By the time American troops landed in Sicily in July 1943, pizza was already an American food.
Italian immigrants had been making and selling it in New York for decades. Pizza businesses appeared there as early as the 1890s. Frank Pepe was selling tomato pies to workers in New Haven before opening his pizzeria in 1925. Boston had its own pizza traditions before the war, and by December 1943, while American soldiers were fighting their way through Italy, a restaurant called The Pizzeria had opened in Chicago at the location that would become Pizzeria Uno.
So the familiar story that World War II “brought pizza to America” is not quite right.
What the war did was introduce pizza to a much larger America.
Millions of young men were suddenly pulled out of hometowns across the country and placed beside people they might never otherwise have met. A soldier from rural Texas or Georgia could find himself serving beside an Italian American from New York, Boston or New Haven. Then, beginning with the invasion of Sicily and continuing onto the Italian mainland, thousands of those men entered the part of the world where pizza had been part of everyday life for generations.
For some, pizza was already familiar.
For others, it was entirely new.
One of the best surviving accounts comes from Cpl. John Stone, an Army cook with the 85th Mountain Infantry Regiment of the 10th Mountain Division.
Stone and his fellow cooks were responsible for feeding hundreds of soldiers during the brutal fighting in northern Italy. Their mobile kitchens operated several miles behind the front. They dug field ovens into the ground, surrounded their stoves with sandbags and tried to make something satisfying out of military food designed primarily to survive transportation and storage.
The standard 1944 C ration included biscuits, candy, coffee, meat and beans, meat and vegetable stew and even canned meat and spaghetti.
It did not include pizza.
Then Stone and the other cooks met an Italian woman and her daughter.
Their names were not preserved in the Army account, but what they taught the Americans was.
“We also learned to cook a lot of pizza,” Stone later remembered.
The women showed the Army cooks how to make it properly, using fresh Italian ingredients whenever they could find them. Stone remembered pizza as a welcome break from C and K rations. Italian partisans also shared pizza, spaghetti and lasagna with American troops, while the Americans sometimes shared their own supplies in return.
It is a small story inside an enormous war, but it may tell the pizza story better than the legend does.
Pizza did not simply travel from an Italian restaurant into the hands of a sightseeing GI. Knowledge moved from person to person. An Italian mother and daughter taught American cooks. Those cooks fed soldiers coming back from the mountains. Those soldiers eventually went home.
And the food went with them.
Not necessarily as a recipe tucked into every duffel bag, but as a memory.
[RUSSO QUOTE: Why pizza creates such a strong emotional memory and sense of comfort.]
At home, America was already becoming more curious about pizza. In September 1944, while the war was still underway, The New York Times described pizza preparation at a Manhattan pizzeria, including mozzarella, tomatoes and other toppings, and even noted special boxes that allowed customers to carry pizzas home. By 1947, the newspaper was suggesting that pizza might someday rival the hamburger in popularity.
That prediction turned out to be conservative.
After the war, returning servicemen joined Italian-American families, restaurant owners, food writers and entrepreneurs in pushing pizza far beyond the neighborhoods where it had first taken root.
[RUSSO QUOTE: How Italian pizza traditions changed as they became part of American life.]
Over time, pizza became something unusual in American food culture. It could still carry family history and regional identity while also becoming almost universally familiar.
New York had its style. New Haven had its tomato pies. Chicago developed deep dish. Town after town developed its own neighborhood pizza places.
And eventually, pizza arrived at a strange cultural destination: it became both unmistakably Italian and unmistakably American.
[RUSSO QUOTE: What the owner believes people are really coming together around when they share a pizza today.]
That may be the better way to understand the role World War II played.
The American GI did not discover pizza for America.
Pizza was already here.
The war simply put far more Americans at the table.
Pull Quote:
Pizza was already in America. World War II helped bring the rest of America to pizza.
Pizza was already in America. World War II brought the rest of America to pizza.