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.

Manhattan's OTHER Project - one of them anyway

The RAF deserved much of the odium that is still attached to the concept of 'area bombing' , the idea you can win a war by killing and de-housing most of the residents of your opponents' cities if only you sprinkle enough bombs willy nilly over them.

But the ultimate examples of "close is good enough in horseshoes and in area bombing" comes from the American Army Air Force planes flying over Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

POOR AIM UNDER IDEAL CONDITIONS

They were two of the best bombing crews in the entire Allied air forces - in particular, having two top notch bomb-aimers on board.

They had no fighters or ack-ack guns to contend with, were flying in daylight and in pretty good weather and yet still managed to miss their targets widely.

It didn't matter - the Manhattan Project planes still destroyed all of both cities with just one bomb falling well off the target area.

A week after those two bombs, the Japanese unexpectedly surrendered, so these 'far-off-the-targets' results still seemed a victory for the Project planners and for their namesake, Manhattan, where so much of the atomic bomb effort had taken place.

THE VIEW FROM SEPTEMBER 1939

But September 1945 seemed a long way from September 1939, when Americans told themselves they would be immune from the new European general war - because of a project well underway in ....Manhattan.

Daylight flights by Army bombers flying well offshore of America itself and flying thousands of feet above the range of enemy warship ack-ack guns, would "drop a bomb into a pickle barrel at 20,000 feet", and sink the battleship or aircraft carrier below.

The enemy fleets destroyed in mid ocean, the land war would never even reach America's shores.

This project - the Norden bombsight - would be as big a secret as the atomic bomb and cost as many billions to produce and use.

BILLIONS WASTED

But the Norden's total failure, embarrassingly (if still secretly) evident by mid war, was the real reason the hitherto reluctant American military-scientific leadership gradually ramped up the atomic bomb in time to be used in this, the second world war.

They needed a PR victory from the vast amount of money and lives spent on aerial bombing , no matter how that victory was achieved.

Area bombing, based on the ancient idea (5,000 years old in 1945) of starting fires in the enemies' cities and then letting the city's own materials provide most of the inflammable energy used to destroy it, was a low tech solution to the failure of Manhattan's first high tech 'project' - the Norden Bombsight and 'Precision Bombing' ....