Allies reluctant to help the small and weak - even more reluctant to let them help

Dawson offered 'hope for all' --- with 'help from all'

The WASP patricians (FDR and Churchill among many) running the Allied show during WWII could find it embarrassingly hard at times to bend down to help small and weak peoples in desperate need.
But at least this wartime task fitted in with their peacetime traditional notions of patrician obligation to extend charity to others.

What they and their ilk couldn't accept at all was the truly radical idea of accepting charity offers from the weak and the small designed to help them, the rich powerful leaders of rich powerful nations, not to lose the war against the Axis.

So they'd repeatedly indicated they would rather lose the war to fellow white man (Hitler) than win it with masses of darkie infantry troops.

'Share the wealth' with the small via a meagre trickle down, was always much more to their taste than to fully share responsibilities (and power) with the small.

At first glance, Dr Martin Henry Dawson's wartime Manhattan-based project to try and save 'the least of these' in medical priority lists, 'the 4Fs of the 4Fs' (the young patients dying from SBE) seemed to fit in well with the patricians' notions of charity to the weak and small.

This despite the fact that it involved saving a category of patients that the patricians of the medical elite had already decided would be among the first to die by 'benign neglect', as they began triaging the priorities in the Allied war medicine effort.

But Dawson also totally rejected the medical consensus to wait for a medicine made by the white man, even if it only came after the war, rather than use medicine made by Nature's 'darkies of the darkies', the tiny microbes.

He gladly turned to them instead and these small and weak beings successfully made the medicine that saved both the small and weak in wartime and also the healthiest, wealthiest and most powerful among us in peacetime : natural penicillin.

Eighty five years later, we're still waiting for White Man's artificial penicillin and the little darkie bugs are still making natural penicillin and all the other beta lactam antibiotics that form the bulk of our defences against fatal infectious diseases.

If we had instead waiting for the WASPs to get their act together, most of us would have died on infections by now....

Hitler's most reliable Axis ally overall : Stalin

First, let us never forget that the words 'Allies' and the 'Axis' really only consisted of Britain and Germany, throughout the entire war.

All of the other allies for each chief opponent came and went throughout the war --- even changing sides or effectively going and remaining offside.

So both coalitions were actually more like fluid blobs than a solid blocks.

Prominent among the many, many reasons why Hitler, Tojo and Mussolini lost was that they were not very effective allies with each other ---- and the other minor members of the Axis were even worse, albeit often for reasons beyond their own control.

In terms of direct military, territorial and economic contributions alone, all these allies certainly aided the main Axis power, Germany.

But they also cost Germany a very great deal in terms of direct military and economic aid to sustain them as allies.

Diplomatically - in terms of co-ordinating an overall war-winning grand strategy with Germany - they almost all were a disaster.

To take but one crucial example, Japan's decision to remain neutral when Germany attacked the USSR ensured that the USSR would survive to fight on in some muted form, even without aid from Britain and America.

And the number of times when Mussolini's madcap freelance military adventures dragged in Hitler against his will, and against his overall grand strategy, is legendary.

But one Axis ally was totally reliable and extremely effective - in fact crucial to WWII even starting : Stalin's USSR.

For two crucial years (June 1939 till June 1941) Hitler could plan and execute extremely risky military ventures because he felt assured that he wouldn't be fighting a war on two full fronts.

All he could expect from the USSR (aside from the USSR stabbing Poland's highly effective army in the back by its unexpected invasion of Eastern Poland in September 1939) was massive amounts of badly needed natural resources for his overall war effort.

WWII might have even ended that way, if not for Britain's unexpected unwillingness to come to term with or surrender to Hitler.

Hitler could have - should have - digested what he had got for a few years, languidly bombing British cities at random while building enough small landing craft to successfully launch a short distant sea invasion of the island nation.

But he choose, instead, to attack the USSR full-out with tanks and to continue to attack Britain, seemingly full-out, with bombers.

This one decision, deliberately opening up an Eurasian war on two major fronts, ensured that Hitler overall became the Axis's most unreliable and most costly ally, as measured over the entire length of this coalition.

I am always miffed when examinations of the Axis coalition fails to fully examine active intermittent allies like the USSR as well as friendly (nominally Neutral) quasi members like Spain .

Too many writers prefer to renew the traditionally shopworn and limited examination of the behavior of the three main partners.

Because no similar study of the Allies ever fails to account for Neutral America's semi official but crucial help to Britain between 1939 and 1941.

Surely, we should fully include the USSR's help to Germany in the same period.

We can't continue to let abject apologists for the evils of communism and marxism continue to rule the academic roost, ensuring that Stalin's role in the early Axis is downplayed in tenure-seeking PhDs.

For during that crucial two year period, any fair observer would admit that Stalin gave far more assistance to Hitler than FDR ever gave to Churchill......

Modernity failed (and eventually faded) when synthetic penicillin failed

Forget what books and movies, your teachers, professors, parents and grandparents all tell you about WWII's "hands across the water" holy war against the utterly evil Nazi values:

because no nation in WWII ever went to war against the Axis unless and until they were first directly attacked by the Axis : on the factual evidence, they warred against the Axis solely in self defence.

Except, of course, for the empires of England and France --but :

if the peoples of these two superpowers still claim that they went to war solely on behalf of the small victims of the Axis, their subsequent actions would hardly prove that assertion -- as generations of Polish (and Jewish) academics are rightly eager to point out.

The problem was that the values of the Axis were but an extreme form - but still fully recognizable - of the same values of Modernity espoused by the middle class of every 'modern' nation on earth in that era .

A world wide middle class culture as largely indifferent to the lynching of Blacks in Georgia USA as to the lynching of Jews in Georgia USSR.

Those values were somewhat under attack during the Great Depression period.

But recent research has revealed that the WWII years were unexpectedly a time when protest against such un-charitable values was actually muted - not heightened - by the military conflict against the nations applying those values in their most extreme forms.

WWII's ideological war that didn't parallel the military war

But I think there was still one all-out ideological battle during WWII, one that ended in the defeat of the Modernity values that fuelled the Axis and led in time to our open commensality led era of post-Modernity diversity and tolerance.

That battle was over who/what would provide the bulk of the Allies' D-Day penicillin.

Synthetic Penicillin to be the Poster Boy of WWII's Terrible Simplicities

On one side were hundreds of the smartest chemists in the universe , assembled by the Allied scientific establishment which believed that man-made synthetic penicillin simply had to be better and cheaper than anything stupid Nature could come up with.

On the other side, an invisibly small team in a backwater ward at Columbia Presbyterian hospital whose leader Martin Henry Dawson said 'don't count the old and the slow and small microbes out so quickly - they just might be able to do it better and cheaper and quicker'.

A lot was at stake : for all of the towering edifice of Modernity was actually sustained on a single slender stock of pure conjecture.

That conjecture was that the biggest, most swiftly advancing, most complex human civilizations at the cutting edge of Life had to inevitably be smarter that the oldest,slowest, smallest microbes that began Life three billion years earlier -in each and every area.

Reductionism was the ideology of Modernity.

It saw the basic bricks of life or reality as being simple and simple minded .

So complexity/intelligence had to grow out of these bricks being assembled into ever bigger entities in a single straight upward line : complexity growing steadily upwards from a single electron to the Hoover Dam, from a single penicillium 'yeast' cell to a tenured chemist with a PhD.

It was true that there was an infection-filled war on and any sort of life-saving penicillin was greatly needed - now !

But the Allied scientific elite would unconsciously rather lose the military war to their (fellow modernist) Nazi opponents than lose the much more important ideological war to the despised slime cells on the question as to who could better make the vital lifesaver : sophisticated Man or stupid microbe.

Feel free to substitute Negro, Jew, Oriental, aboriginal, woman, homosexual, cripple for microbe to better appreciate their deepest physic fears.

But in the end, by D-Day 1944 and beyond, all those genius-level chemists had totally failed - and have still failed, seventy five years on : a single yeast penicillium cell still makes penicillin cheaper and better than by any human synthetic method.

And from that same basic wartime penicillin G, still made in the tens and tens of thousands of tons today by those incredibly tiny yeast cells, we humans create almost all the infection fighting antibiotics we have today.

If the human small and the slow and the old and weak have more respect today than they did in 1940 - and they do, much much more - it won't hurt to thank the first ones who gained that reluctant respect : the penicillium yeasts cells ...

WWII & 'small science' : how new WWII small science infantry weapons helped create our post-war post-modern world

The usual guff about WWII was that the Axis infantry soldier was far better than the Axis infantry soldier but the Allies won because of their superior BIG SCIENCE, with the big war-ending A-Bomb delivered in the big B-29 bomber offered up as a key proof.

But is any of this true ?

Could it not be claimed that while the (relatively few) Axis soldiers actually were a fair better - as individuals - than the average Allied soldier, the Allies had such potentially large numbers of recruits available that the advantage should have gone to the Allies by sheer weight of numbers.

But the Allies deliberately choose to starve their infantry both in manpower and even more critically, in material.

Because the key reason why the German infantry was so superior was that the Germans invented some small science infantry weapons so good the world is still using them as warfare blueprints 75 years later.

The Allied infantry doctrine focussed on squads of mostly riflemen slowly firing rifles discharging large, long range, bullets.

Things like squad level light machine guns were relatively few in number and pretty pitiful as suppression fire weapons.

By contrast, the Germans focussed on supplying each infantry squad with a number of a superior general purpose air-cooled machine gun .

The MG42 was made cheaply, quickly and lightly of stamped parts.

It was most famous for a very rapid rate of fire - sustained by the use of endlessly linked belts of ammunition, not small magazines, and by the ability to change the overly-hot barrels in seconds.

More importantly in the big picture, being so light for such a deadly weapon, it could be easily carried into battle and fired by one soldier, if need be - supplying the fire power of an entire typically combat-thinned British battalion of bolt action rifles.

The fact that German ammunition was generally far less smokey than Allied ammo, meant this one-man-battalion could remain better concealed longer.

Next in importance was the Germans heavy use of the infantry level mortar - an improved version of WWI's most significant infantry level invention - the British Stokes mortar.

Thanks to pipe manufacturer Wilfred Stokes, mortars, in an instant of inspired invention by this sheer amateur, went from being a big bulky heavy bit of artillery to something that ultimately a single soldier could carry and fire.

Again, it multiplied the ability of one or two foot soldiers to impede an entire advancing battalion.

It could be fire from the lee side of a hill and hit advancing troops without them being able to directly fire at it.

The WWI sniper rifle was also improved - more consistent matching of ammo and individual gun barrel and better optical scopes.

All three impeded, from a safe distance , a broad front infantry advance over open ground.

And their price for doing so - peanuts, both to make and keep supplied with ammunition.

 And they totally resisted technological obsolescence that doomed so many highly expensive Big Science weapons within months of delivery. They remain deadly to this day, in their original WWII or even WWI configurations.

Can't say that about WWI and WWII planes, tanks or subs now can we ?

And for close combat, particularly in built-up areas, three other German weapons proved small science could still best Big Science.

The German anti-tank mine was a very cheap and very low tech weapon , considering it could take out one of the leading edges of WWII warfare - the fifty plus ton Main Battle Tank.

Military leadership as carefully counted the estimated totals of MBTs on each side in WWII as they had counted estimates of dreadnoughts in WWI.

The German's 1944 Topfmine for instance was made of a casing of tar-covered cardboard - to resist water, detection and because it was light and dirt cheap.

With the use of a shovel, it was literally dirt-cheap to employ by the tens of thousands as well.

The German Faust Patrone was a very cheap and low tech one time use recoilless weapon that could destroy medium tanks and stop a big tank by destroying its tracks.

Weapon and firing tube together weighed only 3 kilos and was a metre long, the tube being made of cheap stamped steel and wood.

It was easily carried and used by one soldier , who would remain mobile enough to make it hard for tank or accompanying infantry to hit him.

It fired a very low velocity projectile about 30 metres - thanks to its low tech centuries old black powder propelling charge.

 Yet with its carefully shaped explosive charge of only a third of a kilogram it was easy able to penetrate six inches of armour.

It proved even more useful at destroying infantry strong point bunkers.

For the first time ever, even super thick armour was defeated without the need for a large, bulky, heavy artillery piece with long thick gun barrel , elaborate mounting system and case-hardened shell to penetrate armour.

At the very short ranges typical of combat in city streets, a well concealed, poorly trained one man team could fire a cheap 3 kg weapon more effectively than a bulky, hard to move, expensive 7000 kg 88mm anti-tank weapon with a large highly trained crew!

Now even the relatively light MG42 is a big bulky heavy piece of overkill in city combat. Its ability to kill two kilometres away usually irrelevant.

But a single solder firing a lightweight, cheap (stamped-parts) sub machine gun firing pistol strength small cartridges was more effective - more mobile, better able to carry more (smaller) rounds upon themselves.

Instead of mortars lobbing explosives up from concealed positions, this soldier also made free use of small, light cheap hand grenades.

All this little science infantry weapons had an enormous impact , post WWII - in fact helping to bring about our post-modern world .

Post modern in the sense that a truly key hallmark of Modernity - advanced nations lording it over small less advanced nation in the form of imperialism and colonies -  has totally died away.

It all happened when nationalist rebels began using these sorts of small science infantry weapons in rural and urban settings .

That made for such big casualties that Big Science/low casualties oriented western nations gave up their colonies rather than endure losing such long term and asymmetrical wars ....

All superweapons are plenticidal, even if they never kill anyone

1945's American-only atomic bomb was truly plenticidal (plentitude-reducing), but not because a full-out nuclear war would kill off thousands of the world's species in a few months.

It would have been just as plenticidal if it had never ever been used, but only threatened to be used.

Because its real target was not the Axis or even erstwhile allies like Russia - but rather Washington's favoured peace'n'wartime Allies !

Yes its real target were all the other bothersome friendly nations that Washington had to waste some much time mollifying all throughout the war.

But holding the world's only super-weapon puts an end to all that back and forth diplomacy and compromising and debating.

Conducting external affairs gets much simpler when you hold all the cards, make all the rules.

The Manhattan atomic Project was pursued at all speed and all costs, not because it would end the Axis coalition - but rather because it would end the Allied coalition.

Bet you don't find that fact in any of your professors' favourite books ....

The three types of humanity in the early 1940s --- at least as people 'at the top' saw it

In 1940, those people with all the cultural hegemony and economic power found it intellectually easy to divide the world into just three groups.

Type A (themselves) were the smallest group : male and middle aged (generously if vaguely defined as lying between the immature young adult and the senile/impoverished elderly) and from their culture's dominant (and usually majority) ethnicity & religion and middle class or well educated and physically, mentally and morally 'fit' .

Type C , always a poor and repressed minority (and forming a majority only of history's victims of witch-hunts and scapegoating), were all those who fitted in none of these five categories.

Members of Type B , by far the largest group, fitted in at least one of these five categories and so could share , at times, the feeling that they were some small way part of Type A's in-group --- this is how the tiny Type A group maintained its social hegemony over the vast majority of people outside it.

Ie all whites, no matter how poor and uneducated, were in some sense were usually judged superior to even well educated blacks.

But equally , some in Group B could possess three or four of the five characteristics of the the top group and thus possess considerable social and economic power but because they failed in one or two categories could chose to side, at times , with Type C.

I label these people as "inside agitators".

I have pointed to five of The Seven who led the battle to rescue "Penicillin-for-All" as being "inside agitators" --- because I think their physical handicap heightened their innate sensitivity to the plight of the handicapped in a time of utilitarian Total War.

I hope my definition is broad enough to include societies like Japan where the in-group was not white but still found ways to lord it over the small Japanese minorities , along with Koreans, Chinese et al.

And that it adequately covers societies like the USSR where being from the old middle class society was a bad thing but where the educated new middle class of party bureaucrats (or engineering graduates) from working class families ruled the roost over the poorer less educated working class in practise, if not in official rhetoric.

The Type A people were united world wide in treating Type C people badly - basing their actions upon the popular belief in scientific eugenics as their justification for ignoring age old religious beliefs in the essential equality of humanity.

But various people in the Type A group differed widely in just how badly to mistreat them.

So that WWII was not at all a battle between absolutely opposing philosophies but rather a matter of various sides differing over the degrees of their discrimination against 'the unfit'.

Everyone agreed there were already too many Jewish in their nation's universities and professions.

But America tended to merely limit their numbers by formal or informal quotas while Germany started by firing them all , then denied them any other form of work or education, next forced them to emigrate and finally determined to kill them all in gas chambers.

Similarly Germany and America both disliked blacks but while the Nazis killed them, only some in America killed blacks and then only sometimes.

The rest were content to merely treat them as second class in a vast varieties of ways , sometimes even unconsciously while consciously feeling prejudice free.

FDR's 1941 Four Freedoms speech and the subsequent Atlantic Charter tended to queer this pitch - because those documents did (albeit in vague terms) set the Allies absolutely against both Axis rhetoric and practise and much of the Allies' current practise.

(For example, FDR's Freedom from Want included 'the right to adequate medical care' -  something that Dr Dawson welcomed even as the Anglo-American medical-scientific elite opposed it.)

So now the Allied leadership were pointing to The Four Freedoms as the cause for which they wanted the ordinary people of the world to go off to die to defend - at the same time that they themselves were not practising those high-sounding ideals.

No playwright of fiction could have better designed the conditions to ensure the resulting grand dramatic moral conflict.

Enter now Dr Martin Henry Dawson, stage left , to set that moral conflict into play ...

WWII : an EUGENIC war , on both sides - nay, all sides

A truly moral Nuremberg Trial would have considered the war conduct of the Allied and Neutrals, as well as that of the Axis...

Now it is well known that Germany spent its second world war preoccupied, not with winning the military war itself, but with eugenically killing all the 4Fs it could find and then tossing them in open pit graves or into furnaces.

(Cite here the Holocaust, Aktion T4 and the Hunger Plan.)

Eugenic Triages from all sides of WWII

Less well known is the fact that the Allies and the Neutrals were also preoccupied with matters eugenic in the midst of an all-out military war : in this case, a steely determination to avoid killing any of their 1As if they could at all help it.

Naval blockades, aerial bombings and denying the spreading of information about new life-saving medicines and pesticides were the ways the Allied hoped to avoid engaging their 1A young males in hand to hand combat with 1A males from Germany, Japan and Italy.

The British scientists and the military had been united as one with British politicians is disclaiming any need for British troops to invade Germany to fight German troops there.

Britain declared war on Germany at the beginning of  September 1939, but it was not until the sixth year of the war and during the last months of the
European part of that war, that British 1A males finally engaged in deadly combat with 1A German males on German soil.

(The whole war might have ended in months not years, if only the vastly larger manpower pool of the French and English empires had been conscripted into a ground army intent on invading western Germany while the bulk of her army was in the East , invading Poland.)

Instead, they said, naval blockades and aerial bombings and denying new lifesaving medicine would kill enough women, children and elderly in Occupied Europe and Germany to make the young male German 1As want to voluntarily surrender, far in advance of any British invasion with ground troops upon German soil.

Of course, the Neutrals did the best eugenic job of the lot in preserving their own 1As and not diluting them with any 4F gene pools.

They did so by (A) not joining the effort to defend the weak and the small and the innocent and by (b) not letting any of the weak/small/innocent into their countries as hapless refugees.

The dysgenic myth of WWI

It was claimed by avid eugenists during WWI (and by most educated people after the war ) that only the best had died in the Great War while back home the cripples and mentally deficient had breed like rabbits.

No evidence was put forth to support either of these claims - it seemed so common sensical.

In fact by the end of it,  the Great War had killed millions of men who either had been or would have been rejected as 4F material at the start of the war - a war this big cut a wide swath through all men with two legs, from 18 to 45 , in most combat nations.

And the evidence shows in fact that the physically and mentally challenged people around the world and through all the ages marry less frequently and have kids less frequently than the average population.

It is pretty hard to marry and raise a family without first having a steady well paying job  - as most of us who are physically and mentally fit already know first hand.

How much harder for those with mental or physical challenges ?

So, absorbing this false lesson , all the post WWI world's elites sought to avoid wars where their 'best' took on the 'best' from a nation of equal or greater demographic and military power.

This didn't mean no more war - it just meant that post WWI nations tended to attack nations smaller than themselves or to invade countries bigger than themselves that they thought were divided internally or were inept as warriors.

So Germany and Japan invaded Russia and China under reason one, while Japan attacked America under reason two.

And in any and all cases, nations tried to first win wars by killing or terrifying or starving/freezing the civilians of an opposing nation of a size similar to their own, rather than in engaging in direct combat with that nation's armed forces.

But because eugenics was invented in the victorious Allies's nations and only later taken up by the Axis and Neutrals, anything vaguely universally eugenic about the whole war was strictly excluded from consideration at Nuremberg - only crimes unique to the Axis were considered crimes against humanity.

Trust me on this one, every school child one hundred years from now will know WWII to be an eugenic war from push to finish - and on all sides ....

In a world war obsessed by 1A nations, soldiers and scientists, Henry Dawson dared to defend the worthiness of 4Fs... and 4F science

During WWII (1931-1946) a whole series of countries cum bullies - among the Allies as well as among the Axis - almost totally consistently choose to only attack those nations or peoples they judged weaker than themselves.

Britain, for example, shamefully refused to attack Germany with   its potentially much larger Commonwealth army manpower and felt the war could be won by invading weaker Italy instead.

It also choose to starved the prostrate peoples of occupied Europe by blockade , rather than attack Germany directly with all that  Commonwealth army manpower, in hopes this also would win the war, along with success in Italy.

Only twice, both times in December of 1941, did bullies deliberately choose to attack someone they believed was stronger than they were : when Japan and then Germany declared war on America , a nation with by far the biggest economy in the world and also by far the hardest country to invade.

In partial explanation of all this bully behavior, it was the Age of Modernity, when the majority of powerful opinion was firmly convinced that Evolution was unidirectional and always consolidating into fewer (and ever bigger) entities.

Fewer ever bigger animals and plants, fewer ever bigger buildings, ships and dams ,fewer ever bigger corporations and cities , fewer ever bigger nations and empires.

Ever bigger and bigger, ever better and better : so that the destruction and absorption of the smaller and the weaker was simply inevitable.

So what we might now regard - in post hegemonic times - as the shameful behavior of virtually all the nations and people of the world, two billion standing around as bystanders at a holocaust or a schoolyard bullying session, they then regarded as sad but inevitable, "letting Nature take its course."

Henry Dawson didn't agree and he put his strong disagreement into actions.

Dr (Martin) Henry Dawson never said why he did what he did, why he went so far out on a limb to do what he did or why he willingly gave up his life to aid his efforts.

But concrete deeds walk, while abstract talk ... just talks.

By his deeds, we can see that Dawson clearly thought even the 4Fs of the 4Fs were worth saving at the height of Total War, particularly when his side was fighting, after all, opponents who thought they weren't worth saving.

By his deeds, we know he clearly thought tiny 4F science had its own virtues, even during a war when Science, like skyscrapers, was thought only to get better when it got bigger.

Seventy five years on, his solitary figure looks now like the sensible one, while his many  opponents - basically the vast majority of informed opinion - now look to be sadly hubris-ridden and totally lack in the imagination to see beyond the obvious.

Dawson didn't say 'small was beautiful' and 'big was bad', partly because he didn't say anything at all.

 But he definitely acted as if he had concluded that Evolution as progressing in all directions : as often decomposing into tiny viruses as it was consolidating into big dinosaurs.

This could be because any acute observer of Life on Earth, and Dawson was acutely open to everything, would be forced to conclude that reality had indeed given the planet a dynamic mix of stability niches (aiding the existence of large entities) and instability niches (aiding the existence of small entities).

So an eternal global commensality of big and little entities was inevitable.

If Dawson had lived and had been in good health he might have formally stated what he believed and the lessons we might learn from his successes.

But he didn't, so we must tease them out : from his deeds....

The Bad News war is really the Bad Faith war, more accurate but less catchy

Calling the new Halifax ferry "The William J Roue" might pass muster with the world class nervous nellies that make up the local elite.

But, hopefully, ordinary citizens - the young particularly - will simply come to say that "I'm taking the roue to Dartmouth", just as the young took to simply calling the Canadian Dollar "the loonie".

Because a catchy name trumps a more accurate (but more awkward) name almost every time.

I really wanted to sub-title my book "a Good News story from the bad faith war" but that sounds like something that would only appeal to philosophers.

But as yesterday's blog post explained, my view is that WWII was a really bad news war, not simply because of its tens of millions of deaths, but because it was also one of history's most perfidious wars.

 On all sides : Axis, Neutral and Allied.

A low, dishonest decade fallowed by a low, dishonest war.

WWII's really bad news was the tremendous amounts of bad faith floating about in the general moral atmosphere.....

Dawson's commensality supplies Modernity's "Missing Middle"

Seventy five years on, WWII (conventionally 1939-1945 but actually lasting much longer) looks like nothing more than two great grist stones, Reification and Reductionism, relentlessly grinding up all humanity between them .

For example, the Axis reified a scientific claim that humanity could be accurately divided into being either members or non-members of a concretely actual Aryan Race --- and then set out to eliminate all the non members.

The Allies, equally guilty, chose to worship at a scientific temple that claimed the reduction of all human complexity to the view we are but simple aggregates of tiny indivisible protons and electrons.

Neither claim can stand up to a probing examination - then or now.

But in fact, those claims weren't generally contested seventy five years ago.

However one scientist, Henry Dawson, while paddling in his quiet backwater of the study of human-bacterial commensality, implicitly seemed to offer up an extremely muted scientific critique of these two complementary explanations of Reality.

No wonder his view was ignored.

However he persisted because it did seem that these two complementary explanations - one encompassing the very biggest things in reality and the other covering the very small entities in reality - left out the vast middle of reality.

And that is the very place where all life (and most matter and energy) actually 'lives' .

The key concept in commensality ("the dining together of all life, big and small, at a common table") is that tiny but vital connector :  AND  .

Commensality re-unites what reductionism and reification divides.

Commensal Penicillin : the saving of the lives of 1A soldiers AND  4F civilians , on both sides of the war

But it was not until he put his ideas on commensality into practise, as he confounded the Allied plan to weaponize wartime penicillin, that commensality began to have an actual impact on the thoughts of scientists and the general population.

For in science, as in life generally, words - even peer-reviewed published words - don't always speak louder than actions....

Coalitions, not Combat, lost and won WWII

England and pre-1937 Germany definitely started and then attempted to direct World War Two throughout , but they certainly didn't win or lose this truly world-wide war,  not all on their tiny , tiny own.

Instead, two vast world-sized coalitions under their nominal direction - one truly commensal and the other just national imperialism by another name - won and lost the war.

Germany and Japan built far, far, far better fighting machines but lost out totally to the Anglo-led nations, simply because of the Axis inability to form genuine working partnerships with all the people worldwide who were initially willing to back Fascism back in 1939-1940.

In the beginning Japan and Germany seemed to have had 'Science' on their side : most of the educated world resignedly believed that Nature and Darwin had revealed that in the long run, bigger was always better, always beating down the small and the weak.

In other words, they had a baldly naive and a highly hubris-inflated sense of what the Science of Size actually told us.

If you don't know that there actually is a well founded Science of Size, then you won't be prepared for the upcoming mega-sized re-match of WWII, when popular Hubris again collides with unpopular Reality, this time over the question of climate.

Back in the Science-obsessed Thirties, the age-old and realistically grounded moral sense that it was right and proper to come to the aid of the babies of perfect strangers melted away, melted away before this mistaken 'book' fact that "Bigger is Better".

The Japanese and Germans had seemingly appeared to be the next new 'coming thing' , a view their early surprisingly fast and cheap victories only enforced.

But 'scaling up' their early victories proved impossible, as the real Science of Size revealed that their earlier logistics were bound to fail over the vast new regions that they planned to conquer and then hold.

Small and weak peoples, already conquered and defeated, had proven to have more life in them than anyone expected.

They successfully logistically harassed the German and Japanese  until they reduced these over-extended Great Powers to the point where their eventual military collapse before the forces of the Allied coalition became relatively easy.

Meanwhile the Allied coalition had many members, either nominally still neutral or nominally actual co-belligerents, who gave only a few leases on a little of of their land for others to make into vital military bases or provided scarce strategic natural resources, both provided at very good prices to themselves.

But at least none of them needed to be occupied to keep them on side.

Occupied by hundreds of thousands of scarce combat troops to hold each of them and to keep their Resistance partisans at bay , as was the case for everyone of the nations inside the Axis 'coalition of the conquered and subjugated'.

Others in the Allied coalition - the 'Free' armed forces - were the small but very committed volunteers forces of the many governments-in-exile from countries under Axis rule, small forces who provided far more fighting energy than their mere numbers would indicate.

The UK, USA and USSR dominated the Allied coalition, but try to imagine how successfully they would have been if everything had been reversed.

Try to imagine if if the Axis coalition had been as successful as the Allied commensal coalition of the big and the small became, with even China teaming up with Japan in a war against the white powers.

And then try to imagine if the UK had to do without her empire and commonwealth, if the Americans had to do without their banana republics of the Americas, and the USSR had had all of the many nations on its non-western borders in hostile action against her.

Who would have won WWII then ?

the last VICTORIAN war : 1939-1945

Looking over today's crop of leaders in politics, business and culture and comparing them with the world leaders of the 1940s, one is struck by today's leaders' comparative youth.

By contrast, the world of WWII was run by the white-haired teenagers of the Victorian Age.


Normally war is said to be an event for young men and young men's energy, but between1939-1945 the young men silently and glumly marched off to fight, while back home - in charge - the old men postponed their retirements and found a second wind.

They would replay WWI all over and this time, run it their way - not the way of their fathers.

Today's teenagers view the reforming (thermosetting) promises of  Scientism through the cynical and disappointed eyes of 125 years of broken promises, but the eternal teenagers who ran WWII were born in the first flush of the Age of Scientism and never stopped believing.

They still remained as hopeful that Scientism's reforming promises would finally deliver when the last of them died in the early 1970s as when they were still the naively optimistic teenagers of the years of good Queen Victoria's reign.

WWII was not uniquely a war between scientists and technologists - one could make the case that the Napoleonic wars and last year's war were also wars between scientists and technologists.

the last war of unalloyed SCIENTISM : 1939-1945

But it was uniquely the only big war fought between true believers in reform Scientism on all sides : Allies, Axis and Neutrals.

But reform Scientism delivered its first big disappointments in that war , signally failed to do what it had long pledged it could do, if only it was given its head and released from the shackles of old outdated sentiments.

As a permanent reminder of that failure, reform Scientism's seventy years on Earth by 1945 were marked by that war's seventy million dead : a million for each year of Scientism's existence....

Henry Dawson puts the Allied treatment of the weak and the strong to the "Acid Test"

This was Henry Dawson's Acid Test : during World War Two, did the treatment of the weak and the strong by the nations that ultimately made up the Allies differ in kind or only in degree from that of the Axis nations?

Any single individual - let alone a single dying individual - could not pose that question across a broad spectrum of issues and expect to force a response.

But in focussing tightly upon the Allies' differential medical treatment of the lightly wounded combat soldier and of his high school pal back home dying of endocarditis, Dawson did manage to hit a sore spot among the Allies --- across America and Britain in particular.

In late 1943 , Henry Dawson was able to make the Allied public realize that , on this issue,  their elite leaders differed far less in kind from the "the weak must die so the strong can flourish" philosophy of the Axis that anyone could have comfortably imagined back in 1939.

When the Allied public forced their leaders to alter course and provide penicillin, during wartime, for endocarditis patients, the whole of civilized thought shifted course --- permanently.

No mean response for a persistent little team locked away in a ward, a lab and a doctor's office ......

America LOSES WWII : because of quarrels between government agencies, such as over Penicillin

The above headline sounds bizarre to our ears, because we are  used to only hearing it being used as the standard explanation given as to why Japan and Germany lost the (largely technical and scientific) world war against the Allies.

After all, both of these nations had talented and committed cadres of scientists and engineers but endless feuding between various sub sections of the government seriously diluted the impact they might have had on the war, if only they had worked together.

In Japan the Army and Navy Departments frequently seemed more at war with each other, than with America.

In the case of Germany, each of the senior figures in the Nazi hierarchy commanded a lot of semi-independent resources and each Nazi war lord seemed to spend as much time trying to grow at the expense of their political bureaucratic rivals, as in uniting against the common enemy.

But Vannevar Bush chooses, in the foreword to his famous "ENDLESS FRONTIER",  not to see any serious conflicts in the American and Allied scientific and technical effort.

And we believe him - the historians (grateful for the steady diet of research grants to peacetime academics that he is credited with having created) above all .

And after all his side won ----- shouldn't that alone silence all potential criticism ?

Still, in this particular foreword, he chooses to blow his particular agency's horn very very carefully indeed,  when it comes to penicillin.

So for once, it is not his own OSRD that he credits with seeing that "our grievously wounded men" got penicillin in time : he says  it was "the government"  that did the bang up job of co-ordinating the research and development that speeded penicillin up to the front.

For a very conservative Republican ,like Bush, to be praising "the government" is truly a startling sight. He more usually carefully distinguishes agencies like his own highly conservative OSRD from the left wing agencies filled with New Dealers, such as the WPB's own OPRD.

But what could he do ?

For his own right wing OSRD agency chose to take the totally wrong turn on the way to moving penicillin to the D-Day beaches and delivered not one tiny sliver of its vaunted synthetic penicillin to our troops or anyone else : not on June 6th 1944 and in fact, not ever.

It was left to the left wingers in the OPRD to get literally tons of penicillin to the Allied side, between the time they first took up the cause in September 1943 and the end of the war.

They did this not merely by the unimportant but useful work they did on the production side - for by statute this was their job, just as the OSRD's job was not production but research - but by also doing the OSRD's job , in an area of research that the OSRD choose to seriously neglect.

 That was the OSRD-neglected research in studying ways to up the very front end of the penicillin process  : upping the initial biological yield of penicillin.

Biology : horrors !  Just saying that word in front of Bush and the OSRD was like waving a garlic-infused cross at a vampire.

So we must credit the left wing OPRD with starting the research that resulted in that biological yield ( ie , yield before extraction) now being 2500 times as productive as it was in 1943 when the OSRD threw up its hands at the problem.

Just as the quarrelling Japanese Army and Navy did on radar, the two warring branches of Bush's "the government" , the OSRD and OPRD , came to a fork in the road on penicillin and instead of uniting to find a way to use the least resources to solve the problem, they disagreed and pursued independent courses.

Bush's Orwellian use of words like "the government" or "the nation" or "the Allies" ,to explain who won the war , allows him to dissolve any internal conflicts those huge collectivities might have encountered in very slowly moving their overwhelming larger populations into defeating much smaller and very resource-strapped enemies.

So historians mustn't simply accept Bush's Orwellian arguments on blind faith but instead carefully ask , if the nation or government "did" this or that , did that mean that all the nation/government do this or that or did just parts of it do while other parts disagreed, stood around doing nothing or even held things up ?

After all, on the evidence of their own internal memos, the OSRD not merely failed to produce the penicillin that saved our "grievously wounded", they also had no intention of wasting penicillin on anyone who couldn't aid the war effort on recovery, if they didn't have to.

That meant no wasting penicillin, if they had to choose, on those so severely wounded that if they did make a recovery, it would be to discharge and a permanent disability pension.

 And it meant, that if they had to chose between saving a boy dying of endocarditis and instantly curing a boy GI of VD so he could quickly return (to perhaps die) on the Italian frontlines, they'd won't help the endocarditis case, because his disease-weakened heart would not let him do much for the war effort, even if he did recover.

So, if the only thing I ever do in my life is to destroy the OSRD's reputation for furthering penicillin when what they actually did was hold it up and then conspire to use it for truly wicked eugenic ends, I will consider my life well lived....

Henry Dawson's war aims : "You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar..."

The Allies, convinced their troops lacked the Nazi and Japanese killer instinct, spent most of the war trying to prove Dawson wrong by demonstrating that they could be tougher than tough.

But given their overwhelming advantage in men and material over the Axis, it didn't seemed to be working very fast.

But it did eventually work -  at least militarily : only when the Allies seemed sure to win did people in neutral and occupied nations move, ever so slowly, over to the Allied side.

Certainly the moral claims that the Allied raised as to why to support them seemed to have little credibility at home as well as abroad.

Deeds, not words, was what the undecided were looking for - and they found few deeds to reassure them that the Allies wouldn't just be a milder eugenic version of the harshly eugenic Axis.

But in the final days of the long, long war, they saw some reason for hope.

Penicillin the deed

The Allies were beginning to fly penicillin into occupied countries and to neutral sick children and even using it to save the lives of dying Axis POWs : these were deeds, at last, Dawson deeds, not mere empty rhetoric.......

By 1945, Martin Henry Dawson's 1940 war aim had become OUR war aim too

Baby, dank Harry Lime, werden nicht neeeding Teddy

In September 1940 , at the height of the Battle of Britain, war hero Martin Henry Dawson decided against rejoining the Canadian Army to help fight Hitler.

He would fight Hitler instead by saving the lives of the very people that Hitler (and a lot of Dawson's medical colleagues) judged to be "lives unworthy of life" --- particularly in wartime.

In five short weeks, he grew and then injected penicillin into two working class youths, a Negro and a Jew , both dying of invariably fatal SBE.

 In many eyes, they were judged to be the 4Fs of the 4Fs, and definitely not a priority for life-saving during a Total War.

But Dawson instinctively felt that this was something that would definitely separate the Allies from the Axis , proving that the Allies believed in saving all lives - in particular even the smallest and the weakest, "the least of these", as it were.

The Allied government-scientific-military-commercial establishment disagreed, saving penicillin only for the 1As of the 1As, the frontline combat soldiers away from the killing zone due to a non-fatal dose of the clap they had picked up.

They banned the use of penicillin to save SBEs , sentencing them to a certain death.

Dawson, himself dying from a terminal disease, defied the authorities and stole some government-issued penicillin to give to the SBEs , later getting secret supplies from a sympathetic CEO at a Big Pharma corporation.

His misdeeds inspired others, the story broke, Doctor Mom sided with Dawson's ideas and the males in the establishment reluctantly fell in line.

But very soon they saw the virtue in Dawson's ideas, and warplanes were soon flying about, dropping not bombs but penicillin for dying children in both Allied countries and in Neutral nations.

Penicillin-the-lifesaver-of-all-civilian-lives had become a very public weapon in the battle to win the hearts and minds of the world for the Allied cause.

So much so, in fact, that by 1949 erstwhile 'citizen of an Allied nation' Harry Lime was judged one of fiction's all time villains mostly because he had dared to water down the penicillin intended for dying children.  Dying Axis children.

It is this viewpoint, only 4 years after the war, that I thinks allows us to claim "The Third Man" as one of the first postmodern films.

Dawson was four years dead by that point, but I think he would have be proud to think how far his war aims had become our war aims.....