the "THEATRE" of war : 1939-1945

WWII started out on a note of uplift in 1939, with its three actors (Scientific Racism, Scientific Capitalism and Scientific Socialism) all united in eating the scenery but ended in farce in 1945, as the scenery proceeded to eat the three actors.

These actors can't be said to lack ambition.

Japan and Germany agreed to divide the world between them, planning over the course of a few years to double their size every three months until they had grown from roughly 100,000 square miles in size into giants 100 million square miles in size.

(!!!!!!)

These were to be formal empires, ruled directly from Berlin and Tokyo.

Washington and Moscow planned, instead, just informal empires , ruling indirectly, but also saw no reason to stop at sharing the globe with anyone : an entirely capitalist or communist world would do nicely.

But in all these variegated planned empires , their shared gods would at least be a constant : all praise Newton, Dalton and Darwin !

In Physics, Newtonian ballatics still held total sway : for Nordenized bombs , neither snow,rain,heat nor the gloom of night would stay these couriers of death from their anointed round : enemy barrels would soon be in right some pickle.

In Chemistry, Dalton's simple adding together of elemental atoms  had been shown, mostly by German chemists, as able to create anything and everything.

 Hitler, among others,  was reassured that  no more would hunger be a restraint on war, with all the resulting disease and government-toppling food riots. "No bread ? Why don't they just eat food pills ?"

In Biology, all three actors believed in negative and positive eugenics, with characteristic national differences in its actual application.

In Germany, quoting from the Old Testament of Darwin, the matter was strictly genetic, nature not nuture.

Certain races, bound by blood, were irredeemable and to be terminated negatively.

Other races were more plastic and could be molded positively into becoming the new Aryan superman.

Stalin much preferred the New Testament of Darwin , the Lamarck side of the old man , with certain classes , bound by their wealth and education, as irredeemable and to be terminated.

But the workers were more plastic and could made into the new socialist supermen.

America and most of the rest of the modern nations took a bit from both of these extreme positions and saw it was individuals within their nations that were irredeemable , mostly of one class admitably but in that class because of their genetic nature.

Flash forward to the summer of 1945, six long year later.

The actual course of the war hadn't gone exactly to any of the three actors' plans but instead had rather meandered , with Norden-like precision, widely and wildly all over the map.

The Norden bombsight, that apogee of Newtonian ballistic  precision, had been proven so inaccurate thanks to recalcitrant Nature, that the war only truly ended in August when a massive fire bomb was dropped, out of a bomber named after someone's mother,  and burned thousands of babies to death.

Now as long as your bombsight was accurate enough to be sure of hitting the right country, (something that bomber pilots from all combatant nations failed to get right at times), it was good enough : the A-bomb became Physics' reluctant Plan B.

And that summer all over the world, from Vietnam to the Netherlands, people were still looking up to the skies still hoping to see the long promised food pills drop out of the butterfly bombers like modern day manna.

Most dead people in this war, like most wars, still ended up dying of hunger and its diseases : Nature never bites back more violently that in the human stomach.

But no food pills. In fact, a few thousand chemists with PhDs and endless pots of money had even failed to assemble a few of Dalton's atoms into tiny molecules only 300 daltons in size.

So, in the end,  penicillin and quinine still had to be made by dumb nature : and Oxford University's most refined, dying, were saved by Pfizer's Brooklyn Crude, Chemistry's reluctant Plan B.

In fact, Oxford's most refined and least refined were both saved indifferently by Pfizer's and Glaxo's medicine, a sort of chemical Beveridge Report in action.

In July, the voters of Britain, having had a chance to look over what Buchenwald and Beveridge had offered as a solution to the problem of the weak and the poor , had voted overwhelmingly for Beveridge, Biology's reluctant Plan B.

Because even in race-above-all Germany, irredeemable races were soon found to be redeemable after all,  as farming and mining slaves , to keep Germans from starving and freezing to death.

Tens of millions of non-Germans filled every corner of nation that had started a war in an effort to purify itself all foreigners and all useless mouths.

Have I proven that irony and war are made for each other....

Needed: a political - not Technological/Whig - history of wartime penicillin

Almost all histories of penicillin have but one plot : the dramatic, last minute come-from-behind victory of the little guy, HIGH TECH MAN, over the vast evil forces of Nature and fungi spores.

In pointed fact, the technical problems of producing life-saving penicillin was solved very quickly, basically done by one or two  individuals with remarkably low level technology, by the Fall of 1941.

But even the most affluent members of the world could not reliably access life-saving penicillin for another five years and it still remains important to discover why.

And most of the world's poor couldn't access it for many more years after that ---- and in fact millions still die worldwide every year because properly prescribed antibiotics are beyond their economic reach.

The delays in delivering life-saving medicine were not technological in nature (the technological difficulties dog ate my penicillin homework) but rather political --- and ultimately moral.

Conservatives, Republicans & Nazis - and penicillin

It is not a coincidence that the only one of the four English speaking countries ( the four that produced 99% of  WWII's penicillin) that was dominated by a Conservative Party also did by far the worst wartime job in getting penicillin to their dying civilians --- for whom penicillin was their only hope of survival.

I refer to Winston Churchill's UK government.

Penicillin rationing from 1942 onward, in all the Allied nations,  was a deliberate choice made by government bureaucrats and politicians and company CEOs - not something imposed upon them from without by sheer technological necessity.

Academic 'Bad Faith'

To still deny that - 75 years after the events and in light of all our archival knowledge - is to exhibit academic bad faith.

In 1943 that cosy consensus, about rationing penicillin and news about penicillin cures, broke up as some bureaucrats, politicians and CEOs in some countries decided to go all out to produce enough penicillin for everyone - in their own nation and beyond.

Others still much preferred that any spare national cash go to extra weapons and not into building extra penicillin plants.

They did not want to admit the absolute need for a medicine to save the lives of their own civilians , now needlessly dying of infections that the sulfa drugs had once cured.

Today, we have dozens and dozens of alternative antibiotics to suit almost any imaginable life-threatening infection.

Unheard amid the din of war , the Sulfas started failing bad

But each of the half dozen successful sulfa drugs were best over a different narrow array of diseases - so if a patient had a strain resistant to the sulfa drug best suited to their disease, they generally had nothing left between them and death.

Except penicillin - effective against most all gram positive bacteria and much slower to gain strains resistance to it.

Simply put, diverting money that could have gone to building more penicillin bottle plants into building yet more military weapons instead, meant that Allied civilians died needlessly so more Axis civilians could die from Allied bombs.

Britain declared war on Germany in 1939, but thanks to a deliberate decision made by Winston Churchill, British soldiers were not fighting German soldiers on German soil till 1945 - and if he had had his way, British troops would never have set foot on German soil till after the German surrender.

The lives of Axis and Allied soldiers were spared, the lives of Axis and Allied citizens condemned, by this Churchillian decision.

However, his bomber-led vision for winning the war was probably not the main reason his government rejected building enough bottle penicillin plants in 1943 to supply soldier and citizen alike.

The Beveridge Report and Penicillin

After the release of Beveridge Report in the Fall of 1942 - a report he didn't want his government to publicly release -  the idea of his government facilitating the means to give life-saving penicillin to all that needed it seemed to smack of approving of the Beveridge Report.

Penicillin for all civilians needing it seemed the thin edge of a socialist edge.

America's equivalent of the Beveridge Report happened in the mid 1930s under the rubric of calls for more Social Medicine.

That report's main thrust was calling upon governments to actively commit to freeing citizens from freedom of want , particular freedom from want of life-saving medical care.

To Churchill's Conservatives, a government seeing to it that all dying citizens got penicillin would have been as repugnant in peacetime as it was in wartime.

It couldn't politically survive publicly advocating the denial of needed medicine to poorer dying civilians in peacetime, but under the spurious blanket claim of 'military necessity', a government could get away with it in wartime - as the American Republicans and Hitler both found out.

(Hitler only nerved himself to start killing Germany's 'useless mouths' after the war was underway and even appeared to back off as news got out and citizens protested.)

(During WWII, the dominant Republic core of the American medical establishment long denied life-saving penicillin to the mostly poor (aka Democrats) citizens dying of subacute bacterial endocarditis.)

I happen to think that telling the story of the ultimate abundance of wartime penicillin not as a victory over technological challenges but as a battle between different political ideologies is not only truer, but it is almost much more dramatic : a page-turner and good history.....

"The Blitz dog ate my homework" and other tired penicillin-related excuses from UK historians

David Edgerton excepted of course -- he hasn't really written on Britain's deliberately pathetic production of penicillin during the war years but he is unlikely to blame it on the Warfare State's "abject poverty" and "The Blitz".

Let's look at "The Blitz" first.

The German bombing of Britain went on for six years, went on all over Britain,  killed 60,000, wounded hundreds of thousands, damaged or destroyed hundreds of thousands of buildings but in all this, actually varied greatly in its specific intensity in time, geography and effort.

The actual Blitz, from September 1940 to May 1941, was in all three senses, intense : it went on steadily for nine months and involved the bulk of the German Air Force, and ranged widely over all of Great Britain.

But until the V-1 and V-2 attacks over south east England from June 1944 till the end of the war in May 1945, subsequent raids (ie from May 1941 till  June 1944, also the critical period for developing wartime penicillin) were very much smaller in intensity by number of bombers and tons of bombs.

Most consisted of  'tip and run' raids made by single fighter bombers coming in under the radar and bombing ports on the south coast of England.

A commenter on a blog said it perhaps best when he frankly admitted,that while yes he was a kid in Glasgow during the war,  he actually didn't really remember the Glasgow Blitz , because it only happened once and it happened many miles away in a working class/industrial part of that large city.

A child in Belfast might have had the same reaction - it had one big heavy raid on one part of the city, albeit with an extraordinary number of casualties because no one really expected the Germans to bother Northern Ireland.

And Oxford was never bombed.

Though it was basically an outer suburb of metropolitan London (and so very close to German airbases in France), with a large car industry and so surely should have been a suitable target on two counts.

Bombing Britain into defeat was really going to be virtually impossible - like Germany and America it simply had too many alternative metropolitan industrial centres, many with large port facilities, and all well connected to each other by an extensive road and rail network.

Thus the very determined effort to squash the huge port of  Liverpool into dust was a wasted German effort : Greenock, Cardiff and Belfast , to name but a few west coast ports in Britain , would have quickly taken up the slack in the receiving of vital convoys from North America.

A pre-war decision to build a number of duplicate shadow assembly plants a maximum distance of about a half hour rail, canal or truck trip from the original centre of a critical war industry helped a lot to reduce the impact of even a direct hit on that vital British 'choke point'.

The Germans knew precisely where all the pre-1939 vital factories were and often hit and badly damaged them - but the shadow plants near by were unknown to them and took up the slack.

In addition , ensuring that sub contractors were neither right next to the original plant nor 500 kilometres away but within that convenient half hour circle of travel led to a virtually bomb-proof but economical dispersal of vital war industries.

The chances of anything, anything but a twenty megaton thermo-nuclear bomb, destroying such a sprawling industrial metropolitan area a hundred kilometres by a hundred kilometres square rendered such British efforts Blitz-proof.

The Germans duplicated these dispersement efforts equally successfully, if much too late in the game --- by pointed contrast the Russians and Americans kept with single huge production 'n' assembly plants : but at inland sites they felt safe from WWII's longest ranging bombers.

ICBMs and nuclear bombs rendered all that moot : goodbye Kansas City as a safe place to build bombers in WWIII.

True, the massive size and complexity of shipyards capable of building battleships and aircraft carriers are not so easily moved about and in addition were so expensive that they could only be a few in number --- even for super-rich nations like America.

But when the non-shipbuilding nation of Canada decided to quickly build a whole lot of ships and yet be safe from any bombing raid, it did so by going down-market in technological complexity.

It beat the Germans (and any possible bombing raids) by focusing instead on building very large numbers of a few very simple merchant ship and escort vessel types.

Thus they could be built at any of about five dozen new shipyards all over Canada --- even in Thunder Bay, a few thousand kilometres from the open sea: redundancy safety plus !

The Russians would understand that sort of thinking --- lots of simple weapons win wars just as well as a few ,very sophisticated, weapons do.

My point is that the Blitz, even if it had gotten much worse, could only be an moderate not fundamental restraint on British war efforts.

Britain during WII was a heavily industrialized nation with the vastest empire even seen to supply the raw resources and manpower to back up that industrial power.

If civilian paper was in short supply during the war (and it definitely was), it wasn't because Britain was poor -- it was because all of its pre-war paper supply was still coming in, but was now diverted to supplying all the bumpf an officious war nation's government could churn out !

Britain was a rich enough nation during WWII to divert the cost of building and maintaining of just one extra squadron of Lancaster bombers to the building instead of several more bottle penicillin plants in early 1943 --- but deliberately chose not to.

If one of the Four Freedoms that Churchill's Conservative party was forced to pretend to publicly accept included the freedom from want of life-saving drugs , a point hit home in the Fall of 1942 by the Beveridge Report, his party chose to deny it in practise.

With existing sulfa drugs failing by the minute (due to bacterial resistance) and with a scientific consensus building by the Fall of 1942 that new anti-bacteria sulfas were unlikely to come along, penicillin was becoming the only , the only , hope for civilians or servicemen dying of blood poisoning.

Surely the most vital of all possible freedoms is the freedom from premature death, but the Churchill government cocked its nose at Beveridge and said 'only enough resources will be diverted from bombers to save just our servicemen with bottle penicillin'.

A-Ha, says the UK historian, says he : a-ha !

Bottle penicillin - we had that and the Yanks had deep tank penicillin - that is why we couldn't match the rich, Blitz-less Americans in penicillin production.

Awkward facts intrude - the British did build a pilot deep tank design very early on  - with the Americans also willing to license their deep tank technology at firesale prices - but it was Churchill's Conservative minister in charge of the all-powerful MoS, the Ministry of Supply (to the army), that said no.

And deep tank efforts hardly explain the very much better penicillin records of both Canada and Australia - because these two nations, definitely not scientific or industrial powers in the early 1940s, also used only bottle plants and yet did far better in penicillin production than Britain, per capita.

(In population Britain was about 1/3 the GDP and population of America and about about 7x the GDP and population of Australia and 5x the population and GDP of Canada.)

True, that on one hand these Dominions weren't Blitzed like the British.

But on the other hand they had hardly gained their current wealth from homegrown science or industry, unlike Britain.

I count their wartime technical and financial difficulties in producing bottle penicillin as about equal to that of the UK.

What was really lacking in the whole penicillin shortfall crisis, was the moral will to correct it among the one nation in the four led by a Conservative party during WWII.

So, in mid 1945, the UK was producing 30 billion units of penicillin a month, Australia 10 billion, Canada 20 billion and America 600 billion.

To match the Australians per capita, the UK should of been producing 70 billion units a month, to match Canada a 100 billion units and America 200 billion units.

In addition, Britain had not permitted its many colonies to start their own penicillin plants, so the actual shortfall in its ability to save the lives of its civilians and soldiers from the UK and all its colonies was much much bigger than even this stark contrast in effort among the Allies.

By 1946, the penicillin shortfall crisis in Britain was over and it was producing more than enough penicillin for everyone at home and in the colonies and was eager to start exporting to foreign lands.

But that was way too late for Churchill's Conservative party who had been fragged-in-the-back by voter concern over unequal access to necessary medical care and voted for Labour in the July 1945 General Election.

Hitler couldn't defeat Churchill but penicillin (the unequal lack of access to it)  had ...

The first - and internally fatal - Tory response to the Beveridge Report : the Ministry of Supply takes over Penicillin ...

To make sense of this claim, we need to clear as to what the role of Britain's powerful wartime Ministry of Supply actually was.

The Ministry of Supply (the MoS) was never the British equivalent of the American War Production Board (WPB), no matter how many times this claim is offered up.

In fact, it was very much closer in spirit to Vannevar Bush's powerful Office of Scientific Research and Development (the OSRD) per the role set out for both under statute , than it was to the statutory role set out for the WPB.

Britain's Ministry of Supply strived to supply the military's needs - period. Unlike the WPB, it did not try to arbitrate between the conflicting demands of civilian and military claims upon scarce material and manpower.

Equally, the OSRD did  NOT deal with all of America's wartime science and research efforts , a point that no doubt Jesus Christ himself will have to repeat again and again to academics on Judgement Day and on into all Eternity.

It only dealt with that amount of science and research that involved the designing of  (but not the production of)  new weapons that could come into use, during the current war.

Bush was very very careful to sharply limit the parameters of his organization, all to make it more dominant within its narrow but vital sphere.

So when Howard Florey went to both the OSRD and to the Ministry of Supply to help in the production of penicillin - rather than going instead to ask help from the American Public Health Service and the British Ministry of Health, he had already made it very clear where his penicillin priority lay.

He wanted additional penicillin production yes --- but only sufficient to supply the armed forces, period.

Florey was strongly conservative, as were all the key individuals within the Minister of Supply and the OSRD : Big Government to them was abhorrent.

Thus the sudden willingness, eagerness even, of the Ministry of Supply in the Fall of 1942 to go all out and seize control of all of the British commercial penicillin production has to be seen as ideologically surprising.

Unless it can (and should) be seen as the opening conservative counter-attack against the rumoured radical notions of the Beveridge Report.

A preemptive move to ensure that the Ministry of Health (also run by a Tory minister but with wider than just military responsibilities) didn't dominate penicillin production.

If is often claimed that the Ministry of Supply took over all of penicillin production because the Scottish-born minister was an old pal of fellow Scot, Alec Fleming, who asked him to do so.

Politicians -  grant us at least this - do not spontaneously fall upon old friends and their requests with open arms --- not  unless it suits us.

In September and October 1942, Fleming's request much suited Duncan and the British Tories.

In late September and October 1942, the tenor of the Beveridge report, though as yet unreleased, was well known within the top officials of Whitehall.

It called for a placing the values of equality and egalitarianism at the core of the British government - a notion intensely hostile to Tory values.

For penicillin, all this Beveridge "equality" talk could only mean one of two things.

It might mean divvying inadequate amounts of penicillin equally between dying civilians and dying soldiers - when Tories felt the most vital hope of penicillin was that it would help maintain current front line troop levels without the need to "call up" middle class men (their voters) now at home engaged in war work.

Or it might mean diverting the cost of one additional Lancaster squadron (three million pounds) away from the all-out bombing of civilian Germany , towards creating more penicillin factories on the successful Glaxo model.

Glaxo had taken up space in bits of idle factories and by using local cheap and plentiful unskilled labour,( aka women) , had cheaply but efficiently produced a lot of penicillin with current low technology methods and equipment.

(Basically making penicillin as if it was a milk product , using the very abundant modern dairy equipment existing everywhere thanks to the 1920s civilized world's mania over pure milk.)

A lot of similar factories could be quickly brought up to speed, supplying a good deal of penicillin, without requiring too much vital material like stainless steel, already in desperately short supply.

If all this sounds very familiar, that is because this solution is what Britain in the end was forced to do -  but very late and only under intense public pressure.

If it had been done wholeheartedly in the Fall of 1942, there would have been no highly public late 1944 civilian penicillin famine crisis.

But the Conservative bits and bob of the Coalition Government wanted no part of equality and penicillin was just the first of many counterattacks against the threat of Beveridge.

They were unsuccessful in the extreme, blowing what had to seem to them (and to Labour !), a sure electoral victory at war's end.

"Unfair distribution of a vital commodity in short supply" , to quote The Times (of all people !) referencing an earlier debate over Hugh Dalton's fuel rationing proposals , was totally anathema to the British public.

In June 1945, what little polling type information we have suggests it was the unfair rationing of medical services that moved people to Labour .

The most current example of that unfair medical rationing had to be rationing difficulties with life saving penicillin.

Let me repeat that : "life saving". This was not just temporary unfairness in allocating housing or clothing : this was the unfair allocation of life itself.

You can't get a more "vital commodity" than life itself : to switch from the specialized language of the economist to that of the political scientist trying to account for a surprise pattern of vote changing, "life" is a very salient issue.

If so, the unexpected and total defeat of Churchill's Tories in June 1945 can be seen as having its origins in the Fall of 1942, when the Ministry of Supply (and Howard Florey) successfully re-defined the shortage of penicillin (contra Beveridge),  as a shortage of military penicillin, civilians be damned.....