sholio | (no subject)

Here's an esoteric historical question for you: what did WWII-era soldiers in the field do with the packaging from c-rations and other trash of that nature? My intuitive feeling is that they'd just drop it wherever they happened to be, because a) carrying useless weight is highly impractical when you're tired and underfed and people are trying to kill you, and b) our modern-day cultural value regarding "littering is bad" had yet to take hold, and wasn't really something most people thought about, so just chucking a can into the bushes was a perfectly valid way of dealing with it, if you didn't have an immediate use for it.

(For that matter, my general experience has been that there's still sort of an urban/rural divide about it, with a lot of rural/semi-rural people not really thinking too much about dealing with trash in the old-fashioned "just drop it wherever" style. We're always having to clean up after hunters and picnickers in the gravel pit. Read a book not too long ago on Montana ranching that describes how one ranch where the writer worked as a ranch hand would just bulldoze the bodies of dead cows off a handy nearby cliff. Out of sight, out of mind!)

It's a strangely difficult detail to find via googling, though.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Can't give you citations, but familial anecdotage* is in fact that they just dropped it. After all, they'd probably just dropped about sixty former comrades to rot anyway, with all their garbage, so who cares? (well, to be fair the fallen left were probably stripped of most useful things, but yeah.) Granted, my forebearers were all Canadian, not American, but suspect this holds true across lines. :P

Their trash would all be rather more easily broken down than ours, as well, it strikes me - stuff that would rust away or even come apart in the rain. Much less plastic.

*bloodline contained a number of WWII vets, all now dead.

Edited 2014-09-03 01:32 (UTC)

*nods* That definitely fits with my gut instinct on the whole thing, especially since my neck of the woods (rural Alaska) is full of stuff the Army "just dropped" when they stopped actively using it, including vehicles, barrels, heavy equipment, you name it. I can't imagine someone in a field combat situation caring what happens to a can or a box provided they don't have a pressing need for it.

sort of an urban/rural divide about it

"just drop it wherever" is surprisingly common in New York City, too. The snowbanks are disgusting when they melt, because they're studded with empty drink cups, fast food bags, plastic bags, and other garbage.

uggghhhhh, sadly, I can imagine that all too easily. :P People can be such slobs.

I was walking down the street and saw a young man finish drinking his sports drink and then toss the empty bottle down on the sidewalk.

There were garbage cans at EACH END OF THE BLOCK. *headdesk*

Judging from the fact that you can still find WWII equipment in the forests around here (I once found an old gas mask while on a mushroom foray), I'd go for the "drop it" option, however, the forests around here were areas where some of the worst battles of WWII took place, so that might factor in to the findings.

Yeah, it's kind of the same in Alaska -- except obviously a completely different subset of military gear (not combat stuff, but road-building equipment and such) ... but they seem to have just walked away whenever they stopped using something, so it makes sense to me that it would've been the same all over the place. And really, I guess when people are shooting at you, you've got other concerns than packing out your trash (as well as generational changes in how we view that kind of thing -- I'm a little surprised at how difficult it actually is for me to write a character just tossing a piece of trash off a mountain trail or whatnot, even though I know it would be period-appropriate, but it's become so ingrained that you don't do stuff like that now!).

Reminds me of local news I read a while ago about some kids finding a WWII handgrenade in a park, which was washed up from the central lake. Incidentally they dropped it in a wastebasket before telling anyone. So I guess the modern anti-littering education took hold before the safety education of what not to do with war garbage that surfaces. (I recently read that they estimate regular explosive finds to go on for another century or more.)

One way to approach it within your story, if it's a necessary plot element or an intriguing cultural element that you want to wrestle with, is that while they probably would drop certain kinds of trash wherever they were in a pitched battle or with moving lines, they most certainly would not leave a trail if trying to move stealthily. Carelessly dropped trash, branded in your own language no less, screams "We went thisaway!"

And of course many certain things get buried or burned for health reasons, when you have the luxury (or horror) of time.

The anti-trash campaign in the US dates to the late fifties through the late sixties, and influentially to Ladybird Johnson, I believe. So it was well after the war, but led by people of the war generation, fwiw.

Thank you for the input! This makes sense and is very helpful.