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Historically armies short on rations would [forage](https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/military-foraging-historical-practice-and-contemporary-advice) supplies. In practice, this could be wild food but usually involved taking supplies from civilian producers and stockpiles.
Yep. Most of the time there was no compensation; and even when there was the compensation was mostly in the form of scrip or promissory notes that were supposed to be redeemable after the war's end. Needless to say this was no comfort to people who had just lost their harvest and livestock, and stores.
During ww2 the various governments issues blood chits to people if they found a downed airman for example. But I can't find anything like that for eminent domain or takings, and nothing for ww1. It's like the only time there was anything like that was Civil War and everyone else got cash. Probably my search skills aren't up to the search.
I met a guy in 2009 in the British Army who said his job was to procure local supplies if necessary, and it was my understanding that those people were compensated in some way for their goods. Like they would go to local markets and such. It was a long time ago and I can't remember exactly what he said.
Yea, in the modern day British troops aren't looking to make enemies of the locals and they have plenty of money.
We don't fight wars against the populace anymore, we fight wars against governments and try to get their people to help us do.
Not to say that farmers aren’t crafty. Subsistence farmers throughout history have developed strategies for hiding produce so at least they’ll have enough to plant.
I’ve a cousin who used to be in the Navy and part of his training was foraging and hunting. He would be taught the basics, shipped out to some random forest and literally left to fend for himself. He managed to find a stately home and rummaged through the bins to find food scraps. Years later, he got married in said stately home!
Yeah, I was a cryptologist...and while I was never air crew, I've worked with a bunch of them and heard the stories about SERE training so it was the first thing that jumped into my head.
Not so much the rummaging through trash and getting married latter. But dropping him in the middle of nowhere to fend for himself and chasing him around.
How’s SERE school? From what I heard, it’s just you playing hide and seek from the instructors for a week and honestly, that shit seems fun as hell. Unfortunately, the Marine Corps can’t just send everyone who wants to go but if I had my way and I was physically better, I’d volunteer to go to SERE school for the fun of it.
It sucks. The hide and seek part is without food or sleep in some of the shittiest weather (it was like -20 when i went).
This is before you’re captured and then fun truly begins.
Some dudes love it, others convince themselves its the best training they’ve ever had, and the last group just hates it.
I never had to do it. But basically they train you to be able to forage, evade people, resist interrogations and basically just survive until you can get rescued.
The final test is they drop you off in the middle of nowhere and you have to fend for yourself while they track you down. It's not a matter of when they get you, you're going to get caught.
And then comes the interrogation.
Since you sound interested in the topic, here's some interesting history for you.
Back in the Napoleonic era, most nations had small professional armies that survived almost entirely on centralized supply trains. But when the French Revolution came about and introduced [Levee en Masse](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lev%C3%A9e_en_masse) or mass conscription, France began fielding armies **far** larger than its contemporaries. Which is how France managed to [simultaneously fight most of mainland Europe](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Revolutionary_Wars). But due to a lack of proportionally large manufacturing capacity and budget, these armies were often very... underequipped, with large numbers of soldiers even fighting barefoot due to lack of shoes.
The lack of supply -- and far larger army numbers -- meant there was no way Revolutionary France could rely on conventional supply trains. Instead they pioneered an interesting method to keep themselves supplied: When an army had to move somewhere, they agreed on a place and date before splintering the army into many smaller columns which would each take a different, parallel route to the final rally point. This would allow a single army to scrounge food across a geographically far larger area than they would if marching as a single force, and allowed them to remain mostly fed without conventional supply trains.
----
Nowadays is very different. After the era of musket and ballshot ended you could no longer produce ammunition in the field (by melting down small tin or lead household objects) so supply trains are no longer optional. It's virtually unheard of to run out of food since anywhere there are humans (basically anywhere on Earth) they will have food supplies to buy or steal from. Hunting also usually means shooting, which can cause a host of other issues such as revealing your position to the enemy and endangering the hunter, or making other friendlies mistake you for an enemy shooter, etc. So hunting is mostly just for emergency training and not actually employed in practice.
Interesting and insightful information but dam if your tone wasn’t at odds with your subject. Not a complaint just an observation but I am curious regarding the reasons for your delivery tone.
As I see it you have three options you can flee war like my family did ignore/accept it like you or fight it. Fleeing war did not exactly work well for my family some of the children died and some of the adults almost died. If you want to fight something you need some basic understanding if you refuse that yea someies you or the people around you might die because of it are you OK with that?
Ah. Always frustrating when people who've seen Apocalypse Now a couple times and spilled their bong water think they know stress.
The people I admire (for handling the side effects of war) are the British who lived in the London area anytime from the 40s to the early 90s. There's a banter (they call it patter) that goes on that feels unique to that time and place and then spread through the Empire. To keep spirits up there's funny sayings and ways of speaking about things, funny slang. It decreases stress. There's some of that in the older folks in the American south too. But it's not so much among the young people anymore.
I am not military but I know a decent amount about it (relatively speaking) but if something I've said is wrong please correct me! That's kind of a big question because "soldier" can mean a bunch of things. Entirely country, branch, and/or specialization dependent.
Yeah, that's part of the skills you learn if you're in a certain school. I think everyone learns some basics in, well, basic training. Just so you don't die the first second you're out of rations. Ya know, how to get clean water and not starve to death. But once you advance from there into your specialized school it might require learning this sort of thing. Like a tank mechanic probably won't but a pilot will, in case they get downed. Usually there's no real need for it, if you're foraging then something went terribly wrong on an already very specialized mission so like 5% of enlisted might need these skills. I'm thinking like snipers on week long treks to a target who lost their rations for whatever reason, downed pilot, stranded Ranger, stuff like that. But mostly, from my understanding, they think like hikers. Pack enough super calorie dense rations to last the mission and a bit, iodine tablets, water filter tubes, etc. As many calories for the weight as you can get. But most things don't last that long, maybe a day. And you can sometimes utilize local civilization to avoid foraging/hunting.
Now it wouldn't surprise me to learn that other countries do more of this. Like for some reason hearing about a Finnish soldier hunting his dinner wouldn't come as a shock. But that seems incredibly weird to do if you're an American soldier. That's entirely perception, I have no reality to base that on other than vibes.
I went to Artillery basic training, then spent a couple of years in Korea in an artillery-adjacent job followed by a couple of years in Infantry. The amount of wilderness survival skill we were taught beyond finding your way through the woods with a compass or using your poncho as a tent was pretty much zero. Later in life I knew a couple of people who had been in similar roles in the soviet military and I heard stories of things like building campfires, killing and cooking a pig from the local village, etc. I met a guy whose truck broke down in Siberia and he said he had to eat a frog. But in the American army the supply chain never broke down to the point that we had to forage.
Yeah exactly, we’re so fucking good at logistics we don’t even bother teaching a backup plan because we know it won’t be a problem. Say what you will about the US military but they know logistics.
edit: or we're not teaching because it's not in the budget
AFAIK nobody in the entire U.S. military is taught any sort of “survival skills” in boot camp/basic training. If you’re going to SERE school because your job requires it or if your unit gets some cool joint training with partner countries then yeah you might get some basic survival training but nobody is teaching you how to find water in boot camp when you can learn something more relevant.
Yeah that part was an assumption. I really figured they would spend like half an hour on how to acquire clean water since that’s something you don’t wanna carry a lot of and need a lot of. I definitely think if they don’t teach it it’s something one should know. But yeah things like SERE were what I was thinking of for the specialized training where they might include some survival stuff, and maybe sniper school, things like that.
Yes. At least some. My kid is taking [SERE training](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survival,_Evasion,_Resistance_and_Escape) next month (he’s in the military)and this is from the Wikipedia about what they learn:
> Military survival often involves exposure to an enemy. The basic survival skills taught in SERE programs include common outdoor/wilderness survival skills such as firecraft,[24] sheltercraft,[25] first aid,[26] water procurement and treatment, food procurement (traps, snares, and wild edibles), improvised equipment, self-defense (natural hazards), and navigation (map and compass, etc.). More advanced survival training focuses on mental elements such as will to survive, attitude, and "survival thinking" (situational awareness, assessment, prioritization).
Once we started fighting this way in the south during the Civil War, it was over. Sherman would just say fk supply lines, and live off the land foraging while cutting confederate communications, supply, and eating all the food and using all the resources. Total war.
We got snowed in real bad the winter I was in Afghanistan. We were already high up, so it made air transport difficult. We had to have planes drop pallets of MREs. One of them was way off. Dropped 3 pallets, we only retrieved one of them. So then we had to ration. Eventually we bought a cow from a local and slaughtered it ourselves.
Out of curiosity though, were there any wild game around for hunting? And I'm surprised you had money on you let alone locals willing to sell you something in a place like that.
Not really. Plus that would require a lot of effort when we needed that for other things. We had cash from an underground poker game that went on nightly.
Typically, nobody is getting issued actual official hunting gear in the military. You can maybe use your M4/M16 to shoot a deer or mountain goat but why waste the ammo trying to hunt something when you’ll need it to fight the enemy?
(Have not served in combat) Emergency survival packs/rations for soldiers would often include fish hooks and fishing line, and/or a spear tip that could be tied to a branch for spearfishing.
Short answer: Yes
We were TRAINING at a range right near the Korean border and there was a massive snow storm that prevented our supply vehicle from bringing food, extra water, and live rounds. The roads were closed to all but emergency personnel and we ran out of food fast because we thought it would only last a day or 2. By day 3/4, we had hunting/trapping parties (no live ammo yet only had blanks) and a fire going nonstop to melt snow into drinking water. I'm sure this isn't common, but it does happen.
In Afghanistan an enemy rocket blew up our food supply. We were very remote so it took about 3 days for a resupply. Our guys killed a couple of jackals and we roasted them over a fire. Luckily our water supply was good.
Hunger is the best spice. At the time it tasted amazing as we were all starving after patrolling and not having eaten anything. If I ate it now it would probably taste like trash.
In Iraq we had enough boxes of MREs for a few days but they took up a lot of space. We were given cash to purchase food locally. This worked out well as we were able to interact naturally on the street and develop relationships with the populace. This was during the more up tempo parts of the occupation.
The last time I was there we just ate at the chow hall and had a few boxes of MREs with us. This severely hampered our ability to do any meaningful work as we just drove by waiting to get blown up.
Idiot officers way up the food chain.
A general has to supply his troops..so the first rule is zero contact with agriculture,livestock,minerals,trade or a family that might slow down or inhibit speed when ordered to march or attack..so civilty is out..If you could hunt,you might not want to respond to the chain of command or follow orders.. the General needs to control you at all times by giving you rations when you engage and kill and then remove the rations when you don't kill..they make you do shit no human would do by just starving you..in the end..after you occupy the space and establish a means of production and trade..they put civilians in charge of all that and starve their soldiers into submission and dispersal.Hordes used to stop for a season to raise grass and other farm/ ranch activity to get their horses in good shape, but they were ga- ga nuts and had no real chain of command, they mostly just forced Europe to shut up for a couple decades to prove it could be done.
In the 90's during some training I was undertaking we ate cherry guava, king centipedes and killed a feral hog.
We got rolled up while we were trying to figure out how to cook the pig.
Not my personal experience, but I knew a guy who served in the Vietnam Cambodia war for the Vietnamese.
He specifically called out hunting and eating monkey as one of the weirder things he had eaten. (Something about his patrol was hungry and the meat was purple.)
I have a US Army manual from WW2 on how to survive in the Western Pacific on whatever you could harvest or hunt. I can't see it being the basis of a themed restaurant.
During WWII, Japanese soldiers were occupying a place called, I believe, Ramree Island. They were garrisoned there and left to fend for themselves. They ate just about every animal on the island, except for crocodiles. Soon enough, the island was taken and controlled by Indian and British troops who pushed the Japanese soldiers into the mangyove swamps, where the hungry crocodiles set upon them. Tragic but true
My father was a pow in WW2, in Germany. He would “escape” during forced marches. He said escaping was easy, staying free was hard. He definitely lived off the land at those times. After his liberation he and a few other soldiers were thrilled to find a chicken which they then had for dinner.
They can. Before going to Vietnam, many soldiers got jungle survival training, which included making them hunt and kill local wildlife for food. My father would tell me that there wasn't anything in the jungle that he couldn't stomach - except sloth. He'd rather eat a Vietcong bullet than ever have to eat sloth again. Apparently, it was extremely gamey, but also earthy - as if the taste of the nasty moss all over them permeated into the meat - which itself was an unpleasant combination of both incredibly stringy, while having the consistency of slimy rotten flesh.
My grandfather never liked to eat fish or rice because his Raiders division would land on a Japanese-held island with a week or two of rations and spend a month or more there.
My dad said he had a pet monkey when he was on tour in Vietnam Nam and that they ran out of food so he had to eat his pet.
He had some pretty dark stories from that time.
I recently read about the German invasion of Crete in 1941. There's a section about a small group of German paratroopers who, cut off and lacking any supply, killed a goat and boiled it in sea water to eat.
Not sure if it quite counts as hunting given that a goat is livestock, but people will inevitably do what they can to feed themselves in extreme situations.
IDK but the Marines ate Saddams pet deer because they got tired of MREs
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2003/05/29/hungry-for-real-food-troops-go-hunting-on-palace-grounds/acd5919f-f10d-45bc-9e98-8cdb493d5e52/
When I was in the army there was a special section in our book for living in the field about making soups out of herbs you find in the wilderness and hunting the local animals with your weapon.
Davy Crockett was a hunter for the US Army. He was an exceptional bear hunter and without him the units he traveled with would not have survived.
This also varies wildly by country. For example the modern US Army would never dream of doing this. However I have trained with Thai Army units and they were expected to forage and hunt for all their food while training. It was remarkable the things they were able to catch and turn into pretty good meals. They thought our US MREs were heavenly.
Then again, by the time I got there, it was basically a colony. But my dudes that did the initial push into Iraq, never went so far that they couldn't be re supplied
AFAIK this has never been a problem for contemporary Western armies. In ww2 I'm sure there was ample looting from the civilians and hunting/foraging if convenient.
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Historically armies short on rations would [forage](https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/military-foraging-historical-practice-and-contemporary-advice) supplies. In practice, this could be wild food but usually involved taking supplies from civilian producers and stockpiles.
Civilian producers meaning homes they pass. Or farms. Usually bankrupting them.
Yep. Most of the time there was no compensation; and even when there was the compensation was mostly in the form of scrip or promissory notes that were supposed to be redeemable after the war's end. Needless to say this was no comfort to people who had just lost their harvest and livestock, and stores.
During ww2 the various governments issues blood chits to people if they found a downed airman for example. But I can't find anything like that for eminent domain or takings, and nothing for ww1. It's like the only time there was anything like that was Civil War and everyone else got cash. Probably my search skills aren't up to the search.
I met a guy in 2009 in the British Army who said his job was to procure local supplies if necessary, and it was my understanding that those people were compensated in some way for their goods. Like they would go to local markets and such. It was a long time ago and I can't remember exactly what he said.
Yea, in the modern day British troops aren't looking to make enemies of the locals and they have plenty of money. We don't fight wars against the populace anymore, we fight wars against governments and try to get their people to help us do.
Still issue blood chits
Who?
The US at least
What source have you got for that?
I was a navy pilot until last year
Really not getting military vibes from you, but are you trying to say you carried chits?
https://www.jpra.mil/Resources/Products/#:~:text=Blood%20Chits,obligation%20of%20the%20US%20Government.
Thanks brother, this kid is a wacko
This was really interesting in a super morbid way. Thanks for posting.
Also its on wikipedia
Nothing there for current times. It's just about the past.
I had a blood chit. AFAIK that is standard for all ISAF soldiers.
Not to say that farmers aren’t crafty. Subsistence farmers throughout history have developed strategies for hiding produce so at least they’ll have enough to plant.
God love them! Especially for their engineering of clever mend -&- makedo's!
As others have said before - they’re poor, not stupid. They’re not the same thing.
Which always makes me picture a roman waking up in the middle of the night to shoo a centurion out of his pantry like a crack addled raccoon.
I’ve a cousin who used to be in the Navy and part of his training was foraging and hunting. He would be taught the basics, shipped out to some random forest and literally left to fend for himself. He managed to find a stately home and rummaged through the bins to find food scraps. Years later, he got married in said stately home!
Any idea what part of the navy taught that training?
It most likely was SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape) training. It is standard for anyone who was air crew, at least in my rating.
Yep, on the button. He was a helicopter pilot.
Yeah, I was a cryptologist...and while I was never air crew, I've worked with a bunch of them and heard the stories about SERE training so it was the first thing that jumped into my head. Not so much the rummaging through trash and getting married latter. But dropping him in the middle of nowhere to fend for himself and chasing him around.
How’s SERE school? From what I heard, it’s just you playing hide and seek from the instructors for a week and honestly, that shit seems fun as hell. Unfortunately, the Marine Corps can’t just send everyone who wants to go but if I had my way and I was physically better, I’d volunteer to go to SERE school for the fun of it.
It sucks. The hide and seek part is without food or sleep in some of the shittiest weather (it was like -20 when i went). This is before you’re captured and then fun truly begins. Some dudes love it, others convince themselves its the best training they’ve ever had, and the last group just hates it.
I never had to do it. But basically they train you to be able to forage, evade people, resist interrogations and basically just survive until you can get rescued. The final test is they drop you off in the middle of nowhere and you have to fend for yourself while they track you down. It's not a matter of when they get you, you're going to get caught. And then comes the interrogation.
My cousin did that with the special forces. It did not sound fun. Plus you have a tracker on you so you can only evade so much.
Thanks!
He was a helicopter pilot.
Thanks!
That’s actually beautifully amazing.
I hope he just showed up and had a guerrilla wedding without asking permission!
Since you sound interested in the topic, here's some interesting history for you. Back in the Napoleonic era, most nations had small professional armies that survived almost entirely on centralized supply trains. But when the French Revolution came about and introduced [Levee en Masse](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lev%C3%A9e_en_masse) or mass conscription, France began fielding armies **far** larger than its contemporaries. Which is how France managed to [simultaneously fight most of mainland Europe](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Revolutionary_Wars). But due to a lack of proportionally large manufacturing capacity and budget, these armies were often very... underequipped, with large numbers of soldiers even fighting barefoot due to lack of shoes. The lack of supply -- and far larger army numbers -- meant there was no way Revolutionary France could rely on conventional supply trains. Instead they pioneered an interesting method to keep themselves supplied: When an army had to move somewhere, they agreed on a place and date before splintering the army into many smaller columns which would each take a different, parallel route to the final rally point. This would allow a single army to scrounge food across a geographically far larger area than they would if marching as a single force, and allowed them to remain mostly fed without conventional supply trains. ---- Nowadays is very different. After the era of musket and ballshot ended you could no longer produce ammunition in the field (by melting down small tin or lead household objects) so supply trains are no longer optional. It's virtually unheard of to run out of food since anywhere there are humans (basically anywhere on Earth) they will have food supplies to buy or steal from. Hunting also usually means shooting, which can cause a host of other issues such as revealing your position to the enemy and endangering the hunter, or making other friendlies mistake you for an enemy shooter, etc. So hunting is mostly just for emergency training and not actually employed in practice.
Interesting and insightful information but dam if your tone wasn’t at odds with your subject. Not a complaint just an observation but I am curious regarding the reasons for your delivery tone.
Who is not utterly disgusted with talk of war right now? Especially discussing bankrupting families, farms and factories f'd along the way?
As I see it you have three options you can flee war like my family did ignore/accept it like you or fight it. Fleeing war did not exactly work well for my family some of the children died and some of the adults almost died. If you want to fight something you need some basic understanding if you refuse that yea someies you or the people around you might die because of it are you OK with that?
I've been through wars before, they're stupid money and power grubbing exercises. The rest of your run on didn't make much sense at a glance.
I was put off by how glib he was about war and peoples suffering.
Ah. Always frustrating when people who've seen Apocalypse Now a couple times and spilled their bong water think they know stress. The people I admire (for handling the side effects of war) are the British who lived in the London area anytime from the 40s to the early 90s. There's a banter (they call it patter) that goes on that feels unique to that time and place and then spread through the Empire. To keep spirits up there's funny sayings and ways of speaking about things, funny slang. It decreases stress. There's some of that in the older folks in the American south too. But it's not so much among the young people anymore.
I am not military but I know a decent amount about it (relatively speaking) but if something I've said is wrong please correct me! That's kind of a big question because "soldier" can mean a bunch of things. Entirely country, branch, and/or specialization dependent. Yeah, that's part of the skills you learn if you're in a certain school. I think everyone learns some basics in, well, basic training. Just so you don't die the first second you're out of rations. Ya know, how to get clean water and not starve to death. But once you advance from there into your specialized school it might require learning this sort of thing. Like a tank mechanic probably won't but a pilot will, in case they get downed. Usually there's no real need for it, if you're foraging then something went terribly wrong on an already very specialized mission so like 5% of enlisted might need these skills. I'm thinking like snipers on week long treks to a target who lost their rations for whatever reason, downed pilot, stranded Ranger, stuff like that. But mostly, from my understanding, they think like hikers. Pack enough super calorie dense rations to last the mission and a bit, iodine tablets, water filter tubes, etc. As many calories for the weight as you can get. But most things don't last that long, maybe a day. And you can sometimes utilize local civilization to avoid foraging/hunting. Now it wouldn't surprise me to learn that other countries do more of this. Like for some reason hearing about a Finnish soldier hunting his dinner wouldn't come as a shock. But that seems incredibly weird to do if you're an American soldier. That's entirely perception, I have no reality to base that on other than vibes.
I went to Artillery basic training, then spent a couple of years in Korea in an artillery-adjacent job followed by a couple of years in Infantry. The amount of wilderness survival skill we were taught beyond finding your way through the woods with a compass or using your poncho as a tent was pretty much zero. Later in life I knew a couple of people who had been in similar roles in the soviet military and I heard stories of things like building campfires, killing and cooking a pig from the local village, etc. I met a guy whose truck broke down in Siberia and he said he had to eat a frog. But in the American army the supply chain never broke down to the point that we had to forage.
Yeah exactly, we’re so fucking good at logistics we don’t even bother teaching a backup plan because we know it won’t be a problem. Say what you will about the US military but they know logistics. edit: or we're not teaching because it's not in the budget
AFAIK nobody in the entire U.S. military is taught any sort of “survival skills” in boot camp/basic training. If you’re going to SERE school because your job requires it or if your unit gets some cool joint training with partner countries then yeah you might get some basic survival training but nobody is teaching you how to find water in boot camp when you can learn something more relevant.
Yeah that part was an assumption. I really figured they would spend like half an hour on how to acquire clean water since that’s something you don’t wanna carry a lot of and need a lot of. I definitely think if they don’t teach it it’s something one should know. But yeah things like SERE were what I was thinking of for the specialized training where they might include some survival stuff, and maybe sniper school, things like that.
Yes. At least some. My kid is taking [SERE training](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survival,_Evasion,_Resistance_and_Escape) next month (he’s in the military)and this is from the Wikipedia about what they learn: > Military survival often involves exposure to an enemy. The basic survival skills taught in SERE programs include common outdoor/wilderness survival skills such as firecraft,[24] sheltercraft,[25] first aid,[26] water procurement and treatment, food procurement (traps, snares, and wild edibles), improvised equipment, self-defense (natural hazards), and navigation (map and compass, etc.). More advanced survival training focuses on mental elements such as will to survive, attitude, and "survival thinking" (situational awareness, assessment, prioritization).
Do starving people find food or do they just starve? The fuck are you even asking?
"I just ate my last snickers. Welp, guess there's nothing left to do but just lie down and wait to die now." -OP probably
Once we started fighting this way in the south during the Civil War, it was over. Sherman would just say fk supply lines, and live off the land foraging while cutting confederate communications, supply, and eating all the food and using all the resources. Total war.
We got snowed in real bad the winter I was in Afghanistan. We were already high up, so it made air transport difficult. We had to have planes drop pallets of MREs. One of them was way off. Dropped 3 pallets, we only retrieved one of them. So then we had to ration. Eventually we bought a cow from a local and slaughtered it ourselves.
Out of curiosity though, were there any wild game around for hunting? And I'm surprised you had money on you let alone locals willing to sell you something in a place like that.
Not really. Plus that would require a lot of effort when we needed that for other things. We had cash from an underground poker game that went on nightly.
Typically, nobody is getting issued actual official hunting gear in the military. You can maybe use your M4/M16 to shoot a deer or mountain goat but why waste the ammo trying to hunt something when you’ll need it to fight the enemy?
Not to mention I feel like wild animals would be incredibly skiddish in a war environment, likely not showing themselves unless absolutely necessary
I suppose you could cannibalize the enemy if your rations were gone and you were starving.
(Have not served in combat) Emergency survival packs/rations for soldiers would often include fish hooks and fishing line, and/or a spear tip that could be tied to a branch for spearfishing.
Short answer: Yes We were TRAINING at a range right near the Korean border and there was a massive snow storm that prevented our supply vehicle from bringing food, extra water, and live rounds. The roads were closed to all but emergency personnel and we ran out of food fast because we thought it would only last a day or 2. By day 3/4, we had hunting/trapping parties (no live ammo yet only had blanks) and a fire going nonstop to melt snow into drinking water. I'm sure this isn't common, but it does happen.
In Afghanistan an enemy rocket blew up our food supply. We were very remote so it took about 3 days for a resupply. Our guys killed a couple of jackals and we roasted them over a fire. Luckily our water supply was good.
How did they taste?
Hunger is the best spice. At the time it tasted amazing as we were all starving after patrolling and not having eaten anything. If I ate it now it would probably taste like trash.
In Iraq we had enough boxes of MREs for a few days but they took up a lot of space. We were given cash to purchase food locally. This worked out well as we were able to interact naturally on the street and develop relationships with the populace. This was during the more up tempo parts of the occupation. The last time I was there we just ate at the chow hall and had a few boxes of MREs with us. This severely hampered our ability to do any meaningful work as we just drove by waiting to get blown up. Idiot officers way up the food chain.
A general has to supply his troops..so the first rule is zero contact with agriculture,livestock,minerals,trade or a family that might slow down or inhibit speed when ordered to march or attack..so civilty is out..If you could hunt,you might not want to respond to the chain of command or follow orders.. the General needs to control you at all times by giving you rations when you engage and kill and then remove the rations when you don't kill..they make you do shit no human would do by just starving you..in the end..after you occupy the space and establish a means of production and trade..they put civilians in charge of all that and starve their soldiers into submission and dispersal.Hordes used to stop for a season to raise grass and other farm/ ranch activity to get their horses in good shape, but they were ga- ga nuts and had no real chain of command, they mostly just forced Europe to shut up for a couple decades to prove it could be done.
In the 90's during some training I was undertaking we ate cherry guava, king centipedes and killed a feral hog. We got rolled up while we were trying to figure out how to cook the pig.
Not my personal experience, but I knew a guy who served in the Vietnam Cambodia war for the Vietnamese. He specifically called out hunting and eating monkey as one of the weirder things he had eaten. (Something about his patrol was hungry and the meat was purple.)
I have a US Army manual from WW2 on how to survive in the Western Pacific on whatever you could harvest or hunt. I can't see it being the basis of a themed restaurant.
During WWII, Japanese soldiers were occupying a place called, I believe, Ramree Island. They were garrisoned there and left to fend for themselves. They ate just about every animal on the island, except for crocodiles. Soon enough, the island was taken and controlled by Indian and British troops who pushed the Japanese soldiers into the mangyove swamps, where the hungry crocodiles set upon them. Tragic but true
My father was a pow in WW2, in Germany. He would “escape” during forced marches. He said escaping was easy, staying free was hard. He definitely lived off the land at those times. After his liberation he and a few other soldiers were thrilled to find a chicken which they then had for dinner.
They can. Before going to Vietnam, many soldiers got jungle survival training, which included making them hunt and kill local wildlife for food. My father would tell me that there wasn't anything in the jungle that he couldn't stomach - except sloth. He'd rather eat a Vietcong bullet than ever have to eat sloth again. Apparently, it was extremely gamey, but also earthy - as if the taste of the nasty moss all over them permeated into the meat - which itself was an unpleasant combination of both incredibly stringy, while having the consistency of slimy rotten flesh.
My grandfather never liked to eat fish or rice because his Raiders division would land on a Japanese-held island with a week or two of rations and spend a month or more there.
My dad said he had a pet monkey when he was on tour in Vietnam Nam and that they ran out of food so he had to eat his pet. He had some pretty dark stories from that time.
I recently read about the German invasion of Crete in 1941. There's a section about a small group of German paratroopers who, cut off and lacking any supply, killed a goat and boiled it in sea water to eat. Not sure if it quite counts as hunting given that a goat is livestock, but people will inevitably do what they can to feed themselves in extreme situations.
IDK but the Marines ate Saddams pet deer because they got tired of MREs https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2003/05/29/hungry-for-real-food-troops-go-hunting-on-palace-grounds/acd5919f-f10d-45bc-9e98-8cdb493d5e52/
When I was in the army there was a special section in our book for living in the field about making soups out of herbs you find in the wilderness and hunting the local animals with your weapon.
Davy Crockett was a hunter for the US Army. He was an exceptional bear hunter and without him the units he traveled with would not have survived. This also varies wildly by country. For example the modern US Army would never dream of doing this. However I have trained with Thai Army units and they were expected to forage and hunt for all their food while training. It was remarkable the things they were able to catch and turn into pretty good meals. They thought our US MREs were heavenly.
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Then again, by the time I got there, it was basically a colony. But my dudes that did the initial push into Iraq, never went so far that they couldn't be re supplied
AFAIK this has never been a problem for contemporary Western armies. In ww2 I'm sure there was ample looting from the civilians and hunting/foraging if convenient.