During the Second World War, the American company Hormel shipped more than 100 million pounds of canned Spam to Allied soldiers on every front from the Pacific islands to the Soviet Red Army — and after the war, Nikita Khrushchev wrote in his memoirs that without American Spam, the Soviet Union would not have been able to feed its army

In July 1937, the George A. Hormel and Company meatpacking plant in Austin, Minnesota — under the direction of Jay Hormel, the 44-year-old First World War veteran son of the company’s founder, who had learned commercial canned-ham production from German meatpackers during his 1919 postwar travels and had been progressively expanding the family firm’s canned-meat product line across the 1930s Great Depression — introduced to the American consumer market a substantially inexpensive canned pork shoulder product composed of ground pork, ground ham, salt, sugar, sodium nitrite, and water, initially named “Hormel Spiced Ham” and subsequently renamed “Spam” (a portmanteau contribution by the New York actor Kenneth Daigneau, whose brother Ralph was a Hormel vice-president and who reportedly proposed the name at a Hormel New Year’s Eve party in exchange for a $100 cash prize). Four years later, on 11 March 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Lend-Lease Act. And across the subsequent five years of the Second World War, the Hormel Foods Corporation shipped somewhere between 100 million and 150 million pounds of the same canned pork shoulder product to Allied military forces on essentially every combat theatre of the war — the North African campaign, the Italian campaign, the Normandy invasion, the Pacific island-hopping campaign, the Burma-China-India theatre, and, most consequentially of all, the Eastern Front, where the Red Army of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was, at that specific moment in geopolitical history, engaged in what remains the largest and most casualty-intensive single military operation in the recorded history of the human species.

The Soviet Union that the Wehrmacht invaded on 22 June 1941 was in essential respects a country whose domestic food production infrastructure could not adequately feed its own population, let alone the eleven-million-soldier military establishment the Red Army would field across the subsequent four years of the Great Patriotic War. As detailed in the National WWII Museum’s institutional analysis of Lend-Lease aid to the Eastern Front and its specific contribution to Soviet military capability, the German advance across the western Soviet Union in the summer and autumn of 1941 captured approximately 38 percent of the pre-war Soviet grain production, 84 percent of Soviet sugar production, 60 percent of Soviet sunflower oil, 38 percent of Soviet cattle, and 60 percent of Soviet hogs — essentially the entire agricultural productive capacity of Ukraine and the northern Caucasus, which had constituted the substantial majority of the Soviet Union’s pre-war food supply. Soviet horses had been commandeered for military use. Soviet tractor factories had been converted to tank production. Soviet farmers had been conscripted into infantry regiments. Red Army rations by early 1942 consisted of approximately one kilogram of bread per day, with meat, sugar, butter, and tea available when the specific supply-chain circumstances permitted, which was substantially less frequently than the Soviet quartermaster corps had planned for. In the first quarter of 1943 — during the specific interval of the war in which the Soviet counter-offensive at Stalingrad was consolidating and the subsequent Battle of Kursk was being prepared — approximately 17 percent of all calories consumed by Red Army personnel came from American Lend-Lease food shipments, and approximately 50 percent of all fats consumed came from the same source.

The substantial majority of the American food aid that reached the Soviet Union across the 1941-1945 Lend-Lease period was, in practical terms, canned pork. Per the Hektoen International medical-historical journal’s analysis of the specific role of American canned meat in feeding the Soviet Red Army, the United States shipped approximately 75,000 tons of Spam directly to Soviet military and civilian consumers across the war period. Additionally, following early Soviet feedback that the specific ground-pork-shoulder texture of Spam was substantially unfamiliar to Soviet palates trained on traditional Russian canned pork (svinaya tushonka, “braised pork stew” — a substantially more traditional Russian canned product containing whole pieces of pork, onions, bay leaves, and salt in gelatinous broth), Hormel and other American canned-meat manufacturers began producing tushonka to the specific Soviet recipe at facilities including the Kroger Baking Company in Cincinnati, Ohio. The subsequent American shipments of Russian-style tushonka to the Soviet Union across the remaining war period totalled approximately 266,000 tons — approximately 3.5 times the volume of standard Spam sent to the same destination. Soviet Red Army soldiers began referring to the American canned meat collectively as “Roosevelt Sausage” — and, per some contemporary Soviet accounts, as Второй фронт (Vtoroy front, “Second Front”), a wry reference to the substantial delay in the Allied opening of the Western European ground front against Nazi Germany, on the specific soldier’s theory that until British and American ground troops actually landed in France, the American canned pork was the substantially most tangible form of Allied assistance the Red Army was actually receiving.

What Khrushchev actually said

The specific statement about Spam that Nikita Khrushchev subsequently included in his 1970 published memoirs was, in essence, straightforward. As reported in Britannica’s summary of Spam’s role in the Second World War and the specific credit Soviet leadership subsequently gave to it, Khrushchev — who had served across the entire 1941-1945 war as a senior political commissar in the Red Army, including at the Battle of Stalingrad (November 1942 – February 1943), the Battle of Kursk (July-August 1943), and the subsequent liberation of Ukraine (1943-1944), before rising to become General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union between 1953 and 1964, and completing his memoir writing in the Soviet internal exile that followed his 1964 ouster from Soviet leadership — wrote in his memoirs that “without Spam, we wouldn’t have been able to feed our army.” The specific weight of the statement, coming from the specific Soviet leader who had personally commanded political affairs at the Red Army’s most substantive Eastern Front engagements, was substantially non-trivial. Khrushchev additionally wrote in the same memoirs, of the broader American Lend-Lease effort: “If the United States had not helped us, we would not have won the war. One-on-one against Hitler’s Germany, we would not have withstood its pressure and would have lost the war.” The specific Soviet historiographical position across the subsequent 50 years of Cold War era publications had substantially downplayed the American Lend-Lease contribution to Soviet victory. Khrushchev’s memoir directly contradicted the standard Soviet position, on the specific authority of the Soviet officer who had personally been in the trenches receiving the shipments.

What the American soldiers said

The specific reception that American troops themselves gave to Spam across the 1941-1945 war period was, in substantial contrast to the Soviet reception, essentially uniformly negative. As detailed in Defense Media Network’s retrospective on Spam’s specific role in Allied WWII logistics and the subsequent American cultural response to it, American military personnel who ate Spam approximately three times daily for years on end developed a substantial repertoire of derisive nicknames for the product — including “ham that failed its physical,” “Something Posing As Meat,” “Special Army Meat,” and “meatloaf without soul” — and produced enough hate mail to Jay Hormel across the war period that Hormel maintained a specific file of the correspondence in the company archives. General Dwight D. Eisenhower himself, in a postwar letter to a retired Hormel executive that Hormel subsequently made public, wrote: “During World War II, of course, I ate my share of Spam along with millions of other soldiers. I’ll even confess to a few unkind remarks about it — uttered during the strain of battle, you understand. But as former Commander-in-Chief, I believe I can still officially forgive you your only sin: sending us so much of it.” The specific irony of the Spam situation across the entire 1941-1945 war period was that the substantially most enthusiastic wartime consumers of the product were not the American soldiers who received it as their standard-issue ration but the Soviet, British, and Pacific-islander civilian and military populations who received it as substantially exotic food aid — and whose enthusiasm for the product would, across the subsequent 80 years of postwar culinary history, produce the specific Spam-centred regional cuisines (Hawaiian Spam musubi, Korean budae-jjigae, Filipino Spam tocino, British Spam fritters) that currently constitute the substantially most enduring cultural legacies of the specific 100-to-150-million-pound shipping campaign that the Hormel Foods Corporation of Austin, Minnesota conducted between 1941 and 1945.