War, war never changes, but every war in human history has changed a lot
about our living standards, our education, our knowledge of science, and overall development.
In our video about “What Medicine was Like during World War I”
we explored how modern medicine was fast-tracked during the great war.
Today we will be exploring how the second world war propelled those advances furthermore
and even tested our limits to the point that drugs became more dangerous than the war itself.
Welcome to Nutty History, and today we will be looking at what medicine was like during World War
2. Viewer discretion is advised for this video as some of this video may be offensive or disturbing.
We, the makers of this video, in no way support or condone the actions of the subjects featured.
With the possible exception of opium during the Opium Wars,
no drug has ever received a bigger stimulus from armed conflict as speed did in the second
world war. We have made a video about this subject in the past explaining how Pervitin,
a privately manufactured brand of speed, was the cause for both the rise and the fall of the German
army with almost the entirety of German forces being hooked on it for a certain period of time.
But using this so-called “Miraculous drug” to turn soldiers into Super Soldiers wasn’t a one-sided
affair. Medical officers on both sides distributed these speed stimulants to keep weary soldiers
awake for days at a time; to enable troops to perform longer under punishing conditions; and
to deaden the horrific and debilitating effects of shell shock and post-traumatic stress disorder.
Originally marketed as recreational pick-me-up tablets to rival soft drinks such as Coca-Cola,
Pervitin became popular in Germany and soon found its way into the Nazi Party.
By the time war commenced, Hitler himself was likely hooked on Pervitin and the Wehrmacht was
distributing the pill as a standard issue in German soldiers' ration. By 1940, Pervitin was
widely distributed among pilots in the Luftwaffe to prepare them for the rigors of long missions,
or to ward off sleeplessness and hunger if their planes were shot down. Under Pervitin’s influence,
German forces were zooming across Europe giving enemies no time to prepare,
a warfare strategy that was called Blitzkrieg. After British intelligence discovered Pervitin
tablets in a downed German plane, officials hatched a plan to fuel Allied soldiers with
a similar chemical advantage. They settled on the amp called Benzedrine in the form of tablets
and inhalants. It was officially sanctioned by Britain's Royal Air Force for use in 1941
and was meant to be supplied at the discretion of the medical officer attached to the squadron
or airbase. Under the orders of General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the American soldiers who landed
in North Africa in 1942, were also operating under the influence of speed. France on the other hand
was the first country to reject the dangerous drug and soon voices of concern were rising in Britain
as well. The biggest downside of speed was dependence and addiction of course. Providing
soldiers with daily doses inevitably made them, and their performance, dependent on speed.
When the supply dried up, shortage and withdrawal caused chaos among ranks of soldiers.
The symptoms like nausea, hallucinations, anxiety, depression, and diminution of cognitive capacities
were rampant! Especially in German camps. A lot of experts have considered Pervitin
as one of the major causes of the fall of the German army. The only good outcome of
the involvement of speed in the second world war was that the world became aware of the
side effects of the drugs and regulations were launched all over the globe against their use.
Military surgery was in dire need of reformulating its principles from the ground up
and to be reapplied to modern battlefield medicine. The goal was to reduce instances
of death, deformity, and loss of limbs to a level that was previously unattainable.
The medicine men of the era managed to do so by reorganizing the surgical services to be
adaptable to prevailing conditions and providing appropriate medical care to those who need it at
the earliest possible moments. During the war, surgery techniques such as removing dead tissue
resulted in fewer amputations than at any time. Sir Archibald McIndoe, a New Zealand-born surgeon,
found himself working with pilots horrifically burned in their planes
during the Battle of Britain. At that time he was the consulting surgeon at the now-famous
Blond-McIndoe Research Center based out of Queen Victoria Hospital in East Grinstead.
Planes used by the British Air force: Hurricanes and Spitfires were powered by powerful engines
that gave both planes the speed they needed during the battle. These engines were powered by aviation
fuel and both planes carried considerable quantities of this highly inflammable liquid.
If one of the fighters caught fire, which was a very common occurrence if hit by enemy fire,
the flames spread very quickly throughout the plane, causing dreadful injuries to a pilot.
In this case, those who survived were the unlucky ones as most likely they would end
up horrifically burned. McIndoe and his burn units are now famous in the pages of history
for pulling off miraculous work on these brave men. This was not an easy task, McIndoe’s work was
approved without any proper prior test on humans and it was a brand-new method of skin grafting.
Nobody was sure that McIndoe would succeed and these pilot patients were nicknamed Guinea Pigs
for being experimented on. McIndoe knew that he had to deal with deep burns and the early
grafts would be vital to preventing patients from suffering from loss of function as well
as disfigurement. Many of these patients had to spend a majority of time in hospitals as they
would require as many as THIRTY operations. One of the biggest challenges McIndoe had to face was
to learn that sometimes a patient’s body would reject graft due to the patient’s immune system
detecting that the antigens on the cells of the organ are different or not matched. But McIndoe
had no choice but to learn from the good and bad experiences on this job while performing surgeries
on The Guinea Pig Club. But with a surgical specialization such as in the case of McIndoe,
teamwork in medicine reached new heights with the creation of units to deal with
the special problems of injuries to different parts of the body.
However, not all advancement medicine saw during the second world war was the outcome
of a reaction to the war. It just helped to speed it up. For instance, advances in
the treatment of infection had occurred pre-war but with the turmoil of war, research pioneers
pushed forward to find solutions to very pressing problems. May and Baker manufactured M+B in 1936,
the first effective sulphonamides that could be used for a variety of infections.
Two particular variants, M+B 693 and its enhancement M+B 760 proved to be effective
against sore throats, pneumonia, and gonorrhea. With the advent of war, the demand for M+B sore
way higher than the peacetime especially after M+B saved Winston Churchill from pneumonia.
This was one of the cases where manufacturing in the pharmaceutical industry was put on a war
footing since World War One. This pressure further paved the way for the development of penicillin.
Penicillin was one of the earliest discovered and is the most widely used antibiotic agent. While
today, Sir Alexander Fleming is credited with its discovery, it was French medical student Ernest
Duchesne who first took note of the bacteria in 1896 but sadly his research was overlooked.
Antibiotics are natural substances that are released by bacteria and fungi into
their environment, as a means of inhibiting other organisms. One can think of it as chemical warfare
on a microscopic scale. Duchesne’s important discovery would have been lost in history if
Fleming had not observed a plate culture of Staphylococcus that had been contaminated
by a blue-green mold nearly three decades later in 1928. A trained biologist, Alexander
Fleming noted that the colonies of bacteria adjacent to the mold were being dissolved.
This piqued Fleming’s curiosity and he decided to grow the mold in pure culture. From that culture,
he was able to see that colonies of the bacterium Staphylococcus aureus were being destroyed by the
mold Penicillium notatum, proving, in principle at least, the existence of an antibacterial agent.
This proved Paul Vuillemin’s “Theory of Antibiosis” process true that life could
be used to destroy life. While penicillin had been discovered pre-war by Sir Alexander Fleming,
it took the war to force companies to develop a way of making the highly effective medicine
on an industrial scale. The soldiers who got wounded in the second world war could be saved
from infections thanks to Howard Florey and Ernst Chain who shared the Nobel Prize for Physiology
or Medicine in 1945 with Alexander Fleming. By the end of the war, the impact of penicillin
was so big that the research into penicillin resulted in the development of multiple strains.
But during the war, the mass production of penicillin was always of great importance
to the Allies yet it was also a difficult thing to achieve. Penicillin was used en masse after
D-Day on wounded men and it was found to be especially effective against gangrene.
Despite the changes in warfare, one problem that barely changed was the time lapse between
when a man was wounded and when he could be operated on by a surgeon. In the British Army,
the average time lapse was acknowledged to be 14 hours. Before the use of penicillin,
such a period allowed a wound to fester. With the use of a penicillin dressing, the chance
of a wound getting infected was vastly reduced and survival chances greatly increased. Interestingly,
Penicillin wasn’t the only medical wonder that was made possible by an accident during this time.
While wars between nations, communities, and ideologies can never be good,
there are some worthy causes for going to war. Cancer is one of them and we have been at war with
this disease since the second world war thanks to an accidental discovery with a tragic origin.
On December 2nd, 1943, German forces attacked the Italian port town of Bari. The onslaught cost at
least a thousand lives and sunk seventeen ships. One was carrying 2,000 bombs loaded with deadly
mustard gas. As sailors tried to swim away from the disaster towards the safety of the shores,
the gas, which was actually in liquid form, mixed with oil from the sinking tankers to
create a deadly slick that clung to sailors’ skin. Many who made it to
the local hospital were greeted with blankets to wrap around their poison-soaked clothing,
sealing their fate as they awaited care. The agony set in hours or days later. By dawn,
many patients had developed red, inflamed skin and blisters on their bodies the size of balloons.
Within 24 hours, the wards were full of men with eyes swollen shut. The doctors suspected some form
of chemical irritant, but the patients did not present typical symptoms or respond to standard
treatments. Stunned nurses found themselves surrounded by swollen, blistered patients,
temporarily blinded. Then without warning, patients in relatively good condition began dying.
These sudden, mysterious deaths left the doctors baffled and at a loss as to how to proceed.
Stewart Alexander, an American expert on chemical weapons, was called in to
explain the mysterious ailments plaguing the Bari survivors. The deadly cargo in Bari’s harbor was
a fiercely guarded secret. The Geneva Protocol had banned the use of chemical warfare in 1925,
but the shipment was there in case of the need to retaliate if Hitler would resort to chemical
weapons. Despite the British port authorities’ denials, Alexander quickly diagnosed mustard
gas exposure. On December 11th, 1943, Alexander informed headquarters of his initial findings.
Not only was the gas from the Allies’ own supply, but the victims labeled “Dermatitis N.Y.D.”,
as in “Not Yet Disclosed” had suffered prolonged exposure as a result of being immersed in a toxic
solution of mustard and oil floating on the surface of the harbor. While Alexander’s report
was immediately classified and a cover-up was launched, 83 of more than 617 casualties who
suffered from gas exposure at Bari perished. But not before Alexander made a startling discovery
of the toxic effects on white blood cells that he included in the report and caught the attention
of his boss in the Chemical Warfare Service, Colonel Cornelius P. “Dusty” Rhoads. Dr. Rhoads
was head of New York’s Memorial Hospital for the Treatment of Cancer and Allied Diseases in his
civilian life. As the cases at Bari demonstrated mustard’s suppressive effect on cell division
that suggested mustard might have the potential to be used to inhibit the fast-multiplying malignant
white cells that can invade and destroy healthy tissue. Based on Alexander’s landmark Bari report,
and a top-secret Yale University clinical trial that demonstrated that nitrogen mustard could
shrink tumors, Rhoads was convinced the harmful substance, in tiny, carefully calibrated doses,
could be used to heal. Rhoads then persuaded the General Motors tycoons Alfred P. Sloane
and Charles F. Kettering to fund the Sloan Kettering Institute for Cancer Research in
1945. The aim was to create a state-of-the-art laboratory, staffed by wartime scientists,
to synthesize new mustard derivatives and develop the first medicine for cancer known today
as chemotherapy. In 1949, Mustargen, or mechlorethamine, became the first experimental
chemotherapeutic drug approved by the FDA and was used successfully to treat non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
This triumph galvanized the search for other chemical agents
that specifically targeted malignant cells but spared normal ones, leading the American
Cancer Society to credit the Bari disaster with initiating “the age of cancer chemotherapy.”
Military medicine may have had to come up with new methods, techniques, and procedures to tackle
the new challenges posed by the second world war, but at its core, the objective was still
the same as in any other war. To conserve the strength and efficiency of the fighting forces
and keep as many men at as many guns for as many days as possible. The cataclysmic chain of events
that transpired between 1939 and 1945 involved a whole new range of not only weapons but the
nature of weapons that were introduced. Technical marvels of previous recent wars like machine guns,
submarines, fighter planes, tanks, etc. may have been introduced a couple of decades ago
but now they were perfected into unimaginable carnage machines. Battlefield medicine was pushed
to improve throughout the course of the war. In the beginning, only plasma was available as a
substitute for the loss of blood. By 1945, serum albumin had been developed, which is whole blood
that is rich in red blood cells and carries oxygen. That made Serum albumin considerably
more effective than plasma alone. Not only enemy action but diseases in trenches and camps also
rampantly claimed lives. In the tropical islands of the Pacific, malaria was a serious threat.
Service members received atabrine, a group of medications used to protect against malaria,
before going into affected areas. In fact, under the leadership of Neil Hamilton Fairley,
the first full-scale investigation was launched into mosquito bites using Australian soldier
volunteers. Fairley showed that one tablet per day of mepacrine could keep malaria at bay.
His work was matched by the Germans who produced atebrin; though German soldiers were not involved
in tropical warfare. Military personnel was also inoculated against smallpox, typhoid, tetanus,
cholera, typhus, yellow fever, and bubonic plague, depending on where they were sent.
Medics in World War II were the front line of battlefield medicine. In the American army,
a battalion of some 400 to 500 men typically would have about thirty medics or aidmen. Although
sometimes abrasion made that number much smaller. Their job was not to conduct extensive treatment
of the wounded but to stabilize them and prepare them for evacuation to the medical facilities in
the rear. Also, this was the first major war in which air evacuation of the wounded became
available. They were trained to stop bleeding, apply dressings, sprinkle the sulfa powder on
wounds as an antiseptic, and administer morphine as a sedative. More elaborate medical treatment
would wait. Tragically, the medics often had to make the decision of which wounded soldiers were
beyond help, and resolutely move on to the next wounded man. Medics from other allied nations,
and even Axis nations, performed the same basic functions and displayed comparable courage.
Other improvements during World War II included improved crash helmets,
safety belts, flak jackets, and other preventive measures. Because of improvements like these and
others, the survival rate for the wounded and ill climbed to 50% during World War II from
only 4% during World War I. But the research and advancements weren’t halted after the war either.
There were further developments during the Korean War and the Vietnam War. In more recent wars,
statistics show ninety-two percent chances for military men and women of making it home alive.
War has cost many lives but some believe it has also catapulted the advancement of
technology and medical practices. Tell us in the comments, which of these innovations and
discoveries surprised you the most. And as always thanks for watching Nutty History.