There is a small wax box in a museum case at the Hershey Community Archives in Pennsylvania. It is roughly the size of a paperback novel. Printed on the side in black sand serif letters are the words K Ration. The box is brown. The wax has yellowed slightly. If you stood across the room, you might mistake it for a book.
The men who were issued these boxes carried them in the pockets of their field jackets and in the pouches of their web gear by the hundreds of millions. in winters in Belgium and summers in the Pacific and springs in Italy. All through the years from 1942 to the end of the war, when those men were killed in action, the boxes were often the first thing the burial parties found on them.
The boxes and the things that came out of them and the other things that came out of the men’s pockets next to them told a story about an entire civilization. The Germans who searched the bodies in the fields of Belgium in the winter of 1944 understood this. Some of them said so out loud in interrogation rooms after they were captured in private letters home and in conversations they did not know were being recorded.
This is what was in those pockets. And this is the story of how it got there. We have to begin almost a decade before any of those soldiers ever set foot in Europe. In the small office of a chocolate company in central Pennsylvania in the spring of 1937, a man from the United States Army Quartermaster Corps named Captain Paul Logan walked through the door of the Hershey Chocolate Corporation that April with a question.
He sat down with William Murray, the company’s president, and Sam Hinkle, the chief chemist. He told them what he wanted. He wanted a chocolate bar that would not melt in the desert. He wanted it to weigh 4 oz. He wanted it to contain 600 calories. He wanted it sealed against poison gas. And in a phrase that the Hershey archives still preserve in his original correspondence, he wanted it to taste a little better than a boiled potato.
The reason for that last requirement was not aesthetic. Logan wanted soldiers to carry the bar as an emergency ration. If it tasted too good, men would eat it for pleasure on slow days and then have nothing in their pockets when they were cut off from supply on a fast one. Hlel and his team worked on the formula for months.
They cut sugar. They added oat flour to lift the melting point. They increased the chocolate liquor and dropped the milk. The mixture they produced was so dense it could not be poured into molds the way ordinary chocolate is. Each bar had to be pressed in by hand. HL later wrote that even at the experimental stage, it was clear to the chocolate technologists that sweat and toil, if not blood and tears, lay ahead when the time came for quantity production.
The first contract was signed in June of 1937 for 90,000 bars. They went out to soldiers in the Philippines, to Hawaii, to Panama, to the Texas border, and a small batch traveled with Admiral Richard Bird to Antarctica on his last expedition. The reports came back saying the bars worked. They were unpleasant to eat, but a man who ate three of them in a day had enough calories to fight on.
Between 1937 and December of 1941, Hershey produced these bars in small batches at irregular intervals. The army was buying enough to keep its overseas garrisons supplied with emergency rations, no more than that. Most of the production capacity at the Hershey factory in the years between the experiment and the war was still given over to the milk chocolate bars that ordinary Americans bought at corner drugstores.
Then Pearl Harbor happened on January 2nd, 1942. The army placed an order for 300,000 bars in a single contract. For the first time in the history of the Hershey factory, three shifts ran around the clock, 7 days a week. The order was filled in 13 days. The pace did not slow after that. Throughout 1942 and 1943, the orders kept growing and the company kept finding ways to push more bars off the line.
New molding machinery had to be designed because the bar was too dense for any commercial mold ever built. Conveyor belts had to be added. The packaging itself was redesigned after Pearl Harbor to seal the bar against poison gas since the army planners assumed that any future battlefield could include chemical weapons.
Each bar was wrapped in aluminum foil, packed inside cellophane, sealed in waxed cardboard, and shipped in cases of 12, then nailed into a wooden crate. By the end of the war, Hershey would manufacture more than 40 million field ration bars and more than 380 million of a slightly more palatable version called the Tropical Chocolate Bar, which was issued to troops in the heat of the Pacific.
The company received five Army Navy e awards for production excellence over the course of the war, an honor given to civilian factories that exceeded their quotas under wartime conditions. The chocolate company, very nearly shut down at the start of the war as a non-essential business, became a strategic supplier of military calories.
There is a quiet detail buried in the Hershey production records that captures what was happening on the American home front during these years. The company’s regular commercial chocolate sales did not collapse during the war. They grew. Even as the factory was running three shifts a day producing ration bars for the military, the civilian appetite for Hershey’s milk chocolate kept rising.
The country was eating more chocolate, not less. It was sending more chocolate overseas with its soldiers than any country had ever sent with its army. It was doing both at the same time. The civilian and the military were not really in competition for the same scarce resource. They were both being supplied simultaneously by an industrial machine that could keep pace with both.
I tell you about Logan and Hinkle because they are the small visible tip of something almost incomprehensibly large. By the middle of the war, the United States military had built a supply system without precedent in the history of warfare. The kration that turned up in the pockets of dead Americans across Western Europe was not a single product.
It was a coordinated system designed in 1941 by Ancel Keys, a physiologist at the University of Minnesota, manufactured by hundreds of companies under federal contract, packaged in waxed cardboard that resisted water, gas, and rough handling, and built to fit a soldier’s pocket. The full daily allotment, three boxes labeled breakfast, dinner, and supper, contained roughly 2,830 calories.
Inside each box were the canned and packaged staples a man would have eaten if he were home, miniaturized for the field, the breakfast unit contained a small can of chopped ham and eggs, a few dense biscuits, a compressed cereal or fruit bar, a packet of soluble coffee, sugar tablets, chewing gum, and a fourack of cigarettes.
The dinner unit substituted processed cheese for the meat. The supper unit contained a different canned meat, often a pork loaf, with a packet of bullion powder. Across the three boxes, there were also a few Halazone water purification tablets, a wooden spoon, a small folded sheet of toilet paper, a book of matches, and a small can opener called the P38, a piece of stamped steel an inch and a half long that a soldier could keep on his dog tag chain.
The cigarettes inside were the standard American brands. Lucky Strikes, Camels, Chesterfields, the same labels a clark in Chicago could buy at his lunch counter that same week. The matches in some lots were waterproofed. Outside the Kration, in his own pocket, or in his web gear, the soldier carried things that were not part of the ration system at all, but that the army had made standard issue.
A small medical pouch on his belt held the brown paper packet of sulfanylamide powder. the morphine curette, a carile first aid dressing, a small tin of foot powder, and a packet of halazone for water that he could not boil. In a cargo pocket, there might be a folded compress, a tube of insect repellent if he had drawn supplies recently, and a small bottle of atterine tablets if he had served in malarial country.
By the winter of 1944, the German soldier on the other side of the line had a pocket that contained almost none of this. The contrast had not always been so brutal. There had been a moment much earlier in the war when the Germans had first seen the inside of an American supply system and had not known quite what to make of it.
The moment came in February of 1943 in the dust and rocks of central Tunisia at a place the maps marked as Cassarine Pass. The Americans there were inexperienced. Their tactics in their first major engagement against the German Africa corbs were poor. Their commanders were poor. Over five days of fighting, the German and Italian forces under the operational direction of Irwin Rammel broke them.
American losses ran to about 6,500 men killed, wounded, captured, or missing along with hundreds of tanks, halftracks, and trucks. By every battlefield measure that mattered, Casarine was a defeat, and the Germans treated it as one. But the German salvage parties who went over the abandoned American positions afterward came back with reports that puzzled their own officers.
The reports were not really about the tanks. The reports were about the rest of it. Crates of cigarettes still in factory packaging, cans of fruit and meat in such quantity that the salvage parties could not haul them all away in the trucks. They had cartons of chocolate bars, coffee in bulk, tents, new blankets in folded stacks, medical supplies sufficient by German calculation for an entire division for a month scattered across an area where a single American battalion had been holding for a week. Personal radios,
magazines, letters. The American war correspondent Ernie Pile visited one of those areas a few weeks later after it had been retaken. He wrote about what he saw. Equipment, food, paper, personal goods, all of it scattered across the desert in such volume that the men retaking the position were walking through stacks and drifts of it.
The Germans had not bothered to take half of what they had captured. There had been too much. The Vermacht had had a phrase for this. In the months after Casarene, in officers mess conversations and in private letters home, it described an army that had brought too much with it, that fought as much from its commissary as from its rifle.
It was a slightly contemptuous phrase. The implication was that an army that needed chewing gum and fruit cocktail to function was not a serious army. For about 18 months, the Germans believed this. They believed it through the Tunisian campaign which RML’s successors lost in May of 1943 with a quarter of a million Axis prisoners.
They believed it through Sicily and Salerno. They believed it more carefully through the long grinding Italian campaign. By the time the Americans came ashore at Normandy in June of 1944, German officers in the field had stopped believing that American soldiers were soft. They had been hit too many times by men who fought hard and well.
But they still believed almost without exception that the American supply system was a vulnerability too long, too dependent on shipping, too vulnerable to interdiction. The Arden’s offensive that began in December of 1944 was in part a bet on that vulnerability. The German plan was to drive west across the Muse and seize the Belgian port of Antwerp, which the Allies had captured in early September.
If the port could be taken away from them, the Allied advance would, in the German calculation, run out of supply within weeks, and the Western front might be stabilized long enough to redirect German strength east against the Russians. The plan failed. By the time the operation collapsed in mid January of 1945, the German army on the Western Front had lost roughly 100,000 men killed, wounded, or captured.
The last reserve Panza divisions had been used up and the war in the west was effectively over. But while the offensive was still moving, in the third week of December of 1944, German soldiers in the Ardens were going through the pockets of the dead Americans they had killed and the supply dumps they had overrun. What they found in those pockets is what we are talking about now.
And what they were comparing it to in their own pockets and their own kit is worth understanding before we go any further. The German infantrymen in the Ardens that winter had been on a tobacco ration of six cigarettes a day per man since June of 1940 when Hitler personally ordered the limit. Hitler was a non-smoker who genuinely disapproved of the habit.
But the Vemar’s medical staff had argued that some level of cigarette ration was essential for morale and the compromise had been six. By the late autumn of 1944, those six were unreliable. Supply broke down regularly. Replacements were filler, sometimes leaf cut with whatever was available. The standard daily bread issue was a slab of dark rye, often the late war Ursat loaf cut with bran or sawdust to stretch the flour.
The Vermacht’s pre-war bread ration had once been 750 grams of decent rye. By the autumn of 1944, on many sectors of the front, the actual issue was less than half of that, and the bread itself was greenish and dense and sour from inferior ingredients. There was canned meat or sausage when the field kitchen could deliver one.
There was a small portion of margarine or hazelnut paste, almost never butter. The coffee, when it existed at all, was an ursats brew made from chory or roasted barley, or in the worst stretches of the autumn, ground acorns. There was no caffeine in any of it. The men running the German supply effort knew this.
The men eating it knew it. The German army’s supply system, which had been remarkable in 1939 and still functional in 1941, had been overwhelmed by the geography of its own war. The eastern front alone was longer than the entire western front from Switzerland to the North Sea. Every kilometer the Germans advanced into Russia had to be supplied across roads, railways, and tracks that had been designed to carry less and that froze, washed out, or were torn up by partisans and air attack.
By the second half of 1944, with the Allied air forces controlling the skies over occupied Europe and the German railway system being systematically dismembered by strategic bombing, even getting a tin of canned meat from a depot in Germany to a soldier in Belgium was an achievement. Sometimes the achievement happened. Often it did not.
What was in the American soldier’s pocket was not a luxury. It was the standard issue of an army that had decided that one of its young men sent to fight in a foreign winter forest should be given roughly twice the calories, several times the medical supplies, and many times the personal comforts of the German soldier who would shoot him.
This was not coincidence. It was the visible end of a long chain of decisions made over years by quarter masters, factory managers, food scientists, and war production board planners 3,000 mi away. Two of those decisions are worth pausing on because they do not look like much in a pocket, and they meant the difference between living and dying in a winter forest.
The first was a brown paper packet about the size of a folded handkerchief stamped with the words sulfanylamide powder. Inside was a fine yellowish dust, sulfur as soldiers called it. A man hit through the leg or the abdomen who could pour this powder into his open wound or who could have a buddy do it for him before the medic arrived had a dramatically reduced chance of dying from infection.
The drug had been discovered by a Bayer chemist named Ghard Domac in the early 1930s. The original commercial form Prontoil was a German invention patented in 1935. By the autumn of 1944, the Vermacht still had access to sulfur drugs, but quantities at the front had declined to the point where wounded German soldiers in the Arden that winter regularly received nothing for their wounds at all.
Aid stations had run out by the middle of December. The American soldier carried his own packet. Every man in the line had one. Behind him in the chain were field medics who carried larger envelopes and battalion aid stations stocked with industrial quantities. The Germans had invented the drug. The Americans had taken the discovery, mass- prodduced it under American patent during the war, and put a personal supply into every infantryman’s belt.
The second was a small glass tube about 3 in long with a needle protected by a wire loop. This was the morphine cereet, a singleuse injector that a wounded man could use on himself or on a buddy in less than half a minute. Break the loop. Push the wire down to puncture the seal. push the needle into the thigh.
Squeeze the tube. The dose was 30 mg of morphine tartrate, enough for severe pain. The device was developed by ER Squibbon Suns in the late 1930s and adopted by the army in 1940. It was not the only American medical innovation of the war, but it was the one that most often saved a man from going into shock before he reached an aid station.
The German equivalent existed, but by late 1944, it was reserved almost entirely for officers and for the wounded who reached rear hospitals. The man bleeding in the snow, rarely got it. These two items, a brown paper packet and a glass tube, weighed almost nothing. Together, they represented a level of personal medical care no army on Earth had ever issued to its private soldiers before.
They were standard. Every man in the line had them. They were as ordinary as the chewing gum. Beyond the rations and the medicine were items that did not look like military equipment at all. They looked like fragments of someone’s living room. In the wallet of an average American GI when he died and the burial party went through his pockets, there was a folded photograph or two.
Sometimes a wife, sometimes a girl back home he was not yet engaged to. Sometimes parents on a porch, sometimes a younger brother in a school uniform. The army had by 1943 begun issuing standard cardboard wallets to enlisted men in some commands and even where it had not the men had bought their own at the post exchange.
The wallet contained the soldier’s identification card, his blood type, his religion if he chose to record it, sometimes a small printed prayer card or a St. Christopher medal or a muza, and a few bills in local currency that the quartermaster had issued. The country he had come from was visible in his wallet in a way that could not be hidden and that the burial party could read at a glance.
The Germans noticed beside the photographs there was usually mail. A Vmail letter or two folded thin read so often the creases had worn through. A Vmail letter is worth understanding because it tells you something specific about the country he had come from. Vmail, short for victory mail, was a postal system the United States adopted from a British wartime service in June of 1942.
A serviceman’s family wrote a letter on a special preprinted form, took it to a local post office and mailed it. The letter was photographed onto 16 mm microfilm at a Kodak processing center. The microfilm was flown across the Atlantic. At a receiving station near the front, the negatives were reprinted onto small photographic paper at about a quarter of the original size, sorted, and delivered to the soldier in the field.
About 1,800 letters fit on a single 100 ft roll of film. The 37 mailbags it would have taken to ship those letters in their original paper form, weighing more than 2,500 lb, were replaced by a single sack weighing 45 lb. Cargo space saved, weight saved, time saved. In 1944, the United States Army handled more than two billion pieces of mail.
By the end of 1945, that figure was over 3 billion. A letter could leave a kitchen table in Iowa or Oregon and reach the field jacket of a soldier in Belgium in 9 days. A German soldier in the Ardens that winter, going through the pockets of an American he had just killed, could be looking at a letter that had been written by a woman in the American Midwest while she was still drinking her morning coffee less than a fortnight earlier.
There was no equivalent on his own side of the line. The Vermacht’s postal system to its men in the East by the autumn of 1944 was measured in weeks. The Vermacht’s postal system to its men in Russia in the worst stretches of 1943 had taken a month or longer. The mail was not the only paper in the dead man’s pockets.
There was often a small horizontal paperback book. These were not commercial editions. They were the products of a program called the Armed Services Editions, run by a private nonprofit called the Council on Books in Wartime, which between 1943 and 1947 printed approximately 122 million copies of 1,322 unique titles.
The format was deliberately small, sized to fit in the cargo pocket of a uniform shirt or trouser. The covers were thin paper. The bindings were sewn for durability. They contained novels, short stories, poetry, history, technical references, anything an American publisher had produced that the council thought might be useful or comforting or instructive in a foxhole.
The dead American at the side of a Belgian road in December of 1944 might have one of these in his hip pocket. So might his living squadmate 200 m away. There would also frequently be a small booklet titled pocket guide to Germany distributed by the millions to American forces in the late summer and autumn of 1944.
The pocket guide was a 48page War Department publication. It explained the country, the language, the people, the recent history, and the rules of conduct. It told the soldier why he was fighting and what he was likely to find on the other side of the border. It was issued to ordinary infantrymen, not just officers.
The dead man might have his copy folded and worn in an inside pocket of his field jacket. Among officers and a number of airborne troops, there might also be a folded piece of cloth, a printed map of the surrounding country, large enough to navigate by, light enough to weigh almost nothing, waterproof, and silent when crumpled. Most of these maps were printed not on actual silk, despite what they were often called, but on rayon by an American program run by the aeronautical chart service after late 1942.
They were issued primarily to airmen and to special forces. But in the airborne divisions that fought in the bulge, the 82nd, the 101st, the 17th, many soldiers carried them as well. They were the descendant of a British escape and evasion program managed by an organization called MI9, which had been issuing similar maps to downed airmen since 1940.
There were also items that historians and museum curators tend to overlook because they were not exotic. A small bar of soap in commercial packaging with a brand name. A toothbrush. A spare pair of dry wool socks, sometimes two pairs, sometimes carried inside the field jacket against the chest to keep the body heat in them, a small tin of foot powder, a pocketk knife, a few small denomination coins or bills in local currency issued by the quartermaster.
A German staff sergeant going through these things in the snow of a Belgian field would not have seen them as luxury. Exactly. He would have seen them as evidence. Evidence of a country that had not been bombed. Evidence of a country whose factories and farms and shipping lanes still worked. Evidence of a country whose soldiers were not being sent to the front to make do with whatever the supply train could spare.
evidence of a country that had decided somewhere in its institutional memory that a young man asked to die for it should be given every comfort the country could spare him without compromising his ability to fight. The Germans did not have any of this. By the autumn of 1944, they could not have produced any of it even if they had wanted to.
The reasons were not simple, but they reduced to two enormous facts. The first was the Eastern Front. From June of 1941 onward, the veh had placed 2/3 or more of its strength in Russia at any given moment. The Eastern front had consumed German manpower at a rate no army in modern times has been able to absorb.
By the time American forces landed in Normandy in June of 1944, German military casualties on the Eastern Front, killed, wounded, missing, and captured combined, totaled more than 3 million men. The men who died first in any army are the men who lead from the front. The German divisions facing the Americans in the Arden that winter were in many cases hollowed out.
The Vulks grenadier divisions raised in the second half of 1944 were filled with men over 40, men under 18, transferred Luftwaffer ground crews who had never been infantry, and Creeks marine sailors whose ships no longer existed. They were given hasty training, often less than 3 months.
They went forward with whatever equipment was available, which meant a confusing mixture of standard German rifles, captured Soviet weapons, and old French rifles dating from 1940. The second fact was the home front. Germany had been bombed continuously since 1942. By the end of the war, Allied air raids would kill somewhere in the range of 400,000 German civilians, a figure that varies between roughly 350,000 and 600,000 depending on the historian and the methodology.
Industrial production was being maintained at high levels under the leadership of Albert Spear, the Minister of Armaments, who had taken over the role in 1942 and overseen what came to be called the armament’s miracle. But the conditions for the civilian population had collapsed. Food rationing for civilians fell to between roughly 1,600 and 2,000 calories a day for most of the population by the winter of 1944 to 45.
Coffee was effectively unavailable in any real form. Sugar was rationed below subsistence. Tobacco was a luxury bought and sold on the black market. Spear himself understood with a clarity that Hitler and most of the senior Nazi leadership refused to share that the war could not be won on the basis of armament’s output alone.
The figures his ministry knew and that he tried at various points in 1943 and 1944 to communicate to Hitler were not battlefield figures. They were industrial figures. American steel production in 1944 reached approximately 80 million tons. German steel production, including the output of all occupied territories, was approximately 18 to 22 million tons.
American aircraft production for 1944 exceeded 96,000 units. German aircraft production at its frantic late war peak reached just under 40,000. The Liberty ship program was launching merchant vessels at a peak rate that exceeded 120 hulls a month at its high point, an output the German submarine fleet could not have sunk, even if it had been at full operational strength, which by 1944 it was no longer.
What Spear was trying to make Hitler understand was that the war was not really being fought on the battlefield anymore. It was being fought in factories the Germans could not bomb by workers the Germans could not kill on a continent the Germans could not reach. By the time of the Arden’s offensive, Spear was telling close associates privately that the war was already lost and had been since at least Normandy.
He kept producing weapons at impressive rates. He no longer believed the weapons would matter. This was the situation when German soldiers in the Arden that December bent down to search the pockets of the American dead. The chocolate bar, the cigarettes, the morphine, the sulfur, the photographs, the letters 9 days old, the small soap with a brand name on it, the dry pair of socks, the booklets and the maps and the wooden spoons.
None of these were what the German soldier had been told to expect. He had been told for years in the official German press that the Americans were a soft and selfish people, a money-chasing nation that would not stand in a real fight. The propaganda had a phrase for the wealth of the American war effort that was quietly contemptuous. By the winter of 1944 in the field, the contempt was harder to sustain.
I want to spend a moment on what German soldiers actually said about this when they were captured because the testimony exists in the records and it is more honest than most of what was written after the war by senior German officers in their published memoirs. In the spring of 1945, after the Americans had crossed the Rine and were advancing into the heart of Germany, the United States Army’s interrogation units behind the front were processing thousands of recently captured Germans, captains and lieutenants and sergeants, the middle
ranks of an army that had been shattered. The interrogators noticed a pattern in what these men said when asked the standard question about when they had personally understood that the war was lost. The expected answers came up. the bombing of German cities, the Russian advance, the death of friends, the collapse of supply.
But there was another category of answer that the interrogators kept hearing and that they had to file separately in their reports. The other category was the pockets. The recurring observations in those interrogation transcripts followed similar shapes. There were captured Germans who said they had understood the war was lost when they had taken a thermos of real coffee from a downed American pilot behind German lines after months in which they themselves had drunk nothing but a sats brew.
There were captured Germans who said they had understood when they had overrun an American outpost and found in addition to the radios and maps and ammunition a complete dry change of clothing for every man including spare wool socks. There were captured Germans who said they had understood when they had pulled from the pocket of a dead American a bar of toilet soap wrapped in commercial packaging with a brand name on the rapper in a war zone in the middle of the worst winter in Europe in a generation. The pattern was consistent
enough that American interrogation reports flagged it as a recurring theme. German enlisted prisoners, when asked the standard question about the moment they had personally understood the war was lost, pointed more often to small material details from American prisoners, casualties, or captured supplies than they did to any specific battlefield event.
Senior German officers held under different conditions said similar things in private. In a converted English country house north of London called Trent Park, the British Military Intelligence Service had been holding senior captured German officers since 1942 and recording their conversations without their knowledge. The transcripts run to roughly 50,000 pages across all the British facilities used for this purpose.
They are now one of the richest sources we have for what German generals actually thought as opposed to what they later wrote in their carefully edited postwar memoirs. Among the prisoners at Trent Park was Hans Jurgen Fonim, the German colonel general who had surrendered in Tunisia in May of 1943 and who spent more than a year in British custody before being shipped to a prisoner of war camp in Mississippi.
In the recordings preserved by the British listeners, the captured German officers returned often to the question of American material superiority. They had seen the captured American supplies in Tunisia. They had read the reports from the Western Front. They had eaten captured American rations themselves before being taken to England.
The conclusion these men reached in private conversations they did not know were being recorded was the same conclusion the captured enlisted men were reaching out in the frontline interrogation cages. The supplies were not the problem. The supplies were the symptom. The problem was the country behind the supplies. A country that could fill those pockets item by item was a country an army could not defeat.
The pattern was not the chocolate. It was the fact that the chocolate could be there at all. It was the fact that an army on the other side of an ocean 3,000 mi deep into a global war could afford to give every private soldier a 4 oz sealed bar of cocoa and sugar that he might never need to eat.
That kind of margin was not a battlefield fact. It was a national fact. A country with that kind of margin was not really an opponent. It was a different category of thing. If your father or grandfather served in any branch of the United States military in the Second World War, I would consider it a privilege to read his unit and his story in the comments.
The men who carried what we have described in this video carried it because a country had decided they should. They are worth remembering by the specific small things they had on them. So, how did it actually happen? How does a country in the space of half a generation build the industrial machinery to put 4 ounces of pressed chocolate, a glass curet of morphine, a packet of sulfur powder, a bar of branded soap, a photograph of a wife, and a letter 9 days old into the pocket of every one of the millions of men it
sent overseas? The answer is a hundred years of decisions. A country that had built its railroads in the 1870s and its automotive industry in the 1910s and its chemical industry in the 1920s was a country that had almost without noticing accumulated the technical foundations to do what was being asked of it in 1944.
The Hershey factory in Pennsylvania did not appear out of nowhere. It was built on the back of a sugar processing industry that had been refined for 50 years. The Kodak microfilm process that powered Vmail was built on photographic technology that had been improved for 40 years.
The morphine curette was the product of a pharmaceutical manufacturing capacity that had been growing since the 1890s. The standardized waxed cardboard of the Kration box was built on a paper and packaging industry that by 1940 was the largest in the world. When the war came, none of these industries had to be invented from scratch.
They had to be redirected. Detroit’s automobile assembly lines were retoled to make tanks and jeeps and aircraft engines. Hershey’s chocolate lines were retoled to make ration bars. Squibs pharmaceutical plants added ceret production. Kodak’s photographic engineers built the Vmail microfilm cameras.
The country that put 4 of supplies in a private solders’s pocket on a Belgian morning in 1944 was not improvising. It was harvesting decades of accumulated industrial choices all at once and pouring the harvest into the pockets of its young men. Germany had built remarkable things in those same decades. German chemistry, German optics, German mechanical engineering had at various times led the world.
The Tiger tank that some of the German divisions in the Ardens were equipped with was a more powerful weapon than the American Sherman. Gun for gun, the MG42 machine gun fired faster than any American equivalent. German submarine technology, jet aircraft technology, rocket technology, in some cases led the world.
None of that mattered when an American private opened a wax box and pulled out a piece of milk chocolate because the box was not really a piece of food. It was the visible end of a continent’s worth of decisions about what a soldier was worth. The German soldiers who searched those bodies understood. Not all of them. Maybe not the part of them that was still trying to do their duty, that was still loading rifles and listening for orders and staying alive.
But some part understood what the box meant and what the photograph meant and what the letter meant. Some part of them knew that they were not really fighting an army. They were fighting a country. and the country had reached them in the form of the small, ordinary, mass-produced objects in the pockets of the dead. The great public investigations of the German army’s defeat have all reached for explanations involving strategy, leadership, weapons, the Eastern front, the failures of Hitler’s command.
Those explanations are real. They are correct as far as they go. But on the ground, in the snow, in the fields where the men who actually fought were also the men who actually died, there was a quieter explanation, and it was sitting in a pocket. It was 4 oz of pressed chocolate that tasted a little better than a boiled potato.
It was a brown paper packet of yellowish powder. It was a photograph of someone’s mother. It was a letter from Iowa that had crossed the Atlantic in 9 days. It was a country folded down to the size of a paperback novel in the inside pocket of a field jacket. It was the visible evidence that the Reich was no longer fighting another army.
It was fighting the entire industrial output of an unbombed continent item by item in the pockets of dead 20year-olds. That is what stunned them. Not the food, not the morphine, not the photographs taken on their own. It was the realization when those things came out of the pockets of the dead and were laid out for what they were that the four pounds of supplies they were looking at were not a soldier’s loadout.
They were a verdict. The country that had filled those pockets had already won. And the men searching them had been looking at the proof in their hands all along. The men who carried those pockets, the actual men, the riflemen and the medics and the truck drivers and the radio operators did not know they were carrying a verdict.
They thought they were carrying lunch. They thought they were carrying a chocolate bar that did not taste very good and a packet of powder that the medic had told them might save their life and a photograph of a girl they hoped to marry when they got home. They did not know that the small ordinary things in their inside pockets were the heaviest thing on the battlefield.
They were just trying to stay warm and to keep moving and to not die in a country whose name they could barely pronounce. Most of them came home. Some of them did not. The ones who did came back to a country that, having organized itself to fight a war by being more comfortable than it had ever been, never quite stopped being that country.
The Hershey factory kept making chocolate. The squib laboratories kept making medicine. The mail kept moving. The infrastructure that had filled the pockets of their fathers and brothers became the infrastructure of their own peacetime lives. The highways they drove on, and the supermarkets they shopped in, and the hospitals where their children would be born.
The pockets had been the seed. The country that had planted that seed was the country they all grew old in. The ones who did not come home are buried, most of them, in cemeteries in Belgium and France and Italy and the Pacific, under simple white markers that give a unit and a date and a name. Whatever was in their pockets when they died has long been collected, sorted, returned to families, lost, or in some cases preserved in the museum cases I mentioned at the start of this video. You can still see them.
the wax K ration boxes and the brown sulfur packets and the small glass sires in the National World War II Museum in New Orleans and at the Hershey Community Archives in Pennsylvania and at the Imperial War Museum in London and at small regimental museums in towns across Europe. They are very small, those things, they do not look like much.
They are the most important objects of the 20th century. If this story meant something to you, the like button helps it reach the next person who would care. Subscribe if you want more of the small material histories that don’t always make it into the documentaries, the things in the pockets, and the museum cases that almost no one visits, but that say something true about how the war was actually fought.
There are many of these stories. Most of them are about ordinary men and the ordinary things they were asked to carry. Until the next investigation, take care of
