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Rationing didn't end with the war. The Brits in particular had serious rationing for a good while afterwords so that people on the mainland wouldn't starve.
Rationing was even more of an issue there than in the U.S., because they did not have serious refrigeration, and every day was a shopping journey of a couple of hours for the housewives. Even Churchill mentioned the sacrifices of the housewives in his speeches. There were no supermarkets, so the ques were at the greengrocer, baker, fishmonger, butcher, etc.. If a person had hens, the ration board would come around to verify the eggs were being distributed rather than hoarded. One egg per person per week was common for adults. Kids got a little more leeway.
One of my great uncles did time for black marketing tires and gasoline during the War.
I remember reading, I think it was William Manchester talking about sending some souvenirs home from the Pacific packed in packs of cigarettes. His mother thanked him for the smokes and didn't mention the sword or whatever it was.
My grandparents (in Denmark) weren't lacking for basic foodstuffs, the country being pretty much based on agriculture back then, but a lot of other basics were rationed heavily - gasoline and tires, for instance. And of course the luxury imports - coffee, tobacco, chocolate, oranges, bananas, cotton, silk, nylon - were close to unobtainable.
My grandfather was pretty deeply involved in receiving clandestine weapons deliveries - air dropped courtesy of the RAF - and he remembered the pangs of regret from burying parachutes of fine silk, and top-notch nylon line. (Some clever operative in London got the idea of adding cigarettes in the drops for morale - and the Danes had to radio back and ask them to stop. Having tobacco when nobody else did garnered attention, which they could ill afford.)
Cigarettes in Europe weren't just a luxury item, they were currency.
Rationing didn't end with the war. The Brits in particular had serious rationing for a good while afterwords so that people on the mainland wouldn't starve.
Rationing was even more of an issue there than in the U.S., because they did not have serious refrigeration, and every day was a shopping journey of a couple of hours for the housewives. Even Churchill mentioned the sacrifices of the housewives in his speeches. There were no supermarkets, so the ques were at the greengrocer, baker, fishmonger, butcher, etc.. If a person had hens, the ration board would come around to verify the eggs were being distributed rather than hoarded. One egg per person per week was common for adults. Kids got a little more leeway.
Rationing in Britain continued through Attlee's government (thanks to the despised Stafford Cripps), was eased when Churchill came back to power in 1952, and wouldn't end until 1955 (when Churchill was still PM, shortly before his retirement). It lasted longer than rationing did in West Germany, in fact.
Histories of organized crime have said that rationing was to UK organized crime what Prohibition was to American organized crime - that it established it as a force in society rather than loosely connected independent groups of local thugs or traditional ethnic based groups. Not that the mob in the US didn't run rackets related to getting around rationing as well...
One of the somewhat grimy little secrets of the 'Greatest Generation', to my understanding, is the widespread degree of ration cheating. Evidently it was rampant, though just as evidently not rampant enough to negate the value of the rationing to begin with.
From what I've been told - if one lived in a city with a strong mafia presence like Chicago or Detroit (probably NYC and Philly as well), there was all sorts of ration cheating, counterfeit rations, sales of black market rationed goods, etc. going on.
I spoke with someone locally who remembers being upset that chocolate was given to the German POW's being held nearby (it came in their Red Cross packages) but it was not available to American citizens. In the bigger picture, there were more important things than chocolate rationing, but I'm sure it woluld be irritating to see it being given to the enemy when citizens couldn't get it.
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