Why the U.S. Navy Sent an Ice Cream Ship Into a War Zone
As the carrier Lexington sank at the Battle of the Coral Sea, some of her crew were late to the lifeboats for one reason: they had stopped to fill their steel helmets with ice cream. It was not a fluke. In the Pacific fleet, ice cream was close to currency — destroyers ransomed rescued pilots back to their carriers by the gallon, Marine pilots froze it in ammunition cans bolted to their wings at 25,000 feet, and in 1945 the Navy spent a million dollars turning a concrete barge into a floating ice-cream factory and towed it into one of the most-attacked anchorages in the war. This is the story of why a navy fighting across two oceans decided that frozen dessert was worth a warship — and it runs from a booze ban in 1914 to a kamikaze crashing into a floodlit baseball diamond at Ulithi. Sources include the U.S. Naval Institute, Naval History and Heritage Command, the wartime record of the fleet base at Ulithi, and Anne Cooper Funderburg's history of American ice cream. What forgotten piece of WWII logistics should we cover next?
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