by Brian Ford
Although Fleming was proud to be identified as the discoverer, articles discussing the effects of this blue mould had been published as long ago as 1875, and a bacteriologist in Costa Rica named Clodomiro Twight had investigated the anti-bacterial effects of these fungi during World War I. He was not the first person to investigate Penicillium notatum, either; that fungus had been named in 1911 by a Scandinavian scientist who discovered it growing on a pile of decaying hyssop (a medicinal herb). Fleming noticed that the broth in which this Penicillium had been grown could kill bacteria, but he did not try to use it to cure disease. A young (and largely forgotten) young doctor named Cecil Paine, who worked in the pathology department of the Royal Infirmary in Sheffield, Yorkshire, read about Fleming’s observations and grew the fungus himself. He found it could cure an eye infection in newborn babies. During 1930 he treated several patients with eye infections, young and old, wrote up the notes, and — like Fleming — forgot all about it. So Fleming was not the first person to discover the fungus, not the first to describe its effects nor even the first to use it to cure an infection. Why was he regarded as crucially important?
The onset of the war provides the answer. There was now a need to find a super-drug — something that could cure the overwhelming bacterial infections that would take the lives of so many young soldiers, wounded in action and sent home from the front. An Australian scientist, Howard Florey, with a small team including Ernst Chain, Norman Heatley, J. Orr-Ewing and G. Sanders, began work on possible new anti-bacterial drugs at the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology at Oxford University. They had known of the early observations of fungi apparently killing bacteria, and contacted Fleming to ask if, by chance, he still had his original culture of the mould. He had kept it — and thus was able to provide the Oxford group with the source of their much-needed new drug. I knew Florey at Oxford, and found him to be an avuncular and quick-thinking man. He reminded me a little of the comedian Bob Hope in appearance. Another friend, Mrs Monica Dobell, had known Fleming when he was at the prime of his influence. ‘I thought he was an unconscionable little man,’ she told me. ‘Full of himself. He thought he was better than anyone, and said he’d saved the world.’
By 1942 penicillin had been extracted and purified, and this new drug was already being used in clinical trials that proved it to be effective against the common bacterial infections that were claiming young soldiers’ lives. Florey, Chain and Heatley discovered how to mass-produce the fungus in milk bottles, but this could never create the drug in large amounts. The use of penicillin in treating young wounded soldiers meant that the lives of amputees and others could now be saved, whereas they would almost certainly have been lost before. But it was in the United States, not Britain, that mass-production began. Research at the Northern Regional Research Laboratory at Peoria, showed that a common waste-product, corn-steep liquor, was the ideal growth medium for the fungus. A mouldy melon found in the market at Peoria, Illinois, turned out to provide the most potent source of penicillin yet discovered, and a chemical engineer named Margaret Rousseau showed how to grow it in massive amounts inside large fermentation tanks, something like making beer in a brewery.
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.
PEARL HARBOR ATTACKED
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.
Japan now stood bereft of essential supplies. They were not so much short of military equipment as of the essentials needed for day-to-day life, including fuel oil. General Tojo Hideki became the Japanese Premier in October 1941, and realized at once that the position of his nation was desperate. He set 29 November as the date on which Japan would take military action against the United States, if no agreement was forthcoming. The United States, meanwhile, was hoping to inveigle Japan into entering the war and knew that the mighty American fleet moored in Pearl Harbor would be more than a match for any attempted invasion of territory by Japan. The intelligence service had heard that one of the targets would be Pearl Harbor; crucially, these revelations were never passed to the military commanders in Hawaii, so no preventive action could be taken. Moreover, Britain had recently perfected a transponder radar system called IFF (Identification, Friend or Foe) which they offered to the United States Army Signal Corps, but they turned it down. According to their leaders, they did not need anything from the British: American systems were best.
The attack, when it came, was unexpectedly from the air and launched with overwhelming force. Military strategists had expected Japan to invade countries to obtain her vital supplies, and the warships in Hawaii were ready to sail out to repel them when they did; nobody had imagined that Japan would instead annihilate the American fleet.
On the morning of 7 December 1941, a radar operator at the Fort Shafter radar station on the island of Oahu saw a large signal appearing on his screen. He asked a private stationed with him to look, and both agreed that there were a large number of aircraft about 130 miles (210km) away and approaching fast. Their superior officer was 1st Lieutenant Kermit A. Tyler, who listened carefully to their reported sighting. And then he reached his fateful decision. A flight of American B-17 bombers was due in that day, and he guessed this must be them. He was wrong: over 180 Japanese fighters, torpedo planes and bombers were heading to Hawaii at top speed. The opportunity to prepare or take cover was lost.
Six Japanese aircraft carriers were within range, and seemingly endless waves of planes had taken off to join forces against Hawaii. Two massive attacks then followed; 3,500 United States personnel were killed or severely wounded and 18 ships of the Pacific Fleet were sunk or badly damaged. More than 350 aircraft were destroyed. Further damage was done by scores of top-secret Japanese midget submarines that penetrated deep inside the port. Every one of the eight United States battleships was sunk; some 1,200 sailors were killed when just the USS Arizona was attacked. The United States lost her battleship fleet in the space of 2 hours. The Japanese attack was a complete success and a triumph of top-secret planning.
Much of the technology used in this audacious raid would have a far-reaching influence throughout the course of the war and beyond. Midget submarines were a particularly successful secret weapon. Pearl Harbor saw their first use in World War II but they were also used to great effect by the British and Italians.
The technology developed during World War II for small submarines is still in use to this day, often in unexpected applications. Tourist submarines some 32ft (10m) long are in use around the world, carrying people to see the wonders of life beneath the waves. Recently, secretly constructed submarines (some up to 98ft, 30m, long) have been discovered in Central American waters, where they are used for present-day drug smuggling.
Contrary to what we are so often told, the Pearl Harbor attack was no surprise to the United States government — it was launched after much provocation, and after copious warnings; it had even been detected by radar. Whatever else one might argue, it was not an unprovoked attack from an unexpected quarter, though the operation was a triumph of top-secret military planning.
The United States had their best code-breakers assigned to the difficult task of following the Japanese plans. They were systematically decoding their top-secret messages, and they soon learnt of a plan to lure the remaining American ships into a trap at Midway Island. In June 1942 in the battle of Midway the United States successfully turned the tables by sinking four Japanese aircraft carriers and a heavy cruiser in exchange for the loss of one aircraft carrier and a destroyer. This was the turning-point in the Pacific, and from that time onwards the Japanese headed steadily to defeat.
Japanese hydrogen weapons
The secret weapons that were developed by the United States against Japan, and vice versa, included some of the most fanciful ever seen in war. The Japanese resolved to launch incendiary attacks against the United States, and manufactured some 9,000 hydrogen balloons to which they fitted small incendiary weapons that could burn for over an hour and 33lb (15kg) of high explosive anti-personnel bombs. The plan was to launch them into the high-altitude jet-stream — which the Japanese had just discovered — so that the weapons were carried across the Pacific to North America. The balloons were made of paper and were assembled by young women, mostly acting students from nearby schools. The washi paper for the balloons was made from large sheets stuck together with ‘devil’s tongue’ gel made by boiling the roots of arum lilies. Virtually the entire stocks of the arum root gel disappeared from the stores, partly to feed the balloon industry, but also because it had a pleasant taste and was being consumed by the students in copious quantities. Starting in November 1944, the Special Balloon Regiment established under the Imperial Japanese Army released a continuous stream of these balloons from Ibaraki Prefecture, on the western side of Honshu.
Unlikely as it seems, the ruse worked; most of the balloons burst or deflated, landing in the sea, but over 1,000 o
f these secret weapons reached North America and a quarter of them caused damage, mostly small forest fires. The first reports of the fireballs descending from the skies were dismissed as farmhand gossip, but towards the end of 1944 the authorities realized what was happening. Some of the balloons landed intact and were examined by the military. The payload contained magnesium as an incendiary device, partly to set fire to the balloons on landing, but also to ensure that the device was consumed in the blaze, so that the Americans would not discover the true nature of these strange balloons.
However, the balloons produced minimal interference with the conduct of the war, and once the nature of the weapons had been discovered, many were shot down by warplanes in mid-flight. A secret agreement was made with newspaper editors, so that reports of successful attacks were never published, and the Japanese could not find out how successful their balloons had been. After five months had passed without any news of damage appearing in the American news media, the Japanese became discouraged and discontinued their attacks. In reality, 285 balloon bomb incidents had been reported and some of the balloons reached as far as Michigan. One was found by a group of holidaymakers in the Oregon woods, all of whom were killed when they tried to move it and the anti-personnel mine exploded.