The Bad News war is really the Bad Faith war, more accurate but less catchy

Calling the new Halifax ferry "The William J Roue" might pass muster with the world class nervous nellies that make up the local elite.

But, hopefully, ordinary citizens - the young particularly - will simply come to say that "I'm taking the roue to Dartmouth", just as the young took to simply calling the Canadian Dollar "the loonie".

Because a catchy name trumps a more accurate (but more awkward) name almost every time.

I really wanted to sub-title my book "a Good News story from the bad faith war" but that sounds like something that would only appeal to philosophers.

But as yesterday's blog post explained, my view is that WWII was a really bad news war, not simply because of its tens of millions of deaths, but because it was also one of history's most perfidious wars.

 On all sides : Axis, Neutral and Allied.

A low, dishonest decade fallowed by a low, dishonest war.

WWII's really bad news was the tremendous amounts of bad faith floating about in the general moral atmosphere.....

Part of "The Penicillin Holocaust" : Allied POWs dying needlessly of infection because the Allies decided they didn't deserve penicillin...

A whole lot of people died needlessly of infections that wartime penicillin could have/ should have cured --- all because the Allies decided to treat it as a military weapon of war --- only to be used to cure lightly wounded Allied combat troops, to get them back under enemy fire as soon as possible.

Clearly that meant they would rather not have to give penicillin to seriously wounded Allies men or to civilian patients at home or in neutral countries.

In addition, no penicillin for dying civilians in occupied nations or in enemy countries either.

None to enemy troops obviously or to enemy POWs ( though this latter decision was against past custom and current international law.)

But it also meant none for dying Allied POWS behind enemy lines either.

Millions of needless deaths : "The Penicillin Holocaust"

These are just some of the human and moral costs when medical doctors, in their role as government and military advisors, counselled keeping penicillin as a secret weapon of war rather than a public and universal lifesaver.

But one doctor sacrificed his own life to oppose this horrendous policy tooth and nail : Henry Dawson ....

Henry Dawson's war aims : "You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar..."

The Allies, convinced their troops lacked the Nazi and Japanese killer instinct, spent most of the war trying to prove Dawson wrong by demonstrating that they could be tougher than tough.

But given their overwhelming advantage in men and material over the Axis, it didn't seemed to be working very fast.

But it did eventually work -  at least militarily : only when the Allies seemed sure to win did people in neutral and occupied nations move, ever so slowly, over to the Allied side.

Certainly the moral claims that the Allied raised as to why to support them seemed to have little credibility at home as well as abroad.

Deeds, not words, was what the undecided were looking for - and they found few deeds to reassure them that the Allies wouldn't just be a milder eugenic version of the harshly eugenic Axis.

But in the final days of the long, long war, they saw some reason for hope.

Penicillin the deed

The Allies were beginning to fly penicillin into occupied countries and to neutral sick children and even using it to save the lives of dying Axis POWs : these were deeds, at last, Dawson deeds, not mere empty rhetoric.......