In the end, the Borough of Brooklyn (NYC) became home to both : the Iowa class of battleships and the home of most of the war's penicillin.
But it had been a near run thing ; this battle over the moral soul of Brooklyn.
After all, from the beginning of the war, the leaders of the Great Powers (Churchill, FDR,Tojo,Stalin and Hitler) were determined to show the world what the greatest entities on Earth could do, if they set their mind to it.
WWII is proof that they succeeded in spades .
Showing posts with label d-day. Show all posts
Showing posts with label d-day. Show all posts
Wednesday, May 22, 2013
Wednesday, January 30, 2013
Wartime penicillin was "A Genie of Universal Healing", trapped by Florey in a military bottle...
... a Genie intended to remain secret, military and patented for the duration of the war, until others --- led by Henry Dawson --- fought to set it free to benefit all humanity.
Like the war itself, wartime penicillin was not a single event, as we tend to treat it today, but a six year long, world-wide process - a conflict in fact.
A conflict between the much more powerful and much more numerous Hares, led by Florey, who sought to seal off penicillin in many different senses of that phrase.
The small band of Tortoises , led by Dawson, sought to make penicillin free to mix , again in many different senses of that phrase.
The Hares had all the early running from 1939 till 1944, when the Tortoises suddenly appeared out of the dust , like the US Seventh Cavalry, to save the medical establishment's bacon just moments before the D-Day beaches became red with blood .....
Like the war itself, wartime penicillin was not a single event, as we tend to treat it today, but a six year long, world-wide process - a conflict in fact.
A conflict between the much more powerful and much more numerous Hares, led by Florey, who sought to seal off penicillin in many different senses of that phrase.
The small band of Tortoises , led by Dawson, sought to make penicillin free to mix , again in many different senses of that phrase.
The Hares had all the early running from 1939 till 1944, when the Tortoises suddenly appeared out of the dust , like the US Seventh Cavalry, to save the medical establishment's bacon just moments before the D-Day beaches became red with blood .....
Friday, January 18, 2013
The morality of good - temporary - military secrets and bad - semipermanent - military secrets
There is little morally to fear for all of us agreeing to keep traditional (and temporary) military secrets such as all troop movement before the planned big invasion.
Merck has credible excuses for being beaten on D-Day penicillin by Pfizer - but none whatsoever for being crushed by Commercial Solvent
Merck, the OSRD, Florey's Oxford team (all part of the synthetic penicillin obsession) continue to have many defenders among academia.
Thursday, January 17, 2013
Howard Florey, Henry Dawson,Penicillin and the NEW YORK TIMES : how then-tiny Pfizer became the biggest drug company in the world
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| "Giant Germicide" article changed history ... |
Thursday, October 4, 2012
"Sending in the Shovels" : June 6th 1944
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| How Omaha got its "P" |
Wednesday, May 9, 2012
NEWTONIAN MODERNITY dies June 6th 1944, in hail of hand grenades ...
The most effective, the most pinpoint accurate, guided missiles of all WWII ?
The bog-common hand grenade.
And usually thrown by a man thought too stupid, too small, too unhealthy to join the real armed forces: which is why he ended up in the infantry as an MOS 745, aka the bog-ordinary rifleman.
Now he was lobbing that grenade from 10 or 20 feet away , into a MG (machine gun) emplacement, or a concrete pillbox, or down the barrel of a big artillery piece --- and winning the battle for Omaha Beach, turning the potential D-Day disaster into ultimate victory.
More than just a few German and foreign conscripts died in those emplacements on that day: Newtonian Modernity also suffered a grievous blow from which it never recovered.
For weeks earlier and on that day itself, the biggest guns in the Allied navy and the biggest bomber fleets in the Allied air forces, had tried and tried to shut down those emplacements with massive blasts of HE (high explosives) delivered via Newtonian ballistics.
In Newtonian theory (the then dominant paradigm to explain the entire world) it was felt that given enough accurate information, one could correct point and elevate a gun at a distant target, press the 'trigger' and walk away : 'fire and forget'.
If the math was right the shell would wing its way unerringly to the target.
But out in the real world, the problem proves to be a 'many body problem' - one that no amount of Newton will resolve.
The most sophisticated use of Newtonian math and the best in analog computers was on board those battleships and bombers : fire control equipment from famous names like Norden and Sperry.
But nothing worked - both the destructive power of high explosives and the accuracy of Newtonian fire control was highly exaggerated and knowingly oversold.
Today we do have smart bombs and guided missiles but they do not make their way to the target accurately via Newton's math.
No, all their guiding GPS signals are only rendered accurate when Quantum mechanics and Relativity are used to correct their raw data.
But back to 1944: in the end, it took brave infantrymen like Captain Joe Dawson ( no relation except perhaps spiritually to former infantryman Lt Martin Henry Dawson) who had to climb the cliffs above the bloody sand and take out the deadly machine gunners (often just single individuals like the famous Heinrich Severloh) and save the situation.
So, it was down to this : forget the hundreds of thousands of men and the biggest military machines money and science could create trying - via Newton - to take out the D-Day German coastal defences.
Instead, the entire Allied invasion of Europe was reduced to a 'High Noon' type duel battle between a lone German with a machine gun and a lone American with a hand grenade.
If that lone German succeeded long enough in holding the Americans to the beach, German tanks might arrive to drive them off the beach altogether, and thus divide the united Allied beachhead into little pieces and then proceed to conquer it piece by piece - a classic German tactic.
But if the lone American lobbed his grenade just right, the MG fire would cease and the men could move off the beach and go a few miles inland, giving a depth of defence sufficient to blunt any later German armoured counterattack.
D-Day turned out to be a low tech victory in a war that was claimed above all to be a high tech scientific war : don't believe the liars and deniers who say otherwise.
They outa make a movie out of the duel : Dawson versus Severloh for the Fate of the Earth --- except who in Hollywood would ever buy the script --- it seems too improbable.
Once again, fact beggars fiction...
The bog-common hand grenade.
And usually thrown by a man thought too stupid, too small, too unhealthy to join the real armed forces: which is why he ended up in the infantry as an MOS 745, aka the bog-ordinary rifleman.
Now he was lobbing that grenade from 10 or 20 feet away , into a MG (machine gun) emplacement, or a concrete pillbox, or down the barrel of a big artillery piece --- and winning the battle for Omaha Beach, turning the potential D-Day disaster into ultimate victory.
More than just a few German and foreign conscripts died in those emplacements on that day: Newtonian Modernity also suffered a grievous blow from which it never recovered.
For weeks earlier and on that day itself, the biggest guns in the Allied navy and the biggest bomber fleets in the Allied air forces, had tried and tried to shut down those emplacements with massive blasts of HE (high explosives) delivered via Newtonian ballistics.
In Newtonian theory (the then dominant paradigm to explain the entire world) it was felt that given enough accurate information, one could correct point and elevate a gun at a distant target, press the 'trigger' and walk away : 'fire and forget'.
If the math was right the shell would wing its way unerringly to the target.
But out in the real world, the problem proves to be a 'many body problem' - one that no amount of Newton will resolve.
The most sophisticated use of Newtonian math and the best in analog computers was on board those battleships and bombers : fire control equipment from famous names like Norden and Sperry.
But nothing worked - both the destructive power of high explosives and the accuracy of Newtonian fire control was highly exaggerated and knowingly oversold.
Today we do have smart bombs and guided missiles but they do not make their way to the target accurately via Newton's math.
No, all their guiding GPS signals are only rendered accurate when Quantum mechanics and Relativity are used to correct their raw data.
But back to 1944: in the end, it took brave infantrymen like Captain Joe Dawson ( no relation except perhaps spiritually to former infantryman Lt Martin Henry Dawson) who had to climb the cliffs above the bloody sand and take out the deadly machine gunners (often just single individuals like the famous Heinrich Severloh) and save the situation.
So, it was down to this : forget the hundreds of thousands of men and the biggest military machines money and science could create trying - via Newton - to take out the D-Day German coastal defences.
Instead, the entire Allied invasion of Europe was reduced to a 'High Noon' type duel battle between a lone German with a machine gun and a lone American with a hand grenade.
If that lone German succeeded long enough in holding the Americans to the beach, German tanks might arrive to drive them off the beach altogether, and thus divide the united Allied beachhead into little pieces and then proceed to conquer it piece by piece - a classic German tactic.
But if the lone American lobbed his grenade just right, the MG fire would cease and the men could move off the beach and go a few miles inland, giving a depth of defence sufficient to blunt any later German armoured counterattack.
D-Day turned out to be a low tech victory in a war that was claimed above all to be a high tech scientific war : don't believe the liars and deniers who say otherwise.
They outa make a movie out of the duel : Dawson versus Severloh for the Fate of the Earth --- except who in Hollywood would ever buy the script --- it seems too improbable.
Once again, fact beggars fiction...
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