Accounts from Edwin N. Blasingim, First Sergeant, 160 Engineer Combat Battalion, Company B, as told to his son.
When Dad talks about things that happened in the war the subject of food often comes up. The food wasn't the best but the 160th was fed regularly. When the 160th was moving across Europe they sometimes camped where the retreating Germans had recently stayed and the camps showed that the Germans did not fare nearly as well as the Americans.The meals the Americans ate included a lot of C and K rations and they were the object of countless complaints and jokes. These are a few of the memories that Dad has about eating with the 160th.
C and K rations had bread that was a cross between a cracker and a biscuit, Dad said, filling but not very tasty. When the 160th got a break they were able to find real bread. They would go into a town buy all of the bread they had. It was usually dark with a hard crust. They handled it like firewood, piled it into the open back of a jeep or 6x6 and broke it into pieces when it was eaten. It wasn't great but it beat ration bread.
When the 160th was in the area around Thionville some of Dad's friends got their haircuts at a small beauty shop on the southern outskirts of Luxembourg City. The shop was owned by a man and his wife, they were a very nice couple with a young daughter. They became good friends with Dad and some of his buddies and the couple invited them to have dinner at their house on a few occasions. Dad said that the food was very good but he did not know what it was ( no labeled cans ).
One evening Dad and a friend got a jeep and drove to Luxembourg City. They took an empty tub and came back with it filled with vanilla ice cream. The weather was cold enough that it did not melt and the ice cream was served to anyone who had a spoon. There was none left.
Sometimes the food was palatable but the conditions made the meal unpleasant. B Company had just finished a bridge south of Fontainebleau and were camped on the east side of it. Yesterday the front had been at the Seine, about 10 miles away. There had been fierce fighting there with many casualties and fatalities. Bodies were coming in from the front on anything that would roll, there were Americans, Germans and French. Each body was rolled up in half of a canvas pup tent. They would unload them and stack them on the ground in short rows and the next layer would be cross ways to that and then another layer, and other stacks.The bodies were to be picked up later for burial. The 160th C Company had lost seven men yesterday when the Germans ambushed them while they were getting the 5th Infantry across the Seine in Fontainebleau.It was breakfast time and the 160th and others were busy going through the chow line, filling their mess kits and looking for a comfortable place to sit and eat. Unaware, several men walked over to the piles of canvas and proceeded to sit and eat their breakfast. Someone told them what they were sitting on and they scattered, they couldn't get far enough away. Dad was discharged in the Fall of 1945 weighing in at 142 pounds, it wasn't because the food wasn't good.
C rations
Dad eating a K ration cracker
