Drink (63 page)

Churchillian attitudes to alcohol permeated government. Booze was considered a necessity rather than a luxury. In May 1940, the minister for food set out the official position on wartime drinking, with regard to the nation’s favorite beverage: “It is the business of the government not only to maintain the life but the morale of the country. If we are to keep up anything like approaching normal life, beer should continue to be in supply even though it may be beer of a rather weaker variety than the connoisseurs would like.” The resulting brews were indeed feeble—Victorians would have hesitated to offer them to their children. They were, on average, a full 30 percent weaker than the typical nineteenth-century pint and, in the last year of the war, had an average OG of only 1034.5. They were also expensive. Beer duty more than doubled, raising the price of a pint from five pence prewar to a shilling at its conclusion. Supplies of this weak and costly substance were reduced by enemy action: In London alone, breweries receiving direct hits from German airplanes included Barclay Perkins, Taylor Walker, Whitbread, Watneys, Youngs, Fullers, Charringtons, Guinness, and Ind Coope. Pubs also suffered: By 1943 thirteen hundred throughout the country had been obliterated by enemy action.

Austerity measures were also imposed on whisky makers in Scotland, restricting the amount of beverage alcohol they could produce. The larger distilleries kept going by producing industrial alcohol for propellants and explosives. Many of the small malt stills, however, were forced to close their doors. Although much of Scotland was spared the blitz, on September 29, 1940, one of the few Nazi bombs to fall on Edinburgh hit the warehouse of the Caledonian Distillery, destroying 1.2 million gallons of whisky. The following year distilleries were bombed in Glasgow and Greenock, and during the course of the war a further 4.5 million gallons of scotch in government storage were lost to Nazi air raids. Taxes were hiked on the little whisky available for sale: At the outbreak of war, the duty per gallon had been £3 12s 6d, or £4.12 in modern sterling. By 1943 it had nearly doubled to £7.87.

While the high price of scotch was beyond the pockets of most Britons, it did not deter American servicemen, who had begun to arrive in the United Kingdom from 1942 onward, following Germany’s declaration of war against their country. In contrast to the position in the First World War, when Americans in uniform overseas had been expected to stay dry at all times, it was now anticipated that they would tipple when off duty, and to this end they were issued with a brief guide to British etiquette, which included advice on where and what to drink with their hosts. The where was in pubs: “A pub, or public house, is what we call a bar or tavern.” The what was whisky, which was admitted to be rare, or beer. The guide elaborated on the latter fluid, probably to forestall the inevitable disappointment that its readers would experience after their first sip of “bitter,” and also cautioned them not to drink too much, for although it was “now below peacetime strength, [it] can still make a man’s tongue wag at both ends.”

The new relaxed attitude toward alcohol among the American high command was nowhere better demonstrated than in the material broadcast on official radio for the entertainment of the troops. The centerpiece of one wartime Christmas transmission was a “Temperance Lecture” delivered by W. C. Fields. Fields had made his reputation playing drunks in the movies and was famed for his bon mots on the subject of intoxication. His lecture, which would have been blasphemy to the ears of an ASL supporter, sketched a few comic incidents of his failure to stay dry and concluded, “Now, don’t say you can’t swear off drinking; it’s easy. I’ve done it a thousand times.” Clearly, it was now considered safe to represent tippling in a positive light to the troops.

The entry of America into the war in Europe changed the course of the conflict. Superiority was attained in the air and at sea. Weapons and other materiel were shipped in huge quantities to Russia, which had joined the Allies against the Nazis in 1942, and whose troops were pressing in on Germany from the east. In 1944, American, Canadian, New Zealand, and British troops were gathered on the south coast of England to invade France. The British were prepped for their encounter with Gallic culture through the issue of a guidebook,
Instructions to British Servicemen in France,
which warned its readers not to expect to be drowned in celebratory drinks once they had crossed the Channel: “The Germans have . . . drunk the wine or distilled it into engine fuel. So there are only empty barrels to roll.” Moreover, “the idea of the French living in a glorious orgy of ‘wine, women, and song’ never was true, even before the war. The French drink wine as we drink beer. It is the national drink and a very good drink, but there was far less drunkenness in peacetime France than in peacetime England.” After explaining that wine would be rare and was different, the instructions, at the top of its list of don’ts, warned the 1944 generation of Tommies against knocking back too much of it: “Don’t drink yourself silly. If you get the chance to drink wine, learn to ‘take it.’”

As the Allies liberated France during the course of 1944, they received a truly Gallic welcome. Bottles and barrels of alcohol hidden from the Germans were unearthed and offered around. Bars closed by the Nazis or the quisling Vichy regime served drinks once again, often after a symbolic liberation. Ernest Hemingway, over as a war correspondent, performed the ceremony at Jimmy’s American Bar in Paris. The Allies also captured German stockpiles of looted drink, some of which was carried back to Britain, to the chagrin of its customs officials. Duties on wines, beers, and spirits made an important contribution to the war effort. The Americans were perceived to be the worst offenders, not least of all because their camps were beyond the jurisdictionof British bureaucracy. After a thousand bottles of champagne were discovered in a U.S. airfield in Essex, the British Secret Service was detailed to investigate. Colonel J. H. Adam reported that “American officers are bringing wines and perfumes into this country without any Customs formality” and warned, “It will clearly not be long before British officers, realizing the position, will hand such articles to an American officer on the ‘plane’ and ask him to take them to London.” How could Britain expect to repay its lend-lease debts if its officers started to behave like American airmen?

As the Allies approached the borders of the Third Reich, riding high on a wave of liberated alcohol, Germany’s civilians were plunged into drought. The output of domestic breweries had dried up under the pressure of Allied carpet bombing, and for lack of raw ingredients. The strength of beer had dropped precipitously, from a prewar average OG of 1048 for strong beer, to 1030 in 1942, to 1012 in 1943, or below the strength where its alcoholic content can generate intoxication. Brewing ceased altogether in 1944. German wine production was similarly affected. In 1942 the Hitler Youth had dug out all the hybrid vines in Alsace, to be replaced with Aryan strains. The luxury of time they had anticipated—a thousand-year Reich—was over three years afterward—too soon for the replacements to come into service. Domestic supplies of drink were further reduced to feed the Nazi war machine. Distilled alcohol was needed for munitions and as fuel, notably for the V2-rocket bombs. The small quantity of looted or stockpiled booze remaining was diverted to the armed forces and the Nazi elite.

Indeed, the only parts of Germany where alcohol was freely available were those under Russian control. After their victory at Stalingrad in 1942, the Soviet armies had pushed the Nazis out of Russia and forced them back into their own territory. The dry policies of the Bolsheviks were a thing of the past: From 1942 onward, Russian soldiers were provided with a vodka ration of a hundred grams per man per day. It was issued in bottles and shared out among sections. The ration was intended to improve morale and to be a source of food: Prewar Soviet research into the nutritional benefits of alcohol had concluded that a small quantity gave the drinker a shot of energy and might therefore boost the performance of the fighting soldier. In the event, however, an allowance of vodka resulted in a culture of drunkenness among Red Army troops, who supplemented their rations with whatever came to hand, including industrial solvents and antifreeze. Large numbers were killed or incapacitated by such poisons, and intoxication was also responsible for numerous accidental shootings. By the time the Soviet armies entered Germany in 1945, their discipline had been visibly compromised by drinking. According to an allied observer attached to the Soviets, “Russians are absolutely crazy about vodka and all alcoholic drinks. They rape women, drink themselves into unconsciousness, and set houses on fire.”

This culture was prevalent among officers as well as common soldiers. Intelligence reports on the performance of officers in the field employed the euphemism “went off to have a rest” to signify that their subjects had been blind drunk. There was plenty of temptation lying around, for the retreating Germans had left alcohol stocks intact, in the belief that a drunken army could not fight. This was a grave error: The Russians had so great an advantage in men, tanks, artillery, and aircraft that they could tolerate a degree of intoxication in the ranks, and the German civilian population, especially its women, suffered at the hands of drunken and vengeful Russians. Over two million were raped during the Soviet advance through Germany to Berlin.

The scene in the capital of the Reich, in the last weeks before its fall, as the Russians fought from street to street toward its center, blasting buildings into rubble with their tanks and heavy artillery, was apocalyptic. In the Nazi bunkers, a kind of
danse macabre
occurred. The champagne flowed, and Nazi girls, determined to lose their virginity before a Russian stole it, engaged in drunken fornication with state officials and strangers. Hitler married his mistress, Eva Braun, celebrated the event with a champagne breakfast, then the couple shot themselves. Their bodies were laid in a shell crater and incinerated. Outside the bunkers, among the rubble and ruined houses, whose atmosphere was thick with dust and suffused with the stench of dead bodies, the Russian soldiers drank captured alcohol as if the world were about to end and hunted through the ruins for German soldiers and women. A snapshot of the chaos is provided by a letter written by Vladimir Borisovich Pereverzev, a Soviet front-line soldier, or
frontski,
in Berlin:

Pereverzev was dead before his letter reached his nearest and dearest.

The war in Europe ended on May 8, 1945. The Russians had discovered Hitler’s remains and certified them through his dental records a few days previously. His jaws were stored in a little red satin-lined box, “the sort used for cheap jewelry,” and attended, in their container, Russian vodka-fests celebrating the overthrow of fascism. On such occasions a culture of drunkenness united generals and the
frontskis
who served under them, and was condoned at the highest level. When the British foreign minister, Anthony Eden, raised his eyebrows at the spectacle of Field Marshal Voroshilov “being carried out feet first from an inter-Allied banquet,” Stalin explained that in his opinion, his generals “fought better when they were drunk.” The end of the war in the west was commemorated throughout Europe. In Great Britain, it was honored with a public holiday, which was distinguished by its euphoric crowds and mass inebriation. However, after the celebrations were over, and people had turned their thoughts to reconstruction, the prospects appeared bleak.

31 THE BOTTLE

While Europeans contemplated their ruined cities, whose breweries, wine cellars, and drinking places had been bombed into dust, their allies in America enjoyed an increased, rather than a diminished supply of alcohol. American per capita consumption rose by nearly 50 percent during World War II, and this rise had the tacit blessing of the federal government. Unlike 1917, there were no austerity measures to limit brewing, distilling, or the constitutional right to alcoholic beverages, and the expectation that American troops would drink off duty while serving overseas reflected this sea change in attitude. Prohibition was remembered as an unpleasant anomaly, and the sooner that it could be forgotten the better.

The official revival of the love affair between Americans and alcohol was documented in the movies, the plays, and the books of the 1930s and ’40s. The initial response to repeal in Hollywood had been to resurrect the comic drunk of the early years of the silent era. W. C. Fields, whose Christmas temperance lecture had so amused the troops, was the king of the genre. A heavy drinker offscreen, Fields perfected a celluloid alter ego with the same habit, to which were added misanthropy, misogyny, and a hatred of children and dogs. The comic aspects of drunkenness were also explored in cartoons, notably in Walt Disney’s
Dumbo
(1941), whose infant elephant hero drinks, by accident, a bucketful of water laced with moonshine. Spectacular hallucinations follow. Dumbo starts blowing bubbles, one of which mutates into a pink elephant, which clones itself via its trunk, as does its clone, and the trio launch into a jazz arrangement, perform mitosis, melt and blend, then explode into a golden flower, and so on. There could be no better advertisement for the beneficial effects of alcohol upon the imagination. Booze, literally, teaches Dumbo how to fly.

However, by the middle of the 1940s, celluloid topers were being presented in a tragic as well as a Falstaffian light. Repeal had placed not just drinking but drunkenness out in the open, and the latter could no longer be explained away in the language of temperance as the aberrant behavior of a handful of criminals, sinners, and perverts. It was a phenomenon that America had to face, examine, and, if possible, understand. Hollywood rose to the challenge with
The Lost Weekend,
directed and cowritten by Billy Wilder, which won four Oscars, including best picture and best script, in 1946.
The Lost Weekend
dramatizes the psyche and the motives of a compulsive drinker. Its central character is Don Birnam, a handsome, charming alcoholic with ambitions to become a writer, who claims to have been driven to the bottle by lack of confidence—or the realization that he is bereft of talent. While Don is the ghost of temperance noir, equipped with the usual catalog of clichés—vivid d.t.’s, drastic lapses in coordination, cold sweats, blackouts, and a tendency to petty theft—he is nonetheless a sympathetic character, whose insecurity is a matter for pity.