Fizz (20 page)

The telegram turned heads within Coca-Cola. Here was a reporter in a war zone dreaming about drinking Coca-Cola while the Luftwaffe dropped bombs around him. Maybe there was something to Oehlert's vision after all, they thought. Shortly after came an order for seventeen thousand Coca-Cola bottles from the US Army in Iceland. (The British had invaded the island nation early in the war to keep it out of Nazi hands, and America had just taken over the task of protecting it.) The idea of the army seeing Coca-Cola as part of the supplies its troops needed lent even more weight to Oehlert's plan.

By November 1941 Oehlert's vision of soda as a wartime necessity had gained enough momentum for James Farley, the chairman of the
Coca-Cola Export Corporation, to float the idea in a speech to the annual convention of the American Bottlers of Carbonated Beverages. Farley was a former Washington man himself. He served as postmaster general under Roosevelt before resigning in protest over the president's plan to seek an unprecedented third term in the White House. Now he was Coca-Cola's global cheerleader. Wars, he told the bottlers, are won “not merely with guns but with butter” too. Civilian morale, he argued, can make the difference between victory and defeat, and that means soda matters. “With respect to carbonated beverages there is a natural tendency, at first thought, to classify them among the more easily curtailable items,” he explained, but the truth is carbonated drinks are “an affirmative and powerful aid in the defense effort on the military, naval, financial and industrial fronts.”

It was not so much a speech as a manifesto that elevated soda from mere belly wash to the very lifeblood of the war effort. So when America was finally dragged into the war by the Japanese and plans to ration sugar came into effect, the company sprang into action, hoping to convince Washington to see soda not as a disposable luxury but as a liquid morale booster. It pressed the case with officials, published pseudoscientific studies claiming that Coca-Cola breaks could boost production at munitions factories, and got one of its executives appointed to the beverage and tobacco division of the War Production Board. But Washington was unmoved. Sugar would be rationed at 80 percent of 1940 levels and the company's sugar stockpile would be bought by the government at cost and that was that. Soon Coca-Cola was in short supply across the United States. But just as it looked as if Oehlert's plan had fallen flat, Woodruff made a patriotic pledge that took everyone by surprise: “We will see that every man in uniform gets a bottle of Coca-Cola for five cents, wherever he is and whatever it costs our company.”

Coca-Cola had spotted a loophole in the sugar rationing policy. While the restrictions on sugar use applied to domestic goods, it did not apply to products for military consumption. In other words Coca-Cola could supply the troops with as much Coke as they could drink without affecting their sugar ration. Using this loophole, Woodruff and Oehlert developed a strategy that would cost the company millions and provide it with no end of
logistical challenges, but would also take a popular soda and turn it into a liquid as representative of America and its ideals as the Statue of Liberty or the Stars and Stripes. Within weeks of Woodruff's announcement, Coca-Cola bottlers were stepping up rather than winding down production to meet the demand from American troops. The bottler for Elizabethtown, Kentucky, went from producing 100,000 Cokes a year in 1940 to 750,000 in 1944 to quench the thirst of the thousands of troops who were passing through Fort Knox. Boats laden with bottles of Coca-Cola departed from US ports to deliver a taste of home to military stations all over the world, including the Philippine island of Mindanao, where the ill-equipped and outnumbered US troops turned the empty bottles into Molotov cocktails as they fought the advancing Japanese army in April 1942.

By September 1942 supplying the troops with Coca-Cola had become US Army policy, and governments around the world were being pressed to help ensure that the drink made it to the troops. “I have the honor to inform you, in connection with the visit of Mr Patterson of Coca-Cola, that the policy of the U.S. War Department is to endeavor to arrange that this refreshing drink be made available to U.S. troops wherever stationed,” America's military attaché in South Africa told the British dominion's minister of commerce. “There are various U.S. troops now stationed at places for which South Africa is the logical distribution center, and Mr Patterson is endeavoring to complete the necessary arrangements to have Coca-Cola made available to them. Any assistance your department can give in furtherance of this will be deeply appreciated, both by myself and by troops concerned.”

The US military embrace of Coca-Cola deepened further in May 1943 when the Allies finally drove the Axis powers out of North Africa under the leadership of General Dwight Eisenhower, the supreme commander of the Allied forces in the region. In the wake of the victory, Eisenhower, himself a devoted Coca-Cola drinker, asked his troops what they would like more of. “Coca-Cola!” they replied. But rather than ask for thousands of bottles of Coca-Colas to be transported to North Africa, Eisenhower went one better. He asked not for ready-made drinks but for the equipment and workers to set up ten bottling plants across North Africa that could keep the cola
flowing to the front line. The Coca-Cola men sent out to build and operate these plants were given the status of technical observers, or TOs, a specially created rank equal in status to that of an army officer.

Al Thomforde was one of the first TOs. Originally from the Coca-Cola bottler in Hartford, Connecticut, he made an arduous trip on freezing cold planes from New York to Newfoundland to Scotland before traveling down to North Africa to get the Coca-Cola flowing. On arrival he found the equipment, bottles, and syrup had ended up scattered across North Africa. He spent weeks hunting for the mislaid parts before working with Italian prisoners of war to open the first of Eisenhower's plants in Casablanca. Soon US commanders across the world were ordering Coca-Cola plants for their troops. Coca-Cola even started developing special Coke dispensers that troops fighting in the jungles of the Pacific and living on submarines could use. And as the Allied forces advanced, the Coca-Cola plants followed. When the Allies fought their way up the leg of Italy, the Coca-Cola TOs were there, handing out Cokes to soldiers as they fought in the Battle of Monte Cassino and elsewhere.

But this was no mere publicity stunt that had got out of hand, because for the troops Coca-Cola was everything Oehlert claimed it was and more. “Yesterday was a red letter day,” one lieutenant wrote to his mother back in Texas. “The party, your two letters and then on top of it all, I got six bottles of Coca-Cola. They were a present from a friend of mine in the air corp and are the first that I have had since we left the States. I haven't made up my mind whether to hoard them or to drink them…. It is surprising what just a little thing like a Coca-Cola means to a man in the army over here.”

Another wrote to his mother in Berkeley, California, to tell her about how he spied a sailor carrying a Coke bottle in his pocket: “After eyeing it till I could stand it no longer I asked him if I might buy it from him. I explained that I had not had one since I left the States. Whereupon he was so benevolent as to give it to me.” The lieutenant spent the rest of the day hiding it from his fellow sailors, eventually sneaking out of the crew's mess with his precious bottle wrapped in a towel. “I then crept out on the transom in the wardroom and tasted for the first time since I left the States [the] ‘Nectar of the Gods.' It was celestial bliss.”

For many it became a symbol of what they were fighting for. A group of sailors from the US fleet in the Mediterranean wrote to Coca-Cola expressing their hope that Coke would reach them soon before adding: “If anyone asked us what we are fighting for, we think half of us would answer, ‘the right to buy Coca-Cola again.'” After the war, the fighter pilot Robert Scott wrote in his memoirs
God Is My Co-Pilot,
“I don't know exactly what democracy is, or the real, common-sense meaning of a republic. But as we used to talk things over in China, we all used to agree that we were fighting for The American Girl. She to us was America, democracy, Coca-Cola, hamburgers, clean places to sleep, or the American way of life.”

Even US soldiers taken prisoner found solace in their darkest hour in Coca-Cola. One GI told how the Germans put him through a six-week forced march with barely any food. As the seemingly endless trek continued, he found himself losing hope. Then, as they forced him on through a German town, he caught sight of a fading and peeling advertisement for Coca-Cola. “Memories started coming back to me, of home, of the drugstore where my girlfriend (later my wife) and I used to sit and plan our lives together,” he later wrote to the company. “I kept thinking of that Coke sign and what it stood for, of home, of the darling wife and child that were waiting for me, of all the good times and wonderful things that were ahead of me, if only I could get out of this mess alive. Right then and there I said to myself ‘I will get out alive!' and a new feeling of hope and strength seemed to come over me.”

Pepsi-Cola could only look on with envy. Its complaints to the Pentagon about the army giving its bigger rival a monopoly were dismissed, and it found its World War II operations confined to the home front. To show it was doing its bit, the company opened Pepsi-Cola Centers for Service Men and Women in New York, San Francisco, and Washington, DC. These centers were billed as a home away from home for soldiers, offering free Pepsi, showers, and cheap meals. It also provided a recording studio where GIs could record voice messages to their loved ones that were impressed onto vinyl records before being posted for free to their families. More than three million of these “voice letters” would be recorded by the end of the war.

Pepsi also did its best to hold onto the gains it had made in the late 1930s by doing everything it could to find a way to circumvent the sugar ration. An initial plan to keep its bottlers in business using the 86,000-ton sugar stockpile Pepsi had built up at its Long Island City plant ended when the government requisitioned 40,000 tons of its supplies. Mack then ordered the purchase of a 77,000-acre sugar plantation in Cuba to supply the company, only to find the US government would count any imported sugar as part of Pepsi's ration. Figuring that he could instead sell the sugar on the world market, Mack pressed ahead. After the purchase, he learned that the plantation workers lacked access to fresh water, and he sent engineers to Cuba to drill water wells. Two months later the Cuban government turned up, demanding millions in unpaid taxes. Confused by the mysterious bill, Mack headed to Cuba, where the tax official he met explained that Pepsi's policy of improving the conditions for the plantation workers could encourage unrest among those who worked on other plantations, so if somehow the wells were sealed off, maybe the tax bill would vanish too. “I could have hit that little bastard right then and there, but what good would it have done?” he remembered in his biography. Unwilling to pay the extortionate tax bill or to seal the well, Mack sold off the plantation.

Mack then got wind that there was a surplus of sugar in Mexico. He struck a deal with the Mexican sugar cooperative to buy their excess sugar and opened a factory in Monterrey, where the sugar could be turned into a syrup called El Masco that could then be imported and used by Pepsi bottlers to make the Pepsi-Cola. With El Masco, Pepsi was walking along a legal tightrope. Exporting sugar out of Mexico was illegal, and importing sugar to the United States would count toward the company's limited sugar ration. But El Masco wasn't sugar, so it evaded the letter, if not the spirit, of both Mexican and American law. El Masco saved Pepsi, riding to the rescue just as the United States cut back its sugar rations to a level that would have forced a large number of Pepsi bottlers out of business.

Coca-Cola tried to use its influence to get Washington to block the import of El Masco, possibly in reaction to Mack's successful efforts to get its man on the rationing board removed. A government official questioned Mack, who said that it wasn't sugar he was importing, but if the US
government wanted to buy and bring in the sugar Pepsi was using to make it themselves, he would hand it over. The government official checked into it and called back furious. You knew that Mexican law won't allow us to bring in unprocessed sugar, ranted the outwitted official.

Coca-Cola's close ties with the US military also annoyed the British. When US troops gathered in Britain ahead of the Normandy landings, the Americans threw British plans for managing the soft drink industry into chaos. The Americans insisted that the British reopen bottling plants that they had closed so that the Americans could pump out Coca-Cola for the US troops. British officials spent weeks delaying their plans to mothball soft drink factories as they tried to find out where the US troops would be so that they did not shut down plants that would be needed later. The final straw came when the Americans asked that the British provide trucks to ferry their empty Coca-Cola bottles from their bases back to the factories for refilling.

On hearing the request, Ministry of Food official F. J. H. Corbyn blew his top. “This to my mind is a preposterous and retrograde proposal,” he spat. “How on Earth can we go to the Ministry of War Transport and ask for extra transport for this traffic?” The next day he wrote back to the British official who had forwarded the American request to him: “It would be a gross waste of transport which we should not be able to justify to the Ministry of War Transport. If the Quartermaster Depots of the U.S. Army cannot or will not accept the responsibility of getting back their empties then I am afraid that so far as we are concerned the only way of describing the situation is in the Trans-Atlantic idiom ‘It's just too bad.' We do feel that these people should be realistic on a matter of this description in the fifth year of war when we are having all kinds of transport difficulties and are having very great difficulty even to secure transport for most essential items.”