War historians are unlikely to ever be happy with a Hollywood movie presenting WWII as "The Battle between Ultimate Evil and Ultimate Good".
Like us ordinary laypeople, they can all quickly find the human who best represented ultimate evil , but again like us, they can't settle on the exact nature of this thing called ultimate evil : what was the common thread uniting all of its obviously horrific deeds?
But the war historians know too much (and have spend too much of their careers detailing all the many Allied moral failings we'd much rather forget) to find any one human representing all of what little 'ultimate good' can be found in that long sorry mess of a moral conflict.
Sure, Winston and Franklin both talked a good line, but the historians know that these two leaders' actions too often failed to be in the same universe as their soaring rhetoric, let alone be found reading from the same page.
The fact is that despite all of its death and destruction, 1939-1945 represented Planet Earth's far-from-total-war, a war that most of the world's nations sat out, most of the time.
If sitting out the battle of absolute good and evil was itself evil, than there was a lot of it going around.
Because the sad truth is while we today all agree that a big country like Germany invading a small neighbour just to steal and enslave is a great moral wrong, well worth going to war to stop, the world of our grandparents obviously didn't think so.
Many nations didn't think so in September 1931, when Japan invaded Manchuria, or in October 1935 when Italy invaded Ethiopia. Not even in March 1939, when Germany invaded Czechoslovakia after specifically promising the world it would never do so.
They retained that opinion right up until September 1945.
WWII movies remain intensely popular world wide but most nations must enjoy them vicariously, because of the fact that their own nation did not really fight in WWII, but instead chose to sit out what today is regarded as the greatest moral conflict of all time.
Hard to imagine, for example, how much pride Mexico's 100 million citizens can take in the bathetic fact that the grand total of three (3) of their grandfathers died in combat in WWII .
Still that was a lot more combat (Brazil aside) that all the rest of Latin America's two dozen democracies saw put together.
Almost all the nations of the world remained neutral while dozens of small nations were gobbled up by big nations.
Almost all the rest remained *"effectively neutral" , unless and until their own soil was invaded.
(* "Effectively neutral" is a term I use to account for the many nations who 'declared war' on another nation but didn't go into actual combat against them -- their declaration of war was not a moral but rather a diplomatic decision, usually so they won't be kept out of the UN at the war's end.)
A mere handful were more forthright : Germany, Japan , along with Italy and sometimes Russia were the obvious big territory-seeking aggressors.
Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Slovakia, Slovenia in Europe - together with Thailand and Burma in Asia- were some of the small jackal nations who saw a chance to take land from some of the other small nations around them if they nominally joined in with the war started by the big aggressor nations.
Noteworthy that even the big aggressors too all remained neutral , if they at all could, when one of the others in their group invaded a small neighbour.
Only two nation-empires fought WWII without themselves either being invaders or being invaded : England and France, and even this nearly didn't happen, as is well known.
Worth remembering that even these two sat out the earlier invasions of small nations undertaken by Japan, Italy and Germany.
So if examples of absolute good existed in WWII, it can't found in the conduct of any individual nation on Earth, but only in the activities of individual individuals.
Hitler was always at pains to show how conventionally his scientific racist theories were and that all he did new was to put into action what other scientists had only ever talked about.
Taking Hitler at his consistent word, from his word in 1919 to his last word in1945, on the scientifically conventional nature of his thinking and actions, I then sought out a contrasting figure whose scientific views were as far as possible from being conventional in 1939.
They had to not just to greatly contrast with Hitler, they had to join in with Hitler and put their scientific beliefs into concrete political action.
This because most scientists (conventional or otherwise) fail to take their scientific beliefs outside the lab and into the thick of the real world.
Henry Dawson's Aktion 4F project, that lesser known Manhattan Project, was as far opposed as it was possible to be to Hitler's Aktion T4 project, which I take to better represent the core of his thinking that his Holocaust of the Jews.
The Jews, to Hitler, were but a subset of the weak and foolish human germs Hitler saw as infecting the volk body : the Aktion T4 hoped to kill them all.
Dawson's Aktion 4F sought to remind the Allies that they couldn't hope to really defeat Hitler's thinking if they simply did to the Allied weak and small as Hitler was doing the weak and small in Europe.
It doesn't really matter in 2013 that Dawson's actions in WWII were far smaller than the actions of the British Conservative Party or the German Nazi Party : whose ideas of 75 years ago, as opposed to actions of 75 years ago, best reflects the majority's way of thinking today ?
I don't think Winston Churchill won WWII, not if by that you mean that his prewar views are reflected in our postwar world --- but Henry Dawson's prewar ideas certainly are.....
Showing posts with label churchill. Show all posts
Showing posts with label churchill. Show all posts
Tuesday, July 2, 2013
Thursday, June 27, 2013
WWII's Opium Wars : Britain's efforts to weaponize life-saving penicillin
The shabby ways in which the Churchill Conservatives, coupled loosely with Republican friends in the American OSRD, conspired to weaponize life-saving wartime penicillin should not surprise anyone with any historical knowledge.
Britain was a past-master at using life-strangling blockades of someone else's civilian population to substitute for the possible combat deaths of the officer sons of the British elite.
Napoleon had been defeated by just such a blockade policy and the Opium Wars against China had shown just how effective covert drug warfare can be in de-stabilizing a nation's populace.
(A lesson hardly lost on the OSRD's successors in the CIA et al.)
But Churchill and Britain were playing with fire when they attempted to severely limit the production of penicillin and restrict its use to only those frontline Allied sick combatants deemed recoverable for further combat.
Because in the 1940s we did not have the arsenal of about 100 viable antibiotics that we have today.
We had only a half dozen members of the Sulfa drug family and they were all rapidly failing --- due to overuse bringing on rapid bacterial resistance.
Wars bring on sudden pandemics - like WWI's horrific Spanish Flu.
One wonders what would the world response had been to Sir Winston Churchill (the Harry Lime of British politics) if tens of millions of people had needlessly died, before penicillin production was brought up to speed ?
The world was very lucky indeed that Henry Dawson was not so callous as Churchill and the Allied scientific establishment on the turning a precious lifesaver into a weapon of war...
Britain was a past-master at using life-strangling blockades of someone else's civilian population to substitute for the possible combat deaths of the officer sons of the British elite.
Napoleon had been defeated by just such a blockade policy and the Opium Wars against China had shown just how effective covert drug warfare can be in de-stabilizing a nation's populace.
(A lesson hardly lost on the OSRD's successors in the CIA et al.)
But Churchill and Britain were playing with fire when they attempted to severely limit the production of penicillin and restrict its use to only those frontline Allied sick combatants deemed recoverable for further combat.
Because in the 1940s we did not have the arsenal of about 100 viable antibiotics that we have today.
We had only a half dozen members of the Sulfa drug family and they were all rapidly failing --- due to overuse bringing on rapid bacterial resistance.
Wars bring on sudden pandemics - like WWI's horrific Spanish Flu.
One wonders what would the world response had been to Sir Winston Churchill (the Harry Lime of British politics) if tens of millions of people had needlessly died, before penicillin production was brought up to speed ?
The world was very lucky indeed that Henry Dawson was not so callous as Churchill and the Allied scientific establishment on the turning a precious lifesaver into a weapon of war...
Friday, April 19, 2013
1943 : UK overheats the heavens.... while Bengal starves
Churchill always claimed that the UK just couldn't spare the shipping needed to help feed the starving millions in British Bengal in 1943.
But it turns out that what Bengal's would-be rescue ships were really needed for was to bring the millions and millions of gallons of overseas petroleum to the UK, to feed the FIDO systems set up around British airfields beginning in 1943.
Burning petroleum at a rate as high as one to two hundred thousand gallons of fuel per hour, per airfield, was used to create an artificial climate above the airfields - literally burning off the ever-present British fog so bombers could take off and land in all kinds of weather, night or day.
Climate Change and Global Warming, RAF-style.
For those lanky, metallic, mechanized citizens of the British Empire must be feed at all costs, even if the darker human citizens of the Empire must starve to make it so.
The relentless logic of Modernity ....
But it turns out that what Bengal's would-be rescue ships were really needed for was to bring the millions and millions of gallons of overseas petroleum to the UK, to feed the FIDO systems set up around British airfields beginning in 1943.
Burning petroleum at a rate as high as one to two hundred thousand gallons of fuel per hour, per airfield, was used to create an artificial climate above the airfields - literally burning off the ever-present British fog so bombers could take off and land in all kinds of weather, night or day.
Climate Change and Global Warming, RAF-style.
For those lanky, metallic, mechanized citizens of the British Empire must be feed at all costs, even if the darker human citizens of the Empire must starve to make it so.
The relentless logic of Modernity ....
Wednesday, March 13, 2013
The "Not So Good" War : September 1931- December 1941
The Good War began December 11th 1941 when Adolf Hitler persuaded a reluctant American Congress to declare war against the evil of Nazism.
It lasted three years and eight months, from when America declared war on the evilness of Nazi Germany until August 1945, when America defeated the evilness of Tojo's Japan.
It is the war between the armed forces of morality and the armed forces of evil that American TV chooses to celebrate endlessly.
Infrequently discussed - in America - though perhaps not in the rest of the world, was the ten years and three months of The Not So Good War.
It began with the manufactured Manchuria incident in September 1931 that allowed Japan to brutally invade China without any reaction from the armed forces of morality.
Eventually it involved two dozen countries being invaded by aggressive neighbours without any action taken to defend them by the armed forces of morality.
That all changed when Hitler's declaration of military war against America on December 11th 1941, forced Congress and America to defend itself against this new military threat.
But this realpolitik approach to dealing with the worst evilness the world has ever known didn't make for good propaganda, both during the war and ever since, and so the War of Good against Evil was created - mostly, it must be said, on a Hollywood backlot set at the time
And ever since then, mostly it has been created in popular American history books, films and TV documentaries.
The big problem is that in any branch of any public library, there will also be literally hundreds of books, films and TV documentaries about the Holocaust and their basic line - to their authors' credit - is that America knew all about the Holocaust and did nothing while it was happening.
Hard to reconcile these two very popular "popular history" subjects , the Good War and the Holocaust , isn't it ?
It is almost as if the victims of all those years of the Not So Good War have become honorary Holocaust victims, with the six million dead European Jews also standing in for millions more dead all around the world who America also knew about at the time but did nothing to help.
Because in many ways, the Not So Good War carried right on through December 11th 1941, on and on well past the official end of WWII.
Then 1939-1945 could best be seen as a six year effort to violently subjugate the Polish people, begun by Hitler, but when he proved to be not up for the job, was finished by Stalin, with the complicity of Churchill and FDR.
The Good War, by this reckoning , was just an cosmetic overlay over a series of episodes between a group of superpowers, with smaller nations mere pawns in the conflict .....
It lasted three years and eight months, from when America declared war on the evilness of Nazi Germany until August 1945, when America defeated the evilness of Tojo's Japan.
It is the war between the armed forces of morality and the armed forces of evil that American TV chooses to celebrate endlessly.
Infrequently discussed - in America - though perhaps not in the rest of the world, was the ten years and three months of The Not So Good War.
It began with the manufactured Manchuria incident in September 1931 that allowed Japan to brutally invade China without any reaction from the armed forces of morality.
Eventually it involved two dozen countries being invaded by aggressive neighbours without any action taken to defend them by the armed forces of morality.
That all changed when Hitler's declaration of military war against America on December 11th 1941, forced Congress and America to defend itself against this new military threat.
But this realpolitik approach to dealing with the worst evilness the world has ever known didn't make for good propaganda, both during the war and ever since, and so the War of Good against Evil was created - mostly, it must be said, on a Hollywood backlot set at the time
And ever since then, mostly it has been created in popular American history books, films and TV documentaries.
The big problem is that in any branch of any public library, there will also be literally hundreds of books, films and TV documentaries about the Holocaust and their basic line - to their authors' credit - is that America knew all about the Holocaust and did nothing while it was happening.
Hard to reconcile these two very popular "popular history" subjects , the Good War and the Holocaust , isn't it ?
It is almost as if the victims of all those years of the Not So Good War have become honorary Holocaust victims, with the six million dead European Jews also standing in for millions more dead all around the world who America also knew about at the time but did nothing to help.
Because in many ways, the Not So Good War carried right on through December 11th 1941, on and on well past the official end of WWII.
Then 1939-1945 could best be seen as a six year effort to violently subjugate the Polish people, begun by Hitler, but when he proved to be not up for the job, was finished by Stalin, with the complicity of Churchill and FDR.
The Good War, by this reckoning , was just an cosmetic overlay over a series of episodes between a group of superpowers, with smaller nations mere pawns in the conflict .....
Tuesday, March 5, 2013
"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 ...
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 ...
Thursday, October 4, 2012
Hitler was all about "The Triumph of the WORD" , not of the WILL : rhetoric = results
 |
| Triumph of mere WORDS ? |
By talk, words, spin, PR, propaganda, censorship : psych warfare, not bullet-firing weapons.
But it all didn't work, did it?
FDR and Churchill invested the plurality of their war spending on the bombing of cities but failed to break the will of the Germans as much as Hitler's Blitz failed to break Britain.
Tojo and crew dreamed one decisive naval victory at sea would break the American will and force them to agree to letting Japan have its rightful place in the South East Asian sun.
No such defeat came, but even if it had, it don't have done anything but toughened the American will to defeat Japan - and as that will could have used quite a bit of toughening up, such a victory for Japan would have been very Pyrrhic in the end.
Hitler and the Germany Army assumed a few smashing victories in encircling Russian armies would break the will of the Russians, leading to the overthrow of the government and Russia would fall like a ripe plum into German hands.
Who knows what might have happened had Germany captured Moscow in 1941 ---- but the Panzers never really got there : Russian mud and Russian snow don't have ears or eyes and so ignored all the Nazi news of imminent Russian defeat.
WWII proves physical Reality Bites mere rhetoric
People do respond to bad news (and so morale can be broken) but physical reality does not.
Ultimately it was long distances and bad weather (leading to equipment failure and shortages of everything from food to shells to fuel) that frustrated and defeated most armies and navies in WWII --- not their human opponents.
The WORLD defeated the WORD......
Monday, August 17, 2009
On the May & Baker factory floor, the magic bullet of M&B 693 was decidedly low tech
Science journalism and Chemistry Industry advertising (often hard to tell apart in the 1930s) saw the new Sulfa Drugs as the latest and most glamorous product to roll out of the cornucopia of the synthetic arcadia.
But as John Lesch describes in his account of how the British drug firm May & Baker developed its famous M&B693 (the sulfa drug that saved Churchill's life at the height of World War II) the view from the factory floor was distinctly low tech.
A dusty bottle of a rarely used chemical compound, made up for an ex-employee who never used it, but retained by the research lab of a large drug firm because, well, its the Great Depression and money is too tight to lightly throw anything out.
Experimental Chemistry Theory insisted there is absolutely no point in wasting effort in trying the contents of that old
chemical bottle in synthesising a potentially useful analogue from the original German sulfa compound.
Fortunately, an older tradition (in medicine they call this the 'hands on' or clinical approach) said "try everything" .
Unexpectedly ,and thankfully, the unusual new compound showed some promise in the chemical lab.
But the next stage would be to try it on deliberately-infected mice in another type of lab.
But this lab had none of the usual mice (infected with strep bacteria) -- money was tight in the Depression remember ?---
so a harried assistant, trying to fill in for his boss while he was away, tested the compound instead on mice inflected with the bacteria that gives us the worst kinds of pneumonia.
Nothing had ever killed these bacteria reliably and almost everything possible had been tried on them since 1919 and the pandemic of Spanish Flu.
(Most of the Spanish Flu's 50 million deaths worldwide were actually caused by pneumonia -- reason enough to research it more thoroughly than any other virulent agent had been to date.)
Once again, trying the unexpected and the unscientific paid off - this new sulfa killed the most dangerous of the pneumonia types.
This would, if confirmed, be headline news worldwide and would push May & Baker into the front rank of world drug firms.
But for now, back to Depression realities.
A number of intermediate chemicals had to be made in quantity on the way to making the actual sulfa.
Various stratagems were employed as the factory hands struggled to break up recalcitrant chunks of an important intermediate into a coarse powder, without blowing up themselves and their building.
Their delicate lab-grade tools of high precision?
A hammer and chisel !
Then a lot of ordinary mortars and pestles were filled with the crude powder and it was slowly,painfully, hand-ground down to a sufficiently fineness.
May and Baker, despite being a large, diversified , long standing British drug house , had no vacuum still and so its first sulfa 693 had to be made up in one or two litre flasks, so to make that first batch of one kilogram took two months of hard unrelenting effort on behalf of the entire team.
Still,a little of that very first batch in early February 1938, saved the life of a Norfolk farm labourer who was given up for dead because of his seemingly non-responsive lobar pneumonia.
A decidedly better result that the much better known first British effort, in early February 1941, to use penicillin to save the life of a policeman !
Pneumonia - the dreaded 'Captain of the Forces of Death' - had a cure !
But Lesch's detailed account of the development of M&B693 bears only the most fleeting acquaintance with the usual starry-eyed account provided to the public by Thirties media accounts...
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