The last-minute dad joke at the end was worth it.

Coffee was a major part of Finnish culture even before WW2. We quite literally ran out of coffee during the war and made our own "Erzats coffee" or "Korvike" by roasting different grains. It was a national event when the first coffee ship arrived in Finland after the war in 1945.

*The Great Escape* [1963] has a great scene where Henley [James Garner] is tempting The Ferret (a German guard) into his room with the promise of *Real Coffee*

Allies: A Big cup of Joe/Tea to start the day Germany and Japan: *I LOVE METH*

Fun Fact. Tobacco and balsa wood was used to pack equipment so that it could be useful after the equipment was delivered to Britain by the convoys. Tobacco obviously for consumption, but the Balsa wood was used to make model aircraft for enemy aircraft type identification models, as well as the D.H. Mosquito Aircraft. Ecuadorian Balsa, if you were wondering.

the scene in Heartbreak Ridge where Clint goes into the Sergeant-Major's office and is caught stealing his lifers juice is my favourite coffee moment in movie. in the 1980s the BBc had a tv series called "Private Schultz" who was a criminal turned SS soldier who was smuggling coffee to Germans starved of the real thing in ww2. In WW1 there had been shortages of tea - all of it had to come in by ship ofc - so the British govt had actually stockpiled tea supplies. getting tea was no problem for Great Britain because at the time she was ruling most of the countries growing tea - apart from China ofc

I've found quite a lot of US coffee and lemonade aluminium bags in the Ardennes, often on the edge of foxholes

When people think of wars, their mind will automatically think of large set piece battles, machines and destruction. However the day to day mundane aspects of life on the frontlines and on the home front is seldom talked about. This was a very interesting look at what the average soldier would have drank on all sides of the conflict and how the availability of such products would contribute positively to morale and productivity. Fantastic video. Keep up the good work

While in Iraq in 2005 there were periods of time that I went without coffee for up to several days that made me appreciate it so much more when I got back. Even when we would get access to coffee while on missions, it was often powdered "instant" coffee you might get in an MRE. To this day I value every cup I can have whenever I want back in the USA.

What better way to counteract battlefield fatigue than with caffeine, coffee, and tea. The battlefield is a tiring place, and a nice warm brew can make it at least somewhat bearable. It's nice to know the soldiers, particularly the Brits and Americans, had at least some luxuries on the battlefield like these.

Germany: Making bread from literal sawdust America: Dedicated fleet of Ice Cream ships

The USA also has the Kentucky Coffeetree, which got its name from the Civil War. The South was blockaded by the North, but the Confederates found out the seeds made ersatz coffee.

Try the soldier diet 20% Coffee 20% Cigarettes 60% Pervitin

Johnny, those jokes at the end really ground my gears!

This scene where the solder was to bring back more ammo for his pinned down buddies but gets tempted by the coffee only to return to his dead buddies.

4:16 I literally ate a few pieces of Scho-Ka-Kola like 30 minutes ago and then saw this video pop up on my feed. I was hoping you'd mention it. 😄 I have both the red (60% cacao) and blue tins (30% cacao) next to me. They're pretty good actually! The red tin is a dark chocolate with a mild coffee and kola aftertaste. The blue tin is a milk chocolate that is very coffee-forward with a mild kola aftertaste. I thought I had no idea what kola tasted like, but when you taste it you recognise it immediately (from Coca-Cola and Pepsi Cola)

Perfect! Perfect opening with Forrest Tucker in "Sands of Iwo Jima." None better!

I prefer regular coffee but instant is better than nothing. I remember when I was training out west years ago. I was on our company operations chiefs vehicle. His standing order was if the vehicle was stopped more than 5 minutes, the coffee maker was brewing, and since everyone knew we had it we probably made 5 gallons of coffee compared to each gallon of water we drank. Even remember dipping coffee a few times when there was no chance to make it.

Fascinating data. Thanks. And it's cool to see a clip from "Kelly's Heroes." I love that film. 😊

I appreciate that you used a clip from Greyhound. It’s such an incredible yet underrated movie.

I was born in 1946. My mother, an Army nurse, never gave up her love of instant Nescafe. As a kid, I was allowed Postum which was a grain based coffee substitute during the war and after. I love it to this day but it's very hard to find.

When the average German soldiers were finding that the Allies had Coffee, Cigarettes and Chocolate, they knew they would eventually lose the war.

Bill Mauldin (the American wartime cartoonist) had one cartoon where three officers in a jeep are glowering at an enlisted man (clearly the driver) who is holding one of what was, by implication, another in a long succession of matches under his metal cup. The caption reads: “I just ain’t worth a damn in the morning without a hot cup of coffee.”

I once dated a girl who came from Tennessee. Her grandmother still made chicory coffee, she called it "blockade coffee;" it was seen as part of their Confederate heritage. Johnny, only a drip who don't know beans could say you don't work hard to educate and entertain us. This one in particular really perked me up.

.... ☕️ "Let's get this out onto a tray. Nice!" . 👌🏻

Excellent work, Johnny Johnson!!

Original Dunkirk and Sink the Bismarck clips. 👍👍

Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck WWII cartoons are awesome.

Watching Johnny's video while sipping on a cup of coffee makes for a good start of the day. ☕

Not just coffee, chocolate is also one of the essential rations for soldiers. Though theobromine is not as powerful as caffeine. (Their chemical structures are quite similar)

allies: germany, what you doing? Germany: meth.. Allies:WHAT THE FU-

Gert Fröbe played German army Sergeant Kaffee kanne or Sergeant Coffee can in The Longest day, the German non-commissioned officer on his horse with coffee pots and kettles. Very nice video John!

Calmly talking about the germans using meth while theyre bouncing around a table on chairs was the funniest thing ever lmao

4:30 Pervitin has the nicknames Flieger-Marzipan and Panzerschokolade.

This was quite enlightening to me on the point about amphetamine use in Germany. Many KZfaq videos will call out Germany's usage of amphetamines, but not the context behind their reliance on amphetamines vs. naturally caffeinated drinks. I have no historical knowledge upon which to judge, but Germany's lackluster supply of coffee being the reason for amphetamine reliance makes a lot of sense. Also didn't know that Japan had utilized amphetamines as well (Germany is usually the only one cited). Keep it up and love how informative and punny your videos are in a ~5 minute format.

Love the movie clips you're using to illustrate your text. Very apropos, all o them. Especially the dinner scene with Germans riding their chairs.

The issue I have with coffee and caffeine is that is a FANTASTIC stimulant… unless you use it daily and have a built tolerance

3:54 Thanks, Johnny! I’m going to use that word as often as I can now, regardless of context!

My ship was in the yards in Philadelphia in 1975. There was a coffee shortage in the civilian world at the time. We in the engine room got a 20 pound can of coffee every week whether we needed it or not. It was decent coffee too. We had a locker full of these huge, impossible to hide cans of coffee. Yet the yardbirds stole every one.

Telly Savalas also drank real coffee in "Escape from Athena" So angry it was REAL coffee. That he smashed Claudia Cardinale's coffee cup.

Great job, great content, great illustration.. as usual! Cheers from France!

Yesssss one of my favorite aspects of ww2 era soldiers life coffee it was everything from a pick me up to a morale booster my favorite coffe scene has to be from sands of iwo jima

That video was a nice pick-me-up this morning. I enjoyed w a nice coffee.

you can still buy Schokakola in German supermarkets today :)

You talk about wartime field coffee and I just think: "Coffee, Instant, type 2. Nice."

pls never get rid of the puns at the end, I love em' :)

1:03 My Mom was a kid during WW2 and told me about the ration stamps. People used to trade them, gasoline for tobacco among others. Illegal but quite common.

Coffee replaced alcoholic beverages in the US Navy during the First World War period--caffeine addiction in the US Navy was a self-inflicted wound. The visuals with this presentation were well done.

There's a scene in the WW1 movie "The Lost Battalion" where the Americans throw coffee grounds into their morning cooking fires to spread the scent and trick the Germans into an attack/ambush.

Nicely done. In my old squadron we had a giant coffee dispenser that poured out what looked more like drilling slurry than coffee, but it had to be refilled several times per day.

One thing you missed about the British side: our tanks are specially equipped with water heating units, which soldiers to this day use for making tea whilst on duty.

4:39 Incredible editing 10/10 subscribed

Amazingly informative video which I highly enjoyed. Also, the "punny" send off @ the end was great !¡!

Inka: A Polish ersatz coffee. It looks and measures like instant coffee. With sugar and milk it shockingly mimics instant coffee. I'll have two big mugs a day - perfect for the afternoon/evening/night (Folger's real coffee in the morning/noontime). It generally comes in a glass jar or paper can with red and white colouring and red plastic cap.

One thing that the US had that other Allied and Axis Nations didn't have, was an extensive list of Coffee alternatives well known thru-out the US. New Orleans and its Chicory Coffee with Cafe du Monde being the most famous and still available, the use of Wheat Bran & Molasses found in Utah's Postum, both were readily available on the US markets. As for Tea? That Boston Tea Party? The Tea that was dumped was grown in South Carolina, and its still grown there and elsewhere in the South. If you can find it, its some of the best Tea (in my opinion) around. Just harder to find. Finally, my second time at sea on a Carrier (CV-59 USS Forestall in 1986), our squadron requested and received from Ship's Stores a tin of Coffee. 2 Feet Tall, 18 x18 inches square, about 30 pounds of whole roasted beans from 1943 (with leafy Coffee plant branch, unroasted, with leaves, we think they put that in to provide a bit of humidity) and the can was perfectly intact. There was no grinder on board as far as we knew, so, we did the same thing as they did in 1943...improvised. Fill up the old 5 pound coffee with beans enough to a pot, and use a steel bar (2 feet tall, about 4 inches wide round bar) to pound the beans. Aircraft Carriers flooring up on the O3 level is about a foot thick and make a perfect anvil. So shattered beans brew just as good as ground, and since the beans had been aged vacuum packed... and possibly in cold storage all that time... the beans shattered pretty good and within the day the entire ship knew we had a can of coffee from 1943 and EVERYONE on the ship showed up for a cup. Needless to say, those who came begging pounded Coffee to get a cup. Even a huge can like that was almost all used up within days until our Chiefs said "No MORE, go get your own! except for the ship's CO/XO, Air Boss, or Supply Officer, those guys were Golden and could cage a pot if they wanted it.

Coffee makes you stay up at night when you are in patrol because sleeping makes you feel like there’s an ambush coming

Thank you for documenting this bit of World War II trivia.

Hi my name is Bob and I'm a Caffeinoholic! ☕☕☕ ....Oh BTW Johnny you are getting really creative with you dad jokes. Keep up the great work!

Coffee or mud with dandruff and spit?

Ah! With caffeinated World War II beverages, my dad recalled that Coca Cola was a constant presence where he was stationed in a US Army division HQ in Europe between 1944 ~ 1945.

My first cup of coffee was age 27. Trapped in a railroad switching tower for three days during a Iowa blizzard 1979. Today I still work drink a cop before going to work and one cup half thru the shift. Love the smell in the morning.

1:39 I can just see The Donald rationing himself 😼😂

There was a finnish soldier who accidentally ingested the entire platoon's worth of Pervitin and proceeded to vanish for two weeks, tripping balls and losing his equipment, burning a cottage, encountering(and scaring off) a soviet patrol, beating trees with his bare hands, and stepping on mines. He survived and lived to tell what he could remember of his two week adventure hopped on meth in freezing winter forests of northern Finland.

The world seemed to have become more addicted to caffeine and sugar because of this world war. Still, didn't stop folks like the British from awaiting great guests because a tea stalk floated up on their drinks.

I wish all content was like this. Informative and entertaining without dragging it out and milking it for length.

German Ersatz coffee was often made from acorns. It lacked the caffeine hit but had some nutritional value. Concentration camp prisoners sometimes received acorn coffee as part of their (usually meagre) diet.

My father served in the Pacific where, according to him, their coffee came from Australia and was mixed with chicory root. He hated it and would let us know when commercials for coffee with chicory would come on the TV. He also had learned to drink his coffee black. You could find coffee just about everywhere you went, but hardly ever was there anything to put in it (eg, creamer or sugar). An airman who had served at remote Arctic sites said the same thing, so you always carried packets of sugar, non-dairy creamer, or hot chocolate mix in your parka.

For those who are curious, Scho-Ka-Kola is still available both as the original dark chocolate recipe, and a version with milk chocolate. Even the packaging is close to the original, except certain "symbols" are obviously no longer present

Great job Johnny. Thanks for your content

I protect my coffee from the household like i went to the new world and gathered it myself.

It sounds like Johnny needed some more coffee! A+++++

Definitely explains why everyone I know that was in the military became coffee addicts especially the Navy and marine vet's.

I had no idea there was a singular word that could so well describe the coffee from donut shops in the midwest. "muckefuck"

That coffee and sandwich from saving private ryan always looked so god

Interesting fact: the instant coffee supplied to the military was formulated with 3x the normal amount of caffeine.

There's a clip from the 1991 Gulf War ground invasion where a U.S. Calvary Officer is giving a briefing to the press well into the 100-hour ground invasion. For a moment he drifts off into a tangent about his laundry then snaps back to the briefing stating "Oh, it's just the pills kicking in". Though not issued across the force, so-called "Go Pills" can still be issued to ground combat units whose battle plans include excessive sustained operations. As an Infantryman we routinely trained in a sleep deprived state, going for days sometimes a week or more on little to no sleep. I have personally experienced short "Moments" of hallucinations after 3+ days without sleep. One that stands out is carrying on a whispered conversation with a fellow Soldier while pulling security at a short stop from the march, only to finally realize I'd been talking to a bush beside me the whole time. It's this kind of training where you find your limits, both physically and mentally. My 2 cents on it. SSG. U.S. Army (Medically Retired) Infantry / Sniper / SOF Intel (SOT-A), multiple tours

"Were to have access to unlimited tea, when possible." 🤣💦

Great content!!

I bet the british scouts are enjoying tea just watching Germans km away

Putting the pun in punishment at the end.

“A generous three cups a day” That’s cruelty! Who can hold themselves to three? I appreciate the fact that there was a war on, but still, only three?!

The puns at the end are almost as good as the content, keep it up mate 🙂

The apocryphal story goes that US soldiers stationed in Italy supposedly weren’t fans of the super strong espresso favoured by Italians so they diluted them with hot water to make a milder drink in line with filter coffee The resulting drink was thus known as an Americano

Most allies from retires know this, but others prefer own favourites. Life.

We'd pocket the instant coffee packets from our MREs and tuck the grounds under our lower lips like chewing tobacco when we got tired.

0:36 meanwhile in Germany " Hanz we need to cook

I'm a dad, so your many puns appealed to me. I was aware of the Germans having amphetamines, made famous by the Finnish soldier who was on a ski patrol for days, until he became dazed. I forget his name, but that is the most famous example of WWII amphetamines I can think of. Not so aware that Allies also had amphetamine programs.

When i was in submarines, we ran out of coffee because our chop forgot to order extra for the deployment. He got yelled at by the Captain so loudly that you could hear him from control, two decks below. The captain then had us surface to send out a message for an order, and we b-lined to meet up with a subtender within 3 days just to get boxes of coffee, milk, eggs, bananas, and strawberries lmao. cost the US taxpayer easily 1-2 million dollars' worth of man hours and logistics.

Don’t hit me with them Nescafé’s so early in the morning, Moriarty. Have a little Folgers, baby. HAVE. A LITTLE. FOLGERS ☕️

As a civilian mariner let me tell you, merchant shipping would cease if either Heavy fuel oil, duct-tape or coffee ever ran out.

Watching this while drinking coffee 😁

Nescafe is a popular coffee here among the working class in the Philippines, even in the scorching heat didn't stop us from drinking

"They say that in the Army, the coffee's mighty fine, Looks like muddy water, and tastes like turpentine!" -Cadence

I love puns. Absolutely adore them. My girlfriend hates them. And I love that she hates them. She recognizes that I love that she hates them, so she'll play up her dislike of them for shits and giggles. I definitely need to share this video with her, and if you make a habit of being punny at the end of your videos, then I have a good long list to harass her with. 😆

Popular Wartime stimulants by country: U.S:Coffee U.K: Tea France:Cowardice Germ: Meth

Okay. I'm feeling a little guilty drinking my Italian Sweet Cream coffee now. 😬

Scho-Ka-Kola is surprisingly delicious

shit ... i guess some of the old company wasn't kidding when they say they've been making XYZ since the old days

Please make a video on bearskin hats worn by the royal guards/grenadiers. Good video.

I've tried Scho-ka-kola as it's stillbeingmade. I don't like coffee, but I love dark chocolate, and I think it's very good!