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Show AMERICA IN ACTION V. S. BAKERY IN INDIA By Lieut. Col. Karl Detzer AN AMERICAN BASE IN INDIA. American soldiers in this part of India are eating good American white bread, turned out each day by thousands of loaves in a bakery that isn't a bakery at all. For months soldiers had been complaining about the native bread. Still, there was no room aboard the heavily laden ships for the machinery machin-ery necessary to set up a bakery in a war theater. There were no ovens, no baking tins, no fire boxes. There was no white American flour. One day two months ago a ship steamed into harbor with a cargo of flour from Minneapolis. The base quartermaster called in his assistants assist-ants and told them to make it into "G-I bread." Sergeants and corporals toured the town, brought in bricks and scrap iron and some old sets of grates from an abandoned factory boiler room. A lieutenant drew specifications spec-ifications for an oven. Native bricklayers brick-layers went to work and soon the bakery began to take shape. Still there were no baking tins. But over in the salvage dump were several hundred leaky five-gallon oil cans. Smart sergeants began to cut them up and turn over their edges. Scrubbed, they made excellent substitute sub-stitute bread pans. Flour still was a problem, for the quantity aboard the single ship was limited. There was plenty of local flour available, but used alone it gave a sour, musty taste to all bread. Using the trial and error method, quartermaster bakers trained in the army service forces cooks and bakers' schools, found that a mixture of 40 per cent American Ameri-can flour and 60 per cent native product made bread that all the soldiers sol-diers enjoyed. The improvised bakery has a capacity ca-pacity to supply 20,000 men a day. Bread now is being trucked hundreds hun-dreds of miles to distant posts, and a new bakery, also put together with whatever materials are at hand, is being built in another base port several thousand miles away. Released by Western Newspaper Union. |