Celery Soup in the Trenches

From Turkey to DTIC

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Thanksgiving dinner is a prized tradition in Army units that has gently evolved over the years. Unfortunately, Thanksgiving gets few mentions in professional literature. One bright spot is a 1969 article in Military Review highlights that Lieutenant Baldwin’s dinner at New Fort Wingate “consisted of roast turkey and dressing, mashed potatoes, giblet gravy, pickles, currant jelly, and cranberries.”

Many menus are also found in the Army’s archive at the Army Heritage and Education Center. In fact, a search there for “thanksgiving” turns up dozens of menus with a wide variety of dishes. For loyal Harding Project readers, I constructed a representative "median" Thanksgiving menu from 13 randomly selected menus. Spanning from the SS Cedric’s menu in 1917 to a menu from Vietnam in 1965, these menus capture the evolution towards our modern Thanksgiving feast. I transcribed each menu into a dataset, preserving the sequence of dishes. With this data, word frequency analysis on each item in sequence (plus a little Thanksgiving cheer) led to the median menu below:

Tomato Juice Cocktail with Lemon Wedges and Crackers

Cream of Celery Soup

Roast Turkey with Dressing

Cranberry Sauce & Giblet Gravy

Candied Sweet Potatoes

Buttered Mashed Potatoes

Assorted Relishes

Parkerhouse Rolls with Butter

Mincemeat Pie and Pumpkin Pie

Assorted Fruits

Salted Nuts

Coffee and Cigarettes

While that is the “median” menu, there’s a few other points of interest for those curious about Army Thanksgivings. First, the menus I picked randomly contained two units at Fort Cavazos (then Hood) in 1954. Perhaps not surprisingly, but the menus were the same though the printings varied slightly. Second, both tobacco and beer make appearances, but vanish after 1947. Six of 13 menus feature cigarettes, while only 3 feature cigars and only 1 promises beer. Finally, we also see mincemeat pies, which won’t feature on my table today. These appeared consistently from 1935 to 1965 in the menus.

So what does these Thanksgiving menus have to do with professional writing?

They show how we can learn from our archives. The Harding Project advocates for well-organized and searchable archives of our professional journals. Today, the scattering of digital holdings makes finding the Army’s articles nearly impossible—forget mining them for novel insights. We’ve made strides in our partnership with the Defense Technical Information Center (DTIC). Together, we’ve started issuing Digital Object Identifiers for each article (for example, click here) that will make searching and finding our articles easier. They’ve also launched a collection of Army journals at DTIC to simplify searching within them. However, splitting out about 145k articles from 5,728 published issues will take some years. The Army continues to make strides in digitization and archive accessibility, but we’ve still got work to do.

Happy Thanksgiving!