By the time of the Allied invasion of Normandy in 1944, the United States had produced over two million doses of pure penicillin. The saving of life because of this spectacular progress was incalculable. Then, as the war drew to a close, Australia became the first nation to mass-produce penicillin for the general public, and Fleming, Florey and Chain were jointly awarded the 1945 Nobel prize in medicine and physiology. Although many bacteria quickly became resistant to the effect of penicillin administration, a number of semi-synthetic penicillins have since been developed, including Flucloxacillin and Amoxycillin. These are based on the original drug, but their molecules have been slightly modified to prevent their being inactivated by resistant bacteria.
We can reflect on the remarkable involvement of medicine and science in World War II. Much cruelty was meted out; unimaginable suffering and terrible torture was a feature of the conflict and it is hard, even now, to forgive. But the greatest legacy was the acceleration of top-secret research into a drug whose potential had been widely ignored. Penicillin, and the antibiotics that were subsequently discovered, revolutionized medicine. During the war it was a crucially important means of returning troops to the field of battle in record time, and once the war was over it brought hope to countless seriously ill patients. Its ability to return soldiers to the battle makes it a weapon in itself. This is a major legacy of World War II — and it brings some comfort to know that the lives saved through research on penicillin greatly outnumber those who died in wartime. Norman Heatley, whose work was so crucial to the discovery of penicillin, lived through it all; before passing away in 2004.
CHAPTER 6
DANGEROUS IDEAS
Some very dangerous ideas — ranging from the relatively small-scale to those of a world-changing significance — were put into play during World War II. Following her entry into the war, the United States played a role in many of them.
The attack by Japan on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 was the greatest single blow by a foreign power that the United States had ever experienced. It was also the single stimulus that brought the United States officially into World War II, and led to new and urgent secret weapons research. The Pearl Harbor raid has long been mythologized as an unprovoked and unforeseeable attack by a cruel, silent aggressor against an unsuspecting nation state peacefully going about its business. This is not entirely true. Although Japan had already acted aggressively within the Pacific region and had invaded Manchuria; the United States had repeatedly taken unilateral action against Japan. Worse still, the existence of Pearl Harbor as a probable target was already known to the United States authorities — but was kept a secret from the people of Hawaii. The Japanese aircraft were detected by radar, long before they arrived; but the young operators were told that the weak signals they were detecting were probably nothing important. American aircraft were expected: perhaps that’s what they were. In the event, nothing was done and the might of Japan could fall upon the United States.
Ever since the Victorian era, Japan had learnt from the West and had embarked upon rapid industrialization. Japan is unusual in possessing very few natural resources. Britain is also an off-shore nation of similar size (the two have often been compared) yet rests on massive reserves of coal and iron ore, with vast lakes of high-quality natural gas and petrochemicals under her seas. Japan has nothing in comparison, and needs to import to survive. In the decades before World War II, Japan had built up a strong military capability and used it to expand into parts of foreign countries like China and Korea. The Americans, meanwhile, had used their own growing military might to occupy areas in South-East Asia. The Treaty of Paris had given sovereignty of the Philippines and the island of Guam to the United States in 1898 which led to the widely forgotten war of 1899–1902. Americans have been in the area ever since. In many ways the stage was set long before 1941 for a struggle over who was the dominating power in the region.
Matters came to a head when Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected President in 1933. He was a good friend of Britain, and his family had successfully traded with the Chinese for decades, so he looked with increasing distaste at the growing threat of the Nazis, and with even more disapproval at the Japanese invasions of Chinese territories.
When World War II broke out in 1939, Roosevelt’s inclinations were to join with Britain and France to defeat Germany — but the people of the United States were opposed to becoming involved in another European war, and the 1940 Presidential elections were looming. The America First movement was growing in strength, spear-headed by such personalities as Charles Lindbergh and supported by anti-Semitic leaders including Henry Ford. But in direct defiance of this movement Roosevelt donated 50 American destroyers to fight for the Allies. This began in September 1940 when the United States government covertly offered Britain 43 destroyers for the Royal Navy; then seven more were given to the Royal Canadian Navy. This was nominally in exchange for 99-year leases for United States bases in places like Newfoundland, Jamaica and British Guiana. American ships were thus fighting for Britain almost from the start. In 1941 President Roosevelt followed this with the innocently named Lend-Lease Bill which led to the steady supply of materiel — weapons, explosives, etc — from 1941 to 1945. At the same time, the United States offered the secret use of her ports to Allied shipping. Captain Richard Moss of Cambridge, England, recently told me of the Royal Navy’s use of the port of Boston, Massachusetts, for military purposes prior to 1941. The notion that America stayed out of the war is untrue; secretly, she was in from the start.
Germany was also using the help of covertly friendly nations that (like the United States) were ostensibly neutral. Although Sweden made a great show of remaining outside the conflict and loudly proclaimed her neutrality, she supplied much of Germany’s iron ore for weapons production through the Norwegian port of Narvik. Without Swedish assistance, Germany could never have produced planes, ships and weapons as she did.
Japan — always needing supplies of energy and raw materials — had signed a commercial treaty with the United States in 1911, and in the years before World War II Japan had adopted an outwardly friendly attitude towards the United States; but the United States unilaterally terminated the treaty in 1939 and then initiated a policy of economic sanction against Japan, designed to curtail aggressive Japanese expansionism into South-East Asia. The Export Controls Act of 1940 restricted the supply to Japan of oil for use as a fuel and lubricant, and was followed by a ban on all exports of scrap iron and steel to Japan. The Japanese protested, but in vain; and in July 1941, President Roosevelt went on to freeze all Japanese assets in the United States. Britain and the Netherlands did the same. This unilateral action meant that Japan was suddenly unable to purchase oil and the Western action brought further protests, the Japanese emphasizing that they would be obliged to take action against these sanctions.
Japan set out to draw up a plan of war, and proposed to invade Malaya, Burma and the Philippines. These plans were intercepted by Allied intelligence, and the United States knew that her great fleet, based in Hawaii, would be on standby to go to war with Japan once these invasion plans were put into operation. Intelligence agents of the United States continued to monitor messages as Japan planned to take military action.