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 .
Opposing them, Dr (Martin) Henry Dawson was also determined to show the world something too.
In this case, just what the world's smallest,weakest entities (cells of penicillium fungi) were also capable of.
So, as part of that Great Power display of massive size and killing force, the USA had commissioned the last series of battleships it ever built : heavily gunned, heavily armoured and extremely fast.
No war machine has ever been built that was better at going in, taking huge punishment, and still delivering lethal blows in return.
If the editors of machine-porn publications like Popular Mechanics are capable of having wet dreams, the Iowa class battleships were what they (and their mostly male readers) had wet dreams over.
The Iowa class was an extremely potent blend of what a battleship needs to shine and the design (now 75 years old) must have worked because WWII-built ships of that class remain to this day , still in reserve, ready to go back in action.
The Brooklyn Naval Yard built the two most famous, the USS Iowa itself and the USS Missouri ("Big Mo") --- they took 70,000 people in the huge yard several years to do so, working around the clock.
It was the war-related work that the Borough of Brooklyn liked best to be remembered for.
But in a small discarded ice-making plant in another less well known part of the Borough, another item of war was made and shipped all over the world - spreading the good word about Brooklyn in places the USS Iowa class couldn't even think of going.
On a corner of Marcy Avenue was a improvised plant that the then tiny Charles Pfizer Company cobbled together to make naturally-made penicillin (penicillin made by Dawson's little fungi cells) as fast as Pfizer could, as hard as Pfizer could, starting in March 1944.
By June 6th of that same year, natural penicillin underwent its first mass clinical trials : a baptism literally of fire.
Because 80% of the penicillin that came ashore on the Normandy beaches that day was made in the Pfizer Marcy Avenue ice plant.
And Pfizer's naturally-made penicillin continued to be the largest single source of that life saving medicine, around the world, for the remainder of the war.
It doesn't take much natural penicillin to save a life in 1944 - a gram will do nicely - and a tiny glass ampoule, the world's smallest lifesaver, will easily hold it.
By contrast, a full loaded USS Iowa weighed 25 billion grams.
From his luxury apartment high above the exclusive Prospect Slopes area of Brooklyn, the manufacturing head of Pfizer, John L Smith, could easily see the building of the USS Iowa and USS Missouri .
Perhaps as a result he felt that Brooklyn was pulling more than its weight in the effort to stop Hitler and Tojo.
A cautious, frugal man, he wasn't about to bet the shop against the best brains in the world drug industry by producing massive amounts of natural penicillin when the smart money said cheaper synthetic penicillin was only another test tube away.
Sure Henry Dawson was always on his case, urging him to mass produce natural penicillin now, because a ampoule in the doctor's hand was worth a million in the mind of some drug company chemist.
"People are dying needlessly, daily, all over the world because the sulfa drugs are meeting more and more bacterial resistance and there will never be anymore new sulfas in the pipeline."
But John L long resisted (even if his wife was perhaps more open to Dawson's appeal) .
Maybe Smith was feeling that Pfizer had already done enough for the boys overseas, because didn't the firm's exclusive citric acid fuel the cold soda pops that all the overseas GIs, wounded or healthy, craved so avidly?
Soda pops hit the spot for sure, but to a GI dying of blood poisoning, only penicillin could really save their lives.
What if Smith's sole surviving daughter shipped out as a nurse and got seriously ill ?
Would she be grateful to her dad for providing the cold soda pop that eased her dying moments or would she have preferred the penicillin that could have saved her life, if only her father had been more decisive?
But nothing Dawson said seemed to have cut much ice with Smith.
Not until the plight of a dying two year old , saved by penicillin, touched Smith's heart, along with the rest of the world, in mid-August 1943.
Perhaps the crisis for the two parents of young Patty Malone reminded Mr and Mrs Smith all too vividly of the similar agony they went through a dozen years earlier with their first daughter, who died from a disease that penicillin could have saved her from.
Something must have clicked in the soul of John L, because despite strong reports that synthetic penicillin actually was 'just around the corner' this time, Smith suddenly committed Pfizer to an all out effort to mass produce natural penicillin both for the boys overseas by D-Day and for those dying back home for lack of it.
Smith's beloved Dodgers went on to chokedlike never before, during that summer of 1944, but Brooklyn (the Borough) scored big in its own extended road trip.
'Knocked them alive' in fact, in places like Omaha, Utah, Juno, Silver and Gold ....
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.
By their very nature, such secrets are no longer a secret two or three days into battle.
But Enigma code-breaking, The (atomic) Bomb, the Proximity Fuse and Wartime Penicillin were all military secrets with huge moral costs attached.
Enigma was only kept secret for so long by sometimes deliberately not revealing to the effected military units the grim fate before them that the code-breaking revealed --- all in an attempt to keep the code-breaking secret from the enemy long enough for code-breaking to reveal (and foil) huge plans by the enemy.
This moral dilemma has kept the Enigma industry churning out lots of books and movies, 75 years after the events.
Proximity fuses were so wonderful that we couldn't use them against the Germans, convince they would find one unexploded and quickly duplicate it and then use it to horrible effect against our bomber streams because it was actually more useful to them than to us.
This is the same dilemma that the Germans faced about the nerve gas they invented, because they rightly feared we could make better use of it than they could --- so they never used it and kept it secret.
(At least the Germans didn't put much effort into producing nerve gas because it more or less fell into their laps- while proximity fuses were one of the single biggest scientific and engineering effort of the entire war - in my view, a mammoth mis-allocation of scarce war resources.)
The Atomic Bomb could not remain a 'secret' for very long once it was used, because it was seemingly so war-endingly successfully.
Hence nations big enough to afford it simply felt they had to pour immense amounts of money, expertise and national willpower into duplicating what the Americans had hoped to keep secret for at least a generation.
The entire American civic culture changed, for the worse, when the American atomic establishment decided atomic information could actually be "born secret and kept secret government property", even at the moment a new concept first formed in a scientist's mind !
What really kept the Bomb a 'secret' , quote unquote , is the expense and complexity of making it consistently successfully.
Everyone on Earth had heard of The Bomb, knew what it did , what it was made up and even basically how it worked : the American government had showed them all this in the public Smythe Report.
But a successful Bomb, like the Devil , was in the details ; these were complicated, expensive and remained secret to all but the best foreign spies.
And this - presumably - was how the Allies expected to keep the "Penicillin Secret" once they unleashed it as a secret medicine weapon only for Allied frontline casualties on D-Day (if Patty Malone and that damned beta-lactam ring hadn't spoiled the plan).
Who could really expect to keep the good news about penicillin's life-saving powers away from the general public (aka the relatives of frontline troops), as soon as millions of Allied casualties were coming back home alive, while enemy POWs from the same battle were dying like flies ?
No, like The Bomb, penicillin would quickly become uniquely famous all around the world and only remain a 'secret', quote unquote, because the Allied scientific elite figured that the information as how to make it could remain secret from the enemy for at least a year, because it was complex and expensive.
Remember, even the atomic bomb secret was broken in the end, but only about six years after it became first known to Britain, France and Russia that an A-Bomb would likely work.
That's the length of the entire (long drawn-out) WWII.
So a permanent military secret kept for as short a time as a year long, might still be viewed as long enough to be militarily effective.
But penicillin was no where as complex or as expensive as proximity fuses or nuclear weapons : in fact, it is a piece of cake for every and any hospital bacteriology lab to make safely and cheaply, in amounts sufficient to save the lives of all the people in that hospital dying of infections no other medication could help.
In normal situations, those really are not large numbers, spread over an entire year and over an entire country: in peacetime, there needn't ever be a penicillin crisis, for least for the dying of infections would get it when they really needed it.
But a huge invasion like D-Day requires an extraordinary amount of penicillin over a few days or weeks, in a small area , under fluid combat conditions that obviously doesn't allow much in the way of crude penicillin-making labs in sedate base hospitals.
So war weapon (frontline battle) penicillin really did require a lots of stable penicillin in a dry power, to be useful.
But in fact, even without Patty Malone to tip them off, as soon as word of penicillin great success got about, the enemy would start making it by the crude means known in the vast amount of public literature on penicillin.
But the cost of keeping penicillin a non-public success before unleashing it on D-Day, was in denying it for civilians in Allied,Neutral, Occupied and Enemy countries for years and in fact, in denying it to ordinary soldiers dying of infections penicillin could cure, again between 1940 and 1944.
That is literally millions of needless deaths --- at least as much as the Jewish Holocaust.
It was and is , a horrific moral crime, a deliberate crime promoted by doctors.
And it is why I write about wartime penicillin , 75 years after its events...
By their very nature, such secrets are no longer a secret two or three days into battle.
But Enigma code-breaking, The (atomic) Bomb, the Proximity Fuse and Wartime Penicillin were all military secrets with huge moral costs attached.
Enigma was only kept secret for so long by sometimes deliberately not revealing to the effected military units the grim fate before them that the code-breaking revealed --- all in an attempt to keep the code-breaking secret from the enemy long enough for code-breaking to reveal (and foil) huge plans by the enemy.
This moral dilemma has kept the Enigma industry churning out lots of books and movies, 75 years after the events.
Proximity fuses were so wonderful that we couldn't use them against the Germans, convince they would find one unexploded and quickly duplicate it and then use it to horrible effect against our bomber streams because it was actually more useful to them than to us.
This is the same dilemma that the Germans faced about the nerve gas they invented, because they rightly feared we could make better use of it than they could --- so they never used it and kept it secret.
(At least the Germans didn't put much effort into producing nerve gas because it more or less fell into their laps- while proximity fuses were one of the single biggest scientific and engineering effort of the entire war - in my view, a mammoth mis-allocation of scarce war resources.)
The Atomic Bomb could not remain a 'secret' for very long once it was used, because it was seemingly so war-endingly successfully.
Hence nations big enough to afford it simply felt they had to pour immense amounts of money, expertise and national willpower into duplicating what the Americans had hoped to keep secret for at least a generation.
The entire American civic culture changed, for the worse, when the American atomic establishment decided atomic information could actually be "born secret and kept secret government property", even at the moment a new concept first formed in a scientist's mind !
What really kept the Bomb a 'secret' , quote unquote , is the expense and complexity of making it consistently successfully.
Everyone on Earth had heard of The Bomb, knew what it did , what it was made up and even basically how it worked : the American government had showed them all this in the public Smythe Report.
But a successful Bomb, like the Devil , was in the details ; these were complicated, expensive and remained secret to all but the best foreign spies.
And this - presumably - was how the Allies expected to keep the "Penicillin Secret" once they unleashed it as a secret medicine weapon only for Allied frontline casualties on D-Day (if Patty Malone and that damned beta-lactam ring hadn't spoiled the plan).
Who could really expect to keep the good news about penicillin's life-saving powers away from the general public (aka the relatives of frontline troops), as soon as millions of Allied casualties were coming back home alive, while enemy POWs from the same battle were dying like flies ?
No, like The Bomb, penicillin would quickly become uniquely famous all around the world and only remain a 'secret', quote unquote, because the Allied scientific elite figured that the information as how to make it could remain secret from the enemy for at least a year, because it was complex and expensive.
Remember, even the atomic bomb secret was broken in the end, but only about six years after it became first known to Britain, France and Russia that an A-Bomb would likely work.
That's the length of the entire (long drawn-out) WWII.
So a permanent military secret kept for as short a time as a year long, might still be viewed as long enough to be militarily effective.
But penicillin was no where as complex or as expensive as proximity fuses or nuclear weapons : in fact, it is a piece of cake for every and any hospital bacteriology lab to make safely and cheaply, in amounts sufficient to save the lives of all the people in that hospital dying of infections no other medication could help.
In normal situations, those really are not large numbers, spread over an entire year and over an entire country: in peacetime, there needn't ever be a penicillin crisis, for least for the dying of infections would get it when they really needed it.
But a huge invasion like D-Day requires an extraordinary amount of penicillin over a few days or weeks, in a small area , under fluid combat conditions that obviously doesn't allow much in the way of crude penicillin-making labs in sedate base hospitals.
So war weapon (frontline battle) penicillin really did require a lots of stable penicillin in a dry power, to be useful.
But in fact, even without Patty Malone to tip them off, as soon as word of penicillin great success got about, the enemy would start making it by the crude means known in the vast amount of public literature on penicillin.
But the cost of keeping penicillin a non-public success before unleashing it on D-Day, was in denying it for civilians in Allied,Neutral, Occupied and Enemy countries for years and in fact, in denying it to ordinary soldiers dying of infections penicillin could cure, again between 1940 and 1944.
That is literally millions of needless deaths --- at least as much as the Jewish Holocaust.
It was and is , a horrific moral crime, a deliberate crime promoted by doctors.
And it is why I write about wartime penicillin , 75 years after its events...
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.
Yes, one academic excuse goes, yes Merck failed to deliver much penicillin to the D-Day beaches - that was left to Pfizer, which had been a major partner of Merck and Squibb in the three year long effort to produce commercial amounts of penicillin.
But, the excuse went, Pfizer had 20 years of highly successful fermentation experience before late 1941and the commercial penicillin project's beginnings.
But how then to explain the huge success of Commercial Solvents in producing medical grade penicillin from a cold start in January 1944 to levels twice that of Merck in just four months and then levels six or seven times higher than Merck in just three more months after that?
True, Commercial Solvent had 30 years of success in industrial grade fermentation in making bulk acetone but had never done anything even remote to pharmaceutical levels of purity and cleanliness.
But there it was - passing an increasingly demanding FDA testing requirements with its tens of billions of units of injectable penicillin.
Clearly, the supposedly-arcane craft could be learned fairly quickly, if a corporate culture demanded it.
Even Squibb redeemed itself by well beating Merck's output, by late 1944 .
Merck lost the race for one reason only : hubris.
It thought that since it had synthesized a few 300 molecular weight molecules that all 300 weight biological molecules were a piece of cake.
Tell that to penicillin with a weight of 334 and still not commercially synthesized.
Or tell it to quinine , molecular weight 324, and 200 years after Man-The-Almighty first started to synthesize it, still without a commercially viable synthesis technique at hand....
Yes, one academic excuse goes, yes Merck failed to deliver much penicillin to the D-Day beaches - that was left to Pfizer, which had been a major partner of Merck and Squibb in the three year long effort to produce commercial amounts of penicillin.
But, the excuse went, Pfizer had 20 years of highly successful fermentation experience before late 1941and the commercial penicillin project's beginnings.
But how then to explain the huge success of Commercial Solvents in producing medical grade penicillin from a cold start in January 1944 to levels twice that of Merck in just four months and then levels six or seven times higher than Merck in just three more months after that?
True, Commercial Solvent had 30 years of success in industrial grade fermentation in making bulk acetone but had never done anything even remote to pharmaceutical levels of purity and cleanliness.
But there it was - passing an increasingly demanding FDA testing requirements with its tens of billions of units of injectable penicillin.
Clearly, the supposedly-arcane craft could be learned fairly quickly, if a corporate culture demanded it.
Even Squibb redeemed itself by well beating Merck's output, by late 1944 .
Merck lost the race for one reason only : hubris.
It thought that since it had synthesized a few 300 molecular weight molecules that all 300 weight biological molecules were a piece of cake.
Tell that to penicillin with a weight of 334 and still not commercially synthesized.
Or tell it to quinine , molecular weight 324, and 200 years after Man-The-Almighty first started to synthesize it, still without a commercially viable synthesis technique at hand....
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
 |
| "Giant Germicide" article changed history ... |
Since publicity and top secret war weapons don't mix , this explains why when the New York Times sought to interview him upon his arrival on July 3rd 1941, fresh off the Pan Am Clipper, he curtly declined their kind offer and said nothing at all.
(Imagine : the most influential newspaper in the world offering to be your conduit for telling all of America's political and business leaders about penicillin's potential and you toss it aside like an used condom ! )
Perhaps as a result of his playing hard to get, Florey never did get the kilogram of pure penicillin that he sought so hard on this trip, because he had no public pressure backing his private appeal.
By way of contrast, Dr Henry Dawson did take his belief in penicillin's "unlimited potential" (his words) to a huge public medical conflab, attended by many of the world's science and health journalists, and got lots of publicity (as far away as South Africa) about his expansive belief in penicillin.
The New York Times article that changed history ...
Among the media who reported Dawson's comments was the New York Times , which splashed his optimistic views ("Giant Germicide") near the business section of the paper.
Next morning, some busy-- important---executive at then-tiny Pfizer chanced to read about a potential drug he had never heard of over his breakfast table ..... and the rest is history.
That same history reminds us that 90% of the penicillin that landed on the D-Day beaches in the first crucial mass clinical trial of penicillin came from Pfizer and Pfizer alone.
The one drug company in America that Florey had NOT visited on his search for his kilo.
The one drug company that Dawson did approach, ironically because he was merely seeking to help the churlish Florey.
So : "the stone the builder rejected", redeemed by an article in the New York Times.
That is the power of journalism, of publicity and of the New York Times.....
Thursday, October 4, 2012
"Sending in the Shovels" : June 6th 1944
 |
| How Omaha got its "P" |
But as usual Bullshit talks and Reality walks as the two "S"s both failed spectacularly to deliver.
So it was then that early in the morning of June 6th 1944, a hundred thousand shivering infantry with low-tech rifles and a hundred thousand doses of low tech natural penicillin were bobbing about off the beaches of Normandy, about to do the job right.
Once again at the last minute , to snatch low tech victory from the jaws of high tech defeat, the wise and the mighty were reduced to "sending in the shovels".
Shades of the supposed "high tech" led victory of Vimy Ridge...
This may not the history of WWII that you are used to hearing - because it is not really true that only the victors write history : in reality it is often powerful victors with something to hide, with something to spin, that end up writing the big histories: Whig History.
A special kind of Whig History, history re-written with an unique type of hindsight, so that it appears that all events on the victor's side of the war worked together to bring the war to the conclusion that actually happened.
D-Day then not just happened (hard to deny something as big as that anyway !) but was always planned to have happened, and happen when it did and as it did.
But while WWII was Modernity's very own war , at last, it turned out to be the Nadir of Modernity as well.
Because D-Day and the infantry-led conquest of Hitler's Germany, like the mass production of cheap natural penicillin , like the "non-precision" bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki , weren't supposed to happen.
They were , all three , low tech "Plan B"s ,to cover-up the failure of three of the Allies' high tech "Plan A"s.......
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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