Walter’s War: Life in Egypt – Food

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January 1941

Our diet in the desert must have been the reason for our desert sores, because for most of the time we had no fresh food at all. Breakfast was either very thin strips of tinned fat bacon, or strange, bitter tasting sausages, with no skins, packed in tins labelled “Soya links”. We grew to detest these, and longed for something more palatable. Once we were away from the fleshpots of Egypt we had no bread, and instead an unlimited supply of dry hard biscuits. These took a lot of chewing and we often gnawed away at them while driving along, washing them down with swigs of tepid water from our bottles. The main meal of the day was usually eaten in the evening.

The menu varied, depending on the time and place. If they had been driving all day, the cooks had to prepare a meal in semi darkness, and then we usually had some hot vegetables, all tinned of course, and cold corned beef, which was handed out in the can, one tin between two. Pudding would be either boiled rice, or dried fruit, usually apricot, with a peculiar white sauce, rather like paperhanger’s paste. We sometimes had tins of meat and vegetable stew, which came from England; otherwise all the canned food seemed to have come from the USA, except for the corned beef, which came from South America. The tinned vegetables were pretty dull – small hard white canned potatoes, which I hate to this day and flat soft beans and green peas, which were all right, but became monotonous. Midday meal was often just half a dozen biscuits and half a can of corned beef. Sometimes we had a spoonful of jam and a dab of margarine (butter never). The one thing we had at every meal was a pint mug filled with strong, sweet, milky tea, the panacea for all ills.

The cooks travelled on their own truck, with the rations and their stoves and pots and pans, and were adept at getting things going quickly, driven on by enquiries from the hungry squaddies as to how much longer they would have to wait. There was a genuine hate relationship between the cooks and everybody else. The cooks thought that they were doing a difficult job under impossible circumstances and that we were a shower of uncomprehending and ungrateful loud mouths who were never satisfied.

We thought the cooks had a cushy job, never attending parades, never going on inspections, living off the fat of the land and condescending to serve up rations they had done their best to ruin. We were both right to some degree, but the real trouble was that we were all nearly always hungry, and the food supplied was just the basic necessity and only just enough at that. When we were staying in one place for more than a night (which we rarely were) the cooks had more time and made an effort to perk the food up a bit. For instance, they would soak biscuits overnight until they softened and swelled up, and then fry them with the bacon for breakfast. They could prepare dried fruit more thoroughly and serve it with milky rice, and there might even be some second helpings!

The cooks had only one stove; a device called a Hydra, which worked on the same principle as a Primus stove. It was fuelled with petrol (always available) and pressure was applied with a foot pump. When warmed up and working properly, a Hydra would throw a flame about six feet long. The cooks built a sort of tunnel each night along which the flame was blown. Across the tunnel they perched their dixies, which were heavy metal containers about 2 ft. by 1 ft. The heat travelling along the tunnel underneath would cook food or boil water in three or four of these dixies. In effect the Hydra was just a gigantic blowlamp, working on exactly the same principles, and like a blowlamp, creating a roaring noise. This noise could be disadvantageous, as our cooks once found out.

We had lost our officer in the raid on Tobruk, September 1942, and a replacement officer arrived. He, not then being aware of the way the world wagged in that part of the Western Desert, held the usual morning inspection parade, usual that is, in the UK, but not at that time usual in Egypt. We all lined up reluctantly and roll call was held (who would want to be absent?) and a minute inspection of our persona began. The cooks, who were standing by a roaring Hydra, were very free in their condemnation of this new officer who was unwittingly breaching all the rules by holding such a parade. We on the parade could hear, and relish, every remark, some very uncomplimentary, about this chap, straight out from UK, who had the temerity to call us on an inspection.

When we were dismissed the officer, whose name I cannot remember, sauntered down to the cookhouse (which was in a depression, helping to transmit any noises upward) and advised the cooks that if, in future, they wished to make any derogatory remarks, they should keep their voices down. As he had it in his power to punish them for their undisciplined remarks his stock rose immediately and he never looked back.

Later in the desert war, the practice of having all meals cooked and served out at the cook wagon was given up due to the continual risk of being attacked from the air and everyone being caught in one place. “Battle Rations” were issued to individual vehicles according to the number of men riding on it. This led to difficulties in apportionment due to the problem of sharing our canned food evenly.

This was got round by increasing the total issued by ten per cent, a highly popular move. Having food issued in this way naturally meant that the men on each truck had to cook for themselves. As we had no individual cooking utensils, improvisation was the order of the day, and we soon learnt to make use of the cans in which the food came, and to make stoves from empty four-gallon petrol cans. The large potato tins made excellent dixies in which to boil water, and empty beer cans, when punched full of holes, were ideal for holding tea leaves. We cut the tops out of the cans and fixed a wire handle and put tea leaves in the beer can which was then hung in the potato can full of boiling water. This made tea as strong as we liked to have it! The stoves were made by cutting the end out of a petrol can and a round hole in one side just big enough to take a potato can. The stove was half filled with sand into which petrol was poured until the sand would absorb no more, a match was applied and hey presto. Having rations on the truck posed problems of storage and it was not long before each truck sported a metal ammunition case bolted to the front bumper. We also had to decide for ourselves what we were going to have to eat at each meal, and this led to a certain amount of argument and some rather unusual menus!

It was not until 1943 that a sensible way of dealing with rationing in the field was arrived at! This was the introduction of Composite Ration Boxes, ‘Compo’ for short. Each compo box was a substantial wooden affair. In it was everything necessary to feed and supply 10 men for one day, or of course one man for 10 days, or any permutation in between. The boxes contained not only food, but also cigarettes, matches, toilet paper, lemonade powder, sweets, etc. To give variety the boxes varied in the food content and were coded from A to H. It didn’t take long for the contents of each of the eight varieties to be well known. I remember that the ‘G’ box had very tasty steak and kidney puddings as the main meat course, and was greatly sought after. None of this arrived until the desert war was nearly over, and we didn’t have long to enjoy them.

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