Interesting.
I always credited Germany for figuring out how to make alcohol into a weapon with their V1 and V2 rockets. Alcohol was usually too-slow in burning to be used as a weapon.
I had no idea that America would want to restrict the sale of alcohol.
They must have made some booze, though not for civilian sale?
Cigarettes were never rationed stateside. You couldn’t get them hardly, is my understanding. But they weren’t rationed, ha. I would deduce a great number of cartons were mailed back to the USA.
We had beer and wine available, just not the hard stuff. Beer was in bottles, no cans. As beer was being shipped to the troops, there were short supplies on the home front.
Germany was the world capital of chemistry for a couple of centuries, beginning well before modern unification. During the OPEC embargo, the crash programs (crash is a good way to describe most of them) to develop alternative fuels led right back to the millions of pages (many on microfilm storage) of the German wartime synth fuel programs.
Methanol and LOX was the combo used in the V2, because other common fuels were restricted. Just recently I read that the 3000 V2s launched during the war killed 12,000, meaning that each missile on average killed four people. Shows how well civilian populations took cover, I suspect.
In the postwar US, the V2 was altered to use RP1 (refined kerosene) and was used in 1946 to take the first photos from space. More kick in kerosene than in methanol, apparently.
Not sure what fuel the V1 used. The design is so simple it could probably be built in one’s garage. I think the number built did not far exceed the number of V2s, which is weird. A storm of 10,000 of those over the course of a few days, and armed with incendiaries instead of an explosive, would likely have burned down parts of whole cities.
Alcohol was used to make synthetic rubber. And there was “medicinal alcohol”…often mixed with fruit juice by our troops.
The V2 burned ethanol - but the V1 used gasoline (about 640 liters) as fuel.
Regards,