360 Chapter Nine
of history, the irrationality of scientific and managerial rationality
applied to warfare was repeatedly demonstrated in ways more dra
matic than ever before. For with the discovery of atomic explosives,
human destructive power reached a new, suicidal level, surpassing
previous limits to all but unimaginable degree.
Welfare and warfare were also more closely linked than during
World War I. Advances in knowledge about human dietary require
ments made between the wars allowed food rationing to become sci
entific in the sense that vitamin, calorie, and protein requirements for
different categories of the population could be accurately calculated
and, within limits of supply, provided. In Great Britain, health actually
improved during the war, thanks largely to the rationing of food.
Skilled medical teams swiftly suppressed epidemics among civilian
populations, which on several occasions briefly threatened to interfere
with operational plans;^98 and military medicine made World War II far
safer for uniformed personnel outside the battle zone than had ever
been the case before. New drugs like sulfanilamide and penicillin, and
insecticides like DDT, reduced the risks, of infection and changed
whole environments—abruptly.
German slave labor camps and the extermination centers where
millions of Jews and other enemies of the Nazi regime were starved
and slaughtered constituted a macabre counterpart to the sort of wel
fare by administrative fiat that kept the labor forces of each of the
combatant nations in more or less optimal working condition. Ex
tremes of inhumanity, bureaucratized and rendered efficient by the
same methods used for managing other aspects of the war effort,
illustrate more poignantly than any other event of modern history the
moral ambivalence implicit in every increase in human power to man
age and control our natural and social environment. POW camps in
other countries, and wholesale displacements of distrusted ethnic
groups, such as occurred in both the United States and the Soviet
Union during the war, also exhibited the demonic side of the admin
istrative virtuosity that flourished so luxuriantly during the two wars of
the twentieth century.
Planning for peace, on the other hand, though confidently under
taken long before the fighting ended, met with only limited success.
An international relief agency, UNRRA, did forestall starvation in the
- A typhus epidemic in Naples in 1943 was nipped in the bud by wholesale de
lousing with DDT; and two outbreaks of bubonic plague in North Africa were no less
expeditiously snuffed out by Allied medical teams. Cf. Harry Wain, A History of Pre
ventive Medicine (Springfield, 111., 1970), p. 306.
