Facile sloganeering begins all wars...

"Weapons of Mass Destruction" ; "Light at the End of the Tunnel".

Who can forget the facile slogans that seem to start every war ?

"The Bomber Always gets Through" started WWII, quickly followed by "The Battleship Always gets Through" and "The Tank Always gets Through".

To the smart money of the Age of Modernity, these modern mechanical Goliaths seemed surely destined to kick the shit out of any puny David that chanced to stand in their way.

It would seem to be awfully hard to stop an armoured, multi-turretted 'fortress of the air' like the 65 ton B-29 bomber : but in 1945, 2 ton Zero fighters were still dropping them out of the skies like flies.

And in 1945, mammoth 65 ton Tiger II tanks were being stopped cold by 130 lb youths armed only with shoulder fired bazookas.

And in 1945, 75,000 ton super battleships still could be sunk by 750 ton submarines.

If this were a boxing match, its all rather like the heavy weight champion of the world being knocked out stone cold by some four year old wearing her first pair of training gloves.

So, with all due apologies to that famous chicken in that long ago Canadian Parliament chamber:

 "Some Goliath !" "Some David !"

Modernists unite over fear of "the mob"

The authors and artists we think of as "The Modernists" did have their divisions.

Some exalted Modernity's materialism and rationalism while others opposed rationalism (so they said) and sought to go back to an golden age of myths and rituals, a sort of anti-Modernity.

But virtually all of them happily re-united around an abiding fear of democracy and of being ruled by a "mob" of the lower middle class, working class and the defectives.

And an astonishing number wrote of "exterminating" these "lesser" classes.

We can say this for certain of many of the best known Modernists because they left plenty of private papers and have had enough interest from scholars to see that all of their private and public writing has had a through going over with a fine tooth comb.

But I suspect the lack of evidence that the lesser studied Modernists also held these quasi fascist beliefs indicates only a lack of evidence or a lack of scholarly interest, not a lack of such beliefs among them.

Ordinary middle to upper middle class people from the period 1910 to 1945 are even less likely to get studied in the detail that prominent people of that period have been.

But I suspect that a through sampling of what personal writings and newspaper reports from that period that do remain would reveal an amazing amount of quasi-fascist talk from ordinary well-to-do individuals all over the world.

Emphasizing once again that what separated hard core Nazi from soft core Yeats or Elliot was more an matter of degree,  not kind ...

WWII's sins of uncaring omission as War Crimes

Even animals would be discomforted at the audible and visual pain as millions of Indians starved to death during the Bengali Famine of 1943.

It is a pity that so many of us,supposedly more sophisticated, humans have been less discomforted about the event ever since.

Most of us - at least in the Allied West - would strongly reject the  idea that this totally unnecessary mass famine was a war crime and and a sin of uncaring omission.

To ease our own consciences, we much prefer to limit our definition of war crimes to sins of commission, done by obvious evil-doers : the direct shooting, gassing or bayoneting of civilians as at Nanking, the Katyn Forest or at Auschwitz.

But it is not enough to save "oops -sorry !" when bombs we intend for rail yards or oil refineries happen to fall upon 250,000 soon-to-be dead civilians in occupied countries - not if we also clearly know that most of our bombs always fall widely off target.

Claiming that anything and everything is justified if our intent (to defeat Hitler) is good is not a moral claim with legs.

It puts one to mind of the claims of George W Bush that he just had to suspend civil liberties in America ----- in order to bring them instead to the oppressed of the Middle East !

We must always demonstrate extremely due care when we kill some in an effort to save others : clearly seeking to see if there are not other ways to defeat evil without killing so many of the innocent.

Famine , fortunately, was not general throughout the Allied and Neutral world, between 1939-1945.

But many (powerless) people needlessly went more hungry than they had to , in many of the Allied-controlled colonies.

But if Allied famine had been widespread and prolonged - caused perhaps by normally reoccurring weather disasters adding to uncaring imperial government mis-management - would it have been moral to continue to treat DDT as a war secret and deny its use to civilians, to reduce additional loss of food to insect pests ?

The militarizing of wartime DDT thus escaped - just - being another war crime of uncaring omission.

But there are more uncaring crimes of omission in the Allied closet.

In 1940-1941, several years into WWII, the new class of sulfa drugs which had emerged only 5 years earlier, seemed a gift that just kept on giving.

Today when the doctor comes in with the test results and says "I'm very afraid it appears that the cancer has metastasized" , the room gets very still as patient, family and nursing personnel absorb the grim news.

In the years before sulfa and antibiotics, people rarely lived to an age where they could learn that their original primary (localized) cancer tumour had spread throughout their body and that their chances of survival were now slim.

Instead what they feared was something not un-similiar happening with an infection that had originally been localized to one lesion , something most bodies, and good nursing care, could eventually fight off on its own.

Now in came the doctor with the blood tests (indicating colonies of bacteria were thick throughout the entire blood supply) and the room would go similarly silent.

Septicemia (Sepsis) was what the doctor would call it, but laypeople  would whisper to friends "blood-poisoning" , just we tend today to whisper "the doctor says the cancer is all through the body".

While we are correct to say that cancer spreading throughout the body (ie a systemic cancer rather than a localized tumour) is deadly and will directly kill us, our concept of what blood poisoning actually means is only half accurate at best.

It is correct that a bacteria infection flourishing in the blood will spread through out the body (is now a systemic disease) but the bacteria will not directly kill us - not by their "poisons" or their physical actions.

Rather it is that our body overreacts to any massive (systemic) assault upon it - not just to systemic bacterial infections - and it is the body's immune defenses' overreaction that kills us in sepsis.

The 1930s - modernist - mindset thought everything humans did - including our immune system - was marvellous beyond words and simply much preferred to blame those nasty little devils, the bacteria.

Until Sulfa drugs came along, nothing but God's will and dumb luck could prevent sepsis from ending in death.

The arrival of the sulfa drugs had meant all sides in WWII went to war a bit more confident that infection deaths would be much reduced on and off the battlefield.

So, despite the war between them, both the Allies and the Axis went on investigating tens of thousands of sulfa drugs, publicly* patented thousands of them and seriously trying hundreds of them on animals and humans.

*Yes, even in wartime - on both sides ! A notable contrast with the Allied secrecy on DDT and penicillin.

The new sulfa drugs of 1940-1941 tended to be less toxic and more effective than the slightly older ones - some even treated diseases originally thought beyond the reach of sulfa.

How could life ever get much better than this ?

But a year is a very long time in infectious disease treatment when practised massively and on a global basis.

By late1942, the sulfas were in a dire crisis.

Two American chemists, Roblin and Bell- who had helped invent the latest in the sulfa wonder drugs - had just published a convincing chemical explanation for their claim that the sulfa molecule (whatever its other medical uses) would no longer produce any new antibacterial drugs.

Seventy five years on, their claim has stood the test of time.

Typically the popular media (Newsweek, September 21st 1942, for example) played Roblin and Bell's research as a good news story - saying that now chemists could tell if a drug would work, before actually assembling it in the test tube.

But frontline chemists in the sulfa-synthesizing business could not help but hear it as a death knell.

The sulfas had other problems.

A few strains of bacteria had always and instantly shown a resistance to their bacterial action. But now the numbers of strains so displaying resistance had exploded in numbers and their resistance was more potent.

The first human response was to up the dosages to overcome the resistance.

The sulfa drugs had always been moderately toxic even at low dosages and required attention to detail in monitoring their use.

But now heavy dosages and careless doctor and nursing care was leading to needless deaths from the drug itself.

More thoughtful doctors faced a horrible choice : too big and too long a sulfa treatment might kill or permanently damage the patient, but without it , the patient was almost certain to die from sepsis.

They jungled frantically, trying different sulfas as well as backing them off for a while and then returning to them.

This disaster in the sulfa treatment of systemic infections was effecting military hospitals as least as hard as civilian hospitals.

The dirty little secret of war wound medicine is that soldiers rarely die from localized infections, anymore than they do in civilian life.

Soldiers die all the time from massive wounds - as do civilians - but rarely is the fact that the wound is also locally infected the critical factor in their death.

But if any sized wound permits the infection to spread to the blood - then soldiers do die from the indirect result of a wound that was originally just locally infected.

Just as well then that the local curing of local wounds was largely irrelevant to life survival.

Because the sulfas were proving to be totally useless in curing local wound infections. In 1940, two British researchers, Fildes and Woods, had offered up an explanation for how sulfa works (that it is mistaken for a vital food bacteria needs) that has also stood the test of time for 75 years.

Their research also explained why sulfa sometimes didn't work even if the bacterial strain wasn't resistant to it.

If bacterial lesion had lots of the real food around, enough bacteria ate it, instead of the useless sulfa lookalike, to keep the infection going.

Wounds - badly tended war wounds in particular - had lots of that food provided by dead and dying flesh.

So no new sulfas on the way - ever , the ones now in use were proving to be either useless, toxic or increasingly resisted by more and more bacteria.

Today,at any one time, we prefer to use about a dozen different drugs to fight serious infections.

But also we have about one hundred we could use - including the sulfas - if the current dozen all suddenly proved useless.

More importantly, these one hundred represent many different classes of drugs - never is any one bacteria infection resistant to all of them.

These discarded drugs are both more toxic or less effective than those in preferred use, but if death by sepsis is the alternative, even a highly toxic drug is the better - more moral - choice.

But the sulfas were the one and only class of drugs in use in 1942 against systemic life threatening infection ; they all shared the same good and bad features, all shared the same fate.

So it appeared that inevitable death by blood poisoning , for both military personnel and civilians, was on its way back.

Unless .......penicillin was put into serious mass production.

But in 1942, both the British and American medical elites had already decided that penicillin was to be kept as secret as possible and used only as a weapon of war - used only to cure our side's wounded on the QT,  so no one else would pick up on it.

Letting civilians have it and above all letting civilian newspapers chatter on about miracle cures would only alter the enemy into making their own penicillin and the Allied military advantage would be gone.

Powerful figures in Britain and America decided that wasn't about to happen.

But in the Fall of 1942, one man realized that if penicillin was now the only thing between blood poisoning death and a nice long life, he would have to up his own ante in this relentless game of chicken.

So that Fall, Dr Henry Dawson stole his first supply of government-issued penicillin and put it to work saving lives from systemic SBE disease , again against strict government orders to let the SBE patients die.

By his reckoning, if the Allies could militarize penicillin, there seemed no reason why one - dying - doctor couldn't un-militarize it back again......

1940 Penicillin : localized Gas Gangrene or systemic SBE ?

Within days of reading war-dodger Howard Florey's published conclusion that the as-yet-unproven penicillin was particularly suited to the military's most feared infection, gas gangrene, war-hero Henry Dawson defiantly decided - by pointed contrast - that penicillin was particularly well suited to defeat the ultimate in non-military infections, deadly subacute bacterial endocarditis, SBE.

The timing of Dawson's decision - during the most critical days of the expected Invasion of Britain - only heighten this highly unusual contrast between how we expect war-heroes and war-dodgers to behave and how these two examples actually did behave.

Florey had declined to serve his country when he was young but now was very eager to aid it (as a draft-proof middle ager) by steering the new penicillin towards use as as a local antiseptic for gas gangrene infections in frontline casualty tents.

For centuries, gas gangrene infections were the most dreaded and also the most uniquely wartime forms of death (rarely causing death in peacetime).

Any talk of the possibility of finally ending gas gangrene's terrors was acutely pitched to catch the ears of war's political, military and medical leadership.

By contrast, when on the day of America's first peacetime Draft Registration, a day dedicated to locating all of America's 1A youth,  Dawson choose to instead try and save the lives of two SBE sufferers, one Black and one Jewish, he was focused on the most 4F imaginable of the unwanted 4Fs.

The most 4F of all the 4Fs : the SBEs

For no nation's military , no matter how hard pressed for manpower, was likely to regard SBEs as more than just a particularly costly burden for a wartime economy to bear.

It usually hit young adults , the prime category for draft boards and munition factories, but no matter what modern medicine threw at it, it always ended after months of expensive effort with the inevitable death of the patient.

In that Fall of 1940, the Medical School at Columbia University, which employed Dawson, had moved to reduce its offerings in Social medicine and up its offerings in War medicine, in response to the battle for civilization not taking place over the skies of Britain.

It certainly had no cause to expect any complaints from professor Dawson, he of all its employees.

He was, after all, from a Canadian family of five brothers, all who volunteered to fight in WWI, all who were wounded in the front lines - one who had paid the ultimate price and others who got medals for bravery and leadership under fire.

Dawson likely had more front line experience - in the medical corp, the infantry and in artillery - than any one else in the Medical School.

When he wasn't serving in hospitals dealing with wounded soldiers, he was in military hospitals himself as a patient - fighting off life-threatening infected war wounds he himself received.

Surely such a patriot and such a veteran of battlefront infections  saw the sense on Howard Florey's proposal to focus penicillin research on battlefront wound infections  and to agree with his university's decision to focus on war related medical research ?

But clearly he did not - and the mystery is to account for why he did not - but instead, precisely and perversely, did exactly the opposite.

Penicillin did not, in the end, reduce deaths due to gas gangrene - in fact penicillin pioneer ( and WWI veteran) RJV Pulvertaft found that the evidence suggested that the percentage of gas gangrene sufferers who died actually went up in WWII , compared to the results obtained in the last years of the previous war !

By contrast, in the end, penicillin proved to be the best medicine ever seen to stop deadly systemic (body-wide) infections like SBE and blood-poisoning.

Explaining the mystery and the paradox

Based on just the evidence, part of the mystery might therefore seemed to solve itself: the modest Dawson was simply a far better scientist than the very pushy and ambitious, but ultimately plodding, Florey.

But Dawson was also extremely patriotic in ways that Florey couldn't begin to imagine and we still must explain why he felt  that his best way to personally aid the war effort was to come to the aid of Life's weakest members.

Saint Peter had only denied Christ's pleas three times, but between 1931 and 1941, America had denied pleas for help from smaller, weaker countries under attack over two dozen times, only deciding
to put the Greatest Generation Ever to work fighting the only Good War, after it itself was attacked.

Helping Life's weakest members is all very nice in theory said America - but what in the hell does it have to do with fighting WWII - which was all about one's own naked self interest ?

Perhaps Dawson was merely confused -  was still fighting WWI - was still fighting for poor bleeding little Belgium.

Perhaps....

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....

The astonishing Nova Scotia connection to the end of TWO world wars

It is fairly well known that the death of Nova Scotian George Price is traditionally regarded as that of the last British Commonwealth soldier to die in WWI.

Much less well known is the fact that a ship built in Pictou Nova Scotia , the Avondale Park , was the last British Commonwealth ship to be sunk by a U-boat in WWII.

Both events happened literally in the last minutes and hours of their prospective wars and both shouldn't of happened : Price was warned about the sniper who killed him and the U-boat that sunk the Avondale Park had failed to get the radio signal to cease all hostile actions sent days earlier.

Though the back of the wolf pack war was broken in the Spring of 1943, for the next two years individual U-boats continued to quite successfully sink merchant ships and naval vessels from the northernmost end of the Atlantic to the southernmost tip.

In particular, no Atlantic bay or estuary was truly safe right up to the last days of the war - many ships were sunk in broad daylight and in clear view of onshore civilians.

By March and April 1945, the Germany army was becoming as useless as the German air force had long been, but the navy's U-boats at sea remained as successful as ever.

At a relatively small cost in material and in number of military deaths (though in both cases, in percentage terms, these were far the most dangerous branch of their respective militaries to be in), the German U-boats and the American Pacific submarine fleet had done a disproportional amount of damage to their foes.

The U-boats probably lengthened the European war by two or three years - the American subs probably shortened the Pacific war by the same amount of time.

A deadly triumph of the weak and the small....

Neither got the resources and attention that the mostly useless battleship and heavy bomber got - because this was a time when bigness in everything was exalted by any nation that claimed to be truly modern.

But throughout the long war, these small boats often took a repeated and deadly postmodern revenge on this modernistic fantasy....

1939-1945 : Big MO goes Postal instead of going Monumental

Big MO is an appropriate nickname for The Age of Modernity because there was always something inhumanly massive about almost everything and anything that that age and the people within it turned their hands to.

Very hard indeed to imagine the people of the early 1940s not going Postal, and not going to deadly war with each other.

But if they hadn't been building bunkers and had been building monuments and buildings instead, this ponderous essence in their inner character might still be visible.

Hitler and Stalin, not wanting to be outdone by the Hoover Dam and the Maginot Line, were planning to leave their own marks in concrete and rebar steel, massive and tedious beyond all belief.

Modernity was all about regarding Reality as being thermo-settable : plastic until cured and then rigid forever more.

Concrete is the thermoset plastic par excellent : broken up, it is useless to re-melt into new concrete.

Rebar steel, while appearing to be plastic only when red hot and rigid at normal temperatures ( ie thermoset plastic in character) , is actually also somewhat thermosoft plastic in character as well.

Because used steel can be remelted and molded into a new shape as scrap, as part of the normal steel-making process.

Armour steel is thermoset plastic in its character, and became the wartime symbol of Modernity's massive and rigid nature.

Armour plate is plastic when red hot but at normal temperatures, it resists all change : even when change is coming at it in the form of a dense tungsten core of an anti-tank round moving in at 2500 miles an hour !

Bombers, bombs, bomber fleets - perhaps the most typical expression of Modernity at war, got steadily bigger and more armoured as the war progressed.

As did tanks, tank guns and tank fleets.

Ditto naval Taskforces : bigger battleships, bigger guns, bigger aircraft carriers, more armour, more speed, more aircraft and escort vessels.

More, more, more : every war machine just got steadily bigger, heavier, faster, higher, lower : extremes of any and all sorts.

Notably as the world got more war machines and the machines got bigger and fatter, the world's population growth shrank and people got thinner and thinner.

In WWII, (Modernity gone Postal), Modernity showed its true colors : placing machines before people even in the face of near universal malnutrition.