WWII : began and ended September 2nd 1939, at 11 pm ....

Is it not a good general rule that Great Powers, once they had finally and formally declared war on another Great Power (as opposed to simply invading and gobbling up various small powers ) do not withdrawn from that fight until they themselves were either defeated or successful ?

What would the Commensal Story of WWII look like ?

Can the entire story of WWII ever be accurately and exhaustingly told, except from the point of view of the winning Great Powers like the USA, the UK and the USSR ?

Must Estonian historians be forever limited to writing only of WWII's localized impact on Estonia ?

Must we have authors from "BIG-LAND" only talk of the the BIG and writers from "small-land" only talk of the small ?

Must Progress inevitably get mightier and wiser ?

During the truly horrible and nasty 1930s and early 1940s, at the apogee of Reductionist Modernity, this idea was the overall global "meta-ideology".

So powerful a meta-ideology that it actually dominated all the ideologies we then took to be widely apart in their worldviews.

Minor variant ideologies we still call fascist/nazi style nationalism , communism, and mixed socialist/capitalist liberal democracy.

Hydro dams and buildings of all sorts, from all ideology zones, got bigger, wider, taller, heavier --- planes and ships and land vehicles got steadily bigger, faster, longer, more long-lunged : mightier.

Streamlined, smooth,sleek, aerodynamic : more athlete-like, more bullet-like.

Fit, very fit.

Business, government and military bureaucracies, from all ideology zones, got bigger and more complex with a lot more specialized and professional subsections : wiser.

During the Great Depression, the idea that Big is Good and Bigger is even Better temporarily replaced even the claim that Greed is Good.

Was this true ?

At least one prominent scientist didn't think so and wrote a popular-styled essay to demonstrate the limits to the idea that bigger was always and inevitably better.

Google "haldane" and "size" and there it pops up, as truly profound and as eye-opening as ever : a still-useful essay on science that was written more than 85 years ago !

This, despite the best possible definition of a professional scientist being 'someone who wouldn't be caught dead reading a science article in their field that is more than eight and half months old' .

Nevertheless, you and I are not science "pros" and we'll read anything useful : J B S Haldane , "On Being The Right Size".

If you are worried at all that our globe is hurling towards an environmental disaster that will make WWII look like pikers, then please, please read this essay.

You'll need it as you fight the DENIERS, who deny there are any limits on the size of a problem that Man's mental powers can beat.....

Islands and WWII : did anything else important happen (yawn) ?

For hundreds of millions of avid newspaper readers during WWII, an atlas was essential to follow the conflict's global course.

Never more so because of the fact that most of the battles - yes, most of the battles - took place over, around and on islands - with some of the most heavily fought-over islands being almost incredibly tiny.

(The battle for Tarawa Atoll saw almost 10,000 casualties spread over its meagre 500 acres.)

An atlas (and a magnifying glass) was essential to make sense of it all.

Admittedly, the Eastern Front can be understood completely without once referencing a single island but no other major war front can say the same.

Consider, just for one example, why bombers were based in Yorkshire to bomb Hamburg.

It was because this maximized the amount of "Flak-free" water between the bomber base on the island of Britain  and its target on the coastline of the mainland.

So, a war decided by actions involving hundreds of strategic but tiny islands scattered all over the globe in the most unlikely of places.

That isn't something easy to blend with the popular view of WWII was holds it was all about the clash of a few Titans going at it, head to head.

Only a commensal history of 1939-1945 can blend the story of the Great Powers with the stories of the tiniest of powers, to make a truly coherent account of those years.....

a Commensal history of WWII includes the small and the great, the hubristic and the nimble

To render the sprawling activities of WWII palatable to digestion (because even the most devoted of readers have their limits) the tendency of authors is to show the war as seen through the eyes of the Great Powers and the Great Men.

And as seen through the eyes of those wisest of Wise Men, the scientists.

A commensal history of 1939-1945 should also start with a war between a handful of Great Men and Great Powers, because that is the way it all began.

But, to be fully accurate, it should also end in a confused co-mingling of the actions of the decisive small as well as those of the chastened great.

It should end, in other words, as a salient shock to the majority of the world who, in 1939 , were reluctantly convinced it was simple a natural fact that Bigger was always Better and that Might was always ultimately Right.

It should even shock at least some of the youngest of the scientists, those not yet set in their ways , to look again at the supposed science behind the claim Bigger is Better....

Coalitions, not Combat, lost and won WWII

England and pre-1937 Germany definitely started and then attempted to direct World War Two throughout , but they certainly didn't win or lose this truly world-wide war,  not all on their tiny , tiny own.

Instead, two vast world-sized coalitions under their nominal direction - one truly commensal and the other just national imperialism by another name - won and lost the war.

Germany and Japan built far, far, far better fighting machines but lost out totally to the Anglo-led nations, simply because of the Axis inability to form genuine working partnerships with all the people worldwide who were initially willing to back Fascism back in 1939-1940.

In the beginning Japan and Germany seemed to have had 'Science' on their side : most of the educated world resignedly believed that Nature and Darwin had revealed that in the long run, bigger was always better, always beating down the small and the weak.

In other words, they had a baldly naive and a highly hubris-inflated sense of what the Science of Size actually told us.

If you don't know that there actually is a well founded Science of Size, then you won't be prepared for the upcoming mega-sized re-match of WWII, when popular Hubris again collides with unpopular Reality, this time over the question of climate.

Back in the Science-obsessed Thirties, the age-old and realistically grounded moral sense that it was right and proper to come to the aid of the babies of perfect strangers melted away, melted away before this mistaken 'book' fact that "Bigger is Better".

The Japanese and Germans had seemingly appeared to be the next new 'coming thing' , a view their early surprisingly fast and cheap victories only enforced.

But 'scaling up' their early victories proved impossible, as the real Science of Size revealed that their earlier logistics were bound to fail over the vast new regions that they planned to conquer and then hold.

Small and weak peoples, already conquered and defeated, had proven to have more life in them than anyone expected.

They successfully logistically harassed the German and Japanese  until they reduced these over-extended Great Powers to the point where their eventual military collapse before the forces of the Allied coalition became relatively easy.

Meanwhile the Allied coalition had many members, either nominally still neutral or nominally actual co-belligerents, who gave only a few leases on a little of of their land for others to make into vital military bases or provided scarce strategic natural resources, both provided at very good prices to themselves.

But at least none of them needed to be occupied to keep them on side.

Occupied by hundreds of thousands of scarce combat troops to hold each of them and to keep their Resistance partisans at bay , as was the case for everyone of the nations inside the Axis 'coalition of the conquered and subjugated'.

Others in the Allied coalition - the 'Free' armed forces - were the small but very committed volunteers forces of the many governments-in-exile from countries under Axis rule, small forces who provided far more fighting energy than their mere numbers would indicate.

The UK, USA and USSR dominated the Allied coalition, but try to imagine how successfully they would have been if everything had been reversed.

Try to imagine if if the Axis coalition had been as successful as the Allied commensal coalition of the big and the small became, with even China teaming up with Japan in a war against the white powers.

And then try to imagine if the UK had to do without her empire and commonwealth, if the Americans had to do without their banana republics of the Americas, and the USSR had had all of the many nations on its non-western borders in hostile action against her.

Who would have won WWII then ?

WWII : From Manchuria Incident to Nagasaki, NEUTRALITY was majority position of world's sovereign nations

The idea that Hitler, Tojo, Stalin and Mussolini are among the most evil leaders of all time - and that people like them must be stopped at all costs - is a relatively recent idea.

It is an idea promoted by people like you and I, who statistically speaking,  weren't likely even alive when WWII ended.

Thus we never had to do the hard-lifting of deciding just what to actually do, or not do, about these obviously aggressive tyrants.

Our parents, grandparents, and great-great-great grandparents obviously felt - and above all acted  - quite differently than what we claimed we would do , in similar circumstances, today.

My book - The Hyssop and The Cedar - is an effort to explain why this was the case.

Because, starting in late 1931 and onto early 1942, ( ie roughly for one decade) the lands of China, Ethiopia, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Albania, Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Finland, Denmark, Norway, Netherlands, Belgium, Luxenburg, France, Britain, Greece, Yugoslavia, the USSR, America , Australia were all attacked, one after another, by aggressive neighbours acting without cause.

As well, the lands of many of the colonies of Europe and America, from Newfoundland, through Africa to Asia and the Pacific, also came under land attack by aggressive neighbours.

In addition , the shipping of many neutral nations out on the High Seas were sunk without warning and their crews killed.

Throughout all these fourteen long years of violence, from September 1931 till September 1945, many nations still never did find any reason in morality to want to band together with other nations to bring these world-wide bandits to justice.

Other nations only declared war (or agreed to be called co-belligerents) in the battle against these tyrants in the last months of the war, just so they won't be left out of the trade agreements to be formulated by the post-war United Nations !

Generally, this latter group did not offer any actual combat support against the tyrants or merely offered a token number of warriors as late and as slow as possible.

An amazing number of countries we now honour for their war service actually only declared war on the tyrants , when they were themselves directly attacked by them.

Only the British and French Empires quickly declared war on another nation (Germany) simply because it attacked a smaller neighbour (Poland) , and even here France became neutral again less than a year later.

The Poles will also quickly tell you that the English and French, even then, did not come to the direct aid of the Polish nation.

If we take 1932 as the first year where Japanese aggression (involving China in this case)  could and should have been stopped, all nations on earth have a sorry 'war' record : the USSR, for example, only declared war on this aggressor in the very last days of the war.

In the case of Mussolini and Italy, 1935 was the first year it invaded a peaceful neighbour (Ethiopia) and again every nation on earth shows a sorry record in rushing to help this little kid against a stronger schoolyard bully.

In the case of Germany, early in 1938 it invaded its peaceful neighbour Austria and no one did anything.

(Yes, many Austrians wanted Hitler as their leader but probably most of them, if given a a free and fair vote, would have voted to remain an independent nation.)

America, as a prominent example of a sorry neutral, probably would never have declared war on Hitler, if he hadn't done the hard work for them by declaring war on the USA himself first.

One by one the weaker nations and colonies of the world were picked off by stronger schoolyard bullies while good grey people (our dear relatives) averted their eyes and dismissed it as just another squabble in the schoolyard.

Why ? Was their moral values that different than ours ?

I would argue not. But I also argue that their moral values had been gravely weakened by the scientific understanding they had gained at High School and university.

The middle aged adults who ran the world between late 1931 and  early 1942 had all completed their High School education before Queen Victoria died , and were the first generation on Earth to have had to pass standardized science exams to graduate.

A little book knowledge is a dangerous thing and never more so than the four years of Victorian Era Scientism they had to endure to graduate.

In retrospect, Victorian Scientism was as adolescent and as naive as the teens it tried to teach.

It saw the then new idea of  Evolution as demonstrating, beyond all doubt , that life forms and societies proceeded, inevitably, ever upward to bigger and more complex forms, with weaker beings and societies equally inevitably (and regrettably) dying away.

One has to only read all that period's laments for the inevitable falling away of Canada's aboriginals to see how people felt this sad process could hastened or perhaps slowed by much human effort - but never ever stopped, not in the long term.

Nature ruled !

And perhaps regrettably, Science had proven that the study of Nature revealed that (like it or not) Might is Right, Bigger is Better, God is on the Side of the Bigger Battalions, only the Strongest Survive : on and on with the Victoria platitudes permitting strong aggressors to pick off weaker neighbours.

So one can be sure that the picking off of the world's smaller and weaker nations did not go uncommented upon in that long ugly decade between late 1931 and early 1942.

It was accompanied, I am for sure, by a lots of long drawn out sighs and endless helplessly shrugged shoulders.

But in the end, WWII proved not to go the way expected by the Great Powers on all sides.

 As their Modern Science was seen to falter again and again and again, so too faltered the public faith in Modern Morality and in Modernity itself.

Slowly but surely, as the human world changed its scientific understanding, its moral actions also changed.

Slowly, starting around 1945, our (great) grandparents began the slide out of the Modern Era and into our present day Post Modern Era.....

WWII as apogee AND nadir of Modern Science....

The night 'the music died' began when the young pilot of the small plane that Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper and Ritchie Valens were in, misread an instrument and thought he was climbing above a storm when he was really going full blast down into the ground.

Various Modern scientists (and their shills the science 'journalists' , ie editors) might be considered to have done something very similar to that unfortunate pilot.

They mis-read the Atomic Energy fire-bombing of civilians, the mass production of cheap Natural Penicillin and Auschwitz's gas chambers and frugal use of the resulting dead humans as furnace fuel and for soap as triumphs - rather than failures - of Physics, Chemistry and Biology.

The Americans had thought the future of aerial bombing was the Norden bombsight's ability to accurately drop a bomb in a pickle barrel from 15,000 feet, not the ability of an atomic bomb to burn out an entire city, all in an effort to destroy that city's  single navy arsenal.

The British had thought the best, cheapest, quickest way to provide penicillin was to have chemists synthesize it in big chemical factories - but they ended up waiting upon tiny fungal factories (in far off America, to boot ) to do it all by hand.

The Germans had hoped for more positive eugenic activities east of Germany : the Master Plan East talked of settling happy, hard-working, clean, pure German peasants-soldiers on the new eastern agrarian frontier , producing huge wheat crops and guarding the border.

But few German peasants actually wanted to move into an area contested by partisans and Soviet troops.

 So as a result, Hitler quickly told his supporters that 'we actually went to war with Russia so we could totally eliminate (negative eugenics) all the Jews from Europe, once and for all'.

Plan Bs (nadir) glibly sold as Plan As (apogee) : I doubt if even used car salesmen could match the chutzpah of the scientists...

May 10 2013 POSTSCRIPT :

Re-reading this blog post, I realized that I hadn't specifically indicated that the A-Bombing of Hiroshima and the triumph of natural Penicillin occurred so close to the end of the war in 1945, that they share both a wartime and postwar time space.

The end of WWII also revealed another Plan B to to the Plan B (Auschwitz) of the wartime German genetic community.

 Oswald Avery's 1944 reductionist discovery that the chemical molecule DNA was the basis for all the genes (including the long reputed ones for  alcoholism and criminality, etc, etc) had been mostly ignored.

But it was suddenly taken up with particular renewed intensity with the revelations that Auschwitz was the end result of all the prewar German genetic efforts.

Particularly by the many active Jewish geneticists :  like all geneticists, they still held that Free Will barely existed, except among scientists, and that we were largely captives to our forebearers' genes.

But the word DNA seemed offer a way to carry on the good bits of the German prewar genetic program, but minus the gas chambers and under a new name.

Modernity dies in an Adorno Moment : 1939-1945

Between  April 30th 1939 (when the New York's World Fair opened) and the November 20th 1945 (when the Nuremberg Trials opened) a lot of water (together with a lot of blood and brains) flowed under one of Modern civilization's few remaining un-bombed bridges :  call it WWII.

If  to the bemused Theodor Adorno, New York's fair was Modernity's bizarre apogee , he also saw Nuremberg's trials as Modernity's appalling nadir.

But I doubt that even Adorno and his co-conspirator Max Horkheimer had really expected Modernity to soar , burn and crash just that quickly.

Yet it clearly happened. Few people doubt that our new Age of post-Modernity can not be precisely dated to very late in the year of 1945.

Just as very few people deny that the opening of New York's World Fair of 1939 captured the absolute peak of Modernist optimism and hubris.

Now WWI also resulted in dramatic change all around the world.

But I would argue that while the surface of Modernity in 1919 was readily and intensely cracked all over, the deep superstructure actually held stronger than ever.

People often see WWI's dramatic results as the results of long standing tensions, buried below the surface, suddenly precipitating in a crisis situation.

Perhaps : tensions buried under the surface, but not that deeply buried.

By contrast, the surface of immediately post WWII Modernity didn't crack at all but actually burnished all the brighter ("Better Science won the War"), but deep down inside , the moral core of Modernity had lost its appeal to the young.

Modernist elders simply didn't seen their own self-inflicted wounds and so did nothing to reduce its shock upon their young.

As a result, the assault on their children's and grandchildren's moral certitudes was all the more stunning due to their elders' failure to genuinely reflect upon the meaning of the events of 1945.

But demographically, the rot had truly set in and it was now only a matter of time ------ and of baby booms ----  and of funerals....

Civilization can fire Guns OR eat Butter, but not both....

The Cold War is always pointed-to-with-pride as a time when Civilization had guns and butter.

Had guns, yes, but never fired them.

Its all quite different from actual war,( shout out to WWII) , when guns get fired and their shells destroy the butter factories and people are left too hungry to build another shell or churn more butter.

Civilizations like Germany, Japan and Russia then quickly end up with their citizens turning to cannibalism to survive : true they don't eat their guns, but they do definitely eat their leather gun straps before turning on each other as a food source.....

WWII : was Nature REALLY on the side of the bigger battalions ?

The distinguishing claim of the Age of Modernity was that Nature was on the side of the bigger battalions : a claim that finally received a definitive physical (rather than verbal) response from Nature, in the years between 1939 and 1945.

This is why we mark 1945 as the start of the new Age of post-Modernity, because unlike Chesterton's Christianity, Modernity has been tried - and failed.....

Tortoise vs Hare : predicting our world in 1945....

On September 2nd 1939, when the British Empire declared war on the German Empire (thus ensuring we would have another world war), there were two main scientific theories predicting the shape of our world at the war's end.

The far more popular theory at the time was called Modernity, Social Darwinism or simply 'Might is Right'.

 It said Evolution was a vertical affair, with wiser and more mighty entities inevitably and naturally replacing entities that were weaker and more foolish.

The other, far less popular theory, saw Evolution as a horizontal activity, with the weaker and simple-minded entities continuing to co-exist for ever and ever, in global commensality, with the bigger and more complex entities.

It even went further than that.

It claimed that on not-infrequent occasion, the smaller and more simple would even triumph over the larger, more complex and more sophisticated entities in the fundamental effort to survive.

Now it is obviously that these diametrically opposed theories could not both be right.

"the hyssop and The Cedars" will look closely at the course of  WWII to see how accurate each scientific theory was in predicting the twisting course of that awful - and unexpectedly awfully long - war.....

the last VICTORIAN war : 1939-1945

Looking over today's crop of leaders in politics, business and culture and comparing them with the world leaders of the 1940s, one is struck by today's leaders' comparative youth.

By contrast, the world of WWII was run by the white-haired teenagers of the Victorian Age.


Normally war is said to be an event for young men and young men's energy, but between1939-1945 the young men silently and glumly marched off to fight, while back home - in charge - the old men postponed their retirements and found a second wind.

They would replay WWI all over and this time, run it their way - not the way of their fathers.

Today's teenagers view the reforming (thermosetting) promises of  Scientism through the cynical and disappointed eyes of 125 years of broken promises, but the eternal teenagers who ran WWII were born in the first flush of the Age of Scientism and never stopped believing.

They still remained as hopeful that Scientism's reforming promises would finally deliver when the last of them died in the early 1970s as when they were still the naively optimistic teenagers of the years of good Queen Victoria's reign.

WWII was not uniquely a war between scientists and technologists - one could make the case that the Napoleonic wars and last year's war were also wars between scientists and technologists.

the last war of unalloyed SCIENTISM : 1939-1945

But it was uniquely the only big war fought between true believers in reform Scientism on all sides : Allies, Axis and Neutrals.

But reform Scientism delivered its first big disappointments in that war , signally failed to do what it had long pledged it could do, if only it was given its head and released from the shackles of old outdated sentiments.

As a permanent reminder of that failure, reform Scientism's seventy years on Earth by 1945 were marked by that war's seventy million dead : a million for each year of Scientism's existence....

1939-1945 : Big MO goes Postal instead of going Monumental

Big MO is an appropriate nickname for The Age of Modernity because there was always something inhumanly massive about almost everything and anything that that age and the people within it turned their hands to.

Very hard indeed to imagine the people of the early 1940s not going Postal, and not going to deadly war with each other.

But if they hadn't been building bunkers and had been building monuments and buildings instead, this ponderous essence in their inner character might still be visible.

Hitler and Stalin, not wanting to be outdone by the Hoover Dam and the Maginot Line, were planning to leave their own marks in concrete and rebar steel, massive and tedious beyond all belief.

Modernity was all about regarding Reality as being thermo-settable : plastic until cured and then rigid forever more.

Concrete is the thermoset plastic par excellent : broken up, it is useless to re-melt into new concrete.

Rebar steel, while appearing to be plastic only when red hot and rigid at normal temperatures ( ie thermoset plastic in character) , is actually also somewhat thermosoft plastic in character as well.

Because used steel can be remelted and molded into a new shape as scrap, as part of the normal steel-making process.

Armour steel is thermoset plastic in its character, and became the wartime symbol of Modernity's massive and rigid nature.

Armour plate is plastic when red hot but at normal temperatures, it resists all change : even when change is coming at it in the form of a dense tungsten core of an anti-tank round moving in at 2500 miles an hour !

Bombers, bombs, bomber fleets - perhaps the most typical expression of Modernity at war, got steadily bigger and more armoured as the war progressed.

As did tanks, tank guns and tank fleets.

Ditto naval Taskforces : bigger battleships, bigger guns, bigger aircraft carriers, more armour, more speed, more aircraft and escort vessels.

More, more, more : every war machine just got steadily bigger, heavier, faster, higher, lower : extremes of any and all sorts.

Notably as the world got more war machines and the machines got bigger and fatter, the world's population growth shrank and people got thinner and thinner.

In WWII, (Modernity gone Postal), Modernity showed its true colors : placing machines before people even in the face of near universal malnutrition.

The "Not So Good" War : September 1931- December 1941

The Good War began December 11th 1941 when Adolf Hitler persuaded a reluctant American Congress to declare war against the evil of Nazism.


It lasted three years and eight months, from when America  declared war on the evilness of Nazi Germany until August 1945, when America defeated the evilness of Tojo's Japan.

It is the war between the armed forces of morality and the armed forces of evil that American TV chooses to celebrate endlessly.

Infrequently discussed - in America - though perhaps not in the rest of the world, was the ten years and three months of The Not So Good War.

It began with the manufactured Manchuria incident in September 1931 that allowed Japan to brutally invade China without any reaction from the armed forces of morality.

Eventually it involved  two dozen countries being invaded by aggressive neighbours without any action taken to defend them by the armed forces of morality.

That all changed when Hitler's declaration of military war against America on December 11th 1941, forced Congress and America to defend itself against this new military threat.

But this realpolitik approach to dealing with the worst evilness the world has ever known didn't make for good propaganda, both during the war and ever since, and so the War of Good against Evil was created - mostly, it must be said, on a Hollywood backlot set at the time

And ever since then, mostly it has been created in popular American history books, films and TV documentaries.

The big problem is that in any branch of any  public library, there will also be literally hundreds  of books, films and TV documentaries about the Holocaust and their basic line - to their authors' credit - is that America knew all about the Holocaust and did nothing while it was happening.

Hard to reconcile these two very popular "popular history" subjects , the Good War and the Holocaust , isn't it ?

It is almost as if the victims of all those years of the Not So Good War have become honorary Holocaust victims, with the six million dead European Jews also standing  in for millions more dead all around the world who America also knew about at the time but did nothing to help.

Because in many ways, the Not So Good War carried right on through December 11th 1941, on and on well past the official end of WWII.

Then 1939-1945 could best be seen as a six year effort to violently subjugate the Polish people, begun by Hitler, but when he proved to be not up for the job, was finished by Stalin, with the complicity of Churchill and FDR.

The Good War, by this reckoning , was just an cosmetic overlay over a series of episodes between a group of superpowers, with smaller nations mere pawns in the conflict .....

Anschluss began 75 years this minute ...the countdown to WWII had begun

At 5am on the morning of March 12th 1938, the infamous Anschluss began.

At that minute -exactly 75 years ago- leading elements of the German advance team crossed the Austrian-German border, the signal start to the countdown to World War Two , which itself began less than 18 months later.

We can no longer ask the German adults who made the decision to invade Austria why they did it, nor can we ask the adults of the rest of the world why they meekly let Hitler break the Versailles Treaty by doing so.

They are all dead - only the children and young adults of that era are still around and even they are among our most senior citizens.

The origins of WWII have now passed beyond "oral history" into
the history of paper documents.

In addition, simple math reminds us that all of us alive today have spent far more time in the Post Modern Era ( post 1945) than we have in the Modern Era (pre 1945).

As a result we no longer instinctively have a feel for Modernist thought.

The intellectual gulf - far wider than just 75 years - between us postmodernists and the modernists of Anschluss

So a huge intellectual gap looms between us and the senior planners of Anschluss (and the senior politicians, bureaucrats and generals who planned the muted reaction to it) .

It is more than just the 75 years of time between us and the event itself.

In reality, it is the ideological chasm between our postmodernist sentiment and the sentiment of  long dead men whose mental universe was hardened when they were teenagers, more than 125 years ago.

Any 21st century history of WWII can not - I believe - be content any longer merely reciting a long of events : a sort of journalistic W4 .

It must provide the 5th W (why?) and explain it in terms we in the post-modern world can understand......

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 ....

Wartime penicillin's six year odyssey : from secret war weapon to widely publicized beacon of hope

Without really meaning to, we tend to reify World War Two from a six year long process into a single event ("the war"), when we say things like "millions of women went to work in factories for the first time in their lives in WWII".

An event is like my last birthday ---- where I either did or did not have a birthday cake.

But a very long, quasi-total-war spread over an entire world is bound to see seemingly universal processes like "war-time rationing" or "women's war-factory work" actually break down into a huge number of situations happening at different times, to different extents , in different places.

Wartime penicillin was neither a top secret military weapon or a widely publicized beacon of hope but rather both and more - depending upon the time, the place and the institutions and individuals involved.

Wartime penicillin was a six year long debate on the nature of what it is to be human 

Defining the exact nature of wartime penicillin was a six year long debate , a very feisty debate between many people, that probed the deepest questions that humans can ask.

This is why I  continue to write about it, 75 years after the events....

Merck has credible excuses for being beaten on D-Day penicillin by Pfizer - but none whatsoever for being crushed by Commercial Solvent

Merck, the OSRD, Florey's Oxford team (all part of the synthetic penicillin obsession) continue to have many defenders among academia.

Yes, one academic excuse goes, yes Merck failed to deliver much penicillin to the D-Day beaches - that was left to Pfizer, which had been a major partner of Merck and Squibb in the three year long effort to produce commercial amounts of penicillin.

But, the excuse went, Pfizer had 20 years of highly successful fermentation experience before late 1941and the commercial penicillin project's beginnings.

But how then to explain the huge success of Commercial Solvents  in producing medical grade penicillin from a cold start in January 1944 to levels twice that of Merck in just four months and then levels six or seven times higher than Merck in just three more months after that?

True, Commercial Solvent had 30 years of success in industrial grade fermentation in making bulk acetone but had never done anything even remote to pharmaceutical levels of purity and cleanliness.

But there it was - passing an increasingly demanding FDA testing requirements with its tens of billions of units of injectable penicillin.

Clearly, the supposedly-arcane craft could be learned fairly quickly, if a corporate culture demanded it.

Even Squibb redeemed itself by well beating Merck's output, by late 1944 .

Merck lost the race for one reason only : hubris.

It thought that since it had synthesized a few 300 molecular weight molecules that all 300 weight biological molecules were a piece of cake.

Tell that to  penicillin with a weight of 334 and still not commercially synthesized.

Or tell it to quinine , molecular weight 324, and 200 years after Man-The-Almighty first started to synthesize it, still without a commercially viable synthesis technique at hand....

Gradually mass produce natural penicillin, starting in 1940, but ban all mention of the word in newspapers : half way moral approach ?

Producing enough penicillin for all Allied civilians and all Allied soldiers but keeping all word of it out of the newspapers and scientific journals might have been the best possible moral approach on its wartime use.

Yes , sick people in neutral, occupied and Axis countries would still die needlessly, but given the view held by many, many powerful people in the Allied elite, that penicillin should only be used to send lightly wounded troops back into combat, it might have been the most moral approach----- that would be politically acceptable in wartime....