With the ban on alcohol aboard ships in 1914, the US Navy sought to offset the loss of alcohol at sea and found that ice cream was popular among the sailors. It was so popular that the Navy borrowed a refrigerated concrete barge from the Army Transportation Corps in 1945 to serve as a floating ice cream parlor. At a cost of $1 million, the barge was towed around the Pacific to provide ice cream to ships smaller than a destroyer that lacked ice cream making facilities. The Navy proudly announced that the vessel could manufacture 10 gallons of ice cream every seven minutes and had storage capacity of 2000 gallons.
At sea in the Canadian Navy whenever ice cream was served you knew something crappy was going to happen i.e. a wicked cool foreign port visit was cancelled…. We didn’t have ice cream making facilities onboard our ships so it was the victualler whom brought ice cream to the galley. Generally ice cream was used to make “Moose Milk”.
I have heard that one of the first things that the Royal Navy did when they took delivery of the Captain-Class frigates (US DE’s), was to remove the ice-cream machines.
I suppose the daily rum ration was better received on cold North Atlantic runs.
It’s also a good illustration of the logistical capabilities of the Navy in WWII. The Japanese struggled to move food, fuel and ammo to their forward units, we could spare ships and personnel to move large quantities of ice cream.
