BEER DELIVERIES ON SHORT FIELDS.

Before the Flying Boxcar, there were Flying Pubs, in the form of Spitfires adapted to carry beer kegs.

Unattributed Air Ministry photograph retrieved from Plane Historia.

Although fighter planes late in the War were equipped with drop tanks, the kegs were not released at altitude, even in mocking attempts to soften up German positions.

Merely days following the Allied forces’ D-Day landings, amidst the rigorous advances through the Normandy battlefields, and against staunch German opposition.

British troops who had successfully crossed the English Channel and endured the landings faced an unexpected concern.

Their worry was not primarily the V1 flying bomb raids unsettling their loved ones back in Britain, nor the frustrating delays in seizing the strategic port of Cherbourg.

Instead, it was the stark absence of beer within the established beachhead that troubled them.

On June 20, 1944, a fortnight after the D-Day landings, a special correspondent from Reuters reporting with the Allied Forces in France alerted British newspapers that the only libation on offer in the small cafes just miles from the landing sites was cider, “and it is pretty watery stuff. I saw a British private wistfully order a pint of mild and bitter: but the glass he sat down with contained the eternal cider.”

Calvados is pretty good, although the grateful residents of Bayeux had to make do with what the Germans left them. And yet, wasn't it the Duke of Wellington Himself who acknowledged how the moral was to the material?  We'll cut the Tommies some slack for tapping kegs of pale ale to fill the wing tanks.

It was ingeniously discovered that these bomb pylons could be repurposed to transport beer kegs.

Historical photos reveal the use of kegs in various sizes, though it’s unclear if these could be jettisoned during emergencies. When flown at higher altitudes, the beer would be naturally chilled by the cold air, arriving perfectly cooled for enjoyment.

Apparently some resourceful pilots fitted kegs with nose cones and flew those across the channel, and I wonder whether chilling beer below cellar temperature was what the British wanted. Uncle Sam's troops would be another matter.