Very last files UK National Archives plans to digitalize : FO 370/926, futile appeals from abroad for British penicillin

The very last files that the UK National Archives plans to digitalize and put on line won't be the ultra-secret Ultra files . Trust me : Ultra was a success.

No the very last files, if ever, to be digitalized and put on line will be the series FO (Foreign Office) 370/926 : requests from aboard , 1944-1945, for that wonderful British invention , penicillin.

That's because what should have been the greatest success for the UK in WWII turned out to be their worst total balls-up disaster.


The British didn't have any penicillin : not really enough for their own troops and civilians, let alone to address distressing appeals coming from the dying all over the world.

What should have been a signal triumph as Britons freely gave to the word the greatest medical boon it had ever known - would ever know - instead became an opportunity for America to practise "penicillin diplomacy" and replace Pax Britannia with Pax Americana.

The British Empire actually fell, not in early 1942 with "The Fall of Singapore" , but in early 1944, with "The Penicillin Shortfall Crisis".

The cause of the failure was the usual one : leaving policy in the hands of scientists, instead of the politicians.

Stupid and venal as the politicians often are, they know a political  minefield when they see one - but by the time they saw this one, it was just too late.

Just as the families overseas were forced to bury their dead when the British failed to help - so too, the PRO and UK archivists will bury these embarrassing files : but good....

Penicillin Diplomacy comes to Cuba November 12 1943

Batista wooed by PENICILLIN

An American warplane flies south throughout the night in November 1943, all in an effort to deliver scarce American government penicillin to save the life of a small son of Cuban lawyer Angel Diaz Soto.

The effort is widely reported in all the semi-official American media such the New York Times, media that were read all around the world by government elites seeking to discern the attitudes of the largest member of the rising Allied powers of World War Two.

This particular tea leaf wasn't hard to read : penicillin was no longer to be a secret weapon of war, just for American soldiers ; but now was to be an instrument of peace , open to all the nations of the world willing to take up the yoke of defeating the evil Nazis.


Look, this effort said in effect, can you picture the Nazis giving something like life-saving penicillin to the child of an unknown civilian in small little forgotten bit of the world ?

Dawson Diplomacy

Call it Penicillin Diplomacy or Dawson Diplomacy, it doesn' really matter : what matters it that it became more and more widely practised in the last months of the war as penicillin became an evergrowing potent symbol of hope after Hitler was defeated.....