Secrets of the Dead: "World War Speed" ((Hoigggard. Films, Mentom Barraclough Carey, PBS International, 2019)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night [January 18] at 10 KPBS showed a rerun of a 2019 episode of the series Secrets of the Dead called “World War Speed,” which discussed the use of methamphetamines during World War II on both sides: the Germans who were mounting Blitzkrieg (“lightning war”) campaigns in the first year that allowed them to sweep over must of Europe, including France, and the Allies, particularly Britain and the U.S., who had to figure out how to stop them and ultimately reverse the tide of the war. The show was based on the research of a British World War II historian named James Holland, who’s written 30 books about various phases of the conflict and got interested in the use of drugs on both sides of the war when a German Heinkel bomber that had crashed in the fjords off the coast of Norway was recovered in 2012, 70 years after its last flight. The cold waters off the Norwegian coast did an excellent job preserving the contents, including the “survival packs” each crew member had available.Among the items the packs included were small arms, food packets and various stimulants, including chocolates laced with an unusually hight caffeine content and a form of amphetamine called “Pervitin.” Alas, by the time Holland got to see the material salvaged from this plane the Pervitin packets themselves had disintegrated – literally – from their exposure to room-temperature air after decades underwater, but fortunately the Norwegian salvage crew had photographed one of the packets.

Amphetamines had actually been invented before the war – Pervitin was an over-the-counter drug in Germany from its invention in 1938 and its Anglo-American counterpart, Benzedrine, was also an over-the-counter substance since it was first put on the market in 1935. (Judy Garland got hooked early on by her studio, MGM, which put her on the drug not, as is often assumed, to enable her to work a hectic schedule, but to keep her weight down. Twenty years later Elvis Presley would get hooked on the same drugs for the same reason.) Holland contacted Dr. Peter Steinkamp, a German physician and pharmacological historian, who was able to show him some surviving packets of Pervitin. Despite the official anti-drug stance of the Nazi government, Adolf Hitler actually seized on the idea of giving Pervitin and other amphetamines to his soldiers as a way of keeping them awake for long periods of time and also increasing their fearlessness and heightening their aggressiveness. Hither was widely believed to be on drugs himself (and it is known that he regularly took “Dr. Köster’s Anti-Gas Pills,” an anti-flatulence medication which contained sub-lethal amounts of cyanide) and his second-in-command, Hermann Göring, was addicted to heroin (though when he was held at Nuremberg for trial on war-crimes charges, he cleaned up. The rest of the Nuremberg defendants were happy to see Göring back to his old self in court, and though all the defendants were convicted and sentenced to death, Göring cheated the hangman by persuading a U.S. servicemember who was supposedly guarding him to sneak him a cyanide capsule so he could commit suicide and avoid the disgrace of being hanged.

During 1940 the soldiers in the German army, the Wehrmacht, were prescribed a total of 35 million doses of amphetamines, and both sides seized on them as a “miracle drug.” The Germans gave their soldiers and pilots doses of 10 milligrams each, the British Royal Air Force gave their airmen twice as much – 20 milligrans – and by 1944 the Germans were deploying miniature two-person submarines (mostly for espionage, though each mini-sub contained a single torpedo so it could be used as a weapon of war instead of just reconnaissance) in which the crew members were given 100-milligram doses – 10 times what their counterparts in the Wehrmacht were getting and five times what the RAF pilots were taking. Among the quirkier characters mentioned on the show were Dr. Glenn Whitfieid, who actually flew with the RAF on bombing missions inside Germany administering drugs to them as they flew and noting their reactions; and Hugh V. Wallace, pharmacological consultant to British Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, who took over command of the British forces in North Africa and figured out how to defeat his German opposite number, Erwin Rommel, and his notorious Afrika Korps. Drugs were a large part of the British successes against Rommel’s forces; apparently the hopped-up British tank crews (equipped with what were then the best tanks in the world, the U.S.-made Shermans) charged straight at sandbars that often concealed German anti-tank weapons because the drugs made them throw caution to the winds.

Holland and Dr. Jerry Pugh, oen of his medical consultants, got in a tank and showed just how vulnerable they were despite their massive size; not only were tank crews assaulted by the dust and fumes kicked up by the devices, they were sitting ducks for anti-tank artillery, particularly a German weapon that could either be aimed straight up as an anti-aircraft gun or forward as an anti-tank weapon. Holland and Pugh did a chilling experiment with crash-test dummies that showed how easily a tank crew could have been killed through a direct hit on their tank, particularly from shrapnel kicked up by the sheer force of the impact as the anti-tank shell hit them. The show, written and directed bu Steven Hoggard based on Holland’s researches, also covered the “before and after” history of amphetamines and profiled Dr. Edgar Jones, a British medical researcher immediately following World War I who was the first scientist to identify what was then called “shell shock” and is now known as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The episode mentioned the way amphetamines were marketed legally in the 1950’s as weight-loss aids as well as mood enhancers, and mentioned Marilyn Monroe’s well-known addiction to them as well as President John F. Kennedy – though it’s possible Kennedy didn’t actually know he was using them. Kennedy was a patient of the notorious New York-based Dr. Max Jacobson, nicknamed “Dr. Feelgood,” who became (in)famous for giving his celebrity clients injections he said were vitamin B-12 but really contained speed. This Secrets of the Dead episode was fascinating, especially in its documentation of the extent to which governments of all stripes have sought to use pharmacology to their advantage, despite the ill effects it might have on the people taking these drugs, often either without their knowledge, without their consent (let’s face it, if you’re a soldier you’re used to taking orders no matter what) or both.