General DDT

Everyone has heard of the greatest Russian general of all time—General January.  And I have written several times about how General Yellow Fever dramatically changed the course of American history.  Today, I have an addition to the list, though this “general” had a relatively short career:  General DDT.

Before we get into what happened in the past, it is important to note that while DDT (dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane) was effective in controlling disease-carrying insects, its long-term environmental and health impacts led to its eventual restriction and discontinuation in many countries. Concerns over its persistence in the environment, toxicity to non-target organisms, and its potential harm to human health led to the development of alternative insecticides and a shift towards safer pest management strategies.  General DDT was very effective for a while, then was permanently (and justifiably) retired from active duty.

Throughout 1943, Allied bombing pounded the Italian city of Naples, part of the effort to weaken the Nazi defenses before General Mark Clark’s forces could move up the peninsula and take the city from the Germans.  As the Allied offensive stalled, the bombing continued, eventually making the city the most heavily bombed area in Italy.  Perhaps because the Germans were obviously unsuccessful in preventing the bombing, Naples was the first major Italian city to rebel against the Nazi occupation.

The civilians protested en mass, despite frequent arrests and brutal retaliation.  At one point, the German Army even fired indiscriminately into crowds.  The result was an ever more aggressive, armed resistance movement, with some of the partisans as young as nine years old battling the Nazi Army in the streets of the ancient city.

While the resistance was violent, this disorganized response by poorly armed civilians could not pose a serious threat to the German Army, but it was sufficient to enrage the soldiers against these erstwhile allies.  Without orders from Berlin, the Nazis burned down the town’s libraries and archives, destroying centuries of priceless records (including some of the papers of Thomas Aquinas, who had once taught at the University of Naples).

Then, in what can only be called a depraved criminal act under any definition of the laws concerning warfare, the Germans set about systematically blowing up the city’s water supply and sewage systems.  As the aqueducts and reservoirs were destroyed, the Nazis pulled out of the town in September 1943, confident that the lethal results of the destruction would continue long after their departure. 

As the German Army moved north, they moved through the Pontine Marshes just south of Rome.  Until shortly before the war, this marsh had been almost uninhabitable because of the prevalence of mosquito-borne diseases.  Shortly before the war, Benito Mussolini had been successful in draining the swamps, making the land habitable.  (It’s an urban legend that Mussolini made the Italian trains run on time, but the evil putz did drain that swamp.)  The Nazi army blew up the protective dikes and reflooded the swamp so that it was immediately reclaimed by mosquitoes.  This posed a real danger to the advancing American troops since throughout the Italian campaign, diseases had killed more American troops than enemy action had.

Just as the Master Race had intended, epidemics of typhus and cholera soon broke out in the city of over a million people.  Thousands of people were affected because of the lack of sanitation and the spread of body lice, with one in four residents succumbing to the disease.  For the first time in the hundreds of years since the time of the Black Death, carts again removed corpses of the dead that were stacked in the streets.

Not knowing how to fight this type of enemy, General Dwight Eisenhower cabled Washington for assistance in saving the people of Naples.  Luckily, the War Department had a secret weapon.

In the early days of the war, particularly at the Battle of Guadalcanal, the Marines were losing more men to malaria than to enemy action.  At one point, the entire Marine 1st Division was judged unfit for combat duty because of mosquito-borne diseases.   The military Office of Scientific Research and Development awarded large contracts to chemical companies to begin production of the newly developed insecticide, and large quantities were rushed to the American army in Italy.

Infantry “delousing units” were sent into Italian towns to dust the populace with DDT.  At the same time, trucks were equipped to spread the dust as they drove through the streets of the towns and cities.  The swamps were dusted from the air.  The effects were immediate.  Not only did the epidemics in Naples immediately stop, but the mosquitoes in the Pontine Swamp were eliminated.  

As the Allied armies moved across Europe, they encountered millions of victims of Nazi “ecological aggression”:  Concentration camp survivors, starving civilians forced to live under the harsh conditions of occupation, slave laborers, prisoners of war, and civilians living in the remains of towns whose infrastructure had been destroyed by combat.  But, as the War Department proudly proclaimed, “DDT marches with the army.”  Exactly how many lives the pesticide saved can never be determined, but during World War II alone, it must be in the millions.

It was for this reason that Paul Muller, the Swiss scientist who developed DDT, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1948.  It would have been equally justified if he had been awarded a Nobel Peace Prize.

Lest anyone think that the benefits of DDT stopped when the war stopped, I should include the results of its postwar use in the American South.  In the years immediately preceding World War II, the yearly number of cases of malaria there was between one and six million, with the differences in numbers being due to the varying weather conditions year to year.  In the years following the war, American health authorities used the pesticide as aggressively as it had been used on the Italian peninsula.  

As a result of this aggressive prevention policy, only two Americans caught malaria in 1952.