The day an oversight decides World War II

This statistic will prick up your ears: While the Allies lost 1 in 25 soldiers during World War II, the Germans lost 1 in 6. Also, many American and British soldiers returned from the front after just a few weeks due to an injury— most injured Germans never came back. Their wounds would often get infected, so even a grazing shot could result in a Wehrmacht soldier’s death— tens of thousands die like this, far from the front. Why was there a difference— one that could potentially decide the war? What made the Allied troops so resistant?

Unlike the Germans, they had possession of a substance during WWII that drastically reduced the danger of an infected wound: penicillin. Yet its discovery is based on pure chance, or more precisely: the slip-up of a Scottish scientist. On September 14, 1928, 11 years before the war begins, biologist Alexander Fleming forgets to wash a petri dish of bacteria before he goes on vacation. When he returns to his lab two weeks later, he sees a fungus has colonized the dish— and destroyed the bacteria. Fleming names the substance penicillin. It’s a turning point in modern medicine because the substance heralds the era of antibiotics. It can cure diseases that were previously fatal and save millions of lives. It may have even decided the outcome of World War II because in the 1940s only the Allies had access to this “miracle cure.” Without it, historians believe Allied troops couldn’t have stayed so strong for so long. If the Germans had gotten their hands on penicillin, Europe would probably have been a Nazi dictatorship for decades.