So much of middle class elite efforts in WWII semi-consciously revolved around ways to ensure that ‘others‘ fought so effectively in a brief high tech war that the middle class and their children would not end up inside a long drawn repeat of WWI’s bloody/muddy trench warfare.
Susan Lindee’s research into ‘experimental injury’ certainly shows how much war medicine was directed at keeping thse ‘others‘ alive and in effective combat.
There are many other examples.
Churchill signed off on a proposal that scarce penicillin in the Italy Campaign would not go to save dying soldiers — who would only end up discharged to Civvy Street anyway.
Rather it would go to heal elite combat forces who contracted (usually non-life threatening) VD , so as to return them to battle in weeks not the usual months.
*Anything to avoid having to draft people in the rear echelons into combat roles.*
The elite combat units were known to be particularly prone to contract VD - supposedly this confirmed their virility and virulence.
I think it was an honourable way to avoid death on the front lines for a few months. IE a way that untidy reality stomped on middle class plans for a rational war —- deliberately getting VD being a variant on traditional enlisted men’s gold-bricking !
Equally, the fierce stateside white male resistance to having women and blacks in the war factories was based, above all, on the certain knowledge that the men freed up by this effort would only go on towards making General Marshall’s planned original size for the Army a reality. (Big as the eventual WWII US Army seemed to be, the Battle of the Bulge showed how short-handed Marshall and his staff long feared it would be, once into heavy combat.)
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