Authors: Tristan Donovan
Powers also produced a flyer called
“Was ist Coca-Cola?”
to introduce Germans to the drink. “We had millions and millions of these prospectus. An unbelievable amount,” Max Keith, who joined Coca-Cola Germany in November 1933 as an assistant manager, told Coca-Cola's archivists several years later. “We went to restaurants on weekends because on Saturdays and Sundays they had the highest frequentation. We put this prospectus on every table. Sometimes the owner ran after us and took the prospectus off the table or asked the waiters to take them off, but we went back again and again. So that way people finally knew the name Coca-Cola and knew what it meant.”
By the time Keith joined the company, Powers's leafleting campaign was paying off. Sales pushed through the one-hundred-thousand-cases mark in 1933 and kept rising, its growth greased with the economic boom that followed the Nazi Party's seizure of power. In 1936 sales passed the million-cases-a-year mark, lifted by sales from the Berlin Olympics and ads thatâin stark contrast to the drink's embrace of temperance in Americaâ appealed directly to beer drinkers with the words
“Plagt dich der katzenjammer? Eiskaltes Coca-Cola hilft”
(“Suffering from a hangover? Ice-cold Coca-Cola helps”).
But in an increasingly xenophobic Germany, success soon sparked trouble. The Nazi dictatorship ordered the company to declare its caffeine
content on its bottles as part of Hitler's puritan drive to wean Germans off tobacco, alcohol, and caffeine. Then came the leaflets created by Karl Flach. Born in Bonn in 1905, Flach first discovered Coca-Cola in 1929 while traveling in America and its popularity stuck in his mind. So in 1931 when he became the owner of Blumhoffer Nachfolger, a Cologne-based lemonade maker, he launched a cola of his own: Afri-Cola. To sell the drink Flach raided his American inspiration's best ideas. He adopted the franchise bottling model that had powered Coca-Cola's American growth and promoted Afri-Cola as a hangover cure. But he also sought to win over customers by emphasizing Afri-Cola's Germanic origins with the slogan: “Always refreshing, good and German.”
This mix of nationalism and mimicry paid off. Soon Afri-Cola was doing enough business to keep Powers and his team looking over their shoulders. In 1936, while locked in this head-to-head struggle for cola dominance, Flach joined a group of businessmen on a tour of American companies organized by the German Labor Front, the Nazi trade union that replaced the country's independent unions after Hitler took power. One of the stops on this US tour was the Coca-Cola bottling plant in New York City. While Flach was being shown around the plant, a bunch of bottle caps caught his eye. Unlike the usual Coca-Cola bottle caps, these had Hebrew writing on them, as they were intended to reassure New York's Jewish population that Coca-Cola was kosher. But Flach saw an opportunity, and he slipped some into his bag.
On returning to Germany with the caps he wrote a leaflet warning the German people that Coca-Cola was a Jewish company. He distributed this leaflet to leading Nazi Party members, government officers, and the general public together with a photograph of the kosher bottle caps he collected in New York. The leaflet told how this suspect American business spent more than 4 million reichsmarks forcing its way into Germany in a “loud and arrogant manner,” adding that it would be miraculous if there wasn't Jewish money behind such an expensive venture.
The leaflet ended with a call for all Germans to do their duty by refusing to drink this American-Jewish beverage. The accusations may have been false but it was dynamite in Nazi Germany. Throughout 1936 the
Nazis had been attacking Germany's Jews, banning them from politics and teaching, and revoking citizenship rights for anyone of Jewish descent. “They claimed we were an American-Jewish company, because to many of the Nazi people Americans and Jews were just identical,” said Keith. “Consequently, our salesmen had also quite a few battles in the taverns with party members.”
But while Coca-Cola salesmen ended up brawling with Nazi supporters in German bars, Flach's leaflet didn't spark the public backlash against Coca-Cola that Flach had hoped, and the Nazi state paid little attention to the claims. The incident did, however, underline how much things had changed in Germany since Powers's initial dismissive attitude toward Hitler and his followers. As 1938 ended, Coca-Cola Germany was selling millions of cases every year but Powers was thinking about getting out of Germany. He thought about decamping with his wife and two children to Paris to start again, but that would mean leaving his Coca-Cola fortune behind because the Nazis had banned people from taking money out of the country. The fifty-six-year-old was still thinking about what to do when on Thursday, November 24, 1938, a large truck collided with his car in Berlin. Seriously injured, Powers spent the next three weeks in the hospital fighting for his life before dying on December 13. That same day the Nazis opened the Neuengamme concentration camp.
Keith inherited control of the business, but while sales were set to hit the five million cases mark in 1939, the threat of war loomed large. On September 1, 1939, the inevitable finally happened when Hitler's forces invaded Poland. Two days later the British and French declared war on Germany, and World War II had begun. The British imposed a naval blockade to prevent goods and raw materials from reaching Germany, cutting off Keith's supply of Coca-Cola concentrate from the United States. Eager to keep the Coca-Cola flowing, the company looked for ways to get around the British blockade. It looked at flying its concentrate into Switzerland, toyed with the idea of bringing it through Russia, and explored the possibility of smuggling it in via Romania. Eventually fears of a British backlash that could see the company shut out of Canada, Australia, and beyond prevailed, and the company gave up its hunt for a backdoor route into Germany.
Britain's preparations for battle also hit Coke operations in the United Kingdom. In October 1939 the British froze sugar use by businesses at 1938 levels and told soft drink manufacturers to start using other sweeteners such as saccharin rather than sugar. As war progressed British restrictions on sugar got tighter, eventually forcing Coca-Cola to stop producing its drink in the country and Schweppes to take its popular tonic water off the market due to sugar and quinine rationing.
On May 10, 1940, after months of no direct conflict except at sea, the Nazi Blitzkrieg began. German tanks and troops swarmed west, marching into the Netherlands and Belgium as they raced to conquer France. As the German assault smashed through the Belgian forces with ease, Carl West, the head of Coca-Cola in Brussels, gathered his workers and asked if they would join him in fleeing to France. West's homeland of Norway had already been conquered by the Nazis, and he had no intention of sharing the fate of his countrymen.
West's employees agreed to go with him to Paris. They loaded trucks with their belongings, Coca-Cola syrup, and their families before racing out of Brussels as news of the Netherlands' surrender was announced on the radio. Two days later Brussels fell too. The Coca-Cola convoy reached France, but by then the Germans had punched through the French defenses. So they turned west, heading for the coast, hoping to cross the English Channel and reach Britain. By the time they got to Boulogne, however, it was too late. The convoy spent two terrifying days trapped in the heat of the Battle of Boulogne as machine-gun fire peppered their trucks with holes and the Luftwaffe, the German air force, dropped bombs around them. When the fighting subsided they had, somehow, all survived but most of their cargo was lost along with all hope of escape. They gathered up what was left and began the long, ominous journey back to Brussels to face life under the Nazis.
Another fleeing soda man was Guy Linay, the manager of the French Schweppes plant in the village of Gonesse just outside Paris. As the Nazi forces closed in on the French capital in June 1940, he and his family fled south. They had more luck than Coca-Cola's Belgian team, reaching the relative safety of the unoccupied zone of Vichy France, where he enlisted
with the French Resistance. Once France had fallen, Hitler turned his attention to Britain, ordering the Luftwaffe to unleash a bombing campaign that flattened the cities of Plymouth and Coventry and turned much of London into burned-out rubble.
It was into this mix of rationing, air raids, and blackened debris that the former US presidential candidate Wendell Willkie flew in early 1941 on a mission to represent Pepsi-Cola. Willkie owed Pepsi a favor. Back in the summer of 1940 when the corporate lawyer had been seeking the Republican nomination, every pollster and pundit had written him off. By the time the Republicans gathered in Philadelphia to make their choice that June, he was 18 percentage points behind the favorite Thomas Dewey. Then, as the third round of voting began, Walter Mack of Pepsi-Cola came to the rescue.
The Pepsi president had a grudge against Dewey, who had taken the credit for exposing the New York City vote-rigging that Mack had worked to uncover. Now it was payback time. Knowing that many Willkie supporters wouldn't be heard because votes were counted by state rather than locality, Mack demanded a recount in which every local delegate had to name their choice. The recount revealed that Willkie was more popular than anyone had thought and as the rounds of voting continued, more and more people sided with the underdog. In the final ballot he pulled ahead of Dewey and won the presidential nomination.
Willkie lost his battle for the White House to Franklin Roosevelt, but he was eager to return the favor when Mack asked him for help in fighting Coca-Cola in the trademark case that now rested on the decision of Britain's Privy Council. Unlike Coke, Pepsi had only the smallest presence in Britain and no legal representatives to call on in the country. The war also meant that Pepsi couldn't send its own lawyers to the country. So Mack asked Willkie if he could use his influence to travel to Britain and defend Pepsi. After getting over the initial shock of being asked to go to a war zone, Willkie agreed. The former Republican candidate arranged a goodwill mission to Britain designed to reassure the war-torn country that America remained supportive of its fight against the Nazis even though it was staying neutral. While his trip proved to be a much-needed morale boost for the beleaguered nation, the real goal was to help Pepsi beat Coke.
In March 1942 the British lords who watched Willkie and the Coca-Cola lawyers joust over trademark law reached a verdict based almost entirely on looking up the words “cola” and “kola” in several dictionaries. The dictionaries, the lords reported, said cola and kola was the name of an African tree and so could not be trademarked. Their decision meant Pepsi was free to use the word cola in its name throughout the British Empire. Coca-Cola's ten-year battle to banish its New York rival ended there. After the decision Woodruff met Mack in private and hashed out a deal on a hotel napkin that recognized Pepsi-Cola's trademark and ended all litigation between the cola rivals.
As peace broke out in the Cola War, the real world war was getting more, not less, intense. In the summer of 1941 the Nazis had turned on the Soviet Union, sparking what remains the largest military confrontation in human history, and in December that year the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor finally forced the United States into battle. With war intensifying and widespread raw material shortages, the British stepped up their efforts to make everything stretch further, combing the country for ways to save on gas, labor, and sugar. In summer 1941 the British Ministry of Food decided to take control of the nation's soft drink businesses on the grounds that the industry was “not sufficiently important in war-time to justify the use of so large a proportion of the national resources in its production.”
The result was the Soft Drink Consolidation Scheme, and its plan was drastic. By its end 256 soft drink plants had been forcibly closed, and Britain's soda business was using just a fifth of the sugar it had been consuming before the outbreak of war. More than nine thousand employees were moved into more vital work and every soft drink brand in Britain had been temporarily abolished, replaced with generic sodas made to government recipes. When it came into effect in February 1943, Schweppes and Tizer ceased to exist.
Unable to produce its branded products, Schweppes resorted to running ads to remind people that they would once again be able to enjoy the company's tonic with their gin when the war was over. Other British soda companies adopted the same approach, including Pepsi, which ran ads in British newspapers explaining that “the time will come when there will
again be Pepsi-Cola for everyone.” But while Britain's brands submitted to the pressure of helping the war effort, the Ministry of Food's request that Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola join forces to produce a generic “American Cola” was quickly shelved when the bitter rivals decided they would rather stop making their drinks than work together.
America's approach to wartime soft drinks could not have been more different. Instead of curbing carbonated drinks to save resources, the United States militarized soda. While the country remained neutral in the early years of the war, by 1941 there was a growing sense that it was bound to get sucked into the conflict. This worried Ben Oehlert, Coca-Cola's Washington lobbyist, for war meant sugar rationing, and limited sugar meant less Coca-Cola. What the company needed, he felt, was a strategy, a way of persuading the government that carbonated soft drinks were not an inconsequential commodity but a vital part of the war effort.
Oehlert's colleagues were, to say the least, skeptical. Sure, they believed in the greatness of Coca-Cola, but telling the government that fizzy pop was crucial in wartime seemed like a good way to get laughed out of Washington. Despite the dismissive attitude of his colleagues, Oehlert continued to develop his plan for war. Then in spring 1941 Eddie Gilmore, an American reporter for the Associated Press in London, sent the company an urgent telegram: “We, members of the Associated Press, can not get Coca-Cola anymore. Terrible situation for Americans covering Battle of Britain. Know you can help.”