AT THE end of the second World War, the German armament-manufacturing town of Schweinfurt was little more than rubble. When American troops arrived following German's surrender, they famously found only children left to man the town's few remaining defences and anti-aircraft guns.
The father of a good friend of mine was then a young boy and remembers the arrival of the Americans in Schweinfurt with absolute clarity. "They brought us chocolate," he says. "Chocolate! Those American chocolate bars! It was wonderful. They seemed to have endless amounts of them."
And they very nearly did. The two reigning American chocolate companies, Hershey and Mars, shipped tonnes of sweets to Europe and the Pacific during the war, having helped convince the American government that chocolate was an important, energising food. American GIs were eating 50 pounds of chocolate a year, more than triple the pre-war average (which itself was triple the pre-first World War average - wars are good for chocolate), and two-and-a-half times the average European consumption today. Chocolate became indelibly linked in the public mind with the war effort, and eating a five-cent Hershey bar or a bag of Mars M&Ms, a patriotic duty. Chocolate became as American as baseball and apple pie, and the battle for the newly-inflated chocolate market created bitter rivalry between the two largest firms - both highly secretive companies - which persists still. In one corner of the ring is Mars, well-known in Europe, and in the other, Hershey, which remains a nonentity in the European chocolate market, having thrown away the post-war opportunity provided by the GIs handing out its product to chocolate-starved continentals.
Just how secretive - even at times, paranoid - the rivals are is well-documented in The Chocolate Wars: Inside the Secret Worlds of Mars and Hershey, Joel Glenn Brenner's fascinating read on the less-than-sweet history of the glorious brown substance.
It's not exactly the happy world of Willy Wonka and his chocolate factory. Neither Mars nor Hershey releases details of sales, corporate operations or marketing - just the minimum they must publish by law. They don't care whether their stockholders know nothing about the company. They guard the recipes for their products - the chocolate mix in a Hershey bar, the exact composition of a Snickers, the shells on a peanut M&M - in alarmed safes. Only bits of each recipe are revealed to key employees, on a need-to-know basis. Manufacturing processes are so secretive that outside workers are blindfolded and escorted through the Mars plant. The two companies built vastly different empires - as Brenner notes: "Where Milton Hershey saw utopia, Forrest Mars saw conquest." Hershey, the son of an unhappy Mennonite marriage, was a benign dictator who built an entire town - Hershey, Pennsylvania - for his workers. Not only did he insist they have the latest comforts, such as electricity and indoor plumbing, but he also built them parks, a free college, schools, churches, a library, an electric tramway, and a state-of-the-art theatre that brought world-class shows to little Hershey. He eventually donated his own mansion to the town as a community centre.
He also built an orphanage that still exists today, on a model which would have made Dickens weep with joy. Children were placed in groups on a farm overseen by sets of "house parents" in the rolling Pennsylvania countryside, given clothes, an education, chores to do, an allowance to spend as they wished - and, of course, chocolate. By all accounts, the children worshipped Hershey. Before he died, he willed the company over to a trust which runs the orphanage, and today, the orphanage is still the largest stockholder in the Hershey empire and its greatest beneficiary. Frank Mars, and more specifically, his son Forrest, forged a rival company ruled with an iron fist but considered one of the world's premier businesses to work for. That's because long before such methods of management became common, Mars insisted on a flat management structure in which there are no executive perks and everyone has a plain desk in a vast, open office. Employees are called "associates" and even the chief executive is addressed by his first name. But Mars pays salaries a stunning three times the industry average, and all employees share equally in the company's profits. In a good year, salaries are supplemented by fat bonuses. There are only six pay scales within the company, and everyone knows what everyone else is earning. The generous, egalitarian approach has allowed Mars to hire some of the best and brightest in the chocolate industry - as long as they could handle the Mars family's tendency to throw blistering tantrums.
The saga of the rivalry between the companies - which actually once were so friendly that they jointly created M&Ms - is a wild ride through the development of the post-war chocolate industry in America and Europe. As the companies see-saw back and forth with the title of largest American chocolate company, we're given hefty doses of the companies' rages, gloating, employee-poaching, and despair.
But the detours in the telling of the tale are particularly riveting. Chocolate as we know it is really only a phenomenon of this century, when manufacturers finally figured out how to temper its bitterness with milk. It first appears in history as chocolatl - the name the Aztecs gave to a bitter, spicy drink they concocted from cocoa beans, which they valued as much as gold and silver and used as money. The beans were roasted then ground, and a paste was created by adding in chilli pepper, vanilla, and ground maize.
Added to cold water and whipped into a froth, the chocolate drink first reached the Old World courtesy of Christopher Columbus.
BUT it was the explorer Hernan Cortez - who drank chocolate from a golden goblet with Aztec ruler Montezuma in Mexico - who is considered responsible for introducing it to European society. He, too, brought chocolate back to the Spanish emperor, who fell in love with the heady drink. By the mid-1600s, chocolate was known throughout Europe as the drink of the upper classes. By the 1700s, London's chocolate houses were more popular than its famed coffee-houses and taverns.
Chocolate had already acquired the mystical associations it still retains. It gave strength, helped sharpen the mind, and - most enticingly - catapulted the libido into a state of overdrive. The association between chocolate, lovers and Valentine's Day is nothing new - indeed, Montezuma was said to have drunk a goblet of his whipped chocolate to firm up his stamina before a night with his harem.
But chocolate, for all its delicious allure, was still bitter. Only when manufacturers at last found ways of blending milk and chocolate (which, being mostly water on one hand and fat on the other, did not mix) did it become the lusted-after object we recognise today. Each country tended to have a dominant manufacturer that had found a method slightly different from those in other countries, giving chocolate in different countries a different taste. Thus, the British and Irish like the caramelised, very sugary flavour of Cadbury, the Swiss like milky Toblerone and Lindt, the Italians like dark, creamy Baci. And Americans love the coarser flavour of Hershey - a taste sometimes described as slightly sour.
For those of us who worship chocolate's velvety brownness in any form, such differences are, happily, cause to celebrate. Which reminds me of a final caveat - read this book at your waistline's peril. One can only read so much before yearning desperately for some accompanying chocolate, whatever the hour of the day or night.
The Chocolate Wars: Inside the Secret Worlds of Mars and Hershey by Joel Glenn Brenner, is published by HarperCollins, £19.99 in UK