It's an iconic scene in many World War II movies and TV shows: A group of G.I.s on the march encounter a group of children and offer them chocolate.

It's meant to show the goodwill and generosity of the American soldiers, who are liberating Europe, but what those movies and shows usually leave out is many of the soldiers would have been all too happy to give away their chocolate bars — and the recipients might not have been very pleased when they took their first bite. While about 70% of the chocolate issued to American soldiers during World War II was made by the Hersey Company, it tasted pretty terrible.

That's because while the bars might have been made from chocolate and might have been produced by Hershey, they weren't anything like the chocolate bars civilians loved so much before and after the war.

In fact, from the very beginning, the U.S. Army wanted to be sure the chocolate bars didn't taste very good, so troops wouldn't be tempted to eat them for a snack, instead of in an emergency.

Chocolate, first created in Mesoamerica more than 5,000 years ago, is made by fermenting, drying, roasting and then grinding cocoa nibs, then melting the resulting powder into a liquid called chocolate liquor.

It can be cooled to make blocks of raw chocolate, or it can be separated into the nonfat solids and cocoa butter.

Mesoamerican people generally seem to have stopped there, consuming chocolate as a bitter drink or using it in food. The word chocolate comes from the words the Aztec used for “bitter” and “water.”

When the Spanish brought chocolate back to Europe, it was eventually mixed with sugar and other substances, creating a much sweeter taste.

Milk chocolate, so ubiquitous in the modern world, only dates back to the late 19th century, when Swiss chocolatier Daniel Peter mixed chocolate liquor with powdered milk.

It was around the same time that Milton Hershey moved to Philadelphia and started his first candy company. It would take nearly 25 years and a number of false starts, but in 1900, Hershey launched his first milk chocolate bar.

It was an instant hit, offering middle class consumers a chance to buy something that until then had been a luxury item.

In 1937, the company got a request from Capt. Paul Logan with the U.S. Army Quartermaster General about creating a chocolate bar that wasn't a treat but would instead provide much needed nourishment to soldiers in the field. He had a few very specific requirements.

He wanted a 4-ounce bar that was dense in calories, could withstand much higher temperatures than a normal milk chocolate bar and, famously, tasted a tiny bit better than a boiled potato. The idea was to create an ultraportable emergency ration, so bad taste was a virtue. Logan didn't want the grunts eating their chocolate bars when it wasn't an emergency, leaving them without supplies when they needed them.

The Hershey Community Archives offers insight into what came of the meeting.

“The final ingredients were: chocolate liquor, sugar, skim milk powder, cocoa butter, oat flour, vanillin,” it explained. “Sugar was decreased and chocolate liquor increased to give the bar a less appealing taste than normal chocolate bars. The formula created a heavy paste that had to be pressed rather than poured into molds. A 4-ounce bar contained 600 calories.”

The Army ordered 90,000 of what were first called “Logan Bars” for field testing. They were a success, with the recipe eventually evolving to include Vitamin B1 to help prevent beriberi, a tropical disease.

Fulfilling the order for the first trials required creating an entirely new production method. Because of its heat resistance, the mixture for the bars wouldn't melt enough to become liquid and flow into molds.

Instead, Hersey first created molds so the mixture could be kneaded and put into the forms by hand. Production of the first batch of 90,000 took about three weeks.

The bars, christened Field Ration D by the Army and called D rations by the troops, came in a three pack, offering a total of 1,800 calories, which was considered the minimum needed for soldiers each day.

The company developed a method to automate the process, turning out more than 20 million bars a week by the end of World War II.

The D ration possibly saved Hersey at the outbreak of the war. The U.S. government was considering shutting down the entire candy industry for the duration of fighting, in part because sugar and milk were both rationed.

The company was able to argue that production of D rations was essential to the war effort.

By the end of the war, Hershey made more than 3 billion D ration bars.

Soldiers have always complained about their food. In 1897, the New York Times reported soldiers in Illinois were in “a state of open revolt” because they claimed they were being fed beef hearts and liver nearly every day.

In 2023, news outlets nationwide reported young soldiers in the U.S. Army were posting videos online complaining about the quality of the food.

And so it was during World War II. G.I.s took to called the D rations “Hitler's secret weapon” because of the devastating effect it had on their gastrointestinal tracts.

And that was if they could eat it — the bars were dry, crumbly and quite hard. So hard, in fact, that soldiers with bad teeth sometimes couldn't bite into it.

Many took to whittling pieces off, and the wrapper suggested shaving off flakes and dissolving them in liquid to make a drink.

The wrapper also offered advice on how to consume the bar. Soldiers were supposed to eat it slowly, over the course of about half an hour.

The ones who missed that message, or who just ignored it, were the ones who started calling it Hitler's secret weapon.

While the original specifications requested something not very appetizing, Hershey, the Army, or both, decided to take soldiers' complaints to heart and make a better tasting chocolate bar.

Of course, catering to the palates of the soldiers wasn't the main reason for the new bar, at least not from the Army's perspective. Instead, the goal was to create a new chocolate ration, in both 2- and 4-ounce sizes, that could resist melting even after an hour at 120 degrees Fahrenheit. But better taste was in the new brief, as well, and in 1943, the Hershey's Tropical Chocolate Bar started production.

While it was supposed to taste better than the original D ration, the memories soldiers had of them make it clear the Tropical Chocolate Bar still didn't taste good.

In fact, they got their own nickname, “dysentery bars,” because they were they only thing soldiers sick with dysentery could tolerate.

Soldiers found another use for both Tropical Chocolate Bars and D rations. They traded them to the unsuspecting, either civilians or other Allied troops, for more appetizing food.

After the war, production of the Tropical Chocolate Bar continued, and in 1957 the recipe was overhauled. Hershey finally ditched the oat flour and replaced cocoa butter with cocoa powder. The treat stayed in production for decades, and was issued to troops during the Korean and Vietnam wars.

Eventually, Tropical Chocolate Bars even broke the surly bonds of Earth, when the Apollo 15 astronauts took the bars to the moon.

There’s no word on what the astronauts thought about the taste.