Here, for example, is one day's menu on a gray Victory. For breakfast, fruit or fruit juice, canned or fresh, depending on the stage of the voyage. Coffee or tea. For lunch, a choice of two meat entrees after a soup, three or four vegetables, pie or cake or pudding for dessert, and coffee. For dinner, again a choice of two meat entrees, no soup but still at least three vegetables, dessert and coffee.
Coffee is made constantly, drunk constantly.
Watches operate through the day's twenty-four hours and consume an endless stream of coffee. They appreciate that good hot food is not the least of morale builders. The chief difference between the crew of any gray ship, between the merchant marine as a whole and the men of other services, is the difference between a military and civilian service. That is both a pride and a challenge to them. Whatever hostility there was in the beginning soon went.