Food supply in the WWII RKKA was the responsibility of the Directorate for Food Supply of the RKKA (Upravlenie prodovolstvennogo snabzehniia Krasnoi Armii- UPS) of the Main Quartermaster Directorate (Glavnoe intendantskoe upravlenie - GIU) of the RKKA which was under the Chief of the RKKA Rear Services. (For trivia buffs the UPS was a separate Chief directorate of the RKKA from January to June 1943 - the GUPS.) During the war the commanders of the UPS were Major-General of the Quartermaster Service (or Intendant's Service) V.F. Belousov until February 1942 and then Brigade Engineer D.V. Pavlov, who was promoted to Major-General of the Quartermaster Service in January 1943.
In military units, food supply was handled by: Frontal, Military District and Army Food Supply Departments; Divisional and Brigade Food and Forage Supply Sections; and Regimental Chiefs of Food and Forage Supply and Battalion Food and Forage Supply squads. There were Frontal, Army, Divisional and Regimental warehouses, bread factories and bakeries, livestock points and herds.
From June to October 1941 there were serious food shortages in the RKKA. Many units at the front were received no official supply and had to reply totally on foraging and requisitioning or stealing food from the civilian economy. An, as yet, unstudied area of WWII history is the exact effect these food shortages had on the dissolution and melting away of many RKKA units during this time. It can be imagined that many Soviet units simply melted away as they ran out of food (as well as ammunition) just as happened with Napoleon's retreating Grand Armée in 1813.
After 1941 the situation improved significantly and the RKKA relied on official supplies for the vast majority of its food and forage. There were still exceptions, particularly in encirclements and when rapidly advancing RKKA units outstripped their supply elements. Of course when the RKKA advanced across the old USSR borders it seized huge amounts of food - but this was out of policy and sense of revenge as opposed to necessity.
Units were fed according to their actual, or "ration" strength and not their full official, or "shtat", strength. It was a punishable military offence to fraudulently inflate unit strength to gain more rations. It was nevertheless a common practice although fear of punishment kept it within reasonable limits.
There were 14 different categories of food in the RKKA supply system including:
- potatoes
- kasha (groats or buckwheat for porridge)
- meat, dried (including sausage)
- meat, canned (including SPAM)
- macaroni
- fresh vegetables
- black bread
- dried milk
- sugar
- tea
I am afraid that I don't know the other four categories and whether or not Vodka was one of them.
From mid-1942 on the RKKA had sizeable food reserves. They routinely kept 20 days supply in interior Military Districts and 30 days at Fronts. Divisions, mobile Corps and Brigades kept 5 days supply. Individual soldiers kept one days supply in their knapsack.
During the war, the RKKA used over 40 million tonnes of food and forage. Of this, 4.3 million tonnes, or a little over 10 percent of the total, consisted of lend-lease supply. However, the lend-lease food was made up of the most critical items including 610 tonnes of sugar (41.8% of the total) and 664.9 tonnes of canned meat, mostly SPAM (18% of the total).
