Found this snippit in another email from the same Normandy vet, it does refer to 24hr ration packs , so I guess they must have existed even in 1944, I am trying to find out the contents, hopefully will hear back from him soon, hers a cut and paste , The following day more marching and arrived at a large field, surrounded by barbed wire with a large group of other soldiers with 1 large water truck in the middle, for 2 weeks, lots of fatigues, did no cooking. (I cannot find out what they ate only that they had 2 X 24 hour packs that were not to be opened
Meantime lots of shelling over the top of them from our artillery and naval guns. At the end of 2 weeks moved to the outskirts of Bayeux with 8 other cooks to support Royal Engineers in 30 Corp while they waited to move forward. By this time he was cooking and drawing rations for30 men and officers.
JR, I don’t know to what extent the Papua New Guinea Japanese force expected to obtain local food. Its food problems probably came much more from the Kokoda campaign taking much longer than expected. In the Japanese advance phase this required an ever extending supply chain by foot over hard and mountainous country, while the supply chain for the retreating Australians shortened as they came closer to their base in Port Moresby. By the time the Japanese were in sight of Port Moresby they were seriously short of food. As they retreated they became desperate for food and raided native gardens and in a few cases resorted to cannibalism of captured or dead Australians, although it is thought that in some cases there might have been a ritual element to this in eating the enemy (liver seems to have been the relevant organ), as apparently practised by the odious Colonel Tsujii and some other Japanese in various places in Asia and the Pacific . By the time the Japanese had bunkered down in their beachheads at Gona, Buna and Sanananda towards the end of the Australian advance and during the reduction of those beachheads, their food situation was desperate and there were instances of Japanese eating their own dead. Quite some time ago I read a translation of a Japanese soldier’s diary where he records his qualms about eating his comrade versus the need for survival. R. v Dudley & Stephens on land. The Japanese food problems were compounded during their retreat and garrison phases by Allied attacks on Japanese shipping, which reduced further the available supplies.
The problem with carrying supplies by foot is that as the supply line lengthens the carrier requires more supplies to sustain himself on his journey out and return, so he carries progressively less. I can’t recall exact figures, but I seem to recall that at one stage the Australian supply line required something like four porters carrying food just to support themselves and the fifth one carrying supplies for the front.
Although they got some local support, Japanese brutality towards the natives and raids on their gardens meant that the Japanese couldn’t rely on native porters as much as the Australians could, so the Japanese had to divert a greater proportion of their own troops to supply functions.
The Japanese weren’t alone in raiding native gardens as the Australians did it on occasion during the Australian retreat phase, but on a much more modest and less brutal scale.
Reliance on local supplies was much more a feature of the Japanese Malayan and Philippines campaigns. The Malayan campaign went almost perfectly for the Japanese, but General Homma stalled in the Philippines at a crucial stage during the American and Filipino retreat. Homma was accused by other Japanese military leaders of lacking aggression, but at that point a large part of his problem was that he had outrun his lines of supply and couldn’t get sufficient food for his troops. Providence intervened, in the form of large food dumps stupidly left intact by MacArthur in the line of the Japanese advance, which enabled Homma to feed his troops.
In contrast, the Australian practice during the Australian retreat phase in Papua New Guinea was to deny abandoned food supplies to the enemy by destroying or fouling them, notably when the supply base at Myola was abandoned. When the Japanese retreated some of them were so desperate for food that they consumed fouled Australian rations abandoned by the Australians during their retreat phase.
As far as I’m aware the Japanese had no or negligible air supply capacity while, apart from the clear area at the Australian supply dump supplied by air drop at Myola, the dense jungle made air supply largely impracticable for both sides for much of their respective advance and retreat phases over the Kokoda Track.
