During WWII, many a sailor, soldier, and airman left Pensacola for duty all over the world to fight this nation's enemies. As transports carried soldiers and Marines to far off battlefields, one of the things they missed the most was beer and/or liquor to drink on the way. Sometimes, they were on board for weeks at a time and they needed something to pass the time. Or perhaps you were a sailor stationed aboard one of these ships as your regular call of duty. Regardless, alcoholic beverages were hard to come by. But then, there was one way to provide such an entertainment and that was by brewing up a batch of "Torpedo Juice!"
The term "Torpedo Juice" was slang for an alcoholic beverage made from pineapple, grapefruit, or orange juice mixed with 180-proof grain alcohol fuel that was used by the Navy for its motors on their torpedoes. Unfortunately, for the unaware drinkers, it had several poisonous additives that were mixed into the fuel by Navy authorities to make you sick. The ethyl alcohol was denatured by the addition of 5–10% "pink lady", a blend of dye, methanol and other ingredients. Methanol causes blindness when ingested, and cannot be made non-poisonous. The sailors all swore that methanol could be (largely) removed by filtering the fuel mix through a compressed loaf of bread. Maybe! But American sailors are a different breed and they saw this as a challenge not as a warning. So, they devised various methods of separating the alcohol from the poison. Although they expected the normal sought after "hangover" maladies from drinking the concoction they didn't always get what they thought. Other side effects included mild or severe reactions to the poison and on more than one occasion actually brought about death.
But if you were lucky enough to be friends with one of the ship's corpsmen, you could barter for a bottle of medicinal alcohol and cut it with the same ingredients. However, none of these difficulties stopped the US Navy or their first cousins of the Army and Marines from partaking of their distillery practices aboard ship!
In fact, two Pensacola High School buddies from the Class of 1943 made just such a swap when they ran into each other on Guadalcanal. Corpsman Cary C. Ward Sr. of the 3rd Marine Division and Vernon Eddins of the Marine Raider Battalion teamed up and made up a batch of the less potent medicinal alcohol brew that was cut with grapefruit juice. However, neither were brave enough to try Torpedo Juice even if they could have gotten their hands on the Navy's more potent mixture. Japanese snipers were one thing but TJ was out of the question!
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