Keep something out of the newspapers and it can remain a secret forever - even when it is not : the case of wartime DDT

Hard to explain why both the Germans and the Japanese of WWII failed to make use of DDT to reduce their truly immense manpower losses due to endemic insect borne diseases : its use alone, could have prolonged the war a year or two more.

After all, knowledge of how to make the stuff was in the public domain, and in the open scientific literature, having been synthesized more than seventy(70) years earlier.


It had been re-synthesized in 1939 and patented by the Swiss firm Ciegy who proceeded to offer patent licenses to everyone : neutral, Allied and Axis nation alike : just as the Swiss firm Oerlikon did with its anti-aircraft guns, used by almost all military forces during WWII.

But in wartime,  busy generals and even busier bureaucrats and politicians don't have time to read scientific journals, patent applications and industry magazines : though they do like to glance through their familiar newspaper from time to time, to relax.

An "open" secret can still be effectively a total secret

So if you can keep news of a weapon out of the newspapers, as the US successfully did by censoring both DDT's domestic use and domestic coverage of DDT's success overseas, you can keep it effectively secret - albeit an "open" secret - throughout the war.

Unbelievable but true.

And an example of how the Allies planned to keep synthetic penicillin an effective - if open - secret as well....

Penicillin an excellent war weapon because it was so hard to synth, not in spite of that

An excellent antiseptic like synthetic gramicidin was cheap to make, fast acting, stable and a very effective bacterial killer.

But as a weapon of war, it lacked the ability to remain secret for very long .

For if one American chemist could quickly synthesize this product of nature, the massed forces of German Chemistry, widely recognized as the best in the world, would make even shorter work of the same task.

By pointed contrast, despite its relatively small molecular weight, a dozen years of dilatory chemistry efforts by some very good biochemists and some big drug companies had failed to crack penicillin's structure.

It thus promised to be something that even the Germans might take a year to synthesize and get into mass production.

And if both the existence of synth penicillin and the success natural penicillin already had had in curing serious domestic infections could remain a secret until the Second Front opened up on the Germans, that year delay would be a fatal delay.

 Because the first the German High Command would have heard of penicillin was the explanation that it was the new secret Allied weapon that by returning more of their troops (and returning them much quicker) to the front was handily winning the manpower war against the Axis.

The only fly in this happy ointment ?

Man never did succeed, not even 75 years later,  in making penicillin as cheaply and as productively as the penicillium's tiny slime factories did.

(Given that Henry Dawson had spent his whole life demonstrating how smart even the smallest of non-pathogenic bacteria could be, I doubt that he would be surprised !)

Unlike the production of nuclear weapons, the production of penicillin remains as it began, something relatively easy to make in any hospital lab and hardly something that can remain 'secret' forever simply due to its overwhelming expense and complexity.....

Henry Dawson's war aims : "You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar..."

The Allies, convinced their troops lacked the Nazi and Japanese killer instinct, spent most of the war trying to prove Dawson wrong by demonstrating that they could be tougher than tough.

But given their overwhelming advantage in men and material over the Axis, it didn't seemed to be working very fast.

But it did eventually work -  at least militarily : only when the Allies seemed sure to win did people in neutral and occupied nations move, ever so slowly, over to the Allied side.

Certainly the moral claims that the Allied raised as to why to support them seemed to have little credibility at home as well as abroad.

Deeds, not words, was what the undecided were looking for - and they found few deeds to reassure them that the Allies wouldn't just be a milder eugenic version of the harshly eugenic Axis.

But in the final days of the long, long war, they saw some reason for hope.

Penicillin the deed

The Allies were beginning to fly penicillin into occupied countries and to neutral sick children and even using it to save the lives of dying Axis POWs : these were deeds, at last, Dawson deeds, not mere empty rhetoric.......

Nova Scotia-born Dr Henry Dawson and the wartime re-invention of a military secret weapon into a widely publicized beacon of hope

I am talking about penicillin of course.

What other artifact of war has so abruptly and so totally changed its character over the course of a war ?
In 1941, the British and American medical and military elites were in agreement that the new penicillin's best use in wartime was as a weapon - and that its success as a weapon of war depended on it remaining 'new' and hence relatively secret.

The Allies would gain an absolute advantage over the Axis only if they alone had a cheap, abundant, stable, pure , potent (secret) version of penicillin.

This could only happen if the Axis had to make do with only the increasingly ineffective sulfa drugs or the expensive, scarce, unstable, weak Public Domain (natural) version of penicillin, readily obtainable by consulting the already existing published medical literature on penicillin.

Why was penicillin so secret one moment and then the hero of newsreels the next ?

So penicillin had to remain secret in two senses.

 First, penicillin had to be synthesized secretly.

This is because the old cliche of the formula stolen out of a safe in the Golden Age of Mystery books really works as a realistic plot device.

Almost all readers were aware that in the real world, without at least a fleeting glance at the synthesis formula for a process, it was almost impossible to begin to make a stab at a rival method for re-creating a man-made chemical.

Nobody steals scientific formulas used in physics, geology, astronomy or biology now do they ?

Secondly, penicillin's unique life-saving abilities had to be kept secret from the world's general public or they would demand it be made in quality for them.

Technically, the synthesizing method would still remain a secret, but alerted by the resulting public clamour, the enemy would try all the harder to match the Allied synthetic penicillin ---- and neither the Germans or the Japanese were slouches in the synthetic department.

And penicillin's actual medical use was also to reveal a distinctly war-like character : it was to be triaged, military style.

That is to say, it was not to be "wasted" (to use Winston Churchill's infamous "green-inked" phrase).

There was simply no military point trying to save the lives of dying ex-combat soldiers who would be of no further military use if they did survive, not when penicillin could be better used to quickly return lightly wounded or infected combat soldiers into battle, so they could get a second crack at dying for their country.

Battles were won or lost by the side that could muster a greater  number of their units' total complement into battle.

Penicillin used under such inhuman terms certainly approached the most war-like of war medicines.

War medicines like the amphetamines, ("The Ecstasy of the Einsatzgruppen") , which unlike penicillin was never in short supply on any military front.

Not once the Axis and the Allies alike discovered that like booze, it made combat soldiers more aggressive , more willing to kill or be killed.

Germ, chemical and radiation warfare were other areas where medical expertise helped make war and killing more effective.

By contrast, social medicine can actually exist in wartime : it tries to lessen the number of non-combat deaths in war and it does so not merely by pouring penicillin powder into combat wounds to reduce the chance of infection.

It says instead that all life is worthy of life, regardless of an individual life's current utility to the war effort.

Because most deaths in war occurs not in combat between troops, but when captured troops , enemy civilians and your own civilians are triaged into two piles : those worthy of decent food, shelter, and health care and those deemed unworthy.

Nazis let millions of Soviet POWS starve to death or to die of disease to free up food supplies for the German civilians back home ; they also shot to death millions of Jews for the same reason.

In India, British authorities, not caring greatly about the Bengali poor, also let millions starve to death or die of hunger related disease, in a time and place with plenty of food.

In America, medical authorities considered people with endocarditis to be a burden on scarce medical resources, who even if they did live, could never contribute much to the military or the civilian war effort - best deny them life-saving penicillin and let them die.

By contrast, Dawson and his supporters said make lots of penicillin and give it freely to our soldiers ( useless or useful) , to all our civilians at home,  to civilians in neutral and occupied countries and even to enemy POWs and civilians.

And then suggest that such a coalition of nations willing to do that is really a coalition worth fighting or dying for, and a coalition worth surrendering to, because you know you will be treated fairly.

Social medicine, said Dawson, was actually the most effective war medicine of them all : and in the end, even Churchill was probably forced to reluctantly agreed, once he got the time to pause and reflect.

 And he certainly got plenty of time to reflect, after his surprising post-war election defeat ---- caused in part, I believe, by his government's unwillingness to provide civilian penicillin during the war : his green-inked words had definitely come back to haunt him.....

The 180 degree flip of wartime penicillin : from secret weapon of war to public weapon of propaganda

War is not at all like the playing fields of Eton , many reports to the contrary.

Both sides get advance notice of the time, place and nature of the activity in sports - and there is a strictly enforced set of rules.

By contrast, a successful military offensive operation is far more than half won if it is kept secret to the last moment and beyond.

Convince your foe you plan this Spring's big push there , after the roads have dried and then attack here - when the roads are still muddy - and he might still think it a feint even when your troops are in fact about to knock down the doors of his command centre.

Surprise and secrecy can often beat much higher qualities and quantities of  equipment, manpower and leadership --- if most of a weak force is concentrated in a narrow sector of the enemy's lines  at a time the enemy doesn't expect a major attack.

This need for surprise and secrecy applies to military activity off the battle field as well.

If - as happened all the time in the Pacific Campaign- both sides were down to 10% effective strength due to all the rest laid low by endemic local infections , the battle is almost certainly won if a secret cure-all like DDT clears up the insect source of those infections.

Because the exclusive use of DDT by only one side could enable it to send 50% of its tinier force into battle and win.

But only if DDT's abilities remain secret.

DDT was not strictly speaking "secret" ---- its chemical formula and method of manufacture was revealed in the public scientific literature back in 1874 and again in 1940 in a Swiss patent from Geigy.

But the Japanese hadn't seen those scientific reports or if so, hadn't grasped their military significance.

But even the stupidest Japanese general could correctly access urgent Japanese diplomatic cables indicating that the American domestic press was raving about the miracle success of DDT in clearing malaria from its endemic regions in the southern states of America.

So DDT was kept as secret as possible and more fundamentally , was not made available for civilian use during WWII.

This despite the fact that it was easy and cheap to make and very stable in storage - for the cost of one or two B-29s, the country's agricultural zones could all be sprayed by DDT and the resulting greater farm productivity would well repay the cost of the DDT factories.

Crops - as well as guns - win wars too, it could be argued.

But in fact, the productivity side of Total War was totally ignored over the secrecy side of Total War.

It was similar with Penicillin.

 The key reason that striking, dramatic, heart-stopping successes in dragging civilian bodies back from the grave's edge in 1942-1943 were not permitted to be published by the AMA-OSRD-NAS triad was because this would indirectly alert the world to the military life-saving abilities of penicillin.

Wesley Spink did not rock the boat - unlike Henry Dawson

(See Wesley Spink's dramatic first success in July 1942 with seven year old "JE" - a heart-warming case which was not allowed to be published/publicized until April 1945, for a vivid example.)

Publicizing civilian cures would equalize its effects on the war if both sides, suitably alerted, then employed it freely.

Even if the health-restoring ability of penicillin made the war economy far more productive than the cost of setting up penicillin plants would take out of it ---- and this resulting extra productivity was devoted to making more weapons.

Because, at least in theory , both sides would see their economies expand equally - returning everything to the position it was before penicillin became widely public.

So instead, the Allies hoped to synthesize penicillin so that it was both cheap and abundant (like DDT) but also like DDT, they planned not to release it to the public, but use it as a military weapon - a secret medical weapon - exactly as DDT used.

But the heart-warming story of Baby Patricia in August 1943 let the cat out of the bag, as this local story in New York 'broke wide' , not just stateside but all around the world.

Now not just every civilian in the world wanted it for their sick relative like yesterday but military chiefs across the globe awoke (15 years late !) to the military potential of the miracle cure.

The chiefs of the American military medicine triad (and their equally smarmy British counterparts) pouted ---- but clever people in the Offices of War Information in both Allied nations resolved to make a virtue of necessity.

Baby Patty got her penicillin over the heads of the triad, but now official penicillin would be rushed by American military bombers to saving dying kids all over the world and the effort highly publicized in the process.

It would say to friend, foe and neutral alike that unlike those nasty life-denying Nazis, the Allies cared : oh how they cared.

Henry Dawson must have snickered at the blatant dishonesty in
this abrupt volte-face, but he was very glad lives were being saved however it came about and that the "unlimited potential" of the life-saving mold was at long last being released....

Like Penicillin, DDT was a slow killer, so naturally biologists used to the hitherto rapid biological killers, promptly ignored both

Put a bunch of scientists in a room and get them to bet on a race between a tortoise and a hare and they'll plunk their money on the rabbit every time.

That is one big reason why 'we almost lost DDT and penicillin' , to paraphrase a famous wartime ad from the Ayer agency : a bactericide or insecticide that was slow but steady has no great appeal to your average alpha male scientist......

DDT and the myth of "a product of WWII science"

There is no more tired (or dishonest) a journalistic bromide than the claim that this or that boon to humanity was discovered, invented, developed and produced by WWII scientists.

What actually happened, ninety nine times out of a hundred, is that belatedly some senior military or scientific bureaucrat reluctantly agreed to let some underlings spend money on a 'half-baked' idea that had been discovered or invented years earlier but had seen little commercial success up to now.

For example : DDT had been synthesized in 1874.

But no uses had been found for it by its inventor so it lay about un-used until 1939 when Paul Muller of the Swiss firm Geigy decided to try it out as a way to kill the moths that eat woollen clothing.

It worked - and worked - and worked : it was the first wide spectrum insecticide that was both harmless to humans and persistent : killing by contact, for up to six month.

Geigy knew it had a winner but the rest of the insecticide world yawned.

In 1942, it tried a new tactic : it told the military attache from the USA in Berne about its abilities, suggesting it might have wide applications in the sort of terrain the Americans were currently fighting in (dah !), and offered a licensing deal.

Naturally the Defense Department accepted the gift with great reluctance : even the normally mild-tempered Eisenhower actually had to fake a nuclear meltdown to convince the Pentagon to give him more DDT to prevent an expected mass epidemic of typhus in the winter of 1944 in Italy.

This, despite typhus being very well known as the number one military killer throughout the last half millennium of history !

DDT is very much like Penicillin : both were not run of the mill variants of their types but rather far and away the best of their types : their commercial success might have been delayed but it was inevitable they would be huge successes ultimately.

There were very few 'real secrets' in WWII

Neither were totally secret during WWII ( indeed perhaps only the great successes of the Allied and Axis code-breakers were truly secret during the war.)

But they were intended to remain largely unavailable to the general public for as long as possible , not because of any absolute inability to produce them in quantity, but because widespread public success in America would only alert the enemy overseas to their value.

The details on how to make commercial amounts of both Penicillin and DDT were in the public record but the Germans didn't take up Penicillin and the Japanese didn't take up DDT - sending hundreds of thousands of their combat troops to any early grave.

We might regard American and Japanese generals equally stupid for ignoring the military potential of DDT when it went on the market in 1940, but to be fair , we should also regard American and Japanese CEOs being equally blind to the commercial potential of DDT.

And of Penicillin.

It is indeed curious that in all the millions of words written by writers about Fleming and Florey's "seminal"  public articles announcing the miracle of penicillin (over and over and over again), no author has bothered to research the amount of response back to their authors upon publication.

Perhaps because there was so very little.

Gladys Hobby says that a Dr Herrell wanted details and a penicillium sample immediately after Henry Dawson's first
penicillin presentation at a huge medical conference in Atlantic City in May 1942 and a month later, a fruitful letter offering support came from mid level Pfizer (then not really a drug company) employees.

But she says that was it .

(Except that the popular media gave Dawson's presentation huge play : New York Times, Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, Newsweek, the wire services, etc. : perhaps they were more on the ball than the scientific media.)

Earlier, Dawson's plans to inject penicillin into SBE patients in October 1940 had been communicated by his colleagues, consultants to various New York area drug companies, and as a result there had been a sudden flurry of activity around penicillin at these firms but it soon died back.

It generally had consisted of nothing more than putting a few flasks of penicillium up to brew.

Apparently no drug company approached him then to offer to make serious amounts for a proper clinical trial.

Word hadn't reached Pfizer  in October 1940 - it was not then inside the drug company gossip and rumour circuit.

While they claim they had reps at the Atlantic City meeting, I believe that it was more likely the fact that the story of Dawson's penicillin ending up near the business section of the New York Times that probably moved the very cautious management of Pfizer to approach Dawson a month later.

One of the enduring themes of this blog is the relative un-importance of public science (being published in the scientific media) and the crucial importance of popular science (publication in the conventional media) to propel new ideas, inventions and discoveries forward.

Most senior figures in government, business, science, the military etc are simply constitutionally incapable of making the bold move from reading about a major new idea in the scientific press to promptly investing heavily in it.

Only the fear of public embarrassment if one of their competitors gets there first will move them off the toilet : and here stories in the popular media will indeed move them to do so.

'Why maybe their own daughter and wife might see the story and ask why he hadn't made enough penicillin to save his own nephew Joey at Guadalcanal?'

Put bluntly, stores in the popular media is the best (and often the only) way to embarrass bureaucrats to take seriously new ideas they have already read about - and dismissed - in the public (scientific) media.

 And so informal censorship of semi-secret ideas is the best way to prevent such public embarrassment - if hardly the best way to win a war .....