Comments by "Sar Jim" (@sarjim4381) on "The Drydock - Episode 130" video.
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The biggest difference between RN and USN rations was the amount of refrigerator (cold room) and freezer space available. The USN built almost all ships from about 1934 forwards with enough cold room and freezer space available that the crew could have mostly fresh food available for the first 8-12 days (depending on climate) at sea and frozen meats and vegetables for about 20-23 days. By 1942, it was the goal of the Bureau of Supplies and Accounts (later Bureau of Logistics) to retrofit every ship with enough cold room and freezer space to have enough room for food based on the above plan. Each ship also needed to have about twice that cubic footage available for dry stores like flour, rice, and potatoes.
The USN prepared a tremendous amount of dry store products. Loaf bread was the most popular, but men from the South wanted biscuits and grits while men from the North generally wanted oatmeal and toast or sliced bread. They all wanted cakes, pies, doughnuts, and coffee cakes. On destroyer size ships and up, one night was usually steak night, and every meal had some kind of meat product, with bacon, chicken, turkey, and some types of fish being common. The main meal in the Navy was called dinner, and that meal had the most food. Supper was served in the evening and was generally the lightest meal of the day, even lighter than breakfast. Breakfast was often eggs, bacon or sausage, griddle cakes, French toast, dry cereal, grits, or oatmeal along with fruit, fresh or canned. A pot of soup with bread, butter, and coffee as almost always available in the galley for men who missed a regular meal or were just hungry. Men out on the gun line during regular meal hours were brought out trays of sandwiches along with coffee, milk (if available), and fruitaides. Surprisingly, peanut butter and jelly was the most popular sandwich, followed by the aforementioned spam slathered with mustard and ketchup, and sometimes cheese.
The fleet train could generally resupply ships with dry and frozen foods at sea, but they obviously couldn't do so when the ships were under constant threat of attack from kamikazes, and that's when the cook's talents (or lack of the same) would come to the fore. A good cook knew twenty ways to prepare food men would grow to hate, like spam or Australian lamb, and make it tasty enough the men would eat it. He could make dry eggs and dry milk taste like the fresh products, and knew how to substitute one ingredient for another and still make food that mostly tasted good. It's said that ships with the happiest crews had good cooks, and captains often horse traded with other captains for cooks and kinds of foods. Bad cooks could find themselves reassigned from a cruiser to something like a minesweeper just so a captain could get a good cook assigned to his ship. There are numerous stories of good "cookies" given anything they wanted by officers and crews, from women to vodka, as long as they could keep them on their ship. I'm sure being an admiral was good, but it seems like being the most popular cook in a fleet was even better.
Well, rats, I've done another "War and Peace", but I now realize I have no idea how things went in the RN. From everything I heard and read, British and Commonwealth (especially Australian) ships didn't fare as well in the food department. Anyone here who knows how food service went in the RN?
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@chanman819 Generally true, especially on ships from cruiser size up. The captain didn't have a lot of time to get involved with the food selected, although the good ones still did regular food inspections just to make sure nothing was moving in the food that shouldn't have been and it was all the right color. On smaller vessels, a lot of of the skippers were reservists, and many of them had civilian jobs that were at least as important to them as their Navy training, Some came from the food service business before the war, and they used that experience to select the best food from that available for the ships. They could buy local meat and produce when none was available from the normal fleet supplies, and they'd also swap items back and forth with other skippers for food their crews liked better.
The classic is American smokes and RAN ships. Apparently, the RAN didn't supply cigarettes at all to their ships, just loose tobacco, and that was reputed to be not very good. When a US ship was in port, they could trade almost any local or Australian food for smokes. My Dad's PT boat had a skipper that ran his own restaurant before the war, and he was a past master at horse trading. One of their favorites was lobster, something the Aussie guys knew how to catch when they were in port, with the going price being a pack of cigs for one lobster. He'd also swap Australian mutton, which everyone hated but the Aussies liked, for sides of beef. The skipper knew how to trim those to get some pretty tasty steaks, with the leftovers used as stew meat. Every couple weeks, the crew would set up a charcoal grill on the fantail and cook up a meal of surf and turf. The smell brought Aussie forces from the army to navy to air force down to the dock, and the price of a meal was two bottles of beer. The skipper was able to keep the squadron pretty well supplied with things that made life in the South Pacific a lot more tolerable. Everything he did was, of course, contrary to regulations, but he made sure any visiting brass was well fed and had some cold beer from the tiny fridges on the PT's. He never got in any trouble for his "creativeness", and my Dad said that, except for the fact the Japanese kept trying to kill them, serving in New Guinea and the Solomon's wasn't half bad.
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