AUSCHWITZ & HIROSHIMA : the PLAN "B"s of MOdernity

Michael Marshall

Give credit where credit is due : MARTIN HENRY DAWSON planned, at the start of his war, to prove up his concept  that SBE can be permanently cured by the systemic (internal) use of naturally grown penicillin .

He fully accomplished this goal and in the process kick-started the wartime production of the world's best known, best loved, medicine.

He worked closely with some of the weakest members of the Family of Life, tiny unicelled fungi , to save the lives of some of the weakest members of the Family of Man : COmmensality at it its pioneering 1940s best.

But neither the Axis nor the Allied planned at the start of their wars to bring forth the delights of Auschwitz or Hiroshima.

Hitler had always wanted all the Jews out of Europe,yes, but expelled rather than all being killed in German factories of death.

But gassing them all became Job #1 for him when his PLAN A, Operation Barbarossa, failed in the winter of 1941-1942 because Russian mud proved a better soldier than German automotive skills.

 Killing all the Jews he could get his hands on became a sort of consolation prize, a PLAN B, when Hitler failed totally in his main, his real, objective --- taking and holding European Russia.

Similarly for FDR - he of the famous proclamation decrying the killing and burning to death of civilians in the comparatively small bombing raids of early WWII.

He and his scientists had a much better idea :
careful, precise, humane aiming via the top secret NORDEN BOMB SIGHT, accurate enough to "drop a bomb in a pickle barrel from 15,000 feet", it was said.

Designed precisely to destroy just the military target and  ensure no collateral damages among the nearby civilians.

But his Plan A was a total belly flop disaster.

Soon America was onto PLAN B.

Soon American bombers were trying very hard to burn out entire metropolitan cities , burning up everyone from granddaughter to grandmother, in the hopes the flames might also lick at the contents of the factories hidden somewhere inside that metropole.

Toyko, Dresden, Hiroshima --- a 100,000 dead and burnt, "just like that", in each city, in just one raid.

Hiroshima and Auschwitz were MOdernity's failures alright - morally - nearly everyone agrees on that.

But may I propose they were also MOdernity's technological
failures ---Plan B consolation prizes exalted by wartime propaganda as if they had been Plan A all along.

But we,we historians seventy years on, know better - don't we ?

With Hiroshima and Auschwitz as MOdernity's tarnished PLAN B consolation prizes and the unexpected triumph of natural penicillin's  PLAN A over MOdernity's failure to produce the much promised  synthetic penicillin, little wonder that COmmensality's star was on the rise in late1945.....