As Faith shows, the believers in chemical weapons staffing the CWS allied with supporters in the military, government, and private industry to lobby to add chemical warfare to the country's permanent arsenal. Their argument: poison gas represented an advanced and even humane tool in modern war, while its applications for pest control and crowd control made a chemical capacity relevant in peacetime. But conflict with those aligned against chemical warfare forced the CWS to fight for its institutional life--and ultimately led to the U.S. military's rejection of battlefield chemical weapons.
As Faith shows, the believers in chemical weapons staffing the CWS allied with supporters in the military, government, and private industry to lobby to add chemical warfare to the country's permanent arsenal. Their argument: poison gas represented an advanced and even humane tool in modern war, while its applications for pest control and crowd control made a chemical capacity relevant in peacetime. But conflict with those aligned against chemical warfare forced the CWS to fight for its institutional life--and ultimately led to the U.S. military's rejection of battlefield chemical weapons.
Behind the Gas Mask: The U.S. Chemical Warfare Service in War and Peace
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Behind the Gas Mask: The U.S. Chemical Warfare Service in War and Peace
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Overview
As Faith shows, the believers in chemical weapons staffing the CWS allied with supporters in the military, government, and private industry to lobby to add chemical warfare to the country's permanent arsenal. Their argument: poison gas represented an advanced and even humane tool in modern war, while its applications for pest control and crowd control made a chemical capacity relevant in peacetime. But conflict with those aligned against chemical warfare forced the CWS to fight for its institutional life--and ultimately led to the U.S. military's rejection of battlefield chemical weapons.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780252096624 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Illinois Press |
| Publication date: | 10/15/2014 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 176 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
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Read an Excerpt
Behind the Gas Mask
The U.S. Chemical Warfare Service in War and Peace
By Thomas I. Faith
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS
Copyright © 2014 Board of Trustees of the University of IllinoisAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-252-09662-4
CHAPTER 1
Origins, 1917
Despite ample warning that U.S. soldiers would need to be prepared to face poison gas, preparations for chemical warfare waited till almost the last minute. Once the Department of War began making arrangements to enlist, train, and equip the American Expeditionary Force (AEF) to join a war that in 1917 was already in full swing, the nation's political and military leaders hoped that the doughboys would soon be ready to fight on equal footing with the British, the French, and the rest of their allies. Nevertheless, the U.S. Army's lack of prior experience with gas and its dearth of chemical warfare equipment guaranteed that it would depend on British and French assistance during World War I. The United States spent 1917 rapidly and haphazardly cobbling together a chemical warfare organization that needed to be capable of a variety of responsibilities that included performing research, manufacturing war gasses and gas masks, training the soldiers of the AEF to defend themselves against enemy gas, and also deploying gas on the battlefield. The members of the U.S. chemical warfare program performed well under the circumstances, but more advanced preparation would have improved readiness and mitigated the need for emergency measures.
The first proposals to use gas as a weapon in the United States were made during the Civil War. A schoolteacher in New York named John W. Doughty wrote to the White House in 1862 to suggest that cannon shells filled with chlorine gas be used against the Confederates. A member of President Abraham Lincoln's staff forwarded the letter to the Department of War, where the idea was not pursued. In 1864 Forest Shepherd, a professor at Western Reserve University, proposed a formula for a noxious gas cloud that he hoped the Army of the Potomac could use to break the stalemate at the siege of Petersburg. That suggestion was refused by the commanding general, Ulysses S. Grant. A host of other proposals to use various nonlethal chemicals also circulated on both the Union and Confederate sides, but ultimately the U.S. Civil War avoided becoming the first chemical war in modern world history.
With growing concern about the destructive capabilities of nineteenth-century weapons, the Russian Empire hosted a conference of European delegates to discuss the laws of war in 1868. The declaration they produced in St. Petersburg did not address chemical weapons specifically, but it did document their resolve to fix "the technical limits at which the necessities of war ought to yield to the requirements of humanity," and to renounce "the employment of arms which uselessly aggravate the sufferings of disabled men, or render their death inevitable." The St. Petersburg Declaration only expressly outlawed exploding bullets, but the contracting parties acknowledged the possibility that future scientific advancements in weaponry would merit additional arms limitation agreements "to conciliate the necessities of war with the laws of humanity." Attendees at successive Hague Peace Conferences in 1899 and 1907 used the language of the St. Petersburg Declaration to guide their discussions of the various arms-limitation conventions they considered. Deciding that the use of poison-gas weapons would be inhumane, the Hague Peace Conference of 1899 issued a declaration that required the contracting nations "to abstain from the use of projectiles the object of which is the diffusion of asphyxiating or deleterious gasses." In spite of the fact that this Hague Declaration was in force during the First World War among all of the belligerent nations, the agreement did not prevent poison gas from being used.
World War I broke out in August 1914, and it defied predictions that the fighting would be over quickly. The German army overran most of Belgium and advanced rapidly into northern France before it was stopped at the Marne River in September. Afterward the French and the Germans raced their armies north while trying to outflank each other, extending their lines to the English Channel. The British army arrived in time to join the French and Belgians at Ypres, where the Germans were stopped again and the front stabilized for the winter. Both the Germans and the Allied powers dug in and prepared for the war on Germany's "Western Front" to last through the spring.
Even before the stalemate occurred, the French army used tear gas in battle against the Germans—gas grenades that had originally been developed for riot control, but in such small concentrations that their German opponents failed to notice. German chemists, however, were already proposing that their nation's vast chemical resources be marshaled to the cause. The German chemical industry was ready to produce many kinds of war gasses, and the army was willing to employ new weapons that could give its soldiers a battlefield advantage. The military may also have suspected that the French and British were designing similar weapons. Chemistry professor and future Nobel laureate Walther Nernst designed an artillery shell filled with a chemical irritant that was used against the British near Neuve-Chapelle in October 1914. Three thousand of these shells were fired during the battle, but the substance failed to have any effect. In January the Germans launched an assault against the Russians on the eastern front in Poland, at Bolimov, using eighteen thousand tear gas "T-shells." The winter temperature prevented the xylyl bromide in the T-shells from vaporizing, however, and the gas was completely ineffective.
Despite how poorly chemical munitions had performed thus far, Germany continued to develop the technology. Fritz Haber, another future Nobel laureate in chemistry, advocated the use of lethal and widely available chlorine gas, and he devised an alternative method of delivering it. Instead of using shells or grenades, which could only spread small quantities of gas and technically violated the 1899 Hague Declaration against asphyxiating gas projectiles, Haber suggested that the chlorine be released from storage cylinders and allowed to drift across to the enemy trenches with the prevailing wind. Under Haber's supervision the soldiers of Pioneer Regiment 35 spent weeks preparing the first cylinder attack near Ypres. They moved thousands of chlorine cylinders into position and then waited for the wind to blow the right direction and speed. At dusk on April 22, 1915, the Pioneers connected the cylinders to long hoses that led out in front of their trench and opened the valves to release the poisonous gas into the air. The breeze carried the chlorine west along the ground to the unsuspecting soldiers in its path.
The Ypres attack was devastating for the British, Canadian, French, and Algerian soldiers who were caught in the gas cloud. Without protective masks of any kind, the choking soldiers dropped their weapons and equipment and ran from the front lines trying to escape the poison air. "Some got away in time," according to a British news cable to the New York Times, "but many, alas, not understanding the new danger, were not so fortunate and were overcome by the fumes and died poisoned. Among those who escaped, nearly all cough and spit blood, the chlorine attacking the mucous membrane. The dead were turned black at once." For the German army, the attack seemed extraordinarily successful. The Germans who followed the deadly cloud into their enemy's trenches encountered little or no resistance from soldiers or artillery. The French and British were able to mount a hurried defense, but they suffered a loss of territory and an estimated five thousand casualties in the gas attack.
In the aftermath, Germany was vilified by the international press and by foreign leaders. The commander of British forces in World War I, Sir John French, said that he regretted "the fighting has been characterized on the enemy's side, by cynical and barbarous disregard of the well-known usages of civilized war and by flagrant disregard of the Hague convention." For many observers, Germany's use of chemical weapons, combined with the invasion of neutral Belgium at the start of the war and the May 1915 sinking of the passenger ship RMS Lusitania, seemed all to support claims that Germany was an especially barbarous and bloodthirsty nation. The New York Times reported that the German nation and people were being denounced in the Russian press with such statements as "the Germans have turned this war into warfare against humanity at large. They are not content with killing their foes, but must murder every living thing they have a chance to destroy." Even as they denounced the German army as barbarous, the British and French raced to create their own lethal chemical weapons to use in retaliation.
On September 24, 1915, the British launched their first large chlorine cylinder attack against the Germans near Loos, Belgium. They released 150 tons of the gas and, in spite of the calm weather, hoped the breeze would be strong enough to carry the poison cloud across the field as it had for the Germans at Ypres. The gas moved too slowly in the sluggish wind, and while some of the chlorine reached the German lines, some of it settled around the British soldiers in their trenches instead. The incident vividly demonstrated the problem with relying on prevailing weather conditions to deliver chemical weapons, but overall the Allies remained convinced that poison gas was effective, and they resolved to continue its use.
As the war on the Western Front continued through 1915, the British, French, and Germans continued to develop more potent poisonous gasses, more reliable delivery systems, and more effective defensive measures. By the end of the year, all of the combatants had managed to design and manufacture gas masks that could protect their soldiers from chlorine gas. Accordingly, they began to research and develop new types of poison gasses to use against each other. On December 19, 1915, Germany introduced phosgene on the battlefield, gassing the British at Ypres. Phosgene is a more lethal agent than chlorine, and it could not be filtered out of the air by conventional gas masks. Fortunately for the British, their military had realized months earlier that phosgene could potentially be used as a weapon, and the soldiers at Ypres had been issued masks that could defend against it. Despite the existence of these improved gas filters, the British and French began to manufacture and use the new gas as well, and phosgene ultimately caused more casualties than any other gas during World War I. In May 1916 the Germans released yet another new war gas, diphosgene, which rendered masks designed to protect against phosgene obsolete, necessitating a new round of improvements.
Because gas masks could allow soldiers to survive a chemical attack unharmed, poison gas had to be deployed creatively in order to be an effective weapon. Chemical attacks could be timed to surprise the enemy and catch soldiers who failed to put their masks on quickly enough. Other gas attacks were designed to keep poison in the air persistently, long enough to outlast the enemy's gas-mask filters, forcing them either to evacuate the area or to change masks and risk breathing the chemicals. The armies on the Western Front also experimented with different chemical combinations during attacks. Simultaneous use of nonlethal irritants or tear gasses could force suffering soldiers to take their masks off, thereby exposing them to lethal asphyxiants. Alternating the use of visible smoke clouds and an invisible gas, like chlorine, could give enemy soldiers the impression that a poison-gas attack was longer lasting and more severe than it actually was. Using poison gas in concert with a barrage of shrapnel-filled artillery shells could cause injuries, confusion, and destruction as defenders struggled to don their masks. When a soldier was able to get his mask on in time and stay safe, gas would nevertheless remain a powerful threat to morale. Wearing an uncomfortable mask, unable to doze, breathing through a hose and a charcoal filter with poison air swirling around him could make a soldier miserable and terrified.
In view of the fact that launching gas from cylinders could expose your own soldiers to the poison, and because the method depended on favorable weather conditions, all the armies of the Western Front experimented with safer and more reliable methods of deploying chemical weapons on the battlefield in 1915 and 1916. Gas-filled artillery shells were developed that could be filled with adequate amounts of chemicals, fly on trajectory, and disperse the contents effectively on detonation. The warring nations also used mortars to fire small, gas-filled canisters at enemy troops. As new chemical warfare devices were perfected, the use of cylinders to spread poison gas became less common. British Director of Gas Services Charles H. Foulkes continued to favor cylinders over other gas-delivery systems but was virtually alone in that regard.
In 1916 the British introduced a chemical warfare device called a Livens projector. It was a large metal tube, open at one end, which was installed by partially burying it in the ground at an angle. The open end pointed up at the target and a large metal drum full of poisonous gas was lowered inside. Livens projectors were usually installed together in groups of hundreds and were launched electrically from a remote location. When triggered, the projectors would send the hundreds of gas-filled drums sailing through the air toward enemy targets, where they would explode and disperse a dense cloud of poisonous vapors. Installing Livens projectors was labor-intensive work that took days or weeks, and each one could only be used for a single launch, but the devices had substantial advantages. With little or no warning, projectors blanketed a target in a large amount of poison gas, and, because the drums were were launched remotely, enemy retaliatory fire would cause no casualties. Called by one historian "the most-feared chemical weapon of the war," Livens projectors were a salient feature of combat on the Western Front by 1917.
Given that these conditions existed during the First World War in Europe, the failure of the United States to prepare for chemical warfare is perplexing. One reason Americans may have been slow to organize chemical warfare activities was the unchivalrous stereotype that poison gas had. Some members of the military saw gas as a weapon that did not befit a soldier, and they may have dragged their feet preparing to use it against an enemy. Another reason related to the fact that all news about the Western Front arrived in the United States through European censors. Assistant Secretary of War and Director of Munitions Benedict Crowell wrote with hindsight that "during the spring and summer of 1917 two marked tendencies were to be observed in the fighting in France. One of these was the greatly increased use by both sides of poisonous gases and chemicals, frightful in their effect; the other the almost complete censorship that hid the knowledge of this tendency not only from the people of Europe but particularly from those of the newest belligerent, America."
British and French propagandists trumpeted news of the first German poison-gas attack at Ypres as evidence of the enemy's barbarity, but subsequent gas attacks received less or no publicity. Crowell speculated that "the British and French Governments, who then controlled all news from the front, feared, and perhaps with reason, that if the picture of gas warfare, as it was then developing, should be placed before the American people, it would result in an unreasonable dread of gasses on the part of the American Nation and its soldiers." Britain and France feared that too much information about chemical combat would make American participation in the war less likely, but the "news blackout" had the unintended consequence of hindering preparedness. After Congress declared war against Germany on April 6, 1917, European allies seem to have freely shared military and scientific information about poison gas and provided material support. Documents, equipment, and even personnel were made available to the United States over the course of World War I, but allied assistance could not help the American army compensate for systemic inexperience.
Whatever the reason, the U.S. military displayed a clear pattern of inactivity before 1917 with regard to poison gas. There appears to have been no attempt to prepare for chemical weapons on the battlefield before November 1916, when Secretary of War Newton D. Baker assigned Army Surgeon General William C. Gorgas responsibility for designing and developing gas masks. Under Gorgas, the Medical Department began some preliminary research but allowed the project to languish before a mask could be designed. By February 1917, two months before the U.S. declaration of war, neither a single gas mask nor any other piece of chemical warfare equipment had been manufactured for the army. That month the Department of War lost the initiative to a civilian agency within the Department of the Interior.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Behind the Gas Mask by Thomas I. Faith. Copyright © 2014 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS.
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