In the WWII battle over Penicillin-For-All, few had the WWI combat experience that Martin Henry Dawson had

Mostly this because so few people on all sides survived warfare for very long !

For a start, as a soldier from a relatively wealthy nation, Dawson was very lucky not to have died from the many camp infections that killed more soldiers than bullets did and killed almost as many as artillery shells ever did.

Yes, he was seriously wounded twice - but luckily both were enough to take him out of battle during the times of the very heaviest casualty rates - but not so serious to kill him outright or cause him to die of a wound infection.

So, as a result :

Dawson was in the Medical Corp for about a year - in a large hospital near enough to the front to be possibly subjected to aerial bombing and gassing - but not really at serious risk from combat.

Martin Henry Dawson, Canadian Medical Corps 1916, note RED CROSS badge on arm

Then he was a junior Infantry officer  for about a year - a career path with super high death rates and  finally a junior Artillery officer for another year, out at the front scouting targets for his units mortars - almost as dangerous as leading an infantry charge.

But in three and a half years in the military, he probably was in serious combat for three and a half days.

But intense combat periods for an individual battalion and its soldiers were usually very short as well as very deadly.

But we mustn’t forget that merely going to and from the front lines and enduring a few weeks up at the front itself, in a trench, killed almost as many as did intense combat out in No Man’s Land - the daily death toll was much lower but the periods were much longer, so it all balanced out.

So Dawson was at serious risk of dying up at the front for between three and a half weeks and three and a half months in his career.

Not to mention this very little known fact : that probably the first ever people to die in an aerial bombing raid were Canadian soldiers supposedly safely at ease in a training camp in good ole Blighty - a camp that Dawson passed through.

Even the mere process of being transported from Canada to the UK to France meant off-duty soldiers were subject to  death by sinking by sub or warship or plane.

Dawson saw war upfront and personal in a way his opponents on the Penicillin-For-All front had not : some had skipped the war entirely, while others had cushy high end jobs back in civvyland, or in France well back from the front.

It is notable that his strongest friends and supporters tend to have had front line combat experience , on both sides of the war —- while his fiercest opponents, all nominally from the Allied side, had not.

I will put it bluntly : if you believe in Penicillin-For-All then you tend to help others selflessly, whenever they are in need - like when your nation is in dire need.

If you don’t believe in Penicillin-For-All, you tend to avoid helping others selflessly and instead always look out for Number One ....