Thursday, March 29, 2012

D-Day for jerry cans

This was going to be a satirical piece about the hapless minister who, in an echo of his predecessor who advised the British population to ‘Clean your teeth in the dark’ during the miners strike of 1974, yesterday advised us to keep petrol in a jerry can in our garage in anticipation of a possible strike by tanker drivers.

I am old enough to recognise the term as a familiar one. I assumed it must have something to do with the Germans, but wondered what, if any, relationship it had with the other jerry, the chamber pot which used to sit under the beds in nana’s house, so naturally I turned to the OED.

The jerry under the bed is presumed to be a shortened form of jeroboam (a very large wine bottle) & is Victorian slang.

The jerry can – originally jerrican – led me unexpectedly to a stirring tale of how the Second World War was won by jerricans, made in British factories & supplied to the Americans under reverse Lend-Lease.

The OED led me to The Times of 8 November 1944 which reported the story which could finally be told.

A British Government White Paper (Cmd 6570, price 2d) detailed the amount of help given to allies under Lend-Lease or Mutual Aid. The total came to over £1,000,000,000 (which the British did not then call £1 billion). The overwhelming majority of this went to the USA (£604,730,000) and USSR (£269,457,000). The contribution to the Americans inluded the cost of more 7 million jerricans.

On the same day President Roosevelt submitted to Congress his 17th report on Lend-Lease. Under the headline : GETTING PETROL UP TO THE FRONT - STORY OF THE “JERRICAN” The Times told its readers of the President’s account of a story which had not been revealed earlier for security reasons.

The British 8th Army had not been able to exploit its initial success against Rommel in North Africa in 1942 because they ran out of petrol.

Rommel’s supply system worked better in part because of a very efficient 5 gallon petrol can.

The 8th Army captured some of the cans. They were sent back to England & the British started manufacturing them. They were dubbed ‘jerricans’ after a common English abbreviation of ‘German’.

The first of those produced in British factories were all sent to Egypt by every available means of transport. By Oct ’42 when the 8th Army launched its offensive at El Alamein it had enough petrol available & they drove(!) the Germans 1,500 miles across the desert, all the way from El Alamein to Tunisia.

In 1943 it was decided that the Brits should try to produce enough cans to meet most of the anticipated needs of the US army in the European theatre as well as the British Army because carrying them over from America would be wasteful of precious shipping space.

In the months before D Day the Brits more than doubled production, so many millions were filled & ready to go on D-Day.

Said the President to Congress:
“They were among the first supplies landed on the beaches of France.

When the US 1st & 3rd Armies broke out of Normandy it was in these jerricans that the petrol our tanks & lorries needed to keep going was sent forward.

Without these cans it would have been impossible for our armies to cut their way across France at a lightning pace which exceeded the German blitz of 1940.

Cargo planes & even combat planes were loaded with them & carried them forward to airfields.

Lorries of every size, jeeps, armoured cars – everything that rolled on wheels – loaded up with jerricans & rushed them to the front lines.

They were tough enough to be dropped off lorries in motion without bursting open. They could even be dropped from the air into rivers & streams, or they could be dumped overside from ships, because they have airpockets at the top which make then float even when filled.”

So perhaps it is just age & patriotism, not social class, which made Francis Maude (whose father was captured in North Africa in 1942 & spent the rest of the War as a PoW) call the receptacle he had in mind a jerry can, forgetting that it is now illegal to store 5 gallons of petrol in your garage.

But, as minister with oversight of the Census of Population & Housing, he may care to consider whether to add a question about the availability of a garage to the housing section of whatever vehicle is used to collect the information in 2021. That way future ministers will have accurate data on the number of households do not have a garage in which to store their spare fuel.

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