From Burma ’44: The Battle That Turned World War II in the East, by James Holland (Grove Atlantic, 2024), Kindle pp. 50-52:
These 500,000 men had to be fed three meals every single day and, because of the castes, religions, tribes and nationalities involved, an added complication was the thirty different ration scales needed to feed the army. Fresh meat was difficult both to source and to transport, and refrigeration was limited to say the least, so for those who could eat meat the only solution was to provide them with tinned corned beef, or bully beef as it was called, although this was monotonous and lacked the nutrients of fresh meat. Hindus and Muslims, however, could not eat tinned meat, so they had to go without altogether. The trouble was, acceptable substitutes, milk and ghi – clarified butter – were not available in the right quantities either. Much of the tinned milk sent from Britain and America simply did not survive the long journey. The result was a severe shortage of food supplies. At the Assam front, [Gen. William] Slim discovered that instead of the 65,000 tons that should have been stored at the base depot in Dimapur, there were just 47,000 tons, a deficiency of nearly 30 per cent, and much of the shortfall worked against the Indian troops. ‘The supply situation was indeed so serious,’ wrote Slim, ‘that it threatened the possibility of any offensive.’
Part of the problem was bad management at Delhi, and Slim and Snelling were appalled to discover that the system of peacetime financial control was still in place when it came to procurement. Incredibly, if large quantities of dehydrated food were ordered from Indian contractors, demands for tinned supplies from Britain were then cancelled. On the face of it, that was fair enough, but it had been decreed that dehydrated vegetables were, in terms of scale of issue, a quarter that of tinned goods. In other words, for every 100 tons of dehydrated goods ordered in India, 400 tons of tinned veg orders from Britain were cancelled. This was bad enough, but made worse because there was always a massive discrepancy between the quantities ordered in India and those that were ever actually delivered. Consequently, shortages had been allowed to escalate quickly.
To try to solve this, Slim and Snelling had gone to see Auchinleck in person, who vowed to deal with the supply issues as a matter of urgency. By cutting red tape and tightening the administration of food supply, Auchinleck’s staff at Delhi were able steadily to increase the flow of rations. In fact, just acknowledging earlier shortcomings was a marked step in the right direction.
Despite this improvement, both Slim and Snelling realized they needed to adopt a very hands-on approach themselves; it was no good depending on Delhi to sort out their supply issues. As a result, other sources of meat, such as sheep and goats, were reared locally where possible. They also hired some Chinese to set up duck-rearing farms for both meat and eggs, while along the Imphal front 18,000 acres of vegetables were cultivated.
Far Outliers 