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The First Ration Packs
by
Sgt. Bertram King 14254119
.....We were responsible
for the first ration pack made in India. It consisted of six, times ten packets
of cigarettes, which were Victory V’s. I never smoked a cigarette in
my life; I never ever smoked, so my ration went spare every time. But they
were made in a pack, which would go into a pack on your back, with packets
of biscuits which were about, half a dozen biscuits made with oatmeal, and
they were wrapped up in newspaper; Burmese and Indian newspapers that had been
dipped in wax to seal them, which was a novelty. Then you got in that, packs
of, like an oxo cube, it was a tea cube, so you got your tea, your milk and
your sugar in an oxo cube, and you put it in the hot water and you got a cup
of tea.
.....Well that’s your first lot, it went in your jungle pack, and of
course then, you had to live off the land as well. We shot jungle fowl, killed
wild pigs, and very often my blokes used to go off and get a bloody great buffalo
and slaughter it. We got enough liver off the buffalo for the whole battalion.
But back to those Victory V’s; they were terrible apparently, the blokes
said, but they smoked them just the same. Donkey sxxx and stinging nettles.
The chicken’s, we got one each, course plenty of chickens about, eggs
were adlib.
Sgt. Bertram King