How Soldiers in World War II Were Given Amphetamines As Standard Issue — and the Aftermath

World War II was, among many other things, the largest pharmacological experiment in human history. By the time the war ended in 1945, the major combatant nations had collectively issued an estimated 72 million amphetamine tablets to their military personnel. The British distributed Benzedrine to the Royal Air Force and Army. The Americans supplied it to all branches of their armed forces. The Germans issued methamphetamine — under the trade name Pervitin — to Wehrmacht soldiers from the opening campaigns of 1939 onward. The Japanese gave methamphetamine to their pilots, their factory workers, and eventually to the civilian population as a productivity measure in the final years of the war.

This was not covert. It was not a secret program uncovered decades later by historians. Military authorities on all sides made deliberate decisions to pharmacologically enhance their fighting forces, documented those decisions in official memoranda, issued the drugs through standard supply chains, and in many cases encouraged or required their use. The drugs were understood to suppress fatigue, extend wakefulness, increase aggression, and sustain combat effectiveness over periods that would otherwise have been physiologically impossible. They worked, in the limited sense that they did what they were expected to do. The consequences — for the soldiers who took them, for the nations that produced them, and for the postwar drug landscape — were not what anyone had planned for.

Amphetamine Before the War: From Inhaler to Wonder Drug

Amphetamine was not a wartime innovation. The compound was first synthesized in 1887 by the Romanian chemist Lazăr Edeleanu, though its pharmacological properties were not investigated for another four decades. The pivotal figure in amphetamine’s early history is the American pharmacologist Gordon Alles, who synthesized it independently in 1927 while searching for a synthetic substitute for ephedrine — a naturally occurring stimulant used to treat asthma. Alles patented his compound and licensed it to Smith, Kline and French, which introduced it in 1932 as an over-the-counter nasal inhaler called Benzedrine, intended for congestion relief.

The Discovery of Stimulant Effects

It did not take long for users to discover that the Benzedrine inhaler, when broken open and the contents swallowed, produced a powerful stimulant effect. College students used it to stay awake for examinations. Writers and artists used it for extended creative sessions. Truck drivers used it to stay alert on long hauls. Smith, Kline and French eventually pivoted to promoting Benzedrine tablets directly for depression, obesity, narcolepsy, and a range of other conditions, and the drug entered mainstream medicine with a profile that positioned it as safe, beneficial, and broadly applicable. By the late 1930s it was on the cover of Time magazine and was being prescribed by general practitioners across the United States and Britain for conditions ranging from mild fatigue to “lack of initiative.”

Pervitin and the German Military Pharmacopeia

Methamphetamine — a more potent relative of amphetamine with more pronounced effects on dopamine release — had been synthesized in Japan in 1919 and was developed commercially in Germany by the pharmaceutical company Temmler under the name Pervitin, introduced in 1938. It was initially sold over the counter and marketed for everything from depression to low productivity. The historian Norman Ohler, in his 2016 book Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich, documented the extraordinary reach of Pervitin in prewar Germany: it was available in chocolates, given to housewives as a mood enhancer, and used by students and workers as a productivity aid. Ohler’s work drew on military archives and pharmaceutical records to trace how thoroughly methamphetamine penetrated German society before its military applications were formalized.

The Military Decision: Fatigue as the Enemy

Military planners on all sides confronted the same problem: modern warfare made demands on human physiology that human physiology was not designed to meet. Infantry soldiers might march for days with minimal sleep. Bomber crews flew missions lasting eight to twelve hours at high altitude under conditions of sustained stress and vigilance. Submarine crews operated under conditions of confinement, noise, and irregular sleep for weeks at a time. Tank crews fought through days of continuous combat. The cognitive and physical degradation produced by sleep deprivation alone — impaired judgment, slowed reaction time, increased error rates, emotional dysregulation — represented a military liability that commanders wanted to eliminate.

Germany: Pervitin and the Fall of France

Germany’s use of Pervitin in the early years of the war is among the most extensively documented cases of military pharmacology in history. The Wehrmacht’s medical leadership, under Otto Ranke, conducted trials on military personnel beginning in late 1939 and concluded that Pervitin significantly enhanced combat effectiveness by suppressing fatigue and increasing alertness. Ohler’s archival research established that approximately 35 million Pervitin tablets were ordered for the German Army and Luftwaffe in the three-month period between April and July 1940 — the period that included the invasion of France and the Low Countries.

The fall of France in six weeks — a campaign that shocked the world, as France had been expected to hold Germany to a long attritional struggle — has been analyzed by military historians for decades. The German advance through the Ardennes, which bypassed the Maginot Line and cut off Allied forces in Belgium, required armored columns to drive continuously for days with minimal rest. Pervitin made this possible in a physiological sense: tank crews and infantry soldiers who would otherwise have been incapacitated by fatigue continued to advance. How much credit the drug deserves for the campaign’s outcome is a genuinely contested historical question, but the drug’s role in enabling the physical demands of the advance is well-documented in German military records of the period.

Britain: Benzedrine and the RAF

British military use of amphetamine developed more cautiously and was initially concentrated in the Royal Air Force. Fighter and bomber crews received Benzedrine tablets — colloquially called “wakey-wakey pills” — for use on extended missions where fatigue posed a direct operational risk. The RAF’s approach reflected a considered medical judgment rather than mass distribution: the drugs were issued with guidance on appropriate use and were positioned as emergency measures for specific high-demand situations rather than routine supplements.

That restraint eroded as the war extended. By the middle years of the conflict, amphetamine use had spread through the British Army more broadly. Field commanders found that the drugs helped maintain unit effectiveness through the extended operations that became characteristic of the North African and Italian campaigns. The Medical Research Council conducted studies on the effects of Benzedrine on military performance that produced generally positive findings, which provided institutional cover for expanding distribution.

The United States: From Reluctance to Mass Issue

American military medicine was initially more skeptical of amphetamines than its British counterpart. The Army Surgeon General’s office expressed reservations about widespread distribution in the early war years, concerned about dependence and about the post-fatigue crash that followed amphetamine use — soldiers who had been chemically sustained through one period of combat would be severely impaired when the drug wore off. These concerns were medically well-founded and reflected a more sophisticated understanding of amphetamine pharmacology than was generally acknowledged in the military literature of the period.

The concerns were eventually overridden by operational necessity. American forces in the Pacific theater, conducting island-hopping campaigns under conditions of extreme heat, extended combat, and logistical strain, were issued Benzedrine as a standard ration item. By the later stages of the war, American military medicine had largely aligned with British and German practice: amphetamines were a tool of modern warfare, their risks were manageable, and the alternative — fielding an exhausted fighting force — was worse. The U.S. military issued an estimated 180 million Benzedrine tablets over the course of the war.

Japan: Methamphetamine as National Policy

Japan’s use of methamphetamine during the war went further than any other combatant nation and produced consequences that extended longest into the postwar period. The drug — sold under names including Philopon and Hiropon — was used by Japanese pilots, particularly kamikaze pilots in the later stages of the war, and by factory workers in war industries who were expected to sustain production rates that normal human endurance could not support. In the final years of the conflict, as Japan’s military situation deteriorated, the government promoted methamphetamine to the civilian population as a means of maintaining productivity and morale under conditions of severe food shortage and relentless bombing.

The Kamikaze Connection

The image of the kamikaze pilot as a man sustained purely by ideological conviction has been complicated by historical research into Japanese military pharmaceutical records. Methamphetamine was standard issue for special attack pilots, and the drug’s effects — reduced fear response, heightened aggression, suppression of the self-preservation instinct that would ordinarily make a suicide mission psychologically impossible — were understood by Japanese military planners. This does not reduce the ideological dimensions of the kamikaze program, which were real and documented, but it adds a pharmacological layer to the historical picture that is often omitted from popular accounts.

What Amphetamines Did to the Brain — and Why That Created Problems

The wartime utility of amphetamines was real, and it rested on specific neurochemical mechanisms. Both amphetamine and methamphetamine work primarily by causing neurons to release dopamine, norepinephrine, and to a lesser degree serotonin into the synaptic cleft while simultaneously blocking their reuptake — flooding the brain with stimulating neurotransmitters in a way that produces wakefulness, elevated mood, increased confidence, reduced appetite, and reduced sensitivity to pain and fatigue. The effect is powerful and, in the short term, effective at sustaining cognitive and physical performance.

The Pharmacology of the Crash

The problem that American military planners had identified early on — the post-amphetamine crash — is a direct consequence of this mechanism. The brain’s dopaminergic system is not designed to sustain artificially elevated neurotransmitter levels indefinitely. After a period of amphetamine-driven hyperstimulation, the system downregulates: receptors become less sensitive, dopamine stores are depleted, and the brain’s baseline capacity for pleasure, motivation, and normal alertness is temporarily suppressed. The result is a period of fatigue, dysphoria, and cognitive impairment that can be more severe than the original fatigue the drug was taken to prevent. Soldiers who crashed after amphetamine use were, in the short term, worse off than if they had simply rested.

With repeated use, these effects became more severe and more durable. Chronic amphetamine use produces neuroadaptations — changes in receptor density and dopamine system function — that can persist long after the drug is discontinued. The military’s solution to the crash was often simply to issue more amphetamine, which perpetuated and deepened the cycle.

Violence, Judgment, and Combat Atrocities

Amphetamine and methamphetamine reduce inhibition, increase aggression, and impair the prefrontal processes that normally moderate impulsive behavior. In a combat environment that already selects for and rewards aggressive action, these effects compounded in ways that military commanders did not fully anticipate. German military medical records from the Eastern Front include accounts of soldiers exhibiting extreme violence that commanders attributed at least partly to Pervitin use. Japanese soldiers’ conduct in occupied territories has been analyzed by some historians in light of widespread methamphetamine use, though the relationship between drug use and atrocity is complex and cannot be reduced to a single cause. The broader point holds: putting a drug that amplifies aggression and impairs judgment into the hands of men in combat created conditions for behavior that would not otherwise have occurred.

The Aftermath: Addiction, Surplus, and the Postwar Epidemic

When the war ended, its pharmacological infrastructure did not simply disappear. The production capacity built to supply military amphetamine demand was enormous, the medical profession’s faith in amphetamines as therapeutic agents remained largely intact, and millions of veterans had been introduced to the drugs during their service. The confluence of these factors produced postwar amphetamine problems in virtually every nation that had used the drugs extensively during the conflict.

Japan’s Methamphetamine Crisis

The most severe postwar consequence occurred in Japan. When the war ended, the military’s enormous stockpiles of Philopon and Hiropon were released onto the civilian market or stolen and sold on the black market. A population that was already familiar with the drug, living under conditions of extreme postwar privation, and experiencing high rates of trauma and displacement turned to methamphetamine in enormous numbers. Japan experienced what historians consider the first large-scale methamphetamine epidemic in history. By the early 1950s, an estimated 550,000 Japanese people were addicted to methamphetamine — approximately 1 in 150 of the entire population. The epidemic drove a wave of crime, psychiatric hospitalizations, and social disruption that required emergency legislative responses. Japan passed its Stimulant Drugs Control Law in 1951, one of the earliest national methamphetamine prohibition statutes in the world.

Amphetamines in Postwar Medicine

In the United States and Britain, the postwar period saw amphetamine prescriptions expand rather than contract. Smith, Kline and French promoted Benzedrine and its successors aggressively through the late 1940s and 1950s for depression, obesity, fatigue, and a wide range of other conditions. Amphetamine diet pills became a significant market. The drugs were presented as safe and effective, and the medical profession, which had seen them used in the war without obvious immediate catastrophe, largely accepted that framing. It was not until the early 1960s that the scale of amphetamine dependence in the civilian population became impossible to ignore, and regulatory pressure began to mount.

The Road to Regulation

The process by which amphetamines moved from celebrated wonder drugs to controlled substances is a case study in how slowly medical and regulatory consensus can shift when commercial and professional interests are invested in the status quo. The 1965 Drug Abuse Control Amendments began to impose restrictions on amphetamine production and distribution in the United States. The Controlled Substances Act of 1970 placed amphetamines in Schedule II — recognized as having medical uses but with high potential for abuse and dependence. These were the same compounds that had been issued to soldiers without restriction 25 years earlier, assessed by the same medical profession that had endorsed their wartime use.

The Legacy in Military Pharmacology

The World War II experience did not end military interest in cognitive enhancement pharmacology — it accelerated it. The Cold War brought renewed military investment in stimulants, psychedelics, and other compounds as potential tools of combat and intelligence operations. The U.S. military’s use of dextroamphetamine — a more refined amphetamine variant — continued in combat aviation through Korea, Vietnam, and beyond. As recently as the Gulf War and the early years of the Afghanistan and Iraq campaigns, American military aviators were issued “go pills” (dextroamphetamine) for extended missions and “no-go pills” (temazepam) to induce sleep afterward — a pharmacological cycle that would have been recognizable to any Luftwaffe medical officer in 1940.

A 2002 friendly fire incident in Afghanistan, in which American F-16 pilots bombed a Canadian unit during a training exercise, killing four soldiers, brought the military’s continued use of amphetamines into public view. The pilots’ defense argued that the mandatory use of dextroamphetamine had impaired their judgment. The military maintained that the drugs were used appropriately. The question of how much the pharmacological state of a pilot affects the decisions made at 20,000 feet at night did not receive a definitive answer, and military amphetamine use continued.

The story of amphetamines in World War II is, at its core, a story about the collision between short-term military utility and long-term human cost — a collision that military planners on every side were aware of in principle and chose to manage rather than avoid. The drugs did what they were expected to do. The consequences were also, largely, what a careful reading of the pharmacology would have predicted. The gap between those two facts — between what was known and what was decided — is where the history becomes most instructive, and most uncomfortable.

The Brain in History and Culture: Full Series

• Ancient Nootropics: What Egyptian, Greek, and Chinese Physicians Prescribed for Mental Acuity
• The History of Coffee — How the Most Widespread Cognitive Enhancer in History Changed Civilization
• Phrenology and Why Smart People Believed It for 150 Years
• The Lobotomy Era: How a Nobel Prize Was Awarded for One of Medicine’s Greatest Disasters
• How Soldiers in World War II Were Given Amphetamines As Standard Issue — and the Aftermath — You are here
• The History of Cocaine as a Legitimate Brain Medicine (and Freud’s Role in It)
• How the Discovery of Neurons Changed Everything We Thought We Knew About the Mind
• The Victorian Obsession With the Electric Brain — Early Attempts at Brain Stimulation