Fighters in the Cause of Ice Cream

On Peleliu in the Palau Islands in September 1944, the men of U.S. Marine fighter squadron VMF-122 battled boredom rather than the Japanese. Although their F4U Corsairs were only 10 minutes’ flying time from Japanese-held islands, the enemy posed no threat, cut off from its supply lines. As squadron commander J. Hunter Reinburg wrote in his autobiography, Combat Aerial Escapades: A Pilot’s Logbook, “This dive-bombing and strafing just isn’t as exciting as dogfighting, but the damn Japs won’t come up and fight.”
Peleliu offered no fresh food or refrigeration. But Reinburg hatched a plan to raise morale by providing a sweet treat. He ordered the maintenance crew to cut the ends off an old belly-mounted drop tank, string wire at both ends, and mount an access panel to the side. The crew put a waterproof can that usually stored .50-caliber bullets in the panel and secured the can with the wire. The mess sergeant poured canned milk and cocoa powder into the can. Reinburg planned to fly to an altitude well below freezing and return with a gift for his men: five gallons of chocolate ice cream.
Dubbing his exercise an “oxygen system test,” Reinburg circled at 33,000 feet over Japanese-held areas of Palau, watching antiaircraft batteries—useless over 28,000 feet—waste ammunition trying to hit him. After 35 minutes of being shot at, he returned to Peleliu. When they opened the can supposed to contain ice cream, the mixture was cold but not frozen. Squadron members ate it anyway. They concluded the can had been too close to the airplane’s engine.
The next attempt at ice-cream making—“a supercharger test flight”—involved bolting ammo cans to the underside of a removable maintenance panel on each wing, far from the engine. This technique would yield 10 gallons of ice cream, enough for 100 men. This time the mixture froze, and the squadron devoured it. Dissatisfied with the ice cream’s consistency, however, Reinburg had the crew outfit the ammo cans with small propellers. The propellers spun in the wind, driving a screw inside each can to churn the mixture. The technique worked, producing a smooth and creamy chocolate ice cream.
Operation Freeze Flights soon became routine, and went on flawlessly for a while. But, according to Reinburg, his boss, group operations officer Colonel Caleb Bailey, called to say that he didn’t buy the “test flight” ruse. “Listen, goddammit, you guys aren’t fooling me,” Bailey told a VMF-122 officer. “I’ve got spies. You tell [Reinburg] I’m coming over there tomorrow and get my ration.”
Reinburg’s squad was not the only American ice cream maker in the war. Flying Fortress crews in Europe brought ice cream mixtures along on operational bombing raids, according to a 1943 New York Times article, and at least one unit used its P-47s to create vanilla ice cream mixed with canned fruit.