.