Chow

Chow is essential–Good, plentiful chow? Not so much.

Swarming Road Builders Need Food and Supplies

The soldiers who built the Alaska Highway counted their food as a primary source of unrelieved misery. In the early days, the soldiers ate C-rations.  Everything else—milk, eggs, potatoes, and vegetables—came canned or powdered.  Powdered vegetables tasted like cardboard.  Monotonous and unsavory canned food–Spam, chili, Vienna Sausage, corn beef hash and stew—did not help.  And insects dotted the pancakes.

The soldiers did not look forward to chow time.

Years after the fact, the mere mention of the word Spam, nauseated some of them.  Fred Rust of the 18th regiment insisted that the number of discarded Spam Sandwiches could have paved the road.  Cpl. Anthony “Bobby Lee” Mouton remembered corned beef hash as “shit on a shingle”.  The soldiers of the 18^th knew it as “silage”.

To some of the soldiers, shit on a shingle described creamed chipped beef over toast.  And every soldier on the road despised Vienna Sausages–“Yukon Shrimp”.

“Big John” Erklouts of the 340^th remembered, “There were two foods we classified as battery acid, lemonade powder and chili con carne, the worst food I ever tasted.  It was so hot you couldn’t eat it.  The Army medics put a halt to it.”

The quartermasters sent bread to the regiments stuffed in mattress covers, trying to keep it fresh.  Mattress covers or no, it arrived so hard, the cooks had to saw off slices.

More on WWII Army Cooks

Mess cooks did their level best. They did have coffee, sugar, flour, and salt.  And they struggled to make the food as good as possible. They also had as dangerous a job as any on the Project. A company kitchen came equipped with four white gas ranges, and Joseph Prejean remembered starting a white gas burner by throwing gas on it!

Near the end of July, the food supply gradually began to improve.  Butter and occasional fresh pork and ham appeared.  The Army also sent mutton. A few men liked it, most did not. Lt. Walter Dudrow of the 93^rd remembered mutton.  “The cooks tried many ways to make this ‘damn’ goat taste good, but we had it too often.”