I have stumbled across a little news piece on the Bangkok Chronicles ( an English language daily est.1939 reporting the situation of the war to the European readers in Thailand) about how the battle was also fought over coffee consuming. The report goes :
Coffee for Hitler is seized, report
London, September 24th.
The power of the British blockade has now been brought home personally to Herr Hitler.
The British contraband authorities have just seized two tons of coffee from Arabia personally consigned to him.
The coffee was order on August 12th. - BBC Radio(The Bangkok Chronicles, 26 Sep 1939)
The champion of coffee consuming during the WWII was no one else but the Ally, especially Britain and the US. A demand for coffee from the military camps was so high that it exceeded the domestic production in the US. So coffee export was mainly from Latin America (to the Ally soldiers in Europe). In this way, Latin American countries were being guaranteed that their coffee would be bought (and that helped sustain their economies). So Latin America wasn't only a workshop, but also a cafe for the rising American Empire.
Well, the Ally wasn't the only side that wanted to have a sip of coffee. The Axis struggled to import coffee from the Arab producers (because they couldn't get Latin American coffee). Because the Arabian Peninsular was no more the main coffee export like it once was in the 16th century, Germany found it hard to find a chance to drink some coffee when Britain was still world's no.1 in Navy in the 1930s.
So this is the lesson: make coffee, not war
Posts
