On this subject, there was a piece in the Daily Mail today about British rations being sent to New Orleans:
Official: RAF grub is the best in town…
These were the yawning, graveyard hours of a black sunday morning and a phone going off in a lonely office at the Defence Logistics Centre sounded like a salvo of guns. Some emails were lighting up, too. The duty officer scratched down the time, 4:21am. He read the messages carefully. They took some believing.
The US Government, through the defence and state departments, was asking for half a million British military emergency ration packs to be sent to New Orleans so thousands of refugees from Katrina would not starve. The Americans asking the British for aid! This had to be a first.
The order went through to the storage depot in Bicester, Oxford, in a couple of hours and the duty man there wrote that time down as well - 7.20am.
Trucks were moving the 4,300 calorie packs out by mid morning. A DC-8 jet charter landed at RAF Brize Norton on the same evening, was loaded and took off for Little Rock, Arkansas at 10am on monday. The US Army trucked its load to the sunken city.
So 50 hours after that call shook the Defence Logistics Centre outside London, there were people in Bourbon Street waiting for burger and beans, turkey and herb pate, vegetable soup chicken pasta, tea and lots more, all made in Portsmouth. Good healthy grub.
It was better than the food in the American Army’s ration packs. Tastier to. The joke about our army food died years ago. No one has it better now, that’s from the top.
Out there in Diyarbakir, Turkey in the Gulf War in 1991, furious rain turned the airfield into a mud pool and was still coming down in cold white sheets when the RAF kitchen crew opened up for breakfast.
The kitchen was in a khaki tent, open at one end where you queued for food in front of the stoves. Most went for the full deal, bacon, sausages, fried egg and tomatoes.
The airfield was where the mercy flights and air drops went from to feed a million Kurds chased into Turkey over the mountains by Saddam’s tanks. The Americans were hugely involved and had on Diyarbakir airfield fine looking dining huts and a restaurant sized kitchen, all shining steel and stainless, hissing water boilers.
Troops of any country in Operation Safe Haven could eat at either tent.
The rain kept raging out of an icy sky, running down the roof of the RAF tent and then all over the air crews and ground staff hunched in ponchos and lining up with plastic plates in front of sizzling breakfasts.
The powerful smell of a British breakfast, a true elixir, got sucked into the air stuck to the raindrops and spread all over the airfield. It flicked across the tastebuds of a US Air Force Colonel, the most senior officer on the base.
He turned, the way they do in adverts. His nose became a compass. It kept turning him towards a scruffy-looking tent with smoke coming out of a thin chimney.
‘Let’s go’ he said to officers who were with him. He pulled up the hood of his poncho, felt the rain dripping on it and stood with his boots in the mud, shuffling slowly in line towards the stoves with the Corporals and Sergeants and some British helicopters pilots. And me.
‘After you, sir’ many of the Brits said to him, starting to stand aside. He waved them back in line.
‘I’m alright here in line this morning’ he said.
‘Why are you over here, not at your own facility?’ they asked him. It made him laugh.
‘Have you tried one?’
No
‘Then tomorrow I’ll treat you to one.’ He also meant to say that you wouldn’t want to be treated again. ‘This is real food here, with a proper taste and a proper smell. This is what I’d have in my own home.’
A Corporal wiped rain water off the Colonel’s plate. He had everything, a mug of tea as well and carried his tray to a table further back in the tent. His staff went with him.
When he finished, he passed by the serving area again and told the chef it had been terrific.
Now, they had eggs and ham in the American kitchen too. It was cooked in a tea-chest sized block, frozen in Milwaukee or somewhere and flown straight to the stoves at Diyarbakir.
The cooks hacked off lumps, defrosted them and cooked them on mighty sterile ranges. The calorie count was spot on for survival in a combat zone.
Also, it tasted like wet tissue paper dabbed with furniture polish. Give a guy this for long and he’s going to desert. ‘That’s why the Colonel went over to your place,’ a much more junor office said.
I thought all Americans hated and made fun of British food, he was asked. ‘Not any longer, you’ve seen that for yourself.’
American rations come a million packs at a time in one great airlift. So did the eggs and ham.
The British cooked their food right there in the rain in a tent, and it was the best place to eat this close to the Iraqi border.
It wasn’t just the cooked food, the British ration packs were currency. The rate was one British to six American, and six packs bought you one American camp bed.
The French stuck to their own packs with a little solid fuel stove tucked in so you could heat up your small can of boeuf bourguignon.
Next morning the line at the RAF kitchen seemed a lot longer after the Colonel said to someone it was the place to eat in town.
