According to the Cold War Era Civil Defense Museum, each “shelteree” was provided with 10,000 calories in crackers for the entirety of their two-week sojourn, or slightly more than 700 calories per day. Each sealed tin contains 434 biscuits, and one cardboard box holds two tins. While the food supplies were marked “biscuits,” they are actually crackers similar to saltines. It was from one of these abandoned and forgotten shelters in the basement of a building scheduled to be demolished that my enterprising flea market acquaintance had liberated the supplies he was selling. To keep people from leaving early, they stuffed the shelters with food, water and emergency supplies they knew would survive the test of time. Later, the advent of the Cold War and the threat of toe-to-toe thermonuclear combat with the Russians again changed the mission of the CD: Once it became obvious that hiding under your school desk was not going to protect you from a nuke, the Department of Defense and the CD coordinated efforts to turn basements in buildings across the country into fallout shelters and to properly supply them for a minimum of a two-week underground “staycation.” (Many of you might be familiar with the white “doughboy” helmets worn by some volunteers, as well as the emblem of red “CD” letters inside a white triangle surrounded by a blue circle proudly displayed on the front.) By the start of World War II, the Office of Civilian Defense (CD) was established to again coordinate civilian resources and volunteers.
World War II canned provisions and oil lamp from an air raid shelter in London, England, 1941īack at the start of the United States’s involvement in World War I, Congress created the Council of National Defense to help organize civilian resources in support of national defense.
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