Crew Mess

An illustration for the USS Pickerel’s cruise book shows a chief claiming he won a food service award for his Thanksgiving turkey even though the bird is poorly prepared.

Cartoon implying that the contents of the meals were a mystery and dangerous as the officer is depict dying from a bad soup.

An illustration in the USS Prairie cruise book shows a surprised dentist exclaiming that he pulled the wrong tooth.

Cartoons about daily life related to complaints about food and medicine. These types of satirical cartoons were widespread throughout publications and cruise books, the sailors obviously enjoyed the jokes and likely could sympathize with the sailors depicted in the cartoons.

Typically, cartoons about food focus on it being inedible or the cooks being spiteful or incompetent. Even though food on submarines was supposedly better than on surface ships in order to entice enlistment, submariners would often joke of the in-edibleness of the food.

Connecting with the complaints over naval food, sailors often showed displeasure in their drawings over their medical treatment. Cartoons depict sailors desperate to avoid going to the doctor, and especially the dentist, since both are portrayed as either clueless or barbaric.

These cartoons expressing complaints over living conditions in the Navy highlight the shared understanding among sailors that was essential to the forming of a unique culture and worldview.