Churchill's bombers burn babies while FDR's bombers deliver penicillin to babies

I have tried awfully hard to find stories of Churchill's bombers delivering bottles of penicillin, rather than bombs of napalm, to the world's babies.

No luck so far.

But newspapers in 1943-1944 were rife with stories of FDR's bombers delivering various tiny bottles of penicillin half way around the world to save babies.

Wartime Manhattan : from Mars ... or from Venus ?

If I might be permitted to gently chide the citizens of Manhattan, may I suggest that they had done very little, themselves, to balance the horrific wartime image of their city created by being tagged as the place that 'birthed' the atomic bomb and its potential destruction of the entire world.

To the 911 bombers, it is the best known image of the borough.

(And by the way, it is only men, like the bosses of the best known wartime Manhattan Project , who talk about 'birthing the bomb' and think of naming it 'Little Boy'.)

Woman know better.

They actually do birth children and know that a bomb isn't a baby.

But little Patty Malone was a baby - and it was only the fearless challenging spirit of the native born Manhattanite that saved her life ... when a heartless government refused to help.

So, People of Manhattan, take a bow.

True, it was only men that did all the heavy lifting in saving this particular child, but I am convinced that her story moved millions of Doctor Moms to demand that their men get off the sofa and start making penicillin for real, right away.

In particular, her story moved one Doctor Mom with the real power to move mountains of inertia : Mae Smith.

She was the wife of the boss of Brooklyn-based Pfizer,  John L Smith.

In the summer of 1943, his firm was best positioned (culturally) in the world to make the needed penicillin ---- all by its self.

But he was a very cautious and frugal man and he refused to do the right thing, rather than the financially safe and lucrative thing.

Until his wife reminded him, once again, that Dr Henry Dawson had always insisted that their eldest daughter would have remained alive, if only penicillin had been earnestly produced, not long after its discovery.

Learning of little Patty Malone plucked from death's door touched Smith's heart ; finally made Dawson's claim seem real to John L.

In a few short months, Pfizer was indeed producing enough penicillin for all those in the world dying of susceptible infections.

Abundant amounts of Pfizer Penicillin created an opportunity for America to practise influential penicillin diplomacy , replacing Pax Britannia with Pax Americana.

Britain and its Dominions had the most moral capital, from standing all alone against Hitler for years, and it had the moral first claim on penicillin.

But for want of a price of a single additional bomber squadron for Butcher Harris, the Conservative Party-dominated British government threw all that moral capital away, handed it over to the Americans on a platter, gratis.

That price, of just one bomber squadron among many, would have given Glaxo a Pfizer's sized plant, months before Pfizer.

By contrast, WWII is usually seen as the process that finally killed the hopes of the New Deal.

But I argue, that the New Deal's final act was actually its finest hour.

Britain's Ministry of Supply set the amount of penicillin it wanted produced during the war years to just be enough ( barely) for front line troops.

It forbade the bigger colonies like India to make their own penicillin (postwar export market considerations dominated official thinking.)

The supply amounts set by the gutless Dominions perfectly reflected Britain's niggardly attitude to the needs of their own civilians and the civilians of the occupied lands.

By contrast, in May 1943, one of the last big New Deal organizations created, the American WPB (War Production Board) , set the amounts of American penicillin it wanted produced so high that it could easily supply America ( military and civilian) and most of the world besides.

Thirties style "Social medicine" concerns had finally won out over the Forties "War medicine" niggardliness.

Henry Dawson's long, lonely defence of heightened social medicine in a time of war against an enemy who didn't believe in it even in peacetime had finally borne fruit : now America was preparing to combat the Nazis morally , as well as just militarily.

Venus Manhattan was in the driver's seat, along with Mars Manhattan ....

"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 ...

Penicillin's "Bengali Famine Years" : 1943-1944

It was not America and Britain, it was not even the British and American governments ,that made the momentous decision, between late 1942 and early 1943, not to divert tax money just a little away from bombs and towards penicillin production instead.

This decision led, over the period of 1943-1944,  to a Bengali Famine-like situation among the Allies over shortages of live-saving drugs for civilians.

It was only one government agency in each country that made that decision ; albeit all-powerful agencies in the middle of a war.

But I do not believe they acted contrary to the informally expressed sentiments of their country's war cabinets.

Let the record note their names : Vannevar Bush's weapon-developing agency known as the OSRD in America and the Ministry of (Army) Supply (MoS) in Britain, with the common link urging them into this course being Sir Howard Florey.

By contrast, diverting even a tiny tiny amount of the government's war resources to the issuing of firm standing orders for penicillin purchases could have provided adequate semi-purified natural penicillin to treat all cases (civilian and military) of patients dying from blood poisoning that were resistant to the only life-saving alternative, the sulpha drugs.

Let me make it perfectly, morally, clear : the fundamental issue was not that penicillin was in short supply : it was that any method of saving those dying of sulpha-resistant blood poisoning was in desperately short supply.

These diverted resources , expressed as firm government orders for penicillin at currently profitably prices ,would have stimulated private capital to make good use of current technology and of idle rural factories that had closed because of the war , as well as unskilled rural labour also left idle because of the war.

As models that this could have and in fact did work in practise, one only needs, in the case of Britain, to point to Glaxo's first low tech but efficient penicillin factories cobbled out of bits of unused space in other people's factories.

And in the American case, to point to an enterprising rural mushroom farmer called Raymond Rettew who briefly became the world's biggest penicillin producer, in the late spring of 1943.

FDR's party did not lose the 1944 election over this issue , because another part of his American government (the WPB, War Production Board) chose to totally reversed this decision, and in spades.

But Churchill's party did ultimately pay the full price for this decision made by the MoS (led by his fellow Tory, Sir Andrew Duncan) not to push for enough penicillin production resources to help civilian as well as soldier, later in the war.

That was when his party overwhelmingly lost the general election it was supposed to romp home in, July 2nd 1945 .

Churchill's equally callous decision not to stop the wartime Bengali Famine in which four million people died ( "If there really is a famine, why hasn't Gandhi died?" he sneered) probably also sealed the chances of Churchill's Britain holding onto the Indian Empire.

If Florey had been even moderately left wing rather than very right wing, he might have gone to other more left wing oriented agencies of the British and American governments and the wartime penicillin story could have been very different .

If the wartime history of Civil War Era America was written as historians write the Pollyanna story of wartime penicillin, there would be only one America and one government ,with no sense at all of conflict between different parts of America.

My work on wartime penicillin will make it very clear that two agencies of the American government, the OSRD and the WPB were not in agreement on penicillin production levels and methods but in conflict.

 Just as in the UK,  Howard Florey/MoS and Harry Jephcott/Glaxo were not in agreement on these same issues but in conflict.

And I will make it clear that there were no technical reasons why civilians could not have penicillin in 1943-1944 , rather it was the result of a political and moral decision not to produce one less bomber squadron if that was the cost of bring penicillin to dying civilians.

For these were penicillin famines by government fiat : Bengal-on-the-Potomac and Bengal-on-the-Thames.....

"Weaponized" penicillin to be a frontline Army wound powder and hence the needs of the Navy, Air Force and Civilians are not relevant...

One of the most historic of meetings and dates in the whole extended penicillin saga occurred on September 25 1942 at Portland House in London England .

 In fact one key participant at the meeting sensed this so greatly that he even whispered that history was going to view it that way, into the ear of the chairman as the meeting broke up.

In many ways, this meeting was very odd as well as being very historic.

Mostly because who called it and who it asked to attend.

It was called by one of the powerful of the many British wartime Ministries, the Ministry of Supply (MoS), which  actually only supplied the Army (and perhaps in few things , the other two armed services as well) - but never ever supplied civilian needs.

Ronald Clark in his biography of Ernst Chain says this meeting was proceeded by the Ministers of (army) Supply and  (civilian) Health, Sir Andrew Duncan and Ernest Brown, jointly "taking the idea of the immediate mass production of penicillin to the War Cabinet".

If so, it was possibly informally done via a Ministry "Minute" to the War Cabinet as neither gentlemen were ever members of the small War Cabinet : even in peacetime many many British politicians become ministers, without ever being becoming cabinet ministers.

And significantly, no one from Brown's civilian-oriented department was at this historical meeting.

This is a very important matter to resolve definitely, in part because the peculiar nature of this crucial meeting spelt the doom of  Winston Churchill and his party in the election of June-July 1945.

How on earth did penicillin the universal lifesaver ever come be re-jigged as something only useful to the combat needs of the British Army ?

None of the drug firms summoned to this meeting (which did NOT include the very politically powerful firm of ICI ) had any real political or military influence - they didn't push for the meeting to take place but merely came when they were called.

 But two of the four scientists had the meeting certainly did have good credentials with the Army ( but not Navy or Air Force) medical authorities and were of the correct Tory stamp: Howard Florey and Alec Fleming.

They had pushed for this meeting with the Army's supply department.

So, the army-oriented MoS was there in full force with six top officials along with two top officials from the Army Medical Branch charged with drug procurement for frontline casualties.

Missing in action at this meeting - by design - was the Navy, Air Force and any officials representing the Civilian interest in penicillin production.

Florey and Fleming both strongly saw penicillin as basically a useful supplement to the cheap abundant and systemically-oriented oral sulfas,  with penicillin to be used primarily as in "local applications" for frontline combat wounds.

True, the Navy and Air force casualties were more often treated at large hospitals (and more often simply died in action)  than in the case of the Army.

The Army had to deal with the fact that more of its casualties emerged as alive but wounded ,compared to the other services, which was the good news ---- but the bad news was that their wounds were usually about to get badly infected as a result of the primitive conditions at the front line.

A highly concentrated anti-bacterial drug with a long storage life and stable under almost any conditions as a dry powder (ie highly pure as well as highly concentrated) seemed essential.

Then and only then could it be suitable to sprinkle on open wounds immediately as they occurred on the front lines by barely trained medics or ordinary soldiers themselves.

 Or for a busy front line doctor  in am ambulance tent to inject, with a little sterile water, in or around those open wounds, within hours of the wounding.

Chemically, sulfa was born fulfilling these requirements - but penicillin didn't really meet them until after the six years of war was long over.

But unfortunately, no thorough controlled clinical trials of this claim that a frontline local application anti-bacterial medication would be essential for wounded survival was ever done.

At war's end, the general assessment was that, in fact, the frontline powders and needlefuls of these "local" penicillin and sulfa (ie applied directly into the wound) were not essential.

 Instead, the wonderfully low rate of death from wounds (versus either the much worse record of WWI or of WWII Germany)  was felt to be more due to the Allies' quick thorough debridement (removal) of dead wounded flesh , front line blood transfusions and policy of rapid evacuations of wounded soldiers to clean, quiet ,well equipped base hospitals .

That ---- and the general good health of  wounded Allied troops, because they had been kept well fed and lived in warm sanitary conditions in the months before being wounded.

In the military base hospitals and civilian general hospitals,  wartime sulfas and penicillin did prove to be reliable life savers when given as a systemic, if and when blood poisoning was suspected.

In fact, "crude" liquid penicillin (totally un-concentrated and totally un-purified) injected by needle and prepared in the hospital daily by Dr Duhig, saved lives as a systemic at a Brisbane general hospital --- and could have done so in the military equivalent.

Ooops ! It did do so, at Cairo's largest military hospital, where Dr Pulvertaft treated patients with liquid systemic crude penicillin he made daily in the hospital.

How did the Navy, RAF and the public, along with those politicians sworn to protect these groups of humans beings, react to the idea that penicillin was to be made under the control of the Army and for war casualties only ?

Seemingly with initial indifference - though by the Spring of 1943, a freelancing Navy Surgeon Commander had converted the Admiralty's under-producing vaccine operation to a huge penicillin factory supplying all of the Royal Navy's penicillin needs.

The Admiralty had always 'looked after its own', had always produced its own vaccines and serums so it didn't take long before the Navy medical brass had a look around at the penicillin factory and beam approval.

(Unlike the Army and Air Force, they had won the battle to retain the supplying of their needs by a naval units controlled directly by the Admiralty itself.)

For some rather sad reasons, the Air Force had relatively few wounded, for its size, and for other reasons, the treating of the wounded and returning them to battle was not an operational priority.

Over the course of the whole war, each of the British armed service got about one third of the money spent on the war. But in terms of manpower, of five people in uniform there were three in the army versus one in the RAF and one in the Navy/Merchant Marine.

This is because the RAF and RN/Merchant Marine had lots of big expensive machines that if  "taken out of action" usually resulted in a 100% loss (aka "sunk" or "crashed"), while except in disastrous retreats, this rarely happened to the Army and its smaller cheaper machines.

The Allied Armies proved very much better, for example, at recovering even badly damaged tanks , as compared to the Germans.

In terms of personnel killed, the story is more complex.

Most of the RAF were never in real danger of dying but among those that flew, rather than maintained aircraft on the ground, the death rate was very high -often as much from operational accidents as enemy fire.

In Bomber Command, 55 of 100 fliers died before finishing their tour of duty.

Again there were relatively few wounded fliers versus a high rate of deaths - with the relatively few that survived their plane being hit only doing so by remaining out of the war, as German POWS.

People losses anyway and quite frankly , were not a big concern to the RAF : it never had a shortage of qualified recruits.

The RAF was seen as very glamorous to those determined to be very brave and seen a very secure place to spend the war to those with peacetime technical and engineering skills and no urge to be brave.

 Manpower sustaining by speeding the recovery of the wounded was never a critical issue for any of WWII's air forces.

Replacing lost machines ( and frequently the training of new flier recruits) was always their obsession instead.

The world's navies were almost as attractive as the air forces, and rarely suffered from manpower worries and wounded recovery worries.

Instead, the sudden loss of entire town-sized machines (battleships or aircraft carriers) with all two thousand on board dead at one stroke, from a single torpedo or bomb, was their admirals more realistic nightmare.

In addition, while the Merchant Marine had particularly high losses of lives, against the relatively small number of its personnel, the merchant marine crews' relatively high pay and lack of onerous military discipline kept manpower replacement issues at bay.

When all factors are combined, at a gross figure level, the three armed services all lost about the same percentage of dead against the total number enlisted in each service, though as I have shown, the chance of death in service fell very unevenly.

In the case of the Army, it fell hardest on the infantry, followed by the tank crews and often the combat engineers.

Because almost no one wanted to join the infantry, it had few volunteers and generally the infantry got those conscripted recruits so totally lacking in useful education and technical skills that no other section of the Army wanted them.

To combine metaphors : incredibly enough, in all the Allied military , the very pointy end of the offensive stick came from the very bottom of the barrel.

In a nutshell, this is why the Germans and Japanese proved so very hard to defeat.

Over the whole war, the death rate varied greatly among the three services - the Navy death rate actually went down as the war progressed, the RAF's deaths peaked in 1943-1944, while in the case of the Army it was expected to rise suddenly and sharply to WWI Western Front levels, following the invasion of Europe.

The Army faced a short sharp period of potentially huge casualties - most wounded and infected but in Allied hands, not POWS.

If they weren't too badly wounded and the right anti-bacterial medication was at hand, the Army might be able to get most of the wounded back into battle formations before the war ended.

Just as well ,as there were no new men hustling to enter the infantry replacement pipeline at the other end.

At the very least, the thought that if and when they got wounded, the Army could heal most of them, would make the infantry less reluctant to rise up and advance against deadly Mortar and Machine Gun fire.

Or so the Army brass fondly believed.

I have tried to make the Fall of 1942 case for the British Army making penicillin just for itself seem as sensible as possible.

But in fact, it was a case going around with its nose full of Coke and Ecstasy.

In the fall of 1942, the really big medical story wasn't the rise of penicillin ; it was the decline of the previous wonder slash miracle drug : the Sulfas.

After five years of ever newer, better sulfas coming on market, that pipeline had died.

It was a double whammy of disaster, because now the current sulfas were proving less useful as more and more bacteria were becoming resistant to them.

Either a disease's bacteria totally failed to respond to sulfa and the patient died, or so large a dose need to be given that some patients again died from sulfa's toxicity at high dose levels.

This was not some sort of a Army front line versus RAF or Navy base hospital versus civilian home GP issue --- the stuff just didn't work as well as it used to ---- anywhere : in the UK , in battlefields world wide, in Germany and in Russia.

Full stop.

Sulfa's improved replacement - and it might be penicillin, who can tell  ? - would face immense pressure to made in sufficient quantities to fulfill all needs all over the world, in civilian systemic use as well as front line local antiseptic use.

This was Florey and Fleming's greatest intellectual failure : the inability to see this.

Now neither of them were conceptual thinkers, as even their most ardent supporters admit in print - they were uniquely tied to the concrete and conventional here and now rather than to abstract speculation.

 By contrast, Rene Dubos didn't have their success in finding a useful anti-bacterial medicine from microbes, (his luck was bad) but he could  clearly see the Big Picture issues in ways those two could never hope to.

I do not know where Dawson stood for sure on this conceptual versus concrete issue since we have no personal papers of his - but the fact that Dubos always felt highly of him suggests a hint.

Certainly if deeds are better than mere words, Dawson never acted at all as if penicillin had to be first weaponized before it could become useful to humanity.

He was the first to give the world a patient successfully treated by a life-saving antibiotic because he saw semi-crude penicillin as more than good enough to inject safely into a human being : Dies Mirabilis, October 16th 1940.....

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.....