The Army told Hershey to make a chocolate bar that tasted bad

When the U.S. Army approached Hershey's in 1937 for an emergency ration bar that should taste like a boiled potato, Colonel Paul Logan handed over four requirements. It had to weigh four ounces, pack a lot of calories, survive temperatures up to 120°F — and taste only "a little better than a boiled potato."

That last spec was on purpose: the Army wanted a bar joyless enough that soldiers wouldn't eat their emergency food before they actually needed it.

The result, the D ration, worked as designed. Troops "almost universally detested" it and tossed it rather than eat it, and they nicknamed it "Hitler's Secret Weapon" for what it did to their intestines.

Hershey's made it anyway — roughly three billion D ration and Tropical bars between 1940 and 1945, eventually 24 million a week. The recipe got a tweak in 1957, and a D ration even flew to the moon with Apollo 15.

Previously:

• Chocolate was once part of US Army soldiers' emergency rations
• Opening an 80-year-old WWII US Army C-ration can
• Collector eats WWII-era rations, fails to die on camera