This episode re enacts scenes of war and includes gunfire. Listener discretion advised who are tuning into Service Johnny, the strict private first class that are in stories of hunger and war. They joined a service Women Pearl Harbor Member Pearl Harbor, a production from My Heart Radio. We used to just give these people the food from our miss kits. You ain't what you could get, and be thankful for what you were getting. I'm your host, Jacqueline Raposo, Men and women of the United States. On this day, more than sixteen million young Americans are surviving. The three hundred year old American customer of the Musland has it all times called for the fortitude of women. Meanwhile, the British government has begun to racition food and Prime Minister Chamber on Monday from the Thailand and from our Nigi Empa Mount and the struggle single handed until we went joined by the minted rate might of set Raka and later by the overwhelming power and regales of the United States of America. We must be the great awesenal of democracy. In the late nineteen thirties, kids going to school, or working their family farms, or just struggling to find food outlasted the Great Depression, only to find themselves barreling into what would become the deadliest conflict in human history. We've moved through twelve of their individual war and food stories this season, but honestly, I still find it a little hard to connect their intimate experiences with what history books tell us of this overwhelmingly big World War two picture. And so in our final episode this season, we're going to compile all some crossovers from our veterans for two guests who can help us better make sense of things. What changed the most when it comes to combat and puisine. What part did these young men and women play in moving things forward? And where can we most find ourselves in their stories. It's a completely different type of fighting or having to go a tree to tree to root out the Germans. He had to look for the uniform, what the helmet looked like. Not only that they had the anti air thrasher Pickadilly circus. That was a code name on the landing kraft. You were supposed to stop a coordinates. Who's on the coordinate the infantry of the Marines. You don't want to hit them, you want head of them. So with them there are artillery observers on the front lines listening to the cat with These men are describing as what we call Class Witsyan war. This is my coal. It did three tours in Iraq to as a private contractor and a third as a paramilitary civilian with the Defense Intelligence Agency while he was also a Coast Guard officer. He's also authored many fantasy books and two history books on ancient combat while simultaneously working in law enforcement and private intelligence. He doesn't specialize in World War two history, but he has a strong sense of the community our veterans are a part of, plus a jacked up analytical mind. Class Witsian war is traditional warfare as we know it from the Peace of Westphalia up until by argue it's with. But klass Witzian warfare is also known as trinitarian warfare, and trinitarian warfare is there's three things you do to win a war. You destroy your enemy's army, You occupy his territory. Can you break the will of the military infrastructure to carry on the contest? Right? That is how wars have been thought. These are wars of maneuver where military units at the Regimental Battalion Company level are maneuvering against one another, we're charging, retreating in set piece battles, having fos forward, observers calling in fire. None of that has changed. And was that the same in World War One? As well as that a strategy the same. I think they might have had to use signal flags and marker flags, as matter of fact, I'm almost sure they did, but the concepts were still basically the same. My point is is that there isn't that big a difference technologically between what these men were experiencing what's going on now. B M one is still my favorite long gun. It's the same and one that these guys were using, but it's just got fiberglasses that of would that carried. The nineteen eleven it's my favorite pistol. It's called the nineteen eleven because it's from nineteen eleven eight. It is the gun that the Germans had, the best gun of the whole war. All of a sudden, right over my head that the German burp gun, our submachine gun got. We've never seen it burp gun before. I said, I want to go with the p key votes so we could go fast and they could not go fair. The English, the first people to in radar. They were able to keep the fighter planes on the ground until the German planes got close enough than the fighter planes took off, and they had full fuel tanks. Because it was about le Bretton wanted the fighter a machine gun, spring even more bullets, about zooming faster, a plane navigating more precisely, these things seemed to make a huge difference for the bodies in the fight. Our being this great arsenal of democracy. Does technology really not make a difference on a greater scale? The answer is more complicated. It's rather the interplay of technology and doctrine, or the interplay of technology and tactics. I'll give you a perfect case in point. We'll go all the way back to the American Civil War. There's a famous truism in military theory that we are always fighting the last war, and we mean that negatively right. Napoleonic wars, which was the main experience that most generals in the American Civil War had, were wars fought largely with smooth bore muskets. A smooth bore musket means that the barrel of the musket does not have rifling, which is to say that I could be aiming straight ahead of me, and when I pulled that trigger, that ball could go at a forty five degree angle off to the right. It's got nothing to do with what I'm aiming at. By the time the American Civil War was fought, rifling was standard. Your aiming at that's where your bullet's gonna go. But you're still using napoleonic tactics designed to deal with these incredibly inaccurate musket's people lining up present are and then shooting into a mass. But now you're doing it with an accurate weapon. So the casualties were extreme, and it took way too long for the tactical thinking to match the shift in technology. Trench warfare in the First World War is another great example. The crew served tripod fired machine gun was new tech. Those tactics of trench warfare of going over the top and racing into the enemy's trenches, going into the teeth of that fire. Those tactics were designed before you were facing two guys with a tripod mounta machine go could take out a tire company just sitting there going left and right. There's that amazing scene in the beginning of saving Private Ryan, or the moment that Higgins boats Gangway drops and then he says, God, the imn beviated dropped the f and rim and I had no choice. I dropped the rip and then the scene came into the boat and about fourteen guys immediately were killed. I'm sure that that occurred, that doctrine did not shift quickly enough to adapt to advances in technology, and that that cost lives in extreme cases. Truman found out that the invasion of Jap band would have been wished twice the size of Normandy. So this is when President Drumman says, dropped two bombs. The Japanese have seen what our atomic bomb can do. They can foresee what it was. Let's talk about what we mean when we say the deadliest conflict in human history. The United States use of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima killed eighty thou people instantly. Three days later, forty more were killed by a second bomb on Nagasaki. Imagine how many more were affected by nuclear fallout. There's the butta On death March that killed twenty thousand, the one point one million prisoners murdered in Auschwitz alone. Gross estimates of worldwide World War two casualties are counted at fifteen million battle deaths, twenty five million battle wounds, and forty five million civilian deaths. But those are really gross estimates because reports vary so widely. Field strategy might not have changed during or because of this war. But yes, both technology and doctrine worked against human bodies and cost human lives, and that leads us to the biggest difference between this war and all others. December seventh, nineteen one, a date which will live in infamy. The United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by label and their courses of the Empire of Japan. Three of my classmates and myself, we're going to Long Beach unless my brother and two of his friends joined the navy. They were so in demand of nurses that I said to nursing my girlfriend and I said, let's go join the army, and we did. My mother had a very hard time. She had three sons and we roll in combat. I had seven older brothers. They all served but two. She had seven sons and they were all in the service. Keene had a lot of kids who went in. Ten million, twenty thousand, nine and nine three that's how many men were inducted into the armed forces via the draft. Between nineteen forty and ninety six, another six million would voluntarily join up plus three and fifty thousand women and millions of others, building ships and planes and tanks and guns as fast as they could. This was a massive war. Good evening. Today, our fellow citizens, our way of life, our very freedom came under attack in a series of deliberate and deadly terrorist acts. Not eleven I was galvanized. I think like so many other people in the United States, I wanted to get in the fight, and I wanted to get in the fight quickly. But Not eleven failed to galvanize the rush to recruiting stations. We might presume it did it. Military personnel numbers grew by less than thirty thousand between two thousand and one and two and two, and they've lingered at a total of less than point five percent of our population over the last decade. What generation warfare is what a lot of people call coin counterinsurgency warfare, the notion that mau Ze Tongue really revolutionized in his famous book Guerilla Warfare. Do you have hyperpowers at this part? You're not going to defeat the United States Army. No one is going to defeat the United States Army in a set piece battle, even in No. One, not China, not Russia, no One in a field battle. There's no point in even trying. We have superior technology, we have superior training. We have not necessarily more numbers, but the right numbers, the infrastructure that's required. What Mao hit on is that the way you beat a hyperpower you have one goal in class. What's the and trinitarian warfare. Let's break their will to fight, but class what's is talking about their military? What Mau pioneered, you break the will of the populace to carry on the con test. How do you feel like World War Two shifted a sense of patriotism in the militaria? Oh my gosh, there's so many things that are different. The first and most obvious is that World War two is an existential crisis, not just for the United States but for the world. The first Great air raid on Paris, which took place today, evidently had two objectives. It is reported this morning that German bombers and fighting claims are again over southeast British coastal towers by Brown. But you're on the deed and ocean. We're we're growing country and growing great in the air. The stark contrasts between the mission of the access Powers and the mission of the Allied powers. No war sense has had that existential states Vietnam or Korea for the United States, like, we lost, So what what is the impact on people living in the United States? Not my There's another thing. It's really interesting. If you google this, you can find videos made during World War Two teaching service members how to behave in a British public away. And incidentally, the beer isn't cold in England. No, they don't like it cold and they have many ice So if you like beer, you better like it warm. What's that add difference between bitter and mild. The video keeps synthasizing you're in the uniforming the army, don't do these things, don't start a fight, don't get drunk. But with the advent of cell phone technology, anytime you screw up in uniform, that's going on Facebook. The military is reacted to that. So we hide our military. Now we take those uniforms off. You get in trouble if you're in uniform. No one ever told me that this was the motive, But the general spirence I got was they were afraid someone would attack me or hurt me, which is not true. And they were afraid I would do something that would bring discredit on the United States military and it will be caught on a cell phone and put on Facebook and put on other social media. That culture of patriotism, it really did go out. And that's how to real cost In the United States. We are citizen soldiers, citizens sailors. I always say this when I talk about the military. We are you and you are us. We are part of the community. We are not separate from it. That's one of the great strengths of the American military. We'll hear more from Mike incoming seasons as we continue to observe shifting warfare. But in studying World War Two alone, the only big picture I can see our humans slaughtering other humans, a very masculine way of pillaging and ruling the world. This is an ongoing conversation, but after centuries of warfare, I can't begin to envision a peaceful world in the end. I am hoping here, and that really is something that humans have a unique capacity to do. Hope, because without hope. Why do anything right? Then you're just completely nihilist. This is what Obama is constantly pilloried for. But he was absolutely right. It's the audacity of hope. It's one of the greatest things humans do. But I think in this case the hope is supported by some data. We still fight, but we fight differently and the impact of the fighting, as horrific as it is, you just can't compare the casualties in Iraq to the American Civil War. You can't or the suffering of those people. I don't think it's gonna happen in our lifetime or our children's lifetime, but it's gonna happen. Personally, I would not be surprised. The meat the tame the past of American meat diet by the time of the war, and for example, there is a variation of Welsh harshmeat time, which may be prepared in the following month like extra life boxes. And then that they had a dried biscuit, they had a little package of three or four cigarettes or something like. It was a big opportunity for the tobacco industry because they ended up sending samples and a lot of the different masses had four cigarettes Morning went at the Figar makes Water. Welcome back to service Veteran stories of hunger and war from my Heart Radio. I'm Jacklin repos O What soldiers were eating. It's sort of like each war affects the one that follows it. That's Anastasia Mark stays. I'll say though, I'm the author of Combat Ready Kitchen, How the US Military Shapes the way you eat. Anastasia's book dives deep into military food innovation, covering how soldiers ate from the first standing Sumerian armies up through how our troops are eating. M R. E. S feels ready to eat today like Mike, she said, Placing our veterans stories firmly within history means remember bring that military innovation is like a game of leap frog. You jump ahead only to become the hurdle for those coming up behind you. There was a brief but disastrous period during the Spanish American War in the very late nineteenth century where the US military tried to provide canned meat rations. Those canned meat rations ended up spoiling, and it created this huge debacle where the military is basically accused of unintentionally poisoning troops. After that, bad experience, they pulled back on the canned meat. So in World War One they did use the canning technology, but what they put inside it was essentially traditional military rations throughout not just the last hundred years but millennia. They were dried preserved foods, hard dried biscuits that had like other ingredients sometimes added for nutrition, dried meat products, and chocolate. That was called the iron ration, and then moved to something called the trench ration, where they introduced something that was a little wetter in terms of the meat product, but it was still just basically a clump of meat in a camp. And then they ended up with something called the reserve ration, so that would have been taking you up to World War two. In nine, as Anastasia explains in her book, three staff and a sleepy Chicago office started to play around with military cuisine. They didn't know anything about food science. They started with just a couple of pots and pans and a budget of only seven hundred and fifty dollars. But for the first time in history, the U. S. Army Subsistence School at the Chicago depot of the Quartermaster Corps had made space for a few guys to just play around with what military food could be. So in World War Two you end up having what I like to think of as being the first modern fashion, and that you can eat it out of hand or heat it, and it's actually a meal. This famous sea rat was basically a stew, and the idea was as plain as let's try and get something that looks a little bit more like dinner in the camp. So that would be meat and vegetables, potatoes, I think of frank and beans. So it was pretty heavy on the meat and starch. And if not frozen, we will get from the unfrozen canned dates by the barrel road. Cornd. I could say this follow it like food does really lovely at that beginning, like munth that's awful, Oh taste terrible. I never want to eat mutton. I get. That actually intrigued me because it was the first time I had heard that mutton was used to. Certainly spam and corn beef were, and I can understand them getting sick of it. We've heard that the sea rations did improve during the latter years of the war. Finally play Hamburgs and make the other care and they started mixing towards the art. But this still wasn't the home canning of the Great Depression years or civilians victory gardens. Wartime logistics meant the military had to prioritize differently. Items were chosen for the same reason throughout history. Are they portable? Are they durable? Are they long lasting and safe and nourishing? And then coming up you know a close fourth or fifth do people like to eat them? So these two guys and their assistant invented the basic sea rational idea. Plus helped with the intentionally uninspiring nutritional chocolate d bar we heard about from D. D. Army veteran John Vastrica. What was the biggest problem facing these budding food nerds. The things that they had invented when they ramped up production and shipped them around the world did not fare very well because really they didn't have mastery of the science of the food or the packaging. The Roosevelt Institute points out that in June of ninety nine, the roughly one hundred and eighty thousand man U s Army ranked nineteenth in the world, smaller than Portugals. This makes me laugh because half of my family's from Portugal, and I can feel in my bones how small that country is. By comparison, by the end of nineteen forty two, there were almost three million men in the army alone. By v J Day in ninety five, there were over twelve million active military personnel between branches one hundred and eighty thousand, twelve million. Imagine your office manager feeding a company scaling up that quickly. We will tell all that what we saw were raising. If they were actually bugs, then the flower that came over seas to us. Now all those k rations that I got from the say they were so quinn with am I had to throw them away, or I was with no food except the d bar orange maar melade. It was bitter in August wash so bad. You used to take the bad out and cut the candle and pour it on the ground all around where we're gonna eat. They swarmed her there and leave us all. And I still can't eat it to this day. The cans in some cases would rust and fall apart, the labels would fall off in local conditions, the food would heat up and spoil inside. Not spoil in the sense of bacterial contamination, but something that happens just with age with food and then paper packaging throughout world War two was cellophane, which is based on cellulose, which is a plant sugar. Like all plants, it loves water and so it's not a water barrier. And that meant anything that had been wrapped in cellophane would get soggy. The military head powdered eggs, and I hated those powdered eggs. I didn't smoke cigarettes, so I would take my cigarettes and trade them to the Italians for eggs. They took me down the hill in the restaurant and they bought me a breakfast meal and they told me it wasn't powdered eggs, it was real legs. So that's the first time I had real eggs. When I was in England. Got to talking to her and she could make a darn good breaference. Then force like an omel or something like that. What a difference. We would get a ship roll coming in, maybe some eggs or whatever. It was a big deal. Providing rations two millions of soldiers took up an incredible amount of space on ships, so they would try to minimize the space and the weight of the food. Plants are water and animals are seventy percent water. One way to do that is to remove most of the water to dehydrate the food. So it wasn't only eggs, milk and cheese, and from that we have to think for cheese powder. Now eggs are really technically difficult to preserve, and they still don't do a good job of it. It has fat in it, and fat goes rantid over time because of a chemical reaction. And then of course I would say, eggs just have this really special combination of textures when they're fresh that's very hard to replicate with a powdered substitute. For all those reasons, the powdered eggs just have never really been that great. And even now they have prepared eggs in the m R, but they just don't end up being favorites among men and women either. So dehydrated eggs haven't gotten much better. But one of the idea sparks for this podcast was hearing both in a Rock War Army veteran and my World War Two Army veteran grandfather talking about doctoring up the powdered coffee that came in their field rations. In the case of the Iraqi Captain powdered coco too. Have they not improved either. During World War Two, all these powdered items were mostly just dehydrated. They wouldn't have been able to get that goo to Roman taste. We've gotten better at the hydrating things and better at preserving different elements of the food. Nowadays, they really perfected the art of freeze dehydrated beverages. They have these things called micro encapsulation, where they encapsulate the fact that would go rancid with maybe a protein, so that it doesn't go rancid. And in the case of coffee, they actually are able to encapsulate the volatile oil that makes coffee smell good and taste good inside those little crystals. Taking a final broad historical perspective, can we pinpoint what changed the most about these rations in a way that made a significant difference to the millions of individual humans eating them at the time. The impact on the ration itself over the course of the war, it would have been fairly minimal. They have more to do with the can than the food. They were understanding how food deteriorated better, which allowed them to figure out how to keep it from doing that. But they also developed slightly thicker cans, a latex lining for cans rather than an enamel one that they had done using sort of a wax overlay on top of some of the packagings of that water couldn't penetrate it. The really big impact was afterwards, in one there was a sudden realization that they needed to drastically improve the rations. They took that little laboratory and they infused it with money and expertise, and this is really what is the big bang moment of processed food. So, like Mike said about combat, it seems that not much changed during the war for those who served, but the number of those who did made a huge impact on the experience of service for those coming after them. And as we move into the Korean War and the Cold War and Vietnam, we'll hear about things like they wanted to use plastic, one of the new materials in large part developed by the military joint world or to hydration to preserve food that was used to do the famous space ice cream that astronauts microwave dehydration, which uses microwave to remove the water molecule. You end up with like a little mini banana. That can one more thing before we close out. The Navy had the best food. Of all branches, we did not hear another branch get nominated once for this award. Obviously, having electricity and running water moving from place to place so you can literally make food helps, but Anastasia offered another reason. I think anyone who loves to cook can tap into the kitchen onboard a ship or a submarine is the heart of the whole endeavor there, and it becomes something that is very important for morale. So there's almost a contest where the cooks are trying to outdo each other and preparing delicious food, including a tradition of making elaborate cakes to your people up and so an extra nod to those working hard in kitchens from s to Shining Sea and Woodbine, we took a lot of pride and how we did the food, how we presented the food. We were proud of our contribution to what we were going. Thanks for joining us in this our first season. Subscribe to Service on your favorite platform to catch up on episodes you might have missed, get special extra episodes as we dropped them between seasons, and for updates on one our Korean War season debuts. And thanks for dropping a review while you're there. And don't forget. You can find more about this episode and every episode we've aired at service podcast dot org, plus extra clips and nerdy food history stuff on Instagram and Facebook. We're at Service Podcast. You can drop a note will pass on to our guests at our web page too. Service as a production from My Heart Radio with Misty Bladiger as my assisting producer, Gabrielle Collins as our supervising producer, and Christopher Hasiotis as our executive producer. I produced this episode with help from Boston I Heart producer Eric Collins. And thank you to all the artists and engineers who have added creativity and skill to our first season. Thank you for listening, and thank you to those serving and those who have served

This episode re enacts scenes of war and includes gunfire. Listener discretion advised who are tuning into Service Johnny, the strict private first class that are in stories of hunger and war. They joined a service Women Pearl Harbor Member Pearl Harbor, a production from My Heart Radio. We used to just give these people the food from our miss kits. You ain't what you could get, and be thankful for what you were getting. I'm your host, Jacqueline Raposo, Men and women of the United States. On this day, more than sixteen million young Americans are surviving. The three hundred year old American customer of the Musland has it all times called for the fortitude of women. Meanwhile, the British government has begun to racition food and Prime Minister Chamber on Monday from the Thailand and from our Nigi Empa Mount and the struggle single handed until we went joined by the minted rate might of set Raka and later by the overwhelming power and regales of the United States of America. We must be the great awesenal of democracy. In the late nineteen thirties, kids going to school, or working their family farms, or just struggling to find food outlasted the Great Depression, only to find themselves barreling into what would become the deadliest conflict in human history. We've moved through twelve of their individual war and food stories this season, but honestly, I still find it a little hard to connect their intimate experiences with what history books tell us of this overwhelmingly big World War two picture. And so in our final episode this season, we're going to compile all some crossovers from our veterans for two guests who can help us better make sense of things. What changed the most when it comes to combat and puisine. What part did these young men and women play in moving things forward? And where can we most find ourselves in their stories. It's a completely different type of fighting or having to go a tree to tree to root out the Germans. He had to look for the uniform, what the helmet looked like. Not only that they had the anti air thrasher Pickadilly circus. That was a code name on the landing kraft. You were supposed to stop a coordinates. Who's on the coordinate the infantry of the Marines. You don't want to hit them, you want head of them. So with them there are artillery observers on the front lines listening to the cat with These men are describing as what we call Class Witsyan war. This is my coal. It did three tours in Iraq to as a private contractor and a third as a paramilitary civilian with the Defense Intelligence Agency while he was also a Coast Guard officer. He's also authored many fantasy books and two history books on ancient combat while simultaneously working in law enforcement and private intelligence. He doesn't specialize in World War two history, but he has a strong sense of the community our veterans are a part of, plus a jacked up analytical mind. Class Witsian war is traditional warfare as we know it from the Peace of Westphalia up until by argue it's with. But klass Witzian warfare is also known as trinitarian warfare, and trinitarian warfare is there's three things you do to win a war. You destroy your enemy's army, You occupy his territory. Can you break the will of the military infrastructure to carry on the contest? Right? That is how wars have been thought. These are wars of maneuver where military units at the Regimental Battalion Company level are maneuvering against one another, we're charging, retreating in set piece battles, having fos forward, observers calling in fire. None of that has changed. And was that the same in World War One? As well as that a strategy the same. I think they might have had to use signal flags and marker flags, as matter of fact, I'm almost sure they did, but the concepts were still basically the same. My point is is that there isn't that big a difference technologically between what these men were experiencing what's going on now. B M one is still my favorite long gun. It's the same and one that these guys were using, but it's just got fiberglasses that of would that carried. The nineteen eleven it's my favorite pistol. It's called the nineteen eleven because it's from nineteen eleven eight. It is the gun that the Germans had, the best gun of the whole war. All of a sudden, right over my head that the German burp gun, our submachine gun got. We've never seen it burp gun before. I said, I want to go with the p key votes so we could go fast and they could not go fair. The English, the first people to in radar. They were able to keep the fighter planes on the ground until the German planes got close enough than the fighter planes took off, and they had full fuel tanks. Because it was about le Bretton wanted the fighter a machine gun, spring even more bullets, about zooming faster, a plane navigating more precisely, these things seemed to make a huge difference for the bodies in the fight. Our being this great arsenal of democracy. Does technology really not make a difference on a greater scale? The answer is more complicated. It's rather the interplay of technology and doctrine, or the interplay of technology and tactics. I'll give you a perfect case in point. We'll go all the way back to the American Civil War. There's a famous truism in military theory that we are always fighting the last war, and we mean that negatively right. Napoleonic wars, which was the main experience that most generals in the American Civil War had, were wars fought largely with smooth bore muskets. A smooth bore musket means that the barrel of the musket does not have rifling, which is to say that I could be aiming straight ahead of me, and when I pulled that trigger, that ball could go at a forty five degree angle off to the right. It's got nothing to do with what I'm aiming at. By the time the American Civil War was fought, rifling was standard. Your aiming at that's where your bullet's gonna go. But you're still using napoleonic tactics designed to deal with these incredibly inaccurate musket's people lining up present are and then shooting into a mass. But now you're doing it with an accurate weapon. So the casualties were extreme, and it took way too long for the tactical thinking to match the shift in technology. Trench warfare in the First World War is another great example. The crew served tripod fired machine gun was new tech. Those tactics of trench warfare of going over the top and racing into the enemy's trenches, going into the teeth of that fire. Those tactics were designed before you were facing two guys with a tripod mounta machine go could take out a tire company just sitting there going left and right. There's that amazing scene in the beginning of saving Private Ryan, or the moment that Higgins boats Gangway drops and then he says, God, the imn beviated dropped the f and rim and I had no choice. I dropped the rip and then the scene came into the boat and about fourteen guys immediately were killed. I'm sure that that occurred, that doctrine did not shift quickly enough to adapt to advances in technology, and that that cost lives in extreme cases. Truman found out that the invasion of Jap band would have been wished twice the size of Normandy. So this is when President Drumman says, dropped two bombs. The Japanese have seen what our atomic bomb can do. They can foresee what it was. Let's talk about what we mean when we say the deadliest conflict in human history. The United States use of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima killed eighty thou people instantly. Three days later, forty more were killed by a second bomb on Nagasaki. Imagine how many more were affected by nuclear fallout. There's the butta On death March that killed twenty thousand, the one point one million prisoners murdered in Auschwitz alone. Gross estimates of worldwide World War two casualties are counted at fifteen million battle deaths, twenty five million battle wounds, and forty five million civilian deaths. But those are really gross estimates because reports vary so widely. Field strategy might not have changed during or because of this war. But yes, both technology and doctrine worked against human bodies and cost human lives, and that leads us to the biggest difference between this war and all others. December seventh, nineteen one, a date which will live in infamy. The United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by label and their courses of the Empire of Japan. Three of my classmates and myself, we're going to Long Beach unless my brother and two of his friends joined the navy. They were so in demand of nurses that I said to nursing my girlfriend and I said, let's go join the army, and we did. My mother had a very hard time. She had three sons and we roll in combat. I had seven older brothers. They all served but two. She had seven sons and they were all in the service. Keene had a lot of kids who went in. Ten million, twenty thousand, nine and nine three that's how many men were inducted into the armed forces via the draft. Between nineteen forty and ninety six, another six million would voluntarily join up plus three and fifty thousand women and millions of others, building ships and planes and tanks and guns as fast as they could. This was a massive war. Good evening. Today, our fellow citizens, our way of life, our very freedom came under attack in a series of deliberate and deadly terrorist acts. Not eleven I was galvanized. I think like so many other people in the United States, I wanted to get in the fight, and I wanted to get in the fight quickly. But Not eleven failed to galvanize the rush to recruiting stations. We might presume it did it. Military personnel numbers grew by less than thirty thousand between two thousand and one and two and two, and they've lingered at a total of less than point five percent of our population over the last decade. What generation warfare is what a lot of people call coin counterinsurgency warfare, the notion that mau Ze Tongue really revolutionized in his famous book Guerilla Warfare. Do you have hyperpowers at this part? You're not going to defeat the United States Army. No one is going to defeat the United States Army in a set piece battle, even in No. One, not China, not Russia, no One in a field battle. There's no point in even trying. We have superior technology, we have superior training. We have not necessarily more numbers, but the right numbers, the infrastructure that's required. What Mao hit on is that the way you beat a hyperpower you have one goal in class. What's the and trinitarian warfare. Let's break their will to fight, but class what's is talking about their military? What Mau pioneered, you break the will of the populace to carry on the con test. How do you feel like World War Two shifted a sense of patriotism in the militaria? Oh my gosh, there's so many things that are different. The first and most obvious is that World War two is an existential crisis, not just for the United States but for the world. The first Great air raid on Paris, which took place today, evidently had two objectives. It is reported this morning that German bombers and fighting claims are again over southeast British coastal towers by Brown. But you're on the deed and ocean. We're we're growing country and growing great in the air. The stark contrasts between the mission of the access Powers and the mission of the Allied powers. No war sense has had that existential states Vietnam or Korea for the United States, like, we lost, So what what is the impact on people living in the United States? Not my There's another thing. It's really interesting. If you google this, you can find videos made during World War Two teaching service members how to behave in a British public away. And incidentally, the beer isn't cold in England. No, they don't like it cold and they have many ice So if you like beer, you better like it warm. What's that add difference between bitter and mild. The video keeps synthasizing you're in the uniforming the army, don't do these things, don't start a fight, don't get drunk. But with the advent of cell phone technology, anytime you screw up in uniform, that's going on Facebook. The military is reacted to that. So we hide our military. Now we take those uniforms off. You get in trouble if you're in uniform. No one ever told me that this was the motive, But the general spirence I got was they were afraid someone would attack me or hurt me, which is not true. And they were afraid I would do something that would bring discredit on the United States military and it will be caught on a cell phone and put on Facebook and put on other social media. That culture of patriotism, it really did go out. And that's how to real cost In the United States. We are citizen soldiers, citizens sailors. I always say this when I talk about the military. We are you and you are us. We are part of the community. We are not separate from it. That's one of the great strengths of the American military. We'll hear more from Mike incoming seasons as we continue to observe shifting warfare. But in studying World War Two alone, the only big picture I can see our humans slaughtering other humans, a very masculine way of pillaging and ruling the world. This is an ongoing conversation, but after centuries of warfare, I can't begin to envision a peaceful world in the end. I am hoping here, and that really is something that humans have a unique capacity to do. Hope, because without hope. Why do anything right? Then you're just completely nihilist. This is what Obama is constantly pilloried for. But he was absolutely right. It's the audacity of hope. It's one of the greatest things humans do. But I think in this case the hope is supported by some data. We still fight, but we fight differently and the impact of the fighting, as horrific as it is, you just can't compare the casualties in Iraq to the American Civil War. You can't or the suffering of those people. I don't think it's gonna happen in our lifetime or our children's lifetime, but it's gonna happen. Personally, I would not be surprised. The meat the tame the past of American meat diet by the time of the war, and for example, there is a variation of Welsh harshmeat time, which may be prepared in the following month like extra life boxes. And then that they had a dried biscuit, they had a little package of three or four cigarettes or something like. It was a big opportunity for the tobacco industry because they ended up sending samples and a lot of the different masses had four cigarettes Morning went at the Figar makes Water. Welcome back to service Veteran stories of hunger and war from my Heart Radio. I'm Jacklin repos O What soldiers were eating. It's sort of like each war affects the one that follows it. That's Anastasia Mark stays. I'll say though, I'm the author of Combat Ready Kitchen, How the US Military Shapes the way you eat. Anastasia's book dives deep into military food innovation, covering how soldiers ate from the first standing Sumerian armies up through how our troops are eating. M R. E. S feels ready to eat today like Mike, she said, Placing our veterans stories firmly within history means remember bring that military innovation is like a game of leap frog. You jump ahead only to become the hurdle for those coming up behind you. There was a brief but disastrous period during the Spanish American War in the very late nineteenth century where the US military tried to provide canned meat rations. Those canned meat rations ended up spoiling, and it created this huge debacle where the military is basically accused of unintentionally poisoning troops. After that, bad experience, they pulled back on the canned meat. So in World War One they did use the canning technology, but what they put inside it was essentially traditional military rations throughout not just the last hundred years but millennia. They were dried preserved foods, hard dried biscuits that had like other ingredients sometimes added for nutrition, dried meat products, and chocolate. That was called the iron ration, and then moved to something called the trench ration, where they introduced something that was a little wetter in terms of the meat product, but it was still just basically a clump of meat in a camp. And then they ended up with something called the reserve ration, so that would have been taking you up to World War two. In nine, as Anastasia explains in her book, three staff and a sleepy Chicago office started to play around with military cuisine. They didn't know anything about food science. They started with just a couple of pots and pans and a budget of only seven hundred and fifty dollars. But for the first time in history, the U. S. Army Subsistence School at the Chicago depot of the Quartermaster Corps had made space for a few guys to just play around with what military food could be. So in World War Two you end up having what I like to think of as being the first modern fashion, and that you can eat it out of hand or heat it, and it's actually a meal. This famous sea rat was basically a stew, and the idea was as plain as let's try and get something that looks a little bit more like dinner in the camp. So that would be meat and vegetables, potatoes, I think of frank and beans. So it was pretty heavy on the meat and starch. And if not frozen, we will get from the unfrozen canned dates by the barrel road. Cornd. I could say this follow it like food does really lovely at that beginning, like munth that's awful, Oh taste terrible. I never want to eat mutton. I get. That actually intrigued me because it was the first time I had heard that mutton was used to. Certainly spam and corn beef were, and I can understand them getting sick of it. We've heard that the sea rations did improve during the latter years of the war. Finally play Hamburgs and make the other care and they started mixing towards the art. But this still wasn't the home canning of the Great Depression years or civilians victory gardens. Wartime logistics meant the military had to prioritize differently. Items were chosen for the same reason throughout history. Are they portable? Are they durable? Are they long lasting and safe and nourishing? And then coming up you know a close fourth or fifth do people like to eat them? So these two guys and their assistant invented the basic sea rational idea. Plus helped with the intentionally uninspiring nutritional chocolate d bar we heard about from D. D. Army veteran John Vastrica. What was the biggest problem facing these budding food nerds. The things that they had invented when they ramped up production and shipped them around the world did not fare very well because really they didn't have mastery of the science of the food or the packaging. The Roosevelt Institute points out that in June of ninety nine, the roughly one hundred and eighty thousand man U s Army ranked nineteenth in the world, smaller than Portugals. This makes me laugh because half of my family's from Portugal, and I can feel in my bones how small that country is. By comparison, by the end of nineteen forty two, there were almost three million men in the army alone. By v J Day in ninety five, there were over twelve million active military personnel between branches one hundred and eighty thousand, twelve million. Imagine your office manager feeding a company scaling up that quickly. We will tell all that what we saw were raising. If they were actually bugs, then the flower that came over seas to us. Now all those k rations that I got from the say they were so quinn with am I had to throw them away, or I was with no food except the d bar orange maar melade. It was bitter in August wash so bad. You used to take the bad out and cut the candle and pour it on the ground all around where we're gonna eat. They swarmed her there and leave us all. And I still can't eat it to this day. The cans in some cases would rust and fall apart, the labels would fall off in local conditions, the food would heat up and spoil inside. Not spoil in the sense of bacterial contamination, but something that happens just with age with food and then paper packaging throughout world War two was cellophane, which is based on cellulose, which is a plant sugar. Like all plants, it loves water and so it's not a water barrier. And that meant anything that had been wrapped in cellophane would get soggy. The military head powdered eggs, and I hated those powdered eggs. I didn't smoke cigarettes, so I would take my cigarettes and trade them to the Italians for eggs. They took me down the hill in the restaurant and they bought me a breakfast meal and they told me it wasn't powdered eggs, it was real legs. So that's the first time I had real eggs. When I was in England. Got to talking to her and she could make a darn good breaference. Then force like an omel or something like that. What a difference. We would get a ship roll coming in, maybe some eggs or whatever. It was a big deal. Providing rations two millions of soldiers took up an incredible amount of space on ships, so they would try to minimize the space and the weight of the food. Plants are water and animals are seventy percent water. One way to do that is to remove most of the water to dehydrate the food. So it wasn't only eggs, milk and cheese, and from that we have to think for cheese powder. Now eggs are really technically difficult to preserve, and they still don't do a good job of it. It has fat in it, and fat goes rantid over time because of a chemical reaction. And then of course I would say, eggs just have this really special combination of textures when they're fresh that's very hard to replicate with a powdered substitute. For all those reasons, the powdered eggs just have never really been that great. And even now they have prepared eggs in the m R, but they just don't end up being favorites among men and women either. So dehydrated eggs haven't gotten much better. But one of the idea sparks for this podcast was hearing both in a Rock War Army veteran and my World War Two Army veteran grandfather talking about doctoring up the powdered coffee that came in their field rations. In the case of the Iraqi Captain powdered coco too. Have they not improved either. During World War Two, all these powdered items were mostly just dehydrated. They wouldn't have been able to get that goo to Roman taste. We've gotten better at the hydrating things and better at preserving different elements of the food. Nowadays, they really perfected the art of freeze dehydrated beverages. They have these things called micro encapsulation, where they encapsulate the fact that would go rancid with maybe a protein, so that it doesn't go rancid. And in the case of coffee, they actually are able to encapsulate the volatile oil that makes coffee smell good and taste good inside those little crystals. Taking a final broad historical perspective, can we pinpoint what changed the most about these rations in a way that made a significant difference to the millions of individual humans eating them at the time. The impact on the ration itself over the course of the war, it would have been fairly minimal. They have more to do with the can than the food. They were understanding how food deteriorated better, which allowed them to figure out how to keep it from doing that. But they also developed slightly thicker cans, a latex lining for cans rather than an enamel one that they had done using sort of a wax overlay on top of some of the packagings of that water couldn't penetrate it. The really big impact was afterwards, in one there was a sudden realization that they needed to drastically improve the rations. They took that little laboratory and they infused it with money and expertise, and this is really what is the big bang moment of processed food. So, like Mike said about combat, it seems that not much changed during the war for those who served, but the number of those who did made a huge impact on the experience of service for those coming after them. And as we move into the Korean War and the Cold War and Vietnam, we'll hear about things like they wanted to use plastic, one of the new materials in large part developed by the military joint world or to hydration to preserve food that was used to do the famous space ice cream that astronauts microwave dehydration, which uses microwave to remove the water molecule. You end up with like a little mini banana. That can one more thing before we close out. The Navy had the best food. Of all branches, we did not hear another branch get nominated once for this award. Obviously, having electricity and running water moving from place to place so you can literally make food helps, but Anastasia offered another reason. I think anyone who loves to cook can tap into the kitchen onboard a ship or a submarine is the heart of the whole endeavor there, and it becomes something that is very important for morale. So there's almost a contest where the cooks are trying to outdo each other and preparing delicious food, including a tradition of making elaborate cakes to your people up and so an extra nod to those working hard in kitchens from s to Shining Sea and Woodbine, we took a lot of pride and how we did the food, how we presented the food. We were proud of our contribution to what we were going. Thanks for joining us in this our first season. Subscribe to Service on your favorite platform to catch up on episodes you might have missed, get special extra episodes as we dropped them between seasons, and for updates on one our Korean War season debuts. And thanks for dropping a review while you're there. And don't forget. You can find more about this episode and every episode we've aired at service podcast dot org, plus extra clips and nerdy food history stuff on Instagram and Facebook. We're at Service Podcast. You can drop a note will pass on to our guests at our web page too. Service as a production from My Heart Radio with Misty Bladiger as my assisting producer, Gabrielle Collins as our supervising producer, and Christopher Hasiotis as our executive producer. I produced this episode with help from Boston I Heart producer Eric Collins. And thank you to all the artists and engineers who have added creativity and skill to our first season. Thank you for listening, and thank you to those serving and those who have served