War Ration Book

We could auction them off with the receipts going to "6thcorpscombat engineer" WEB Site. AL

Al: Yes, I well remember the ration stamps for almost everything prior to enlisting in

WW 2. I also remember os "farm boys" being allowed to get a small rationed allotment of .22 cartridges along with shotgun shells for "pest and varmint control" along with this.

Also remember turning in fat drippings to get more meat stamps in the local butcher

shop to buy meat. When comming home for a "delay in route of 10 days" prior to being

sent overseas being given gas coupons from the local authoriies of rationing for 10 gals.

of gasoline which the local gas station didnt take and just filled the tank instead. This

was a godsend to my mother as I filled the car prior to leaving also..

Post WW2 ration items.

A dress white shirt: I arrived home in Feb. 46 Things were back to normal! What wvwe Normal is.

There were plenty of casual clothes and shoes. NO dress suits OR white shirts. I checked the local clothing stores where I always bought my clothing. Nothing for several months, the shelves were empty.

One day as I walked in a man walked out witha white shirt. Oh they got some in? When I looked there was the same empty sheleves. Asking the customer later he said they have them in the back store room. Next time I lined up with the back room door and asked ab out shirts, sorry no in srock. So I pointed thru the door way and asked how about them. Oh they were ordered for friends.

So I replieed NO point in trying to buy in this store. I am NOT a friend. Good bye he then followed me out the door trying to tell me I had it wrong.

My Father told me about getting the allotment of .22 shells, and using them to put rabbits in the stew pot for dinner. Also told me about carrying a lunch to school in old lard buckets that usually amounted to a couple of bisquits. My Mother told me about the ration stamps, and also about how in highschool (during WWII) the kids rolled bandages for The Red Cross rather than having P.E. time.

I would love to have lived during a time when the people in this country were all marching to the same drummer, at least during the war effort, and all doing their part with rationing at home.

Jim

Al: Yes, I well remember the ration stamps for almost everything prior to enlisting in

WW 2. I also remember os "farm boys" being allowed to get a small rationed allotment of .22 cartridges along with shotgun shells for "pest and varmint control" along with this.

Also remember turning in fat drippings to get more meat stamps in the local butcher

shop to buy meat. When comming home for a "delay in route of 10 days" prior to being

sent overseas being given gas coupons from the local authoriies of rationing for 10 gals.

of gasoline which the local gas station didnt take and just filled the tank instead. This

was a godsend to my mother as I filled the car prior to leaving also..

Joe; The wife still has two or three ration books still full of stamps that her

father got, I never saw any till she showed them to me. Again Joe, in the

city was a little different. She tells me lines formed for different things and

yes, flour sacks were made into dresses. Youwere lucky to get a 10 day

leave. I was shipped directly from Basic to New Jersey with one stop in

Pa. Those ration books are priceless and she has to decide what to do

with them. You were and are fortunate to live in the country. Roque

10 gallons of gas? That's barely a 1/2 tank for me. Even with the more fuel efficient cars of today that would barely get any one to work for an entire week anymore.

Can you imagine people today dealing with rationing?

Brooke

Brooke, it wouldn't happen would it? People today dealing with it? I listen to people complain in the store everyday over dumb things. They already think it's so tough and rough. I have to laugh sometimes. They ain't seen nothing!

A "different breed of cats" back then. We were used to hardships due to the 1929 Big

Depression that lasted for about 10 years. So rationing was no big deal. Cant help but

wonder if many of the newer and softer generations could exist with it. I hope we never have to find out. Can you imagine the 35 MPH speed limit to save tires and gas

for one thing . The "A" gas stamp book for non-essential workers for 3 gals. per week?

Even essential workers were closely rationed. Wont go into food ETC.

About depression gasoline. We could buy "Cassin Head" gas for 8 cents per gallon in North Texas around 1936. That is raw white gasoline just out of the processing plant. No addatives...Two for 15 cents.... Regular brand gas was 12-15 cents per gallon. AL

A "different breed of cats" back then. We were used to hardships due to the 1929 Big

Depression that lasted for about 10 years. So rationing was no big deal. Cant help but

wonder if many of the newer and softer generations could exist with it. I hope we never have to find out. Can you imagine the 35 MPH speed limit to save tires and gas

for one thing . The "A" gas stamp book for non-essential workers for 3 gals. per week?

Even essential workers were closely rationed. Wont go into food ETC.

Joe; talk about old times, remember the WPA and the CCC. Pot belly stove

in the middle room woodburning cook stove and in the city we had to either

go to the river for drift wood or get R.R. ties that didn't have creosote

for the cookstove buy a ton of coal for the potbelly. Plus the fact that

we were a little different in color didn't help matters much but Joe those

were the best years of my life. I could go on and on but I think you get

the picture. I am a happy ole dogface and I tell the wife that I have my

best FREINDS on this site, including a pleasently mature gal. see ya all. Roque

Joe and Rocky, you are both correct. You learned to live with hardships at a very early age. Took nothing for granted, so when rationing became the norm for the war, well, it was just another thing. Tain't no big thang!

Most people today could not live with it. Well they probably could, but not without a ton of bitchin'. Most don't appreciate what they have and that is very sad. You know what, they make themselves miserable. They are always looking for something better, waiting for another day, looking for an elusive high or something that's just out of reach. Therefore they miss so much of their lives. They throw hours and friends away. They look too far and miss what's right in front of them. Thank God I was brought up the way I was. The little things in life make me happy. Hope they always will.

Signed that "pleasantly mature gal".

Enough to go around

by Carl Zebrowski

There were lines at the grocery store, the butcher shop, and the gas station. Shoppers carried booklets of government-issued stamps that were required if they wanted to buy certain goods. It was rationing, with the government deciding who could buy what. It reeked of communism, and it was right here in the United States. And it wasn’t all bad.

As the military moved overseas to fight the war, it needed clothing, equipment, vehicles, weapons, and food. But the people at home needed supplies, too. The government stepped in to make sure both would have enough. The goal was to control the availability of certain essential goods and keep the prices reasonable. Shoes, appliances, razor blades, tires, heating oil, butter, cigarettes, beef, gasoline, and coffee were among the affected items.

The responsibility for running the ambitious and controversial rationing program fell to the Office of Price Administration. The first target was tires, as the Japanese gobbled up the rubber-producing islands of the Pacific. It was up to the OPA to figure out which citizens needed tires most. Those whom the OPA decided absolutely needed to drive were given a certificate right away that allowed them to buy a new set of tires. The list of the privileged included doctors, public officials, and war workers. It did not include ministers, an omission that raised a public outcry, especially from the rural South. President Franklin Roosevelt “was outraged that anyone could be so casual about both fundamentalist religion and the fundamentals of American politics,†remembered OPA administrator John Kenneth Galbraith. “Ministers were promptly proclaimed essential.â€

Eventually, the OPA realized the best way to conserve rubber was to cut down on driving. The mainstay of that effort was gasoline rationing. Again, the government determined who most needed to drive and then issued different grades of ration stickers. In the beginning, the lowest-level sticker entitled the holder to three gallons of gas a week, which was good for only about 60 miles of driving. That basic sticker quickly became a sign of low standing in the community, leading socially conscious citizens to petition for upgrades. The OPA estimated that eventually half of all drivers had better-than-basic stickers, even though a Gallup Poll determined that three-fourths of Americans who drove to work could have found other transportation.

Food rationing soon followed. In early May, representatives of each household had to visit their local schools, where teachers handed out ration books. The so-called “sugar book†contained stamps that could each be used for a specific product. “You needed a coupon to buy sugar,†reported Gordon L. Cornell of Broadalbin, New York, “but the fact that you had a coupon did in no way guarantee that you could find some!†To check out at the grocery store, a shopper handed over perhaps a sugar stamp, a butter stamp, and any other required stamps along with cash.

The second ration book the government issued, and future books, worked differently. It came filled with different-colored stamps with different point values. Red stamps were for meats, hard cheese, and fats, and blue stamps were for canned and bottled fruits and vegetables. Each person received 16 points in red stamps and 48 points in blue stamps per week. At the store, a shopper found a number displayed on the shelf below an item that told how many ration points the item cost. At checkout, the grocer would tally the cost in ration points and in dollars, and the shopper would hand over the total stamp and cash amounts owed.

The system was a big headache for the grocer. He had to take all the stamps he collected and stick them onto the pages of empty stamp booklets supplied to him by the government. He then took those filled booklets to his distributor, and the amount he was allowed to buy was based on how many stamp books he turned in. Perhaps the biggest trouble for grocers was having to keep up with the continually changing point values that the government assigned to various products.

For families with kids, shoe rationing may have presented the greatest challenge. “My dad had a couple of brothers who were married but didn’t have any children, so he would always collect coupons from them so they could get me a pair of shoes,†remembered Tom Reese, a childhood resident of Washington, DC.

Rationing was far from perfect. Sellers and buyers alike were often frustrated by the complicated regulations. Some turned to the black market. The government, for its part, had problems with enforcement. But in the end, statistics show that the average American ate better during the war than ever before. The little bit of borrowed communism had something to do with that. ...............................................................

Carl Zebrowski is the managing editor of America in WWII. This article originally appeared in the June 2006 issue of America in WWII.

http://www.americainwwii.com/stories/enoughtogoaround.htm

I recently became friends with a high school teacher from Texas. He wrote to me earlier in the week regarding my WWII jukebox, and he is working our site into his lesson plans. What an honor.

This afternoon he sent me a question and I am placing the question and answer here. GREAT question!

Hi Marion,

I hope I'm not bothering you but I just tried to find an answer to something on the internet to no avail and thought you might know off the top of your head. I know that sugar was rationed in WWII but why?

Someone told me that it is because they used sugar in explosives but I haven't been able to confirm that. Do you know if that is true?

Thanks,

Ferryn Martin

=======

Hi Ferryn:

Happy to answer. Actually it was due to import shortages and the fact cane sugar was shipped from such places as the Phillipines and South America.

It was remembered how difficult sugar was to obtain during the WWI, so Americans began stockpiling sugar in 1941. Sugar began being rationed and actually continued being rationed through 1946 until the sugar supply was sufficient to meet demand.

Warmly,

Marion