Jim Bradshaw: Sugar wasn't the only shortage during World War II

We know that sugar for coffee often ran short — not to mention coffee itself — and that there was lack of rubber for tires during World War II, but we don’t hear so much about the wartime shortage that really pinched. Alcohol that would normally be consumed in south Louisiana night spots was being used to make bombs instead of booze.
In February 1944, Ed Dauphin, chairman of the Southwest Louisiana liquor industry board, had to explain about the shortage. Some folks apparently thought bigshots were keeping the stuff for themselves.
“The whiskey shortage is a reality, notwithstanding rumors to the contrary,” Dauphin promised. “Furthermore, the shortage is likely to continue to be real as long as the war lasts.”
He said “abnormal labor and economic conditions” were partly to blame, but that “the shortage is due primarily to the fact that military demands for alcohol in the manufacture of explosives are so great that no alcoholic beverages have been distilled since Nov. 8, 1942.”
He said 100 gallons of alcohol were needed to make just one 18-inch shell and also that “it has been discovered that a better grade of butadiene is more economically made from alcohol than from other materials formerly used.”
Butadiene was important in making synthetic rubber.
The good news, he said was that 420 million gallons of whiskey were stored in bonded warehouses in the United States.
The bad news: “That figure represents the amount put in barrels several years ago. The government allows 15 to 35 percent loss through soakage and evaporation … [and] the industry has placed aside a post-war reserve since whiskey cannot be aged quickly enough after the war to meet any immediate demand.”
That meant that only 208 million gallons of whiskey would be available for the duration of the war — and nobody knew in February 1944 how long the war would last.
A shortage of store-bought whiskey would not have been a big deal in south Louisiana in normal times, because those legendary backwoods distillers from Appalachia weren’t the only ones who knew what to do with a piece of copper tubing and a bit of this and that.
Some of the best booze made during Prohibition came from Acadiana and the art of home distilling had not been lost when World War II began. But this time we couldn’t fall back on the still behind the barn because homemade hootch used lots of sugar, and sugar supplies were just as short as alcohol.
But even with a short supply of whiskey, the bars seemed to be doing OK, perhaps because of other attractions.
In September 1944, Provost Marshal Fred Allen, the man in charge of military police in the area, found it necessary to call a meeting of “bartenders, tavern, and saloon keepers” to discourage “the frequenting of their places by women of questionable character.”
The barkeeps said they would surely keep a careful watch and would “weed out the undesirables,” but Captain Allen was back in the newspapers in January 1945, when he warned that bars selling liquor to minors would not be allowed to serve GIs.
According to the press, “Captain Allen stated that the abuses of this law have caused considerable trouble. … [and] operators who do not comply with the laws … applying to minors and who still favor the minors’ business … cannot expect future military patronization of their establishments.”
Luckily, there was still a bit of whiskey left when the war ended in 1945 and celebrations spilled over into the streets. The record is not clear on whether minors and undesirables joined that party.
A collection of Jim Bradshaw’s columns, "Cajuns and Other Characters," is now available from Pelican Publishing. You can contact him at jimbradshaw4321@gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.