Free The Coke Machine by Michael Blanding

strains forward in productive effort in a new tempo,” it urged. “In times like these Coca-Cola is doing a necessary job for workers . . . bringing welcome refreshments to the doers of things.”
    Incredibly, the American government bought the line. One of Coke’s own execs was appointed to the rationing board, and Coke was offered an exemption to quotas even as all other sugar users were limited to 80 percent production. Coke’s next move was even more masterful. In an act of genuine patriotism, calculated scheming, or both, Robert Woodruff publicly promised that every soldier could buy a Coke for a nickel anywhere in the world—expenses be damned! In fact, Woodruff may very well have known that the company would never have to pay a dime, since Coke reportedly had been in talks with the government well before Pearl Harbor about aid in establishing Coca-Cola bottling plants overseas in order to spread American influence.
    Sure enough, an order signed by General George C. Marshall himself informed commanders they could order bottling equipment to the front lines as an essential military priority—all paid for by Uncle Sam. The biggest taker was General Dwight D. Eisenhower, who requested 6 million Cokes a month during the North Africa campaign of 1943. (So much for the “military-industrial complex.”) A war correspondent nearly met his end on a plane so overloaded with Coke bottles it could barely clear the sand dunes. “You don’t fuck with Coca-Cola!” the pilot told him when he complained.
    But the soda did seem to genuinely perk up morale. Thousands of letters poured in from dirty foxholes and heat-baked islands from soldiers grateful for the familiar taste of home. “If anyone were to ask us what we are fighting for . . . half of us would answer, the right to buy Coca-Cola again,” wrote one. “To my mind, I am in this damn mess as much to help keep the custom of drinking Cokes as I am to help preserve the million other benefits our country blesses its citizens with,” wrote another.
    Never particularly patriotic before, Coke seized upon the sentiments for a new wartime ad campaign. Dozens of full-color ads depicted soldiers and airmen around the world, bottles in hands, greeting the natives with the words “Have a Coke!” In one, a soldier spots a sign for Coke; the caption reads: “Howdy, Friend . . . When you drink ice-cold Coca-Cola, you know it’s the real thing ”—the first appearance of Coke’s most famous slogan. Almost overnight, Coca-Cola suddenly seemed worth fighting tyranny for, a stunning transformation from refreshing pause to all-American symbol in less than a decade.
    And Coke’s new association with its home country would stick well beyond the war. One ad in 1946 read, “As American as Independence.” A sign at Coke’s own 1948 bottlers’ convention crowed: “When we think of Nazis, we think of the swastika, when we think of the Japs, we think of the Rising Sun, and when we think of Communists we think of the Iron Curtain, BUT when THEY think of democracy they think of Coca-Cola.”
    One little fact, however, marred Coke’s newfound support for its country: During World War II, it continued to do business with the Nazis. Germany had long been one of Coke’s best markets under the leadership of American expat and Coke franchise owner Ray Powers, a fan of the rising Nationalist Socialist party who sent telegrams to Woodruff ending “Heil Hitler.” But the real power was German businessman Max Keith, a six-foot-six giant with a Hitler-inspired mustache who distributed Coke at Nazi Youth rallies, advertised on Nazi educational pamphlets, and draped the stage in swastikas at bottler conventions.
    That support of the regime may have been simple self-preservation, but Keith took it further. When Powers was killed in a bicycle accident, Keith wangled an appointment as overseer of all soft drink bottlers in the Third Reich, taking over bottlers as the blitzkrieg roared through