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 .....

Chloroquine : hiding one of WWII's most valuable secrets in 'plain sight' : in the scientific literature

To understand how OSRD fumbled the ball on synthetic penicillin but neatly hid the fact with lot of the taxpayers' money, consider the similar case of chloroquine, the best anti-malarial drug of WWII (aside from natural quinine) and a truly horrific example of the stupidity that can result from the excessive secrecy of war science.

The German chemical giant I G Faben had created what was to be ultimately called chloroquine in the 1930s and named it resochin.

They soon modified it slightly because they believed it to be too toxic and re-named the result sontochin and then offered that to their American subsidiary Winthrop Stearns.

They in turn offered sonotochin to the Rockefeller Institute in 1940 who were looking at effective chemical alternatives to quinine in event of a likely Pacific war.

Their leading expert - not a chemist - nevertheless felt he knew  chemistry well enough to dismiss sontochin's formula as hopelessly far too toxic .

Meanwhile, the OSRD was ramping up a truly Manhattan Project level effort to quickly screen or invent suitable chemical anti-malaria agents now that the Japanese have almost all the world's natural quinine.

They eventually felt they had invented a totally new anti-malarial agent but then in 1943, some French chemists in North Africa noticed it was exactly like the German sontochin , available all this time on the open market !

OSRD excelled at coverups ...

Extreme embarrassment - so the American 'discovery' was quickly slightly modified and called chloroquine and the awkward facts deeply hidden in the files.

But it got worse - for it was eventually found that the American invention #2 (chloroquine) was just the same old German invention resochin and that it ( great embarrassment for I G Faben) hadn't ever been toxic after all !

Similarly, the OSRD  worked to ensure that no one ever questioned the billions they spent competing with a German A Bomb that never existed.

They planned all along to quickly use their A Bomb on the greatly hated Japanese, almost regardless of the circumstances of the war, if only to prove its military value in the next war.

So when synthetic penicillin proved to be both a 15 year life-waster and a 4 year tax money waster the OSRD knew exactly how to cover that fact up.

They announced grandly that one of their very own chemist-researchers had actually produced synthetic penicillin but that currently, natural penicillin was still cheaper.

Actually the tiny amount of synthetic penicillin produced was an tiny impurity created in passing,  in the course of taking a totally wrong approach to the structure of penicillin :  and there still remains no way in the universe to scale up an error and get success.

It was all a calculated big lie or at best a deceitful half truth and entirely in keeping with the way that the OSRD operated from beginning to end....

Australians give away British Store

Mark Oliphant flew to America in a bomber to beg them to make the Atomic Bomb after British scientists had pushed its development while the American government held back.

Howard Florey flew to America in a Clipper plane to do ditto with Penicillin, a British development that the American government had also put on the back burner.

For both Australians, they did this out of strong personal conviction that it was the right thing to do.

It is true that both also did it with approval from some mid to upper level bureaucrats within the British government.

But there hadn't been anything like a full debate at the top of the British government  about the matter, before the Australians were allowed to give away the store.

If there had been, it might have led to very different decisions on what was to become so portentous to Britain's dismal post-war fate.

Try to imagine our world post-1945 if the British , not the Americans , held the whip hand in atomic bombs and penicillin.....