Socks and Smokes

American Poster, artist unknown, 1918

Many people on the Home Front sent care packages to the men and women overseas. In Edith Adams Ninth Annual Cookbook she gives detailed instructions on what to pack and how to pack it. Some acceptable items include butter in a sealed container, sugar cubes, evaporated milk, chocolate milk powder, tinned meats and fish, dried vegetables and fruit, cheese, jams, jellies, pickles, maple syrup, honey, fruit cake, plum puddings, shortbread, powdered milk, fruit juice (concentrated), powdered eggs, and tinned nuts. Ms. Adams also recommends using popcorn as a packing material and stuffing empty spaces with little extras such as shoelaces, chocolate, gum, and "smokes." Of course, there's always got to be room for an extra pair of hand-knitted socks.

What happens when the men received their packages? Well, according to Harry Rankin, some of it was sold to civilians:

In London too, we'd visit Canada House and be given socks and balaklavas knitted by dear old ladies for the war effort. Some of those socks were so enormous that they'd go up over our knees. So we'd take them out and sell them to civilians who'd unravel them and knit them up into something useful. My family would send cigarettes, but since I never smoked, they got flogged too. All this went for a few drinks and a little extra grub.

Sometimes my mother would send a food parcel and I'd share some of it with my buddies just as they'd share theirs. But you didn't go handing it out to civilians like they show in the old war movies; food supplies may have been bad for civilians but they were just as bad in the army cookhouses.

--Rankin's Law: Reflections of a Radical by Harry Rankin, 1975. November House, Vancouver

Rankin says the food was so bad sometimes the soldiers would go on strike and refuse to get leave the bunkhouse. This conflict came to a head just before the men from the Seaforth Highlanders were about to fight the Battle of Ortona.

On the invasion practices, everything was laid on as if it were the real event--including the food. In our pockets we'd carry a couple of cheese or jam sandwiches to hold off starvation. Then, at night we'd arrive back at camp, soaking wet and chilled to the bone to be fed a scoop of applesauce, a piece of cheese, a couple of chunks of bread and a mug of tea. By this time the first division had been around long enough that we weren't going to take this kind of shit. So we went on strike. Lt. Colonel B.M Hoffmeister was commanding at the time and I'm sure he could see his whole career going down the drain with that strike. After all, this was mutiny among the troops selected to invade Sicily! That night he sent a truck to Glasgow for more rations. We ate a little better after that.

--Harry Rankin, Ibid.