No Such Thing As A Nights Sleep

Section I: Sleep, Monsters, and Hot Chocolate
ALAN DERICKSON
“No Such Thing as a Night's Sleep”:

The Embattled Sleep of American Fighting Men
from World War II to the Present
Abstract
This project aims to contribute to our understanding of the fraught relations of
sleep and wakefulness in late modern America. The essay argues that the experi-
ence of sleep loss has been a widely prevalent phenomenon within the ranks of the
modern American military. The study focuses on the Second World War, an
inflection point in the trend toward sustained and continuous operations and other
marathon activities. The nature of much combat in that global conflict demanded
of fighting men unprecedented levels of stamina and resiliency, levels which often
exceeded the limits of human endurance in terms of maintaining alertness and even
consciousness. Under considerable pressure to perform and commonly faced with
inhospitable conditions for obtaining rest, fighters struggled to meet the steep chal-
lenge of prolonged wakefulness through self-discipline and ingenuity. In this
ongoing effort from the 1940s up to the present, American warriors have been
aroused by fear, chemical stimulants, and a desire not to betray their comrades'
trust. This essay seeks to complicate somewhat our sense of modern manhood by
drawing attention to wakeful self-denial as a significant factor in gender identity
formation. Acceptance, and sometimes celebration, of sleep deprivation in the
armed forces reflected and reinforced cultural values and social practices of “tough-
guy” masculinity, and carried those hard values and practices into civil society.
In a great many instances the difference between sleepiness and alertness is the
difference between life and death. A man who dozes off in a jungle foxhole may
never wake up again.
J. D. Ratcliff, 1945
For two years on ship I think I never slept. I'd go 48 hours with no sleep. But
that's a sign of endurance. The XO [executive officer] says to me, “Now there's a
man.”
Unidentified naval officer, ca. 19961
Like any other society, America has construed the vigilance and alertness of its
armed forces in time of war as a matter of keen interest. Modern American
Journal of Social History vol. 47 no. 1 (2013), pp. 1–26

doi:10.1093/jsh/sht049
© The Author 2013. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.
For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com.
2 Journal of Social History Fall 2013
military policy and practice have sought to give weary warriors varied incentives
and resources to remain awake for ever-longer spans of time. U.S. military leaders
and their civilian advisors have attacked drowsiness on the battlefield with an
armamentarium comprised of punitive measures, administrative practices, chemi-
cal stimulants, and other sleep countermeasures. In no small part, this demanding
system reflected and reinforced an extreme martial ideal of stoic, self-denying mas-
culinity.
This essay concentrates on the Second World War as a decisive moment in
the drive to press operations beyond the normal limits of human endurance.
Although in prior wars the exigencies of armed conflict sometimes forced fighters
to maintain consciousness for long stints, World War II marked an inflection
point in the trend toward night warfare, extended engagements, and restless
movement. The Japanese in particular attempted to capitalize on Americans'
unfamiliarity with nocturnal fighting. Beyond strategic and tactical calculations,
technological advances by the 1940s promoted exhausting battles and made
human endurance a major constraint. Aircraft, ships, and other types of mecha-
nized vehicles could operate for lengthy periods of time. The invention of radar
and other imaging and communications technologies facilitated making war in
the dark. Bombers protecting ships from German submarines in the Atlantic
Ocean routinely made eighteen-hour runs. Bombing raids on Japan could be of
comparable duration. Protracted tank battles and artillery bombardments raged
throughout the war. Naval vessels were constantly on the move, with amphibious
assaults commencing in the predawn hours. Supplying and maintaining rapidly
advancing forces often made logistical activities into around-the-clock work.
Aggressive commanders like General George Patton tested the limits of mobile,
tireless modern weapons and their support systems.2
This global war served as a rite of passage for a generation of young men (and
a large number of young women), who took military practices and ideals of sleep
and sleeplessness back into postwar civil society. More than fifteen million men
and about a quarter million women of all classes and races served in the U.S.
armed forces between 1941 and 1945. World War II marked the culmination of
the democratic tradition of citizen-soldiering, with broad participation and widely
shared risks.3
The daunting experience of carrying out dangerous assignments while coping
with protracted sleeplessness shaped this cohort's sense of manhood. Combat in
World War II, as in all American wars, remained a man's job. Warfare thus again
made males the primary protectors of the nation's territory, populace, freedoms,
and way of life. Lost sleep became but one of countless hardships to be endured
for a larger cause, and hardly the worst among them. Sharing a problem like
chronic sleep deprivation helped to forge stronger bonds of solidarity in the ranks.
Sustained fighting, long marches, or simply scanning the horizon all night
became tests of strength that built group cohesion. Those who passed these tests
gained a cherished sense of brotherhood. Winning a marathon struggle against
the Axis powers, U.S. warriors displayed a staying power that impressed not only
their immediate comrades but society as a whole. Guardians of the imperiled
nation earned more rights and privileges. As historian Linda Kerber put it, “The
association between soldiering and entitlement runs very deep.” The triumphant
war experience reinforced a hegemonic masculinity that celebrated male stamina
and adaptability, along with courage under fire, aggressiveness, and other martial
“No Such Thing as a Night's Sleep” 3
virtues. The war thus served to elevate wakeful self-denial as a component of mas-
culine identity.4
The quest for a more demanding martial sleep discipline launched during the
Second World War has continued up to the present. Certainly, the tendency to
undertake protracted operations only accelerated after 1945. An extensive and
permanent research apparatus arose in the postwar years to search for chemical
and other means to finesse fatigue. By the dawn of the twenty-first century, some
in the military hoped to create a fighter capable of functioning for a full week
with little or no sleep. This study aims to uncover the origins of the dream of the
seven-day soldier. In doing so, my purpose is to illuminate another potent cultural
force in the making of a society in which sleep deprivation is widespread and gen-
erally accepted as inevitable.5
Exploring wakefulness as manliness takes us into uncharted historiographical
territory. Although across the broad range of gender studies devoted to modern
masculinity there has been occasional notice of staying power and perseverance as
valued characteristics, no historian has problematized men's sleep and sleepless-
ness as matters of major concern.6 Similarly, on the narrower question of
American military masculinity, recent historical analyses have offered few insights
into stamina and endurance as measures of manly strength; no work has dealt
with sleep and sustained wakefulness in the nation's fighting forces.7
Moreover, the historical literature on almost all aspects of American sleep
practices and values is quite sparse. To be sure, there are a number of helpful
studies of the development of sleep science and medicine. But the patterns of
unconscious rest actually engaged in by ordinary Americans have thus far been
the object of minimal attention, though this behavior fulfills a fundamental phys-
iological need. We know almost nothing about how average daily sleep time appa-
rently declined by two hours or more over the course of the past century. In
discussing overwork and industrial fatigue, for example, historians generally have
skirted the related topic of sleep deprivation in the workforce, even as nonstan-
dard shiftwork schedules have proliferated. Along the same lines, the pursuit of
“beauty rest,” the cultural tradition of denigrating slumber as a slothful waste of
time, and many other matters related to an activity that fills approximately one
quarter or one third of the normal human lifetime have attracted virtually no
interest among historians. Probing prolonged wakefulness and sleep deprivation
in the military can make a contribution to understanding better this significant
realm of social life.8
Afraid to Sleep
Many factors kept American fighters awake during wartime. Fear provided
one of the biggest incentives to remain conscious while serving on or near the
front lines of combat. Concern over having one's position overrun or raided by
the enemy at night or at dawn provided perhaps the greatest stimulus. In the
Pacific theater in particular, American troops faced an adversary that launched
both minor incursions and major attacks in the late hours. The trauma of the
early morning raid on Pearl Harbor, which caught many sailors still in their
bunks, had been a galling lesson in Japan's use of the element of surprise. In the
jungles of New Guinea, enemy assaults typically commenced at around two in the
morning. General Alexander Vandergrift succinctly characterized the situation in
1942 on Guadalcanal: “Our men worked all day and fought all night.” The two
sleeping members of Robert Leckie's platoon who were hacked to death in their
foxhole by Japanese scouts on that island paid the price for violating the rule that
on the front lines one of the pair of occupants of these perimeter positions had to
be vigilant at all times. At the European front, battles frequently began before
dawn or continued through the night. Robert Franklin, who took part in numer-
ous nocturnal and extended operations against the German army in Italy in 1943,
recalled that “we slept when we got the chance, but chances rarely lasted more
than three or four hours.” Besides serious engagements with enemy forces,
American troops were occasionally kept awake by distant artillery fire or various
forms of harassment intended to disrupt sleep and raise anxiety.9
The threat of formal disciplinary action gave sentries and others responsible
for vigilance added motivation to keep their eyes open. In 1806, Congress made
falling asleep on guard duty in wartime a capital offense. More than two centuries
later, the Uniform Code of Military Justice retains the sanction enacted by the
Ninth Congress: “Any sentinel or look-out who shall be found sleeping upon his
post, or leaves it before he is regularly relieved, shall be punished, if the offense is
committed in time of war, by death or such other punishment as a court-martial
may direct.” What message could be more bluntly value-laden than that a man
who falls asleep deserves to die? The extent to which the military justice system
actually imposed and carried out this sentence is quite unclear. However, the
threat of a disgraceful death by execution, long carried out in an elaborate public
ritual, undoubtedly had an arousing effect on drowsy sentries.10
Another source of trepidation for the rank-and-file warrior was the informal
punishment meted out by his peers. When a Marine private nodded off on guard
during the precarious early stage of the invasion of Guadalcanal, his furious corpo-
ral laid the private's own bayonet across his throat and gave him the emasculating
nickname “Sleeping Beauty.” In an angry confrontation, the corporal told the
feminized offender, “The other guys think you don't give a damn.” On Peleliu,
another contested island in the Pacific, Marine Eugene Sledge resorted to holding
his eyes open with his fingers in order to stay awake while serving as a sentinel.
Unquestionably, those who dozed off when their comrades needed them knew
full well that they risked being branded them as unreliably weak and unmanly.11
Even where an individual's drowsiness endangered no one, the same norms
of tenacious wakefulness applied. These standards were apparently durable as well
as sweeping in nature. As far back as the Civil War, stalwart soldiers derided the
lazy and irresponsible type known as the “beat.” The repertoire of this shirking
weakling included lounging in bed while better men got about the day's business
in camp. During World War II, the popular cartoon series “Sad Sack” portrayed a
chronic slacker who snored at morning roll call and engaged in other ludicrous
displays of unconscious indiscipline. When another platoon in his company fell
behind in their advance into Germany in early 1945, Grady Arrington, an infan-
try sergeant, branded the stragglers “sleeping babies.” Conversely, the ability to
meet standards of stamina and resilience fostered pride. Charles Kelly, a recipient
of the Congressional Medal of Honor for heroic action in Italy, considered one of
the distinctive virtues of his infantry comrades their “fierce pride in . . . not sleep-
ing at all for days and nights.” Members of the armed forces knew what was
expected of them with regard to avoiding inappropriate sleep.12
Unsettling Settings for Sleep
Soldiering did not foster any expectation of an environment—natural or

built—that accorded with the modern sensibility of comfort. Indeed, inhospitable
sleeping conditions presented many of the steepest challenges for those seeking
rest. Beyond the sounds of guns firing and bombs exploding, noises of all sorts pre-
vented sleep. The soldier trying to rest in an open foxhole was spared none of the
myriad sounds of his surrounding environment. Infantryman Harold Gordon, Jr.,
spent nights awake in France in mid-1944 listening to, and shaking under,
German artillery fire. On Guadalcanal, Thomas Gallant could not shut out the
cacophony of the jungle and its creatures—“hums, throbs, crunches, buzzes and
thumps, rustles, snaps and squeaks.” Gallant found that “sleep . . . was impossible.
All sounds were danger signals.” In his view, “there was no such thing as a night's
sleep for anyone.” Elsewhere on that island, men in Robert Leckie's unit lay
awake listening to crocodiles crunching on nearby Japanese corpses. The facilities
housing aviators were often raucous places, especially for those attempting to rest
during daylight hours. Eighth Air Force pilot Bill Odell had a hard time trying to
sleep at the Molesworth base in England because his quarters were “as bad as a
brothel with women giggling or screaming.” In steamy Burma, crews of the Air
Transport Command who hauled supplies over the Himalayas into western China
(on a route so dangerous that the debris of many wrecked planes strewn along the
way made it known as the Aluminum Highway), encountered heat and humidity
that prevented restful slumber. Over time, enduring enough disrupted and low-
quality rest brought on dangerous drowsiness and increased vulnerability to nod
off at the wrong time.13
Probably the most unfortunate aspects of sleeping conditions were the spaces
in which combatants had to try to rest. Although troops demonstrated great
ingenuity in finding and improving sleeping places, they often put up with the
most primitive discommodations. Abandoned or appropriated buildings offered
the most promising sites, even if they lacked heat or other utilities. Many
American fighters preferred barns, with their ample supply of clean hay for
bedding. They appreciated any sturdy structures with habitable cellars, where they
could lie below the line of fire. In early 1945, the 350th Infantry Regiment,
advancing through northern Italy, made most of its contacts with the enemy
during routine night patrols. Although the regiment's commander, James Fry,
tried to arrange for patrollers to recuperate during the day in the dark basements
of abandoned buildings, he recognized that this rest was inadequate. Colonel Fry
viewed night operations as “a heavy drain on the physical and mental stamina of
every participant.” Next on the comfort continuum were hovels and other found
or hastily improvised refuges. These tended to offer a measure of quiet and protec-
tion from the elements, and sometimes were improved to approximate the amen-
ities offered by houses. General martial skills of scouting and maneuvering came
into play in the search for hospitable temporary lodging.14
Another common dormitory in the field was the two-man pup tent. Each of
two partners carried a sheet of canvas that they fastened together to create a
modest shield against some precipitation and a little cold or heat. This form of
protection had been a standard piece of army equipment since the Civil War.
Basic training for World War II included learning to pitch and use this small
shelter, which by that time was known as a pup tent. Some recruits welcomed the
rude training experience as part of their socialization into a culture of hardy mas-
culinity. In a memoir titled Helmet for My Pillow, Robert Leckie recalled his initia-
tion as a Marine trainee: “We slept on the ground and had but a length of canvas
for a home, but we had begun to pride ourselves on being able to take it.” In
1943, a committee of psychology professors blandly assured the troops that
“nearly any man can sleep soundly on the hard ground.” Many soldiers discarded
this piece of baggage when they reached a combat zone, where the structure
attracted enemy fire. Those who chose to stay under canvas received limited pro-
tection against noise, precipitation, insects, and other disrupters of sleep that
easily entered their flimsy domicile.15
Unsurprisingly, the least desirable sleeping places lacked any overhead
shelter at all. Troops slept in various dug-out spaces—trenches, shallow pits adja-
cent to trees or boulders, and, most often, small excavations called foxholes.
Foxholes may have blocked a fraction of the wind and incoming fire but did
nothing to impede falling rain, snow, and sleet, to say nothing of mortar shells
and other high-trajectory projectiles. GIs trapped in southeastern Belgium in
December 1944 dug through a foot of snow to start carving out foxholes. Caught
without heavy winter clothing in freezing temperatures, the enlisted men of the
101st Airborne found that shivering, exacerbated by nerve-wracking mortar
attacks, made it nearly impossible to sleep in their excavations. In warmer
weather, heavy rain sometimes filled the bottom of sleeping holes with a mix of
water and mud. After ten virtually sleepless nights out in torrential rain in
Okinawa, Eugene Sledge rigged a platform from an unused stretcher that allowed
him to lie just above the water and ooze. This sort of inventiveness was not always
on display. In a Bill Mauldin cartoon, the archetypal infantrymen Willie and Joe
sat dejectedly in their flooded hole, up to their knees in water. Willie lamented,
“Wisht I could stand up an' git some sleep.” In another scene, bivouacking in the
rain, Willie told a fresh-faced replacement, “A experienced field sojer will figure
out a way to sleep warm an' dry. Lemme know when ya do.” A dark sense of
humor apparently served as one of the main coping mechanisms for keeping
warm and dry inside while toughing it out in an unforgiving environment.16
Sleep Deprivation
Enduring rough conditions over a long period often resulted in a sizable sleep
debt. Part of the war of attrition eating at the American military's human resour-
ces, sleep debt accumulated insidiously. Almost a third of the members of heavy
bomber crews who had flown more than twenty missions over Europe reported fre-
quent sleep problems in 1944. At that time, the typical airman was getting less
than seven hours of sleep per day and reported feeling sleep-deprived. Some avia-
tors were already plagued by lack of sleep before they flew one sortie. Almost half
of the naval pilot trainees who considered themselves overly fatigued named
insufficient sleep as an important cause. Eighty-five percent of infantry veterans
of the Italian campaign slept six hours or less when in action, including thirty-one
percent who reported getting four hours or less. Bruce Egger claimed that he
“never had enough food or sleep.” Fellow infantryman Grady Arrington com-
plained of frequent disruptions: “It seemed like every time . . . I hit the sack, it
was only minutes before some emergency would arise.” Eugene Sledge noticed
the toll expressed in the face of a typical infantry colleague: “His bloodshot eyes
were hollow and vacant from too much horror and too little sleep.” Bill Mauldin's
images of haggard, drowsy soldiers captured the ravages of sleep deprivation. In
one frame, Willie took note of his partner marching with his eyes shut: “Maybe
Joe needs a rest. He's talkin' in his sleep.” Sleep loss particularly beset the fraction
of men located at the front or otherwise placed in combat roles.17
Although individuals varied widely in their responses, most suffered adverse
effects of a prolonged shortfall in rest. Chronic deprivation left the victim defi-
cient or even dangerously ineffective in the performance of his duties. Of greatest
importance, worn-out fighters were less able to defend themselves and their com-
rades. In 1943, a panel of behavioral scientists at the National Research Council
advised military officials that even one sleepless night produced a loss of atten-
tiveness and lowered efficiency. These advisors warned of hallucinations by the
third consecutive day awake. Psychiatrist Stanley Peal reflected on the toll taken
by jungle warfare in the Pacific: “A soldier learns to become fully alert when
awakened by noises at night. Because of the light sleeping thus conditioned, insig-
nificant night noises keep the soldier awake and fatigued.” Too little sleep or low-
quality sleep for too long also contributed to the combat or operational fatigue
that sometimes led to psychological collapse. In the Air Forces, where concern
over fatigue grew most acute, physicians belatedly turned to sedatives, rest leaves,
and other therapeutic interventions.18
Efforts to ward off the deterioration brought on by failure to obtain a full
night's sleep took varied forms. Napping was one very common adaptive practice.
Thomas Gallant commented that “snatches of rest are taken in fits and starts, day
and night, serving to keep all men going all the time.” Exhausted pilots slept in
their planes between dive-bombing runs while defending Guadalcanal from a
Japanese counterattack in August 1942. Charles Kelly remembered that when his
infantry unit got a brief break during a long march in southern Italy, “most of us
flopped down and were asleep and snoring by the time we came to rest.” During
the D-Day invasion of Normandy, wasted paratroopers threw themselves down
when conditions allowed and immediately lapsed into unconsciousness. After the
furious battle to cross the Rhine at Remagen, Germany, a brief respite allowed
some of Grady Arrington's compatriots an overdue chance to rest: “The men
sprawled in every available space to sleep the sleep of exhaustion.” Troops
became adept at seizing any opportunity to catch a nap, however brief.19
Caffeine
Members of the American armed forces had the benefit of chemical stimu-
lants. By far the most important was caffeine. President Andrew Jackson ordered
the U.S. Army to introduce a coffee ration in 1832. By the Civil War, coffee had
become an indispensable staple. The poor Confederate side could not afford real
coffee. Rebel troops invented sorry substitute drinks from acorns, chicory,
peanuts, and other uncaffeinated vegetable matter. In the Union Army, on the
other hand, each soldier regularly prepared a pint or a quart in a small tin pot over
an open fire and guzzled the analeptic brew in camp and in the field. In his
memoir Hardtack and Coffee, John Billings rhapsodized about this most reliable
stimulant: “There was but one opinion of the coffee which was served out, and
that was of unqualified approval.” Writing in the late 1880s, Billings assessed the
formative influence of heavy wartime consumption: “Today the old soldiers who
can stand it are the hardest coffee-drinkers in the community, through the school-
ing they received in the service.” In the First World War, the doughboys drank
the bracing brew at every meal; oatmeal and coffee constituted a standard break-
fast for many. As had been the case after the Civil War, the habits formed in the
world war shaped postwar behavior among the two million men who served over-
seas. Naval personnel shared in the longstanding pattern of imbibing freely.
“Aboard ship,” observed naval officer Howard Bierman, “the ever present coffee
urn is a Navy tradition.” By the 1940s, heavy caffeination with ample quantities of
strong coffee was deeply engrained in American military culture.20
World War II witnessed strong demand for strong coffee. Of course, a large
share of those entering military service had already formed the habit of regularly
drinking the beverage. In 1940, over two-thirds of the world's coffee bean imports
came to America. Nonetheless, a number of factors further bolstered interest in
this stimulant. The coffee industry promoted its product as a weapon of war,
capable of building a fitter, more energetic fighting force. The Army Quartermaster
Corps brought in eminent home economist Ida Allen to refine its brewing
methods, in order to improve taste and increase fatigue-fighting potency. The
widely disseminated guide Psychology for the Fighting Man offered this rationale:
“A large cup of coffee will wake you up, make you more alert, speed you up and
improve your muscular coordination.” The military went through coffee at the
extraordinary annual rate of thirty-two pounds per man or woman. Physician
Bierman noticed that “a startling amount of coffee is consumed by naval person-
nel.” Eugene Sledge valued coffee as “the stuff that replaced bread as the staff of
life for Marines and sailors.” Sledge's fellow Marine Thomas Gallant, who put
away seven pints a day, would have agreed. As historian Mark Pendergrast
observed, “The American soldier became so closely identified with his coffee that
GI Joe gave his name to the brew, a ‘cuppa Joe.’”21
Industrial methods produced most of the coffee consumed by American
forces in the Second World War. To be sure, in some difficult circumstances fight-
ers themselves had to prepare water-soluble instant coffee from powder included
in the standard subsistence ration packages. Ingenious GIs discovered that
burning a K-ration box generated just enough heat to make a warm cup of the
instant brew. In direst straits, a desperate drinker could get the powder to dissolve
in cold water. This beverage was roundly criticized but grudgingly appreciated as a
last resort. Although mass preparation of coffee sometimes involved roasting and
vacuum-packing supplies on the home front, for the most part the Army
Quartermaster Corps managed to deploy mobile roasting units, often placed very
close to the front lines, to fuel the troops. The scale of these roasting operations
was far greater than when the Army first adopted similar production methods in
World War I. By the summer of 1944, sixty-nine mobile units were positioned
near troop concentrations in all the major theaters. Using locally grown beans,
the roasting plant in New Caledonia in the southwestern Pacific made it possible
to serve a million cups a week to needy troops. A typical set of machinery put out
three tons of roasted and ground material a day, enough to give three army divi-
sions the roughly 200,000 cups they required. Suppliers for the Third Army in the
European Theater went through over a million pounds of beans in January 1945.
Such productivity guaranteed that no warrior suffered from any shortage of this
stimulus. Scores of mobile Red Cross stations also dispensed coffee.22
Other measures ensured the thorough caffeination of American forces. Tea

was readily available in mess halls almost everywhere. Both emergency and stand-
ard rations contained portions of chocolate, another source of the mainstay stimu-
lant. Coca-Cola set up sixty-four overseas production facilities in areas occupied
by large numbers of troops, having won an exemption from sugar rationing. On
the western front, Coke invaded, in turn, Iceland, Algeria, Italy, France, and
Germany with its bottling operations. In the east, production sites arose from the
Pacific islands to China. Where bottling was infeasible, the company arranged for
soda fountains. Altogether, the firm served ten billion Cokes to American fight-
ing men and women. Outflanked rival Pepsi Cola gave away its product at
Servicemen's Centers in many locations. Supplementing the doses of caffeine
delivered in beverages and foods, the military also requisitioned massive quantities
of caffeine tablets. For the bulk of the members of the American armed forces, the
most important chemical stimulant by far was the familiar, tried-and-true caffeine,
the most widely used psychoactive drug in human history.23
Benzedrine
Despite its well-recognized benefits and proven safety, some military leaders
came to view caffeine as inadequate for certain purposes. If war is the ultimate
form of competition, then the intense competition to field an alert and indefati-
gable fighting force led to exploration of the value of the amphetamines, particu-
larly amphetamine sulfate, manufactured in the U.S. by Smith, Kline and French
Laboratories beginning in the mid-1930s and sold under the trade name
Benzedrine. Early in the war, it became apparent that our adversaries were making
large-scale use of synthetic stimulants. America and its allies attributed the speed
and intensity of German blitzkrieg assaults, in part, to wholesale ingestion of
methamphetamine, called Pervitin at that time by its German manufacturer.
Intelligence sources reported distribution of Benzedrine to the Imperial Army of
Japan, helping to account for its apparent superhuman ferocity. It also came to
light that Japanese fighters got an energy boost from cocaine suppositories. In
addition, American officials were well aware that the aviators of their British
allies took Benzedrine.24
Fearful that American warriors could find themselves at a disadvantage, mili-
tary officials and their civilian advisors in the Office of Scientific Research and
Development (OSRD) intervened decisively. The newly created federal agency
pursued a wide-ranging research agenda. OSRD encouraged original studies of
analeptic drugs and further analysis of relevant foreign science and military
behavior. This assessment exercise generated the knowledge base for setting
wartime policy. In this endeavor, Andrew Ivy, a professor of physiology at
Northwestern University, emerged at the beginning of the war as the leading U.S.
authority on military stimulants. Although he had conducted no major original
research in this area, the prominent physiologist saw a virtual vacuum of expertise
and moved speedily to fill it. The Northwestern physiologist staked his claim to
authority with a literature review of Benzedrine, which appeared in the inaugural
issue of War Medicine in January 1941. This overview advised that the drug's
“most frequently reported effect” was a change in mood, with passing mention of
its tendency to induce euphoria. The article also announced that Benzedrine
enhanced reaction time and performance on other psychomotor measures.
Beginning what would become a series of invidious comparisons with caffeine,

Ivy and co-author L. R. Krasno held that amphetamine increased steadiness,
whereas the more familiar stimulant decreased it. Only eight days after the U.S.
declared war, Ivy submitted a proposal to OSRD to test Benzedrine, Pervitin, and
caffeine as aids to wakefulness. The federal office promptly approved this proposi-
tion, as it would his proposals for related inquiries. In the panicked months after
the shock of Pearl Harbor, there was both a great willingness to grasp at quick
fixes and the resources available to pursue all options. Smith, Kline and French
stood ready to do its part. In March 1942, Alfred Richards, chairman of the
OSRD's Committee on Medical Research and professor of pharmacology at the
University of Pennsylvania, informed the Army Surgeon General's office that
one of the Philadelphia drug maker's executives had told him that the British had
just ordered three million tablets and had inquired as to “why nothing is being
done . . . for our forces.”25
Hastening to confirm their predisposition to put this modern invention to
work for the nation's defense, Ivy and partner Robert Seashore, a Northwestern
psychologist, raced through a set of field studies in 1942. Initially, the
Northwestern team experimented with long forced marches followed by overnight
guard duty with Army volunteers at nearby Fort Sheridan. The research program
soon extended to Chicago-based civilian long-haul truckers, tank crews and
truckers at Fort Knox, and finally to infantry marchers and tankers at Camp
Young in the California desert. The investigators sent federal officials a report
summarizing their findings in January 1943.26
The Northwestern projects yielded the desired results. Ivy and Seashore
found strong evidence of the utility of Benzedrine in postponing drowsiness
during prolonged wakefulness, allowing military personnel to continue to do their
jobs with reasonable efficiency. Sleep-deprived troops performed significantly
better than research subjects in control groups given a placebo. The overall results
on objective measures were quite clear-cut, if not always statistically significant,
due to some relatively small sample sizes. On several performance indices, includ-
ing reaction time, visual acuity, and steadiness, caffeine and Pervitin also gave
better values than the placebo. Moreover, as Nicolas Rasmussen has emphasized,
Benzedrine produced striking subjective outcomes: experimental participants on
that drug felt energetic, confident, and sometimes exhilarated. Ivy and Seashore
concluded that Benzedrine stood out as the superior stimulant because it led to
positive effects both objectively and subjectively. The Northwestern investigators
acknowledged that both caffeine and Pervitin also aided measurable performance
on behavioral tests, but faulted both for the negative subjective symptoms, like
irritability, that they seemed to induce. However, the assessment of self-reported
factors did not extend to the issue of overconfidence and its relationship
to observable decision-making behavior. Instead of exploring this already-
controversial aspect of the subjective reactions to amphetamine, Ivy and Seashore
chose to ignore it. Although their summary report made no explicit recommenda-
tions, its analysis dismissed caffeine and Pervitin and supported Benzedrine. That
direction was already evident in the narrowing focus of this team's research as it
proceeded: the last four of its eight experiments were confined to testing
Benzedrine only against a placebo.27
The rush to elevate Benzedrine to favored status was all the more remarkable
for its disregard of the latest relevant scientific and military developments. The
American evaluation of stimulants played out in a fluid situation. By early 1943

when policy on wakefulness drugs was being set, the European infatuation with
these potent substances had ended. In 1941 the Nazi government reclassified
both Benzedrine and Pervitin as dangerously addictive drugs, subject to tight reg-
ulation. Subsequently, the German military curtailed distribution of metham-
phetamine. The British were increasingly wary of Benzedrine's limitations and
side effects. In particular, the tendency of Benzedrine to make some of those
who took it recklessly overconfident and otherwise to impair their judgment
caused the Royal Air Force to restrict sharply its use. Even before America's direct
military involvement in the global conflict, the domestic medical community
had already expressed doubts about amphetamines. In November 1941,
F. A. Hellebrandt and Peter Karpovich suggested that any drugs that “push the
person beyond more or less normal limits of endurance are potentially dangerous
and should be reserved for strictly emergency use.” Hellenbrandt and Karpovich
proposed building wakeful endurance primarily by elevating fitness through “sys-
tematic physical training.” At the same time, a leading pharmacology textbook
identified troubling effects of amphetamine: “Restlessness, tremors, insomnia,
talkativeness and irritability are common. Confusion, assaultiveness, hallucina-
tions, delirium, panic states and suicidal or homicidal tendencies have also been
observed.” Numerous warning signs marked the path of those making wartime
drug policy.28
Nonetheless, very much influenced by Andrew Ivy's work, U.S. military offi-
cials decided to charge ahead with fairly widespread, though limited, distribution
of Benzedrine. On February 23, 1943, the Army Surgeon General issued guide-
lines for its proper administration and proclaimed it “the drug of choice” for
dealing with fatigue. A circular letter to medical staff promised that this amphet-
amine “prevents deterioration of performance” during extended wakefulness. The
authoritative statement duly warned of several of the drug's limitations and
hazards, but misleadingly declared that it achieved sustained performance
“without any impairment of judgment.” Commanders in the field, not medical
professionals, were to decide when to administer Benzedrine, though the Surgeon
General maintained that “its use should be confined to special situations.” The
deep flaw in this plan was its denial of the well-known side effect of impaired
judgment resulting from a euphoria that sometimes soared into irrational overcon-
fidence. A more reasonable position would have been to alert field commanders
and medical staff to the possibility of this dangerous effect.29
Immediately after the issuance of the Surgeon General's letter, large quanti-
ties of Benzedrine began to flow through supply channels. The War Department
had begun stocking up on the drug in late 1942 and was ready to move without
further delay. The Army appears to have undertaken widespread dissemination
without hesitation. Regular monthly shipments of hundreds of thousands of units
to each of the major theaters of operations became standard arrangements.
Six-tablet packages of five-milligram doses of the drug were added to the first-aid
kits carried by paratroopers and jungle fighters. The Army and its Air Forces also
made Benzedrine inhalers readily available. Despite more hesitancy, the Navy
distributed the drug to aviators. Although the total amount of Benzedrine sent
out to American military personnel cannot be determined with any precision,
Nicolas Rasmussen's research indicates that the quantity was at least in the range
of many tens of millions of tablets.30
Of course, availability and usage were two different things. Marines relied on
the drug to a significant extent, beginning with the invasion of Tarawa in
November 1943. Paratroopers ingested it during the exhausting D-Day landing.
The Army Air Forces became most enamored of the stimulant, particularly in the
Pacific, where the bombing sorties tended to be far longer. Fighter pilots also wel-
comed this new wakefulness resource. Unlike bomber pilots, who could share
duties with a co-pilot, solo operators controlled fighter aircraft, often in precarious
flights over the open ocean with no place to set down to gain a respite. Yet a
mid-1945 survey of bomber crews disclosed that only one in seven men flying in
the Pacific-Asia arena had taken Benzedrine and only one in twenty operating in
Europe had resorted to it. Asked in this survey for ideas about reducing fatigue,
only one of 314 airmen suggested more reliance on Benzedrine. Across the
branches of military service, some individuals tried amphetamine, only to learn
quickly that it was not for them.31
Wariness in the ranks persisted despite an ongoing chorus of high-level assur-
ances. In March 1944, David Grant, the top medical officer of the Army Air
Forces, published a ringing endorsement. Grant posed the question in unequivo-
cal terms: “The importance of the ‘sleep crisis’ may be appreciated if one remem-
bers that military depends not only upon the arrival of enough men and
equipment at the right place at the right time, but also upon their continuation in
action the right length of time. To win a battle, in other words, striking power
must be supported by staying power.” The Air Surgeon insisted that “the effect of
the drug upon a person ready to fall asleep is to restore his alertness and produce a
sense of well-being and confidence without impairment of judgment.” In corrobo-
ration, he referred not only to Ivy's work but to that of others as well. This
included an experiment by David Tyler, a physiologist at the California Institute
of Technology, on groups of Marines, some of whom received moderate doses of
the chemical to stay awake for as long as 108 hours. Subjects who ingested
amphetamine were in a better mood than their counterparts in a control group
and had better objective marksmanship scores, while supposedly suffering “no
harmful effects.” However, this was not what Tyler had found. Grant may or may
not have been aware of Tyler's findings of “overconfidence that . . . went to some
interesting extremes” of bad decision-making. In fact, a year before Grant's blithe
assurances, Tyler had alerted officials of incidents of faulty judgment which had
occurred during the course of his research. “Should these findings be confirmed
upon further experimentation,” he cautioned, “it would seem that Benzedrine is
counter indicated in those men whose sound decisions are vital to the successful
completion of a task.” Nonetheless, Science Digest reprinted a condensed version
of Grant's glowing report for its mass-circulation audience. In addition, the
National Research Council's psychologists offered fulsome praise for Benzedrine.
The war gave amphetamine use an aura of efficacy with a patriotic connotation.32
The official blandishments did not satisfy everyone. Doubts about the safety
of Benzedrine persisted and, in some circles, grew. Army physician Maurice
Walsh wrote to War Medicine in the spring of 1943 to defend criticisms of
Benzedrine that he and a colleague had raised in the journal the previous year.
Walsh's experience administering the drug led him to contend that “the effect of
elation or depression in blunting the finer critical judgments is well known. . . .
The danger of any such effect in flying personnel should be obvious.” Off the
public record, an evaluation by the Navy Bureau of Medicine and Surgery in July
1943 did not gloss over the drug's problematic nature. Robert Bigelow alerted his
superiors to evidence of “euphoria with excitement, overconfidence, and impaired
judgment. Such reactions could lead to reckless behavior which might have
serious consequences.” However, this report stopped short of condemning all use
of Benzedrine, considering it possibly appropriate in certain extreme situations
but noting that the British now “rarely used” it. Bigelow made no policy recom-
mendations, but it was clear that the Navy was at least contemplating a relatively
cautious approach. The revised edition of Harry Armstrong's authoritative text-
book on aviation medicine, appearing in 1943, warned that Benzedrine “may
result in a slight impairment of judgment.” Armstrong endorsed caffeine as the
safest stimulant for long military and civilian flights. A public event that produced
no published record witnessed perhaps the sharpest criticism. At a meeting of car-
riers operating the Air Transport Command, held at Harvard Business School in
1944, a number of corporate officials expressed varying degrees of opposition to
Benzedrine. One representative of Pan American Airways divulged that British
pilots had made worse landings on the drug than when merely tired. The Pan Am
medical officer overseeing the brutal Miami-to-Karachi run condemned Benzedrine
for its widely varying effects.33
Yet in battle, the risky strategy seems to have worked in the short term.
Neither my research nor that of any other historian has uncovered any instance
in which Benzedrine caused a disastrous error of judgment by a pilot or other
member of the U.S. armed forces during the war. James Fry's detailed memoir of
his experience in charge of an infantry regiment in Italy included a matter-of-fact
admission of taking the drug after a strenuous all-night uphill march: “I trudged
back toward my own headquarters, gulping a Benzedrine tablet as a substitute for
the sleep I needed badly.” Fry then apparently proceeded to meet the many
demands of leadership through the next day, without flying into a drug-induced
euphoria that led him into irrational decisions. Nonetheless, over the longer term
the subtle process by which large numbers of men and women in uniform became
acquainted with amphetamine as an authorized asset in the war effort was less
benign.34
Stimulating Productivity on the Home Front
The prestige conferred on Benzedrine by its official adoption by the War

Department encouraged wider civilian experimentation with this dangerous sub-
stance. Smith, Kline advertising burnished the drug's image by trading on its mili-
tary associations. (In 1943, the Army did squelch one proposed ad, titled
“Fighting Men Carry Benzedrine Sulfate in Combat,” which boasted that “unless
Benzedrine Sulfate had been proved to possess a wide margin of safety, it would
obviously never have been selected for this revolutionary application.”) Business
Week in January 1944 noted that the firm was marketing its product to civilians
for chronic fatigue, depression, and other maladies. Calling attention to concerns
voiced by the American Medical Association about the addictive potential of the
stimulant, this article worried about future problems: “Widespread use of the drug
by the Army has raised the question of whether its postwar over-the-counter sale
for self-medication can be controlled.” Later that year, on the other hand, a
popular song projected a cavalier attitude, asking the whimsical question “Who
Put the Benzedrine in Mrs. Murphy's Ovaltine?” As with the actual practices in
the military, the extent of civilian consumption related to war work is unknown,
but surely not insignificant.35
But in all probability, civilian employees in defense jobs got much more stim-
ulation from caffeine than from Benzedrine. Coffee rationing curtailed domestic
consumption only from November 1942 to July 1943. Like the drug makers, the
coffee industry made sure to link its product to the nation's warriors, declaring its
product “the favorite drink among the fighting forces and among fighters on the
home front.” In early 1944, the employees at Ford's enormous Willow Run
bomber plant swallowed approximately 120,000 cups per day. Wartime intensifi-
cation of the labor process, long hours, and multi-shift operations gave rise to a
new workplace institution, the coffee break. During a brief recess period or two
per shift, employees received what many managers viewed as a reliable aid to pro-
ductivity and morale. Some workers began to assume that they had a right to
have a short break for the brown brew prior to starting the overtime segment of
their work day. Steel mills took no general breaks, but individuals and small
groups took advantage of pauses in the manufacturing process to make coffee on
hot slabs.36
For the minority of defense workers with no taste for coffee, there were other
ready sources of caffeine. Some employers made free tea a fringe benefit. Republic
Aviation poured 700 gallons of tea a day into the workforce building P-47 fighter
planes. The firm arranged tea service in the cafeteria and rolled out wagons to dole
out the drink at three in the morning for the graveyard shift. Management attrib-
uted subsequent production records in part to the stimulant. Coca-Cola and its
challengers sold their invigorating beverages in cafeterias or from vending machines
at countless worksites. Drowsy workers could also turn to NoDoz tablets.37
Overall, the war deepened American society's tendency to promote sleepless-
ness. The very nature of the conflict—a necessary struggle for survival against tyran-
nous aggressors—linked manly sleepless perseverance to a righteous cause and to
fundamental societal values. On the practical level, the war introduced new ways to
cheat sleep and reinforced old ones. In the immediate postwar period, millions of
men returned to civilian life with direct or indirect knowledge of the novel analep-
tic drug amphetamine. Some came back to America more dramatically than others.
General Curtis LeMay and General Emmett O'Donnell flew a B-29 over 7,000
miles from Japan to Chicago. Honored with the Distinguished Flying Cross at a
gala dinner at New York's Waldorf-Astoria on October 1, 1945, LeMay explained
his formula for stamina in the air: “We made the trip on cigars, K rations, and
Benzedrine. Nobody slept.” Much of the inventory of unused first-aid kits and
Benzedrine inhalers found its way into the civilian marketplace through a massive
sell-off of surplus military goods. During both the war years and the postwar era, the
most profound impact of promotion of amphetamine was to lend further legitimacy
to the idea that sleep was something to be postponed, minimized, or otherwise
avoided at all costs. When widespread use of amphetamines by long-haul truckers
became a matter of growing fear in the postwar years, some observers traced the
appetite for these stimulants back to wartime exposure. Millions of troops also
returned from overseas with a stronger sense that a strong cup of coffee or a cold
bottle of Coke embodied the pleasures of the American way of life. In 1946, the
first coffee machine appeared on the market. The Kwik Kafe device headed for the
nation's workplaces as its primary destination. By the mid-1950s, the coffee break
had become an entrenched practice, one important benefit of which was to help
sleep-deprived employees make it through the day.38
The Ongoing Quest to Deny Sleep
The end of the world war did not, by any means, signal the end of American
research into the amphetamines. Despite the lack of any evidence that the Soviet
adversary held or sought any wakefulness advantage, the curiosity and momentum
generated by wartime initiatives kept the military-industrial-academic machine
rolling. Perhaps of still greater importance was the assumption that the trend to
uninterrupted fighting in sustained and continuous operations would accelerate.
Although investigations into the alertness properties of Benzedrine continued,
attention soon shifted toward Smith, Kline and French's latest amphetamine,
Dexedrine, its brand of dextro-amphetamine. In an article titled “Living without
Sleep,” Newsweek announced in 1947 that the Air Force planned to test the new
compound in long flights. At the same time, the older amphetamine's champions
had to deal more seriously with ongoing criticism. A 1946 report on Canadian
military research suggested that Benzedrine lacked effectiveness. The following
year a British investigator argued that the possibility of flawed judgment and other
limitations made that drug's risks greater than the benefits. Some researchers con-
tinued to defend the substance. In 1953, Ivy and Seashore published their exoner-
ation of Benzedrine, which, they maintained, caused only “relatively unimportant
side-effects.” The authors explained their publication's curious timing, i.e., ten
years or more after the experiments were done and seven years after their findings
were declassified: “The results are now published since they are applicable to
industrial and other phases of daily life wherein errors of human performance are
to be minimized despite fatigue and prolonged wakefulness.” For the most part,
however, advocates of synthetic stimulants took advantage of pharmaceutical
innovation by shifting their focus to Dexedrine. By the late fifties, when
Benzedrine had become associated with disreputable types like beatniks and
outlaw truckers, amphetamine proponents also began to construct a fictionalized
revisionist history in which American forces in World War II did not receive that
drug through official channels as approved supplies. By the early 1960s, the Air
Force dispensed Dexedrine to bomber and fighter crews, and had apparently dis-
continued Benzedrine. A 1964 study by the Air Force's School of Aerospace
Medicine determined that most fighter pilots carried dextro-amphetamine, with
about a quarter using it.39
Dexedrine's honeymoon with the armed forces proved to be a relatively brief
one, at least in terms of public relations. The war in Vietnam brought unpleasant
revelations about friendly-fire incidents and ugly associations with addicted veter-
ans. However, as congressional hearings in the late sixties and early seventies
brought to light these and other negative facets of reliance on amphetamines,
they also revealed declining distribution by all branches of the armed services.
From the 1970s on, the U.S. military has taken a more circumspect approach to
these stimulants. Yet in 1980 the rate of amphetamine use among those in
uniform was more than twice that of civilians in the same age bracket, the only
sizable difference in drug use between the groups. From 1992 to 1996, the Air
Force went so far as to prohibit use of the Dexedrine tablets known as “Go Pills.”
At present, aviators in the Army, Air Force, and Navy are authorized to use
dextro-amphetamine in accordance with a detailed and restrictive protocol.40
Throughout the late twentieth century and into the twenty-first, the role of
analeptic drugs has diminished somewhat with the rise of more sophisticated
multi-faceted sleep management regimens. In part, the de-emphasis on drugs fol-
lowed from a line of research that suggested that partial sleep loss was simply not
problematic. In the 1970s, scientists at the Naval Health Research Center in San
Diego explored various methods of limiting sleep without recourse to drugs. One
of their projects enabled trainees gradually to cut their allowance of unconscious
rest almost in half, to around four hours a night. In 1986, the center's guide to
sleep management distilled its findings: “If possible, there should be at least 4 or 5
hours of sleep per 24 hours, in a single unbroken period. This is enough sleep to
prevent performance impairment over an indefinitely long period of time for the
average person.” Positive news of this sort received a warm welcome. In 1995, a
textbook entry on Air Force combat psychiatry presented this summary of recent
work: “Studies have shown that 4 hours of uninterrupted sleep, especially if it
includes the 3 hours between 2 A.M. and 5 A.M., are necessary to maintain the
efficiency of the troops over the long haul.” Five years later, the Navy advised its
medical staff who dealt with aviators that “the minimum amount of sleep to main-
tain performance during sustained operations is four-five hours.” According to its
proponents, such a level of partial deprivation was acceptable, obviating any need
for analeptic drugs.41
Despite the advent of a more diversified strategy, chemical stimulants to cope
with the demands of modern warmaking have remained a significant component
in the evolving sleep-control system. In 1987, based on a comprehensive assess-
ment of the demands placed on troops by continuous operations, scientists at the
Walter Reed Army Institute of Research concluded that there was “a need for a
drug that will reduce the need for sleep so that normal alertness can be main-
tained for days, weeks and even months in the face of restricted sleep (e.g., 4–5
hours in each 24 hours).” Obviously, the Walter Reed team did not share their
San Diego colleagues' level of enthusiasm for reliance on drug-free sleep-dieting,
as it pertained to operations that lasted over twenty-four hours. Since 1990, mili-
tary leaders and their biomedical experts have taken the quest for pharmaceuti-
cally induced wakefulness beyond amphetamines. Of particular interest has been
the emergence of a novel stimulant with more precise pharmacological action
limited to wakefulness, in contrast to amphetamines, which stimulate and stress
multiple organ systems—elevating heart rate, blood pressure, and respiration rate.
Discussion of the dramatic effects of modafinil began to appear in the European
scientific literature in late 1980s, sparking American military interest. In 1991,
Terence Lyons and Jonathan French, biomedical scientists in the Air Force's
Aerospace Medical Science and Technology unit, enthusiastically hailed the
potential of this compound: “It could be an ideal replacement for amphetamine
in short-term operations in which fatigue might threaten the successful comple-
tion of a mission.” Mindful of the “serious limitations” of amphetamine and
the side effects of caffeine, Lyons and French called on their colleagues to study
this promising aid to military performance. They sought to broaden the appeal of
this stimulant by suggesting possible nonmilitary applications: “Besides the enor-
mous potential for a safe and effective anti-fatigue agent in the military, modafinil
could be used by civilians in critical jobs involving night shift work.” Intense
scrutiny of the latest stimulant ensued. Research quickly generated an abundance

of positive findings on cognitive functioning, reaction time, and other measures
of performance. However, a 1997 Canadian study also reported that this drug
brought some of the same undesirable overconfidence as amphetamine. In 1998,
Cephalon, Incorporated, began to produce and sell modafinil in the U.S. as
Provigil. It soon gained a place on the roster of approved military supplies and was
put to use by both the Army and Air Force in Afghanistan by early 2003.42
Rather than greet modafinil as a panacea, military planners in the new mil-
lennium have chosen to cast a wider net. In 2001, the Defense Advanced
Research Projects Agency (DARPA) announced its aim of creating soldiers
capable of functioning efficiently for a full week without sleep. To that end, it
moved to support not merely more investigations into analeptic substances like
orexin-A, but other lines of nonchemical inquiry as well. Envisioning genetics as
the next frontier of wakefulness promotion, the defense research agency set out to
find a sleep gene and the mutation that would eliminate it. Work with fruit flies
soon produced promising sleep-resistant variants, leading to studies involving
mice. The wide differences in resting behavior among animal species have also
prompted interest. A 2007 DARPA summary of its sleep-related initiatives
observed that some migratory birds were “naturally resistant to the performance
decrements seen in other species after sleep deprivation.” In the same vein, a
defense consultant in 2008 offered this possibility: “Suppose a human could be
engineered who slept for the same amount of time as a giraffe (1.9 hours per
night). . . . An adversary would need an approximately 40 percent increase in the
troop level to compensate for this advantage.” These ambitions of minimizing
sleep have been nurtured because defense officials and their supporters were able
to make connections, even tenuous ones to unidentified adversaries, between this
work and national security. They also rested on the restless quest for cheating
sleep, a drive that had its take-off phase sixty years earlier.43
Conclusion
The Second World War served to reinforce American wakefulness in two

important ways. It elevated the value accorded alertness and stamina by linking
them to patriotic sacrifice. This message was conveyed by varied means. An out-
pouring of memoirs, historical studies, and cinematic treatments celebrated the
“greatest generation” that won the good war. Bill Mauldin's evocative cartoons,
many of which depicted drowsy GIs toughing it out, were published in 1945 in a
collection titled Up Front. The book stayed atop the New York Times bestseller
list for a year and half. In countless postwar conversations and speeches, millions
of veterans told and retold war stories to audiences large and small. Woven into
many of these narratives were testaments to the sleep-deprived staying power of
the nation's fighting men. Also embedded in these morally loaded interpretations
was denigration of sleep as neglectful, irresponsible, fatal. The wartime equation
of sleep with death deepened the unfortunate pejorative connotations surround-
ing this basic physiological necessity.44
World War II also contributed to widespread societal sleeplessness by legiti-
mating and otherwise promoting analeptic drugs. Subsequent military policy and
practice have generally reinforced this stance. Beginning in 1941, America
engaged in intensified chemical warfare, deploying caffeine and amphetamine in
massive quantities. To be sure, the traditional stimulant in the ubiquitous coffee

cups and Coke bottles did most of the work of propping up weary warriors and war
workers. But in a society increasingly receptive to the notion that there was a pill
for every human problem, the arrival of Benzedrine at this critical moment gave
an alluring, false promise of superhuman, if not endless, performance. Drugs were
especially helpful in dealing with the war's irregular and unpredictable sleepless-
ness: no one expected fixed shifts or regular schedules at the battlefront.
Accordingly, the war underscored, especially for the postwar civilian workforce,
the imperative to learn to adapt to sleeplessness. Workers who today deal with
forced, often unscheduled, overtime by taking Provigil (commonly known as “the
overtime pill”) are following a path broken by their parents and grandparents,
who may well have stayed awake with the help of its predecessors. Employers'
efforts in the late twentieth century to make employee flexibility into an impera-
tive received a major boost from the pharmaceutically based methods of coping
introduced by the Second World War and refined ever since.45
Endnotes
I am grateful for the encouragement and other assistance offered by Philip Jenkins, Nic
Rasmussen, Carol Reardon, Peggy Spear, and Peter Stearns. Address correspondence to
Alan Derickson, Department of History, Pennsylvania State University, 108 Weaver
Building, University Park, PA 16802-5500. Email: avd3@psu.edu.
1. J. D. Ratcliff, “Benzedrine: Two-Faced Drug,” Coronet, July 1945, 10–11 (quotation);
Frank J. Barrett, “The Organizational Construction of Hegemonic Masculinity: The Case
of the U.S. Navy,” Gender, Work and Organization 3 (1996): 136 (naval officer quotation).
2. John Ellis, The Sharp End: The Fighting Man in World War II (New York, 1980), 88–90;
Stephen E. Ambrose, Citizen Soldiers: The U.S. Army from the Normandy Beaches to the
Bulge to the Surrender of Germany (New York, 1997), 251–72; Charles W. Bray, Psychology
and Military Proficiency: A History of the Applied Psychology Panel of the National Defense
Research Committee (Princeton, 1948), 104–14; S. L. A. Marshall, Night Drop: The
American Airborne Invasion of Normandy (Boston, 1962), 11–17, 338–43; Bruce E. Egger
and Lee M. Otts, G Company's War: Two Personal Accounts of the Campaigns in Europe,
1944–1945, ed. Paul Roley (Tuscaloosa, 1992), 120–21, 205; Richard Overy, “The Air
War in Europe, 1939–1945,” in A History of Air Warfare, ed. John A. Olsen (Washington,
2010), 27–52; Richard R. Muller, “The Air War in the Pacific, 1941–1945,” in ibid., 53–
79; John Hines, “Victory Rode Military Highway,” International Teamster, October 1945,
18–20; Ladislas Farago, Patton: Ordeal and Triumph (New York, 1972), 133–756. On noc-
turnal activity in World War I, see U.S., Army, Center of Military History, United States
Army in the World War, 1917–1919, 17 vols., vol. 4: Military Operations of the American
Expeditionary Forces (Washington: The Center, 1989), 3, 4, 7, 57, 87–88, 105–6, 124, 133,
136, 152–53, 187.
3. Ambrose, Citizen Soldiers; Gerald F. Linderman, The World within War: America's
Combat Experience in World War II (Boston, 1997); John Willis, “Variations in State
Casualty Rates in World War II and the Vietnam War,” Social Problems 22 (1975): 558–
68, esp. 566; Richard H. Kohn, “The Social History of the American Soldier: A Review
and Prospectus for Research,” American Historical Review 86 (1981): 553, 557; Edith Eustis,
War Letters of Morton Eustis to His Mother, February 6, 1941, to August 10, 1944
(New York, 1945); Robert Sherrod, Tarawa: The Story of a Battle (New York, 1944), 31.
4. Linda K. Kerber, No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies: Women and the Obligations of
Citizenship (New York, 1998), 224 (quotation), 221–302; Mark Leff, “The Politics of
Sacrifice on the American Home Front in World War II, “ Journal of American History 77
(1991): 1296–318; Glenn C. Altschuler and Stuart M. Blumin, The GI Bill: The New Deal
for Veterans (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). On shared sleep loss as a factor in
group cohesion, see Stephen E. Ambrose, Band of Brothers: E Company, 506 th Regiment,
101 st Airborne from Normandy to Hitler's Eagle's Nest (New York, 2004), 221.
5. On the prevalence and consequences of sleep deprivation, see U.S., National
Commission on Sleep Disorders Research, Wake Up America: A National Sleep Alert: Report
of the National Commission on Sleep Disorders, 2 vols. (Washington: Government Printing
Office, 1993); Katherine A. Stamakis, George A. Kaplan, and Robert E. Roberts, “Short
Sleep Duration across Income, Education, and Race/Ethnic Groups: Population Prevalence
and Growing Disparities during 34 Years of Follow-up,” Annals of Epidemiology 17 (2007):
948–55; Sara E. Luckhaupt, “Short Sleep Duration among Workers—United States,
2010,” Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, April 27, 2012, 281–83.
6. For emphasis on more dramatic parameters of manhood, see, among others, Michael
S. Kimmel, Manhood in America: A Cultural History, 2d ed. (New York, 2006); Clifford
Putney, Muscular Christianity: Manhood and Sports in Protestant America, 1880–1920
(Cambridge, 2001); John Pettegrew, Brutes in Suits: Male Sensibility in America, 1890–1920
(Baltimore, 2007); Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender
and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago, 1995); Stephen H. Norwood,
Strikebreaking and Intimidation: Mercenaries and Masculinity in Twentieth-Century America
(Chapel Hill, 2002); Pierre Bourdieu, Masculine Domination, trans. Richard Nice
(Stanford, 2001). Among the projects that do take up male stamina and perseverance are
Elliott J. Gorn, The Manly Art: Bare-Knuckle Prize Fighting in America (Ithaca, 1986), 71,
114, 118, 141, 233, 247; Melissa Dabakis, Visualizing Labor in American Sculpture:
Monuments, Manliness, and the Work Ethic (New York, 1999), 27–28, 96, 99, 124, 247n6;
Edward S. Slavishak, Bodies of Work: Civic Display and Labor in Industrial Pittsburgh
(Durham, 2008); Rupert Wilkinson, American Tough: The Tough-Guy Tradition and
American Character (Westport, CT, 1984), 18–20; R. W. Connell, “An Iron Man: The
Body and Some Contradictions of Hegemonic Masculinity,” in Sport, Men, and the Gender
Order: Critical Feminist Perspectives, ed. Michael A. Messner and Donald F. Sabo
(Champaign, IL, 1990), 83–95.
7. Joshua S. Goldstein, War and Gender: How Gender Shapes the War System and Vice Versa
(New York, 2001); Andrew J. Huebner, The Warrior Image: Soldiers in American Culture
from the Second World War to the Vietnam War (Chapel Hill, 2008); Nancy C. M. Hartsock,
“Masculinity, Heroism, and the Making of War,” in Rocking the Ship of State: Toward a
Feminist Peace Politics, ed. Adrienne Harris and Ynestra King (Boulder, 1989), 133–52;
Christopher H. Hamner, Enduring Battle: American Soldiers in Three Wars, 1776–1945
(Lawrence, 2011); Katerina Agostino, “The Making of Warriors: Men, Identity and
Military Culture,” Journal of Interdisciplinary Gender Studies 3 (1998): 58–75; Robert
A. Nye, “Western Masculinities in War and Peace,” American Historical Review 112
(2007): 417–38; E. Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity
from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York, 1993), 232–39; Craig M. Cameron,
American Samurai: Myth, Imagination, and the Conduct of Battle in the First Marine Division,
1941–1951 (New York, 1994), 49–88; Ralph LaRossa, Of War and Men: World War II in
the Lives of Fathers and Their Families (Chicago, 2011).
8. Kenton Kroker, The Sleep of Others and the Transformation of Sleep Research (Toronto,
2007); John Shepard, Jr., et al., “History of the Development of Sleep Medicine in the
United States,” Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine 1 (2005): 61–82; William C. Dement,
“History of Sleep Medicine,” Neurologic Clinics 23 (2005): 945–65; Elizabeth Cromley,
“Sleeping Around: A History of American Beds and Bedrooms,” Journal of Design History 3
(1990): 1–17; Peter N. Stearns, Perrin Rowland, and Lori Giarnella, “Children's Sleep:
Sketching Historical Change,” Journal of Social History 30 (1996): 345–66; Alan

Derickson, “‘Asleep and Awake at the Same Time’: Sleep Denial among Pullman Porters,”
Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas 5: 3 (2008): 13–44; Alan Derickson,
“Physiological Science and Scientific Management in the Progressive Era: Frederic S. Lee
and the Committee on Industrial Fatigue,” Business History Review 68 (1994): 483–514.
On the decrease in sleep time since the late nineteenth century, see National Commission
on Sleep Disorders Research, Wake Up America, 1: 48. On the spread of night work in the
nineteenth century, see Peter C. Baldwin, In the Watches of the Night: Life in the Nocturnal
City, 1820–1930 (Chicago, 2012), 105–37.
9. Ellis, Sharp End, 88 (Vandergrift quotation); Robert J. Franklin, Medic! How I Fought
World War II with Morphine, Sulfa, and Iodine Swabs (Lincoln, 2006), 53 (quotation), 64,
115–17; Gordon W. Prange, At Dawn We Slept: The Untold Story of Pearl Harbor
(New York, 1981), 16, 508, 518–19, 525; T. Grady Gallant, On Valor's Side (Garden City,
NY, 1963), 327–29; Robert Leckie, Helmet for My Pillow: From Parris Island to the Pacific
(New York, 2001), 84, 89–90, 230–31; Richard Tregaskis, Guadalcanal Diary (New York,
1943), 35, 82, 115, 127, 158, 215; Richard E. Overton, God Isn't Here: A Young Man's
Entry into World War II and His Participation in the Battle of Iwo Jima, 3d ed. (Clearfield,
UT, 2008), 206–23; Cameron, American Samurai, 119–23; Robert Kotlowitz, Before Their
Time: A Memoir (New York, 1997), 134–36; Ambrose, Band of Brothers, 144–45; Sherrod,
Tarawa, 57–60, 82, 84, 102, 122; U.S., War Department, Basic Field Manual: Jungle
Warfare (Washington, 1941), 47–48.
10. U.S., United States Code, Title 10, Sec. 913, Art. 113: Misbehavior of Sentinel (quota-
tion), http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/10/913, accessed Dec. 28, 2010; U.S., “An
Act for Establishing Rules and Articles of the Armies of the United States,” April 10,
1806, in U.S., The Public Statutes at Large of the United States of America, vol. 2, ed. Richard
Peters (Boston, 1845), 365 (quotation); U.S., “An Act to . . . Establish a Uniform Code of
Military Justice,” in U.S., The Statutes at Large of the United States of America, vol. 64, pt. 1
(Washington, 1952), 139; Steven J. Ramold, Baring the Iron Hand: Discipline in the Union
Army (DeKalb, 2010), 368–84, esp. 368–69, 374–75; Bell I. Wiley, The Life of Billy Yank:
The Common Soldier of the Union (Indianapolis, 1962), 203–4; John D. Billings, Hardtack
and Coffee: or, the Unwritten Story of Army Life (Boston, 1888), 157.
11. Gallant, On Valor's Side, 303 (quotation), 302–3; E. B. Sledge, With the Old Breed, at
Peleliu and Okinawa (New York, 1990), 117 (quotation), 117–18, 163; Kotlowitz, Before
Their Time, 109–16; Grady P. Arrington, Infantryman at the Front (New York, 1959), 42;
Overton, God Isn't Here, 307–8.
12. Billings, Hardtack, 99 (quotation), 99–100; Arrington, Infantryman at the Front, 180
(quotation), 179–80; Charles E. Kelly with Pete Martin, One Man's War (New York,
1944), 151 (quotation); Egger and Otts, G Company's War, 23 (Egger quotation); Yank,
July 15, 1942, 14, January 13, 1943, 14, October 22, 1943, 14, March 24, 1944, 16.
13. Gallant, On Valor's Side, 247 (quotation), 260 (quotation), 249, 260–63; Gerald
Astor, The Mighty Eighth: The Air War in Europe as Told by the Men Who Fought It
(New York, 1998), 35 (quotation); Harold J. Gordon, Jr., One Man's War: A Memoir of
World War II (New York, 1999), 50, 56–57, 112; Leckie, Helmet for My Pillow, 87; Donald
W. Hastings et al., Psychiatric Experiences of the Eighth Air Force: First Year of Combat
(New York, 1944), 26–27; William Jeffries, “Stress on Personnel Flying the ‘Hump,’”
Bulletin of the U.S. Army Medical Department 6 (1946): 605.
14. James C. Fry, Combat Soldier (Washington, 1968), 258 (quotation); Bill Mauldin, Up
Front (New York, 1945), 151–60; Kotlowitz, Before Their Time, 178–81; Stephen
E. Ambrose, The Wild Blue: The Men and Boys Who Flew the B-24s over Germany, 1944–45
(New York, 2002), 132.
15. Leckie, Helmet for My Pillow, 40 (quotation), 38–40; U.S., National Research Council,
Psychology for the Fighting Man: Prepared for the Fighting Man Himself (Washington, 1943),
267 (quotation); Billings, Hardtack and Coffee, 51–54; Mauldin, Up Front, 144; Fry,
Combat Soldier, 172; U.S. Army, Center of Military History, The Quartermaster Corps:
Organization, Supply, and Services, 2 vols., vol. 1 by Erna Risch (Washington, 1995), 1:
130–31.
16. Mauldin, Up Front, 166 (quotation), 145 (quotation); Stars and Stripes, May 3, 1943, 6;
Ambrose, Band of Brothers, 181, 183, 186, 189; Fry, Combat Soldier, 227; Ralph
Z. Boroughs, A Private's Eye View of World War II (Greenwood, SC, 1987), 134–36; Yank,
July 2, 1943, 3; Sherrod, Tarawa, 81; Sledge, With the Old Breed, 271, 299; U.S., Military
Intelligence Division, Military Reports on the United Nations 14 (1944): 36, 40.
17. Egger and Otts, G Company's War, 136 (Egger quotation), 104, 122, 205–8, 217;
Arrington, Infantryman at the Front, 113 (quotation), 51, 121, 181; Sledge, With the Old
Breed, 144 (quotation), 79, 159, 271, 292–93; Mauldin, Up Front, 143 (quotation), 21, 41,
101; Samuel A. Stouffer et al., The American Soldier, 2 vols., (Princeton, 1949), 2: 77–79,
374, 389–90; Ashton Graybiel et al., “The Problem of Fatigue among Student Pilots at the
Naval Air Training Center, Pensacola, Florida,” Journal of Aviation Medicine 15 (1944):
18–19.
18. Stanley Peal, “Psychiatric Experiences in a Tropical Theater of Operations,” Bulletin of
the U.S. Army Medical Department 1 (1944): 74 (quotation); Roy R. Grinker and John
P. Spiegel, Men under Stress (Philadelphia, 1945), 54 and passim; U.S., Army Air Forces,
School of Aviation Medicine, Flight Surgeon's Handbook (Randolph Field, Tex., 1942), 65,
66; National Research Council, Psychology for the Fighting Man, 262–66; Sledge, With the
Old Breed, 293; Jeffries, “Stress on Personnel,” 603–12; Joseph L. Fetterman, “Fatigue and
Exhaustion States in the Army and in Industry,” n.d. [ca. March 1945], 4, 9, Medical
Historical Unit Collection, Professional Papers, Group 1, box 33, folder: Ferguson-Filbert,
U.S. Army Military History Institute, Carlisle Barracks, Carlisle, Pa.; Ross McFarland, “An
Analysis of Fatigue in the Ground Forces Echelons of the Thirteenth Air Force (Revised),”
January 6, 1944, Ross McFarland Collection, box 8, folder 14, Special Collections and
Archives, Wright State University Libraries, Dayton, Ohio; Donald W. Hastings et al.,
“Sodium Amytal Narcosis in Treatment of Operational Fatigue,” War Medicine 5 (1944):
368–72; John M. Murray, “The Syndrome of Operational Fatigue in Flyers,” Psychoanalytic
Quarterly 13 (1944): 411, 413–14, 416.
19. Gallant, On Valor's Side, 250 (quotation), 249–51; Kelly with Martin, One Man's War,
62 (quotation), 61; Arrington, Infantryman at the Front, 175 (quotation), 55, 107;
Marshall, Night Drop, 101, 133, 357; Tregaskis, Guadalcanal Diary, 162; Astor, Mighty
Eighth, 34; Ambrose, Band of Brothers, 67; John Jones, Jr., “Army Service Experiences
Questionnaire,” n.d. [ca. 1990], 7, 9, 11, World War II Veterans Survey Collection, Third
Armor Division, box 18, folder 32, U.S. Army Military History Institute, Carlisle Barracks,
Carlisle, Pa.; Wilford Lind, “With a B-29 over Japan—a Pilot's Story,” New York Times
Magazine, March 25, 1945, 37; Henry A. Zimmerman, “Fatigue in B-29 Crewmen,”
Bulletin of the U.S. Army Medical Department 7 (1947): 305, 307; Egger and Otts, G
Company's War, 136, 205, 243.
20. Billings, Hardtack and Coffee, 122 (quotation), 130 (quotation), 94, 111, 121–29;
Howard Bierman, “Nutrition in Aviation Medicine,” War Medicine 3 (1943): 12 (quota-
tion); U.S., War Department, Surgeon-General's Office, A Report on the Hygiene of the
United States Army with Descriptions of Military Posts (Washington, 1875), xxii; Mark
Pendergrast, Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World
(New York, 1999), 48–50, 146–47, 156; Kenneth G. Baker, “Oatmeal and Coffee,” Indiana
Magazine of History 97 (2001): 44–46, 52, 70, 74.
21. National Research Council, Psychology for the Fighting Man, 282 (quotation), 283;
Bierman, “Nutrition in Aviation Medicine,” 12 (quotation); Sledge, With the Old Breed, 27
(quotation); Pendergrast, Uncommon Grounds, 224 (quotation); Ernst Behrendt, “Coffee
Goes to War,” Travel, March 1942, 28–29; “Fighting Men Get Best Cup of Coffee
Possible,” Tea and Coffee Trade Journal, July 1942, 15; Editorial, “Coffee Is a Most Essential
Diet Item,” ibid., 11; National Coffee Department of Brazil, “Coffee: The Fighting Man's
Drink,” ibid., November 1943, 17; Gallant, On Valor's Side, 240–41; Egger and Otts,
Company G's War, 39, 151.
22. Center of Military History, The Quartermaster Corps, 180, 187; Fry, Combat Soldier, 174;
Gallant, On Valor's Side, 240–41; Jay A. Bonwit, “How Freshly Roasted Coffee Is Supplied
to the U.S. Army Overseas and at Home,” Tea and Coffee Trade Journal, April 1943, 11,
26; “QMC Portable Coffee Roasting Units Give Troops a Roaster-Fresh Product,” ibid.,
October 1943, 28, 30; “Army Plant in New Caledonia Supplies GI Brand of Locally
Grown Coffee,” ibid., August 1944, 11, 20; “American Red Cross Workers Overseas Keep
GIs' Coffee and Tea Cups Full,” ibid., January 1944, 9; Ellis, Sharp End, 253–54; Stars and
Stripes, November 8, 1943, 3; Pendergrast, Uncommon Grounds, 147, 223–24.
23. Center of Military History, The Quartermaster Corps, 179–80, 183, 185,187; Mark
Pendergrast, For God, Country, and Coca-Cola, 2d ed. (New York, 2000), 197–202;
Pendergrast, Uncommon Grounds, xv, 231; David T. Courtwright, Forces of Habit: Drugs
and the Making of the Modern World (Cambridge, 2002), 19, 26; Boroughs, Private's Eye
View, 90–92, 197; Ellis, Sharp End, 254–55; Clifford Morgan to Surgeon General, U.S.
Army, January 8, 1943, Record Group 112: Records of the Office of the Army Surgeon
General, General Subject Files, 1938–44, box 83, folder: 441, 1943, Archives II, National
Archives, College Park, MD.; Fred Stock and D. P. Morgan to H. G. Batcheller,
September 1, 1943, ibid., folder: 441, 1943.
24. Nicolas Rasmussen, On Speed: The Many Lives of Amphetamine (New York, 2008), 21–
71; U.S., Army Services of Supply, Southwest Pacific Area, Enemy Materiel Medical:
Japanese Drugs and Medicines (n.p., n.d.), 55, 84; Great Britain, Flying Personnel Research
Committee, The Use of Benzedrine to Overcome Fatigue on Operational Flights in Coastal
Command, by R. H. Winfield, Report 361 (Fairborough, 1941); Gordon Kembrell,
“Summary,” October 31, 1941, A. C. Ivy Papers, box 86, folder 26, American Heritage
Center, University of Wyoming, Laramie; Paul Hawley, “Use of Benzedrine for Relief of
Fatigue—Great Britain,” November 18, 1941, ibid.
25. A. C. Ivy and L. R. Krasno, “Amphetamine (Benzedrine) Sulphate: A Review of Its
Pharmacology,” War Medicine 1 (1941): 20 (quotation), 15–42; Alfred Richards to James
Simmons, March 16, 1942 (quotation), Richards Papers, box 12, folder 6; Committee on
Medical Research, “Minutes of Fifteenth Meeting,” December 19, 1941, 2, ibid., folder 30;
R. G. Prentiss, Jr., to Alfred Richards, February 28, 1942, Ivy Papers, box 86, folder 26;
A. C. Ivy, “Proposal for Contract in Medical Research Pertaining to National Defense,”
December 16, 1941, Record Group 227: Records of the Office of Scientific Research and
Development, Records of the Committee on Medical Research, Contract Records, 1941–
1946, box 31, folder: Contract—Northwestern University—Ivy, OEMcmr-46, Archives II,
National Archives, College Park, MD; U.S., OSRD and Northwestern University,
“Contract No. OEMcmr-46: Memorandum of Understanding,” February 5, 1942, ibid.;
George Darling, “How the National Research Council Streamlined Medical Research for
War,” in Doctors at War, ed. Morris Fishbein (New York, 1945), 363–64. On OSRD, see
James P. Baxter III, Scientists against Time (Boston, 1946); G. Pascal Zachary, Endless
Frontier: Vannevar Bush, Engineer of the American Century (Cambridge, 1999), 89–276,
esp. 129–30. On the wartime physiological research network, see D. B. Dill, “Physiologists
in World War II,” Physiologist 7 (1964): 35–37; Steven M. Horvath and Elizabeth
C. Horvath, The Harvard Fatigue Laboratory: Its History and Contributions (Englewood
Cliffs, NJ, 1973), 53–72.
26. A. C. Ivy and Robert Seashore, “Monthly Progress Report No. 4,” May 31, 1942,
Walter Miles Papers, box 2, binder: Bulletin, Subcommittee on Clinical Investigation,
1942–1944, U.S. Army Military History Institute, Carlisle Barracks, Carlisle, Pa.;
A. C. Ivy and Robert Seashore, “Monthly Progress Report No. 5,” June 29, 1942, ibid.;
Robert Seashore to A. C. Ivy, June 10, 1942, MilMed: Committee on Aviation Medicine:
Problems: Drugs: 1942–1944, in National Academy of Sciences-National Research
Council Archives, National Academy of Sciences, Washington; Roger Prentiss, Jr., to
A. C. Ivy, July 25, 1942, Ivy Papers, box 86, folder 26; Linda Warkentin to Alfred
Richards, December 1, 1942, RG 227: Records of the Committee on Medical Research,
General Records, 1940–46, box 44, folder: Ivy, Dr. A. C.; A. C. Ivy and R. H. Seashore,
“The Effects of Analeptic Drugs in Relieving Fatigue from Prolonged Military Operations:
An Advance Summary,” n.d. [ca. January 1943], McFarland Collection, box 289, folder 40.
27. Ivy and Seashore, “Effects of Analeptic Drugs,” passim throughout, esp. 1–2, 5, 8, 13,
17, 24–25, Appendices I-A-II through II-B (unpaginated), McFarland Collection, box
289, folder 40. In general, my interpretation of the research by Ivy and others concurs with
that of Nicolas Rasmussen. We do part company, however, on the question of the measura-
ble benefits of Benzedrine for performance related to wakefulness. Rasmussen minimizes
the objective effects (On Speed, 76–83) and legitimately points to the subjective factors dis-
covered and valued by Ivy and his psychologist colleague, as well as by other researchers.
But their summary report offers cogent evidence that Ivy and Seashore saw consistently
positive differences between the objective performances of the Benzedrine recipients and
those of the control groups. In fifteen of forty-two behavioral tests conducted during their
studies, Benzedrine was associated with statistically significant (p < .05) advantages (See
“Effects of Analeptic Drugs,” Appendix II-A, [unpaginated]).
28. F. A. Hellenbrandt and Peter Karpovich, “Fitness, Fatigue and Recuperation: Survey of
Methods Used for Improving the Physical Performance of Man,” War Medicine 1 (1941):
768 (quotations), 745–68; Louis Goodman and Alfred Gilman, The Pharmacological Basis
of Therapeutics (New York, 1941), 444 (quotation); A. C. Ivy and F. R. Goetzl, “A Review
of the Literature on Pervitin or Deoxyephedrine,” n.d. [ca. January 1942], Miles Papers,
box 2, binder: Bulletin, Subcommittee on Clinical Investigation, 1942–1944; Committee
on Medical Research, OSRD, “Verbatim Transcript of Proceedings, August 22, 1941,
2-13-14, 16, Alfred Richards Papers, box 12, folder 25, University Archives and Records
Center, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.
29. John Rogers [“For the Surgeon General”], “Circular Letter No. 58: Benzedrine,”
February 23, 1943, 1 (quotations), 3 (quotation), 1–3, RG 112, Executive Office, Office
Service Division, Publications File, SGO Circular Letters, 1942–1944, box 12, vol.:
Circular Letters, 1942–1943; A. C. Ivy to George Guest, Feb. 11, 1944, RG 227, Records
of the Committee on Medical Research, Contract Records, 1941–1946, box 31, folder:
Contract—Northwestern University—Ivy, OEMcmr-46.
30. Headquarters, Army Services of Supply, War Department to C[ommanding] G
[enerals], U.S. Army Forces in Middle East et al., February 27, 1943, RG 112, General
Subject Files, 1938–44, box 84, folder: 441 (Benzedrine); Headquarters, Services of
Supply, War Department to Commanding General, North African Theater, February 27
and March 5, 1943, ibid.; Robert Carpenter to Commanding General, Army Air Forces,
December 2, 1944, ibid.; A. T. Beisner to Commanding General, Headquarters, Army Air
Forces, Office of the Air Surgeon, November 27, 1944, ibid., box 83, folder: 440; U.S.,
Army Service Forces, Supply Control: Monthly Progress Report, March 31, 1945 (n.p., n.d.
[1945]), 132; W. A. Wood, Jr., to the Surgeon General, December 9, 1944, ibid.; U.S.,
Army Service Forces, Basic Field Manual: First Aid for Soldiers (Washington, 1943), 103,
105; “Benzedrine Inhalers,” Bulletin of the U.S. Army Medical Department 4 (1945): 414;
Rasmussen, On Speed, 76–78.
31. Nicholas Collias and William Bachrach, “Some Factors in Fatigue in Combat Crews in
B-24 and B-17 Bombers as Reported by Combat Veterans,” July 4, 1945, 2, 10, McFarland
Collection, box 190, folder 5; Rasmussen, On Speed, 81, 83–85, fig. 13 after 85, “Erratum”
insert; Marshall, Night Drop, 100, 101; Overton, God Isn't Here, 62, 233, 306; Franklin,
Medic!, 31–33.
32. David N. W. Grant, “When to Use the ‘Benzedrine Alert,’” Air Force, March 1944, 25
(quotations [italics in original in first quotation]), 26 (quotation); David Tyler, “Monthly
Progress Report No. 1,” March 30, 1943, 4 (quotation), 5 (quotation), 7, and passim, RG
227, Records of the Administrative Office, Contractor's Reports, 1940–1947, box 94,
folder: CMR, California Institute of Technology, OEMcmr-282; David N. W. Grant, “‘Pep
Pills’ for Bomber Pilots,” Science Digest, June 1944, 85–87; National Research Council,
Psychology for the Fighting Man, 283.
33. Maurice N. Walsh to Editor, n.d., War Medicine 3 (1943): 561 (quotation); Robert
Bigelow, “Operational Use of Benzedrine (Review of Recent Reports),” July 6, 1943, 1
(quotation), 5 (quotation), 1–6, RG 52, Records of the Research Division, Terminated
Medical Research Project Reports File, 1940–66, box 8, folder: X120 Aviat F6-2, File 1;
Bigelow to Harold Smith, July 7, 1943, ibid.; Ross McIntire to Commandant, Marine
Corps, July 8, 1943, ibid.; Harry G. Armstrong, The Principles and Practice of Aviation
Medicine, 2d ed. (Baltimore, 1943), 471 (quotation); Weekend Conference on the
Relation of Aviation Medicine to Aeronautical Design and to Flight Operations,
“Proceedings,” May 14, 1944, 108, McFarland Collection, box 156, folder 2; Sam Russell
to Commanding General, Headquarters, AAATC, Camp Davis, September 22, 1943, Ivy
Papers, box 86, folder 25: “From personal experience and observation, the undersigned
believes that judgment is impaired for about a six hour period after dosage.” For the skepti-
cism to which Walsh was replying, see G. L. Adamson to Editor, n.d., War Medicine 3
(1943): 560; for the original critique, see Jan H. Tillisch and Maurice N. Walsh, “Chronic
Exhaustion State in Test Pilots,” ibid., 2 (1942): 921.
34. Fry, Combat Soldier, 172–73 (quotation), 171–74. For an incident in which U.S. pilots
on Dexedrine accidentally killed four Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan, see New York
Times, January 19, 2003, 1, 14.
35. Smith, Kline and French Laboratories, “Fighting Men Carry Benzedrine Sulfate in
Combat,” n.d. [ca. August 1943] (quotation), Medical Historical Unit Collection,
Professional Papers, Group III, box 31, folder: Riley-Rioch; Harrison Shull to Colonel
Murphy, September 23, 1943, ibid.; Smith, Kline and French Laboratories, “Benzedrine
Inhaler in the Armed Forces,” n.d. [ca. June 1944], ibid., Group I, box 115, folder: Smith;
Captain McDonough, “Approved [ad copy],” July 12, 1944, ibid; “Energy in Pills,” Business
Week, January 15, 1944, 42–44 (quotation); Harry Gibson, “Who Put the Benzedrine in
Mrs. Murphy's Ovaltine?,” 1944, http://www.internazionale.it/pagine/blognote/ovaltine.
html; Rasmussen, On Speed, 85, fig. 14 after 85, “Erratum” insert.
36. Pan-American Coffee Bureau, “Too Good to Waste,” Tea and Coffee Industry Journal,
October 1942, 19 (quotation); “‘Too Good to Waste’ Is Theme of the 1942–43 Coffee
Campaign,” ibid., 21, 24–26; National Federation of Coffee Growers of Colombia, “Coffee—
The Vital Beverage,” ibid., July 1943, 15; “Coffee Is a Definite Aid to Morale,” ibid.,
September 1943, 20, 22; “Willow Run Illustrates the Magnitude of In-Plant Feeding of War
Workers,” ibid., March 1944, 10; Pendergrast, Uncommon Grounds, 223–24, 242; James
Quinn, Scientific Marketing of Coffee (New York, 1960), 158; William Thomson to U.S.
Department of Labor, September 5, 1944, Record Group 11: Records of the Bureau of Labor
Standards, Division of Labor Standards Classified Central Files, 1941–1945, box 22, folder:
Rest and Lunch Periods, Archives II, National Archives, College Park, MD; U.S., Bureau of
Labor Statistics, Studies of the Effects of Long Working Hours, Part 1, by Max Kossoris, Bulletin
791 (Washington, 1944), 50; U.S., Bureau of Labor Statistics, Studies of the Effects of Long
Working Hours, Part 2, by Max Kossoris, Bulletin 791-A (Washington, 1944), 7, 15, 31;U.S.,
Women's Bureau, Women's Employment in the Making of Steel, by Ethel Erickson, Bulletin
192–5 (Washington, 1944), 21, 31.
37. John Penfield, “Tea Preferred by the Builders of Thunderbolt Fighter Planes,” Tea and
Coffee Industry Journal, September 1943, 10–11; Pendergrast, For God, 179–80, 196,
202–4; NoDoz Awakeners, “How to Keep Awake on Your Victory Job,” Life, January 25,
1943, 111; Fred Stock and D. P. Morgan to H. G. Batcheller, September 1, 1943, RG 112,
General Subject Files, 1938–44, box 83, folder: 441, 1943.
38. New York Times, October 2, 1945, 3 (LeMay quotation), 1; Ratcliff, “Benzedrine:
Two-Faced Drug,” 10–11; Russell R. Monroe and Hyman J. Drell, “Oral Use of Stimulants
Obtained from Inhalers,” Journal of the American Medical Association 135 (1947): 909, 911;
O. D. Shipley, “The Benzedrine Problem,” Drivers' Digest, December 1955, 5–6;
Rasmussen, On Speed, 85, 89–91; Kevin Segrave, Vending Machines: An American
Social History (Jefferson, NC, 2002), 127, 142; “Coffee Break,” Saturday Evening Post,
September 22, 1956, 41.
39. Robert Seashore and A. C. Ivy, “The Effects of Analeptic Drugs in Relieving Fatigue,”
Psychological Monographs: General and Applied 67 (1953): 16 (quotation), 1 (quotation),
1–16; “Fatigue and Prolonged Wakefulness,” Bulletin of the U.S. Army Medical Department 7
(1947): 108; “Living without Sleep,” Newsweek, February 3, 1947, 51; Walter Somerville,
“The Effect of Benzedrine on Mental or Physical Fatigue in Soldiers,” Canadian Medical
Association Journal 55 (1946): 470–76; D. R. Davis, “Psychomotor Effects of Analeptics and
Their Relation to ‘Fatigue’ Phenomena in Air-Crew,” British Medical Bulletin 5 (1947): 43–
45; G. T. Hauty and R. B. Payne, “Effects of Dextro-Amphetamine upon Judgment,” Journal
of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics 120 (1957): 33–37; G. T. Hauty and Robert
Payne, “Effects of Analeptic and Depressant Drugs upon Psychological Behavior,” American
Journal of Public Health 48 (1958): 571–77; Vance Marchbanks, Jr., “The Amphetamines
and Their Use by B-52 Crews,” n. d. [ca. 1959], McFarland Collection, box 292, folder 15;
Richard McKenzie and Lois Elliott, “The Effects of Secobarbital and D-Amphetamine on
Performance during a Simulated Tactical Air Mission,” 1964, ibid., box 293, folder 9;
Rasmussen, On Speed, 94–99; Chauncey D. Leake, The Amphetamines: Their Actions and
Uses (Springfield, IL, 1958), 116; David Emonson and Rodger Vanderbeek, “The Use of
Amphetamines in U.S. Air Force Tactical Operations during Desert Shield and Storm,”
Aviation, Space, and Environmental Medicine 66 (1995): 262.
40. New York Times, March 6, 1968, 4; ibid., March 7, 1968, 16; ibid., January 19, 2003,
14; Jonathan Black, “'Speed' That Kills, or Worse,” New York Times Magazine, June 21,
1970, 14; U.S., House of Representatives, Select Committee on Crime, Amphetamines:
Fourth Report, 91st Cong., 2d sess., 1971, House Report 91-1807 (Washington, 1971), 7–8;
Lester Grinspoon and Peter Hedblom, The Speed Culture: Amphetamine Use and Abuse in
America (Cambridge, 1975), 19–20; Rasmussen, On Speed, 190–92; U.S., Military
Manpower Task Force, Military Manpower Task Force: A Report to the President on the Status
and Prospects of the All-Volunteer Force, rev. ed. (Washington, 1983), II-16-17; U.S., Navy,
Naval Strike and Air Warfare Center and Bureau of Medicine and Surgery, Performance
Maintenance during Continuous Flight Operations: A Guide for Flight Surgeons (Fallon, Nev.,
2000), 8–11, 14–16, Appendix (unpaginated); John A. Caldwell and J. Lynn Caldwell,
“Fatigue in Military Aviation: An Overview of U.S. Military-Approved Pharmacological
Countermeasures,” Aviation, Space, and Environmental Medicine 76: suppl. (2005):
C39-C51, esp. C46-C47.
41. U.S., Naval Health Research Center, Sleep Management in Sustained Operations: User's
Guide, by P. Naitoh, C. E. Englund, and D. H. Ryman (San Diego, 1986), 13; David
R. Jones, “U.S. Air Force Combat Psychiatry,” in War Psychiatry, ed. U.S., Army, Office of
the Surgeon General et al. (Washington, 1995), 199 (quotation); Naval Strike Center,
Performance Maintenance, 4 (quotation), 12; “Sleep—Needed or Not?” Newsweek, October
21, 1957, 105; L. L. Ainsworth and H. Bishop, The Effects of a 48-Hour Period of Sustained
Field Activity on Tank Crew Performance (Alexandria, VA, 1971); Laverne C. Johnson and
Paul Naitoh, The Operational Consequences of Sleep Deprivation and Sleep Deficit (Paris,
1974), 16–20, 33; Gerald W. Lucas, “A Practical Approach to CONOPS,” Field Artillery,
October 1988, 49. On the evolving multi-faceted approach, see G. Belenky et al.,
“Sustaining Performance during Continuous Operations: The U.S. Army's Sleep
Management System,” in Countermeasures for Battlefield Stressors, ed. Karl Friedl et al.
(Baton Rouge, 2000), 197–205.
42. U.S., Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, Effects of Continuous Operations
(CONOPS) on Soldier and Unit Performance: Review of the Literature and Strategies for
Sustaining the Soldier in CONOPS, by Gregory Belenky et al. (Washington, 1987), 2–12
(quotation); Terence J. Lyons and Jonathan French, “Modafinil: The Unique Properties of
a New Stimulant,” Aviation, Space, and Environmental Medicine 62 (1991): 432 (quota-
tions), 434 (quotation), 432–34; F. Goldenberg and J. S. Weil, “Effects of a Central Alpha
Stimulant (CRL-40476) on Quantified Vigilance in Young Adults,” in Eighth European
Congress on Sleep Research, Sleep '86: Proceedings (New York, 1988), 343–45; Odile
Benoit et al., “Effects of Modafinil on Sleepiness in Normal Sleep Deprived and
Symptomatic Subjects,” Sleep Research 16 (1987): 74; Joseph Baranski and Ross Pigeau,
“Self-Monitoring Cognitive Function during Sleep Deprivation: Effects of Modafinil,
d-Amphetamine and Placebo,” Journal of Sleep Research 6 (1997): 84–91; John Caldwell
and J. Lynn Caldwell, “Stimulants,” in Sleep Deprivation: Clinical Issues, Pharmacology, and
Sleep Loss Effects, ed. Clete A. Kushida (New York, 2005), 423–31; Jerome Groopman,
“Eyes Wide Open,” New Yorker, December 3, 2001, 52–55; Wil Hylton, “The War on
Drugs,” Esquire, February 2003, 116–17. For the discovery of a risk of addiction, see Nora
Volkow et al., “Effects of Modafinil on Dopamine and Dopamine Transporters in the Male
Human Brain: Clinical Implications,” Journal of the American Medical Association 301
(2009): 1148–54.
43. U.S., Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, Information Paper: DARPA's
Preventing Sleep Deprivation Program, October 2007 (quotation), http://www.darpa.mil/
Docs/PSD_info_paper_Oct07_200807180945043.pdf; MITRE Corporation, Human
Performance (McLean, VA., 2008), 27 (quotation), 2, 7–8, 20–27; Groopman, “Eyes Wide
Open,” 55; Hylton, “War on Drugs,” 117; Sam A. Deadwyler et al., “Systemic and Nasal
Delivery of Orexin-A (Hypocretin-1) Reduces the Effects of Sleep Deprivation on
Cognitive Performance in Nonhuman Primates,” Journal of Neuroscience 27 (2007):
14239–47; Nancy J. Wesensten, Rebecca M. Reichardt, and Thomas J. Balkin,
“Ampakine (CX717) Effects on Performance and Alertness during Simulated Night Shift
Work,” Aviation, Space, and Environmental Medicine 78 (2007): 937–43.
44. Tom Brokaw, The Greatest Generation (New York, 1998); Studs Terkel, “The Good
War”: An Oral History of World War Two (New York, 1985); Huebner, The Warrior Image,
15–167, esp. 37; Thomas P. Doherty, Projections of War: Hollywood, American Culture, and
World War II, rev. ed. (New York, 1999). See also the works of Stephen Ambrose and the
numerous memoirs cited in the notes for this chapter.
45. Karen Barrow, “Overtime Pill: The Rest Is History?” BET.com, November 17, 2009,
http://bet.healthology.com/workplace-health/article1258.htm.
Copyright of Journal of Social History is the property of Oxford University Press / USA and
its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the
copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email
articles for individual use.

No Such Thing As A Nights Sleep

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

No Such Thing As A Nights Sleep

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Section I: Sleep, Monsters, and Hot Chocolate

“No Such Thing as a Night's Sleep”:

Journal of Social History vol. 47 no. 1 (2013), pp. 1–26

Unsettling Settings for Sleep

Soldiering did not foster any expectation of an environment—natural or

Other measures ensured the thorough caffeination of American forces. Tea

Beginning what would become a series of invidious comparisons with caffeine,

American evaluation of stimulants played out in a fluid situation. By early 1943

Stimulating Productivity on the Home Front

The prestige conferred on Benzedrine by its official adoption by the War

The Ongoing Quest to Deny Sleep

scrutiny of the latest stimulant ensued. Research quickly generated an abundance

The Second World War served to reinforce American wakefulness in two

massive quantities. To be sure, the traditional stimulant in the ubiquitous coffee

Sketching Historical Change,” Journal of Social History 30 (1996): 345–66; Alan

You might also like