Then the United States joined the war, and the company president gave an order "to see that every man in uniform gets a bottle of Coca-Cola for 5 cents, wherever he is and whatever it costs the company." As a result, Coca-Cola shipped 64 bottling plants overseas during the war. And when the war ended, they were ready to expand around the world. From the mid 1940s until 1960, the number of countries with bottling plants nearly doubled