CARE Packages Provided a Lifeline for World War II Survivors. Here’s How the Group Turned Leftover Army Rations Into an 80-Year Legacy

CARE Packages Provided a Lifeline for World War II Survivors. Here’s How the Group Turned Leftover Army Rations Into an 80-Year Legacy

The organization began as the Cooperative for American Remittances to Europe, and it became a way for those in need to receive food, clothing and other necessities. It continues to aid people today

Patrick Sauer | History Correspondent

November 6, 2026 12:30 p.m.

Upon the 2012 death of Marlene Mahta’s husband, Peter, at the age of 90, friends reached out and offered to make charitable donations in memory of her beloved partner of 50 years. The numerous requests eventually triggered a childhood memory of post-World War II Germany that made her think of an organization they could send their funds to: CARE.

“I was 6 years old, and without CARE packages, I wouldn’t be here today,” says Mahta, now 86, from the New York City apartment she’s called home since 1980. “The euphoria of receiving powdered milk and bread inspired me to start learning English off the American Forces Network radio. I wanted to be one of those wonderful people, not one of the bad guys.”

Born in Frankfurt, Mahta and her two younger siblings were sent to the countryside with their mother during the Allied bombing campaign in the latter stages of World War II. “In my 80s, I started getting panic attacks when I’d see the destruction of bombings on the news,” she says. “The fear I had as young girl returned, of coming back to Frankfurt and it was all gone.”

In the aftermath, however, Mahta’s mother found a job working in laundry for the United States military. For the next five years, the family lived in a cellar on an American military compound where packages began arriving to aid desperate European refugees. She fondly recalls the boxes going beyond mere sustenance like beans and bacon. Within the package of donations were lightly worn garments—pants, shirts and dresses all laid out by size. Putting on new clothes was a treat, especially after she used another vitally important item in the boxes: “Soap! Yes, red bars of Lifebuoy disinfectant soap came in our first package, and it was such a luxury,” she says. “We hadn’t even been able to wash our hands for so long, and now we could use it on our bodies and our hair. It smelled so good—it smelled like the American soldiers.”

An ocean away, in a New York suburb, Susan Walton, a 5-year-old girl from England, was preparing boxes for Europeans in need at a private day school. Though Walton, now 84, was very young then, her recollections have lasted a lifetime. Her father, working for British Information Services out of New York City’s Rockefeller Center, had brought his entire family with him, far away from the Nazi threat. Following the Allies’ victory in 1945, Walton’s family journeyed back home to visit her grandparents in Liverpool.

“The difference between our life in America, with plenty of food, shelter and where we hadn’t been bombed like in England, was an enormous contrast, as you can imagine,” she says from her home in Yorkshire, England. “Even as a young girl, I returned to New York knowing I wanted to help people.”

Back at school in the U.S., Walton and her older sister Jill, now 88, ended up preparing CARE packages. They “packed these parcels with tinned food and practical items like toothpaste,” she says. “Having just witnessed the lack of food, the rationing and the destruction … I didn’t know where the packages were necessarily going, but I remember packing them clear as day.”

Even though “care package” has become part of the lexicon as a box of goodness sent by a loved one, the name began as an acronym for the Cooperative for American Remittances to Europe. CARE packages were first delivered in 1946 and were the centerpiece of a massive humanitarian initiative to address post-World War II suffering and starvation. The program has changed over time but is still going strong, helping nearly 60 million people in 121 countries just last year.

Over the six-year life span of the war, experts estimate that more than 20 million civilians around the world died due to famine and hunger-related diseases. With much of Europe in ruins, three American men came together to create CARE: Wallace J. Campbell of the Cooperative League, a federation of businesses across the U.S.; Arthur Ringland of the War Relief Control Board, established by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to oversee postwar efforts; and Lincoln Clark of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration. (Clark’s wife, Alice, came up with the organization’s acronym.)

Clark and Ringland worked quickly in the formation of CARE, incorporating the organization in 1945 and uniting 22 American charities—including religious and secular groups—as members. The commander in chief even got involved: On May 7, 1946, one day short of a year since V-E Day, President Harry S. Truman wrote a $1,500 check for 100 CARE packages, which were shipped out to ten European heads of state for distribution.

A few days later, the first 15,000 packages landed in the French port city of Le Havre, roughly 100 miles from the Normandy beaches stormed by the Allies on D-Day. The initial packages, stamped “CARE,” were filled with leftover Army food rations. The dietary staples included margarine, honey, raisins, egg powder, lard, steak, kidney beans and eight ounces of liver loaf. Recipients also got a pound of chocolate for dessert.

The Army surplus rations soon ran out, so CARE workers started assembling their own packages, with donations from prominent brands such as Del Monte and Domino Sugar. Americans sent CARE Packages overseas by mailing a $10 check—a value of about $170 today—with a guaranteed delivery time of four months. In the beginning, it was a person-to-person operation, as a specific designated recipient was required. Family members sent handwritten notes with the intent of reaching friends and loved ones left behind.

“The program functioned as an avenue for Americans to find lost family members in Europe. CARE workers would go to an address, and if the people weren’t there, or if the building was leveled, they’d go hunting for where the intended recipients ended up,” says Margaret Peacock, a Cold War historian with the University of Alabama. “CARE served as a way for Americans to get news about relatives to find out if they were still alive, or at least confirmation that loved ones had died.”

Soon, CARE received numerous donations to send parcels to unspecified people, such as “a hungry occupant of a thatched cottage” and “a school teacher in Germany.”

As the famine began to subside in the late 1940s, CARE shifted focus to broad-based relief and expanded into other continents, and it changed the meaning of its acronym to the Cooperative for American Relief Everywhere in 1953. In the mid-20th century, the organization would eventually establish a presence in Asian, Latin American and African countries.

CARE also began providing more developmental items like farm equipment, seeds, school supplies, scientific and technical books, cobbler’s kits, sewing machines, knitting needles, and other tools. During the ensuing years, large CARE donors even sent medical equipment, including iron lungs to help polio patients, to hospitals.

When CARE began delivering humanitarian aid at on a larger scale, still funded by donations, the organization became fully involved in the Cold War. The first major flashpoint came in June 1948, after the Soviet Union blockaded all rail, road and canal access to the western zones of Berlin, leaving about 2.5 million civilians without access to food, medicine, electricity and other necessities. The U.S. responded with help from above. More than 200,000 CARE packages were flown in during the Berlin Airlift. CARE trucks were the first to roll into the German capital when the blockade ended the following May.

“From 1948 on, CARE’s work is simultaneously helping starving people and fighting the spread of communism,” says Peacock, who drew upon an underutilized New York Public Library archive in writing a book about CARE currently under academic review. “It was a sincere concern by American citizens for Europe’s suffering population, but it was also an articulation of material U.S. power in a postwar world.”

After President John F. Kennedy created the Peace Corps in 1961, CARE helped train the agency’s earliest volunteers and manage some of its initial projects. Not long after, the 50 millionth package touched down in Colombia.

The 80-year durability of CARE packages is more than a metaphor: The cardboard boxes of the early decades weren’t the flimsy disposable kind sitting on doorsteps today. They had to be strong enough to hold 30 pounds of goods, shipped thousands of miles, which meant industrious Europeans found multiple uses for the resilient boxes.

For Ruth Carlyle, 60, a health librarian in Lichfield, England, the CARE packaging has been a family heirloom going back to her youth. “My great-grandparents, who were born in the 1870s and lived in genteel poverty, were likely part of local distribution in Somerset as well as receiving their own box,” she writes over email. “It was so sturdy my great-aunt Dorothy filled it with her Shakespearean costumes in the late ’70s and transferred it to me when I started drama lessons at school. It remains in my parent’s Leicester garage, still designated as the dressing-up box.”

A cardboard CARE package in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History collection is a perfect example of those durable boxes. This particular package from the 1960s includes seven smaller boxes and bags of macaroni, cornmeal, Carnation instant chocolate flavored drink mix, nonfat dried milk and a paper insert that reads: “August 6, 1962. Greetings from the men of the USS Lake Champlain.”

In the 1970s, American crews ceded leadership of initiatives and distribution to local experts who better understand their community’s cultural and economic situations. (Today, 97 percent of CARE staff are hires from the country in which they work.) Women and girls became central to CARE outreach in the ’80s and ’90s. The organization in 1991 introduced a grassroots communal savings and loan program fostering women’s economic empowerment in Niger. And in 1993, the official name was altered again, this time to Cooperative for Assistance and Relief Everywhere.

CARE packages have changed with the times. Items now vary by an individual country’s needs and incorporate technological advancements. Earlier this year, lightweight tarps, solar chargers and emergency lights were distributed to the Philippines following a 7.8 magnitude earthquake off the south coast. The humanitarian work continues in locations including Gaza, Lebanon and Ukraine, as well as highlighting places with crises that have been underreported by the mainstream media, such as Angola, Burkina Faso and Zambia.

“Over 80 years, CARE has shown what’s possible when compassion turns into action—millions of lives saved, but also futures strengthened with dignity and opportunity,” says Michelle Nunn, president and CEO of CARE, in an email. “It’s a story of people reaching across borders to support one another—and that spirit continues to shape a more hopeful, connected world.”

The affinity that Susan Walton and Marlene Mahta have for the organization that meant so much to them decades ago has made them both choose to give back.

In June, Walton trekked 100 miles around Yorkshire as part of a fundraising effort sponsored by CARE International’s branch in the United Kingdom. She finished three days early and raised nearly $2,000.

“I’d never done anything like that before and didn’t realize how much longer a mile is than a kilometer,” says Walton with a laugh while in the middle of her CARE walk. After completing the challenge, she adds, “My six grandchildren were determined I would make it somehow. They spread the word. I was amazed and touched by donations from many friends of my past and by local media taking up my story. I consider it quite an achievement for a great cause.”

For Mahta, recalling the significance of CARE packages—“gifts from heaven,” in her words—during her childhood has been a blessing. She lights up at the memory of popping open discarded cans of mystery MREs, and the excitement of unearthing Spam, or even better, the food she loved most, pudding. Mahta credits American largess as putting her on the path to a life fulfilled, which is why, at this later stage, she’s repaying the organization through donations and as a public spokesperson.

“Organizations like CARE matter because humanitarian aid does more than deliver food or medicine,” she says. “It lets people who are suffering know that they have not been abandoned.”

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