David Mattiske - Food supplies from the US
Transcript
David: I suppose there were lots of grizzles and grumbles about it, but it wasn't really too bad. Towards the end of the Philippines Campaign, supplies were very slow in coming forward and we lived on cottage pie not often, but quite often. Cottage pie was bully beef with dehydrated mashed potatoes on top with a few things on it, eh?
Speaker 2: Did you ever eat it again when you got home with some real mince, and...?
David: Oh yeah, my word. It was fine. Fresh vegetables were always short, but sometimes the American supplies would catch up with us. We'd get them. The American supply system was generous and magnificent. I can remember on one occasion in Leyte Gulf where we hadn't seen any Australian supplies for three or four weeks, a big ship like Shropshire still had a reasonable amount of good food, but the destroyers like Arunta would be in trouble. And then we were told there were new supply ships coming up from Admiralty Islands. They'd be supplying everybody with everything. The Americans sent them first, one of the first ships in with fresh vegetables and things, the Americans sent to the Arunta, because they knew that we had more problems than what they had. Very generous of them.
