OPRD and Dawson vs OSRD and Florey : social or war penicillin ?

If America was to win the war for the Allies by being becoming a ponderous and relentlessly-slow grinding mill of the gods ( a veritable "Arsenal of Democracy" as President Roosevelt proclaimed) than sometimes Vannevar Bush's OSRD (Office of Scientific Research and Development) worked hard against that objective, never more so than with Penicillin (and DDT).

In Total War, attrition (greater weight of arms and men) rather than generalship (the better use of the elements of secrecy and surprise) is felt to be - in the long run - the truly dominant factor.

The OSRD obviously disagreed, as did Hitler's High Command and the Japanese War Cabinet.

These three agreed amongst themselves that it didn't really matter that both sides shared the same 105mm howitzer and that so the side with the best rate of production of that artillery piece and its ammunition would win in the long run.

That was so old-school, so World War One style thinking.

No, the OSRD would win a quick clean war, by speed and secrecy of new weapon invention and by taking the offensive role at every turn in the war of new weapon invention : as the British would say, WWII was to be a war between sciences : a Boffin's war, not a foot soldier's war like WWI.

But you could also see this as classic "chicken hawk" style thinking  : stoutly favouring bold offensive operations, albeit from the cosy safety of an comfy armchair.

Because seemingly the only requirement for rising in the OSRD hierarchy was that you had successfully avoided combat when you were young and fit enough to do so, but now that you were now old and fat and balding and safely beyond the age of conscription your bellicosity had returned full on.

The German, Japanese and British military agreed with the OSRD - preferring to invent more truly new and superior - secret- weapons even when they knew this meant that fewer units of existing conventional weapons would be produced.

(By contrast, the Russians tended to want to produce greater numbers of a far fewer and far less technically sophisticated range of weapons - working in some minor incremental improvements over long, long production runs.)

So if the OSRD "took up" the development of Penicillin and DDT it would come with some heavy and hidden costs : for these two would now be developed strictly be for use as  secret and new "instruments of war" (weapons).

How we "almost lost penicillin" : it got captured by the OSRD

Penicillin being "captured" by the OSRD in the summer of 1941 when Howard Florey took it to his old pal ( OSRD heavyweight Dr A N Richards) wasn't as bad as being captured by the Gestapo , but it was a close run thing.

By contrast, the War Production Board (WPB) and its OPRD (Office of Production Research and Development) took a more sophisticated view of war work in a Total War situation : understanding completely that if civilians don't eat or are home sick, both old-fashioned howitzers and new-fashioned atomic bombs don't get built.

So if the epidemic of lung infections in America in the winter of 1944 among war workers had become a pandemic and shell production had been cut in half, just when the Battle of the Bulge needed more 105 mmm shells not less, the OPRD would have been ready, with massive amounts of civilian penicillin for ailing war plant workers.

But the OSRD would be left touting its claim that fewer of our wounded men in the Ardennes were languishing in hospital beds than in the case of the Germans, thanks to our Allied frontline military hospitals having most of the world's scarce supply of natural penicillin.

Artificially scarce , by government fiat, only because the OSRD and its British counterpart were STILL working on trying to make top secret synthetic penicillin and didn't want to warn the Germans of penicillin's potential by letting civilian doctors use it and then talk up miracle cures.

Dawson's unexpected SBE cures with stolen government penicillin leading to dying Baby Patricia Malone's widely publicized 'stealing' of penicillin beyond the OSRD's direct jurisdiction, brought the public and the OPRD into the picture and finally got us wartime penicillin en masse : for frontline Ardennes soldier and home front civilian alike .....

The 180 degree flip of wartime penicillin : from secret weapon of war to public weapon of propaganda

War is not at all like the playing fields of Eton , many reports to the contrary.

Both sides get advance notice of the time, place and nature of the activity in sports - and there is a strictly enforced set of rules.

By contrast, a successful military offensive operation is far more than half won if it is kept secret to the last moment and beyond.

Convince your foe you plan this Spring's big push there , after the roads have dried and then attack here - when the roads are still muddy - and he might still think it a feint even when your troops are in fact about to knock down the doors of his command centre.

Surprise and secrecy can often beat much higher qualities and quantities of  equipment, manpower and leadership --- if most of a weak force is concentrated in a narrow sector of the enemy's lines  at a time the enemy doesn't expect a major attack.

This need for surprise and secrecy applies to military activity off the battle field as well.

If - as happened all the time in the Pacific Campaign- both sides were down to 10% effective strength due to all the rest laid low by endemic local infections , the battle is almost certainly won if a secret cure-all like DDT clears up the insect source of those infections.

Because the exclusive use of DDT by only one side could enable it to send 50% of its tinier force into battle and win.

But only if DDT's abilities remain secret.

DDT was not strictly speaking "secret" ---- its chemical formula and method of manufacture was revealed in the public scientific literature back in 1874 and again in 1940 in a Swiss patent from Geigy.

But the Japanese hadn't seen those scientific reports or if so, hadn't grasped their military significance.

But even the stupidest Japanese general could correctly access urgent Japanese diplomatic cables indicating that the American domestic press was raving about the miracle success of DDT in clearing malaria from its endemic regions in the southern states of America.

So DDT was kept as secret as possible and more fundamentally , was not made available for civilian use during WWII.

This despite the fact that it was easy and cheap to make and very stable in storage - for the cost of one or two B-29s, the country's agricultural zones could all be sprayed by DDT and the resulting greater farm productivity would well repay the cost of the DDT factories.

Crops - as well as guns - win wars too, it could be argued.

But in fact, the productivity side of Total War was totally ignored over the secrecy side of Total War.

It was similar with Penicillin.

 The key reason that striking, dramatic, heart-stopping successes in dragging civilian bodies back from the grave's edge in 1942-1943 were not permitted to be published by the AMA-OSRD-NAS triad was because this would indirectly alert the world to the military life-saving abilities of penicillin.

Wesley Spink did not rock the boat - unlike Henry Dawson

(See Wesley Spink's dramatic first success in July 1942 with seven year old "JE" - a heart-warming case which was not allowed to be published/publicized until April 1945, for a vivid example.)

Publicizing civilian cures would equalize its effects on the war if both sides, suitably alerted, then employed it freely.

Even if the health-restoring ability of penicillin made the war economy far more productive than the cost of setting up penicillin plants would take out of it ---- and this resulting extra productivity was devoted to making more weapons.

Because, at least in theory , both sides would see their economies expand equally - returning everything to the position it was before penicillin became widely public.

So instead, the Allies hoped to synthesize penicillin so that it was both cheap and abundant (like DDT) but also like DDT, they planned not to release it to the public, but use it as a military weapon - a secret medical weapon - exactly as DDT used.

But the heart-warming story of Baby Patricia in August 1943 let the cat out of the bag, as this local story in New York 'broke wide' , not just stateside but all around the world.

Now not just every civilian in the world wanted it for their sick relative like yesterday but military chiefs across the globe awoke (15 years late !) to the military potential of the miracle cure.

The chiefs of the American military medicine triad (and their equally smarmy British counterparts) pouted ---- but clever people in the Offices of War Information in both Allied nations resolved to make a virtue of necessity.

Baby Patty got her penicillin over the heads of the triad, but now official penicillin would be rushed by American military bombers to saving dying kids all over the world and the effort highly publicized in the process.

It would say to friend, foe and neutral alike that unlike those nasty life-denying Nazis, the Allies cared : oh how they cared.

Henry Dawson must have snickered at the blatant dishonesty in
this abrupt volte-face, but he was very glad lives were being saved however it came about and that the "unlimited potential" of the life-saving mold was at long last being released....

it was the patients' MOMS who brought penicillin to the DOCTORS

The private discovery of penicillin happened in September 1928, the public discovery in June 1929 when it was published in an important, peer-reviewed scientific journal.

But then it just sat there for twelve to fifteen years.

So your great grandfather or great aunt died needlessly because the doctors and the scientists did nothing with penicillin, after that public discovery.

In August and September 1943, however, your grandmother "popularly" discovered penicillin when she read about Baby Patricia in some newspaper articles in some of the Hearst publications.

Now the fur really flew, as your grandmother demanded to know why your uncle, off wounded in a hospital in the South Pacific, wasn't getting any of this penicillin.

Her Mom-like anger and urgency finally got the men moving and before long her doctor and every other doctor had penicillin to treat patients.

So don't go tell me that doctors bring penicillin to patients.

Publication in a scientific journal (aka making something public as the scientists say) is not the be all and end all of effective science, as satisfying as it is to scientific egos.

The most influential scientific publication of  Doctor Martin Henry Dawson was an oral, not printed, account of the first human cases ever treated with systemic penicillin, given at an Annual Meeting of the Society of Clinical Investigators in May 1941 in front of hundreds of the world's leading medical scientists from all over the world.

Did he publicize his work with penicillin ? We laypeople might think so.

Howard Florey, however, sensed a loophole.

 He chose to regard an oral presentation of a paper at an conference, and subsequently published on paper in July 1941, as 'not a scientific publication' and ignored all mention of Dawson's breakthrough in his own references to his subsequent August 1941 paper on penicillin.

Thankfully, Dawson's work got written up in the New York Times ---near the business section --- not a scientific publication, admittedly.

However when the people in charge of the chequebook at Pfizer read it, they saw to it that their Brooklyn Crude penicillin was there to save the wounded on the D-Day beaches and ever after, until the war's end.

Florey continued to publish scientifically on his synthetic penicillin (Oxford Pure)---- but he never actually delivered any.

Pfizer never did publish on its safe, effective Brooklyn Crude.

They just delivered to the beaches, on time, and in quantity.

If you were a soldier in the Princess Louise Regiment (PLF) regiment lying on the Gothic Line, wounded, which would you prefer: British published talk or unpublished American walk ?

Well I was a (post war) member of the PLF and I bloody well know which one I'd prefer.

"OXFORD talks, but BROOKLYN walks..."