Hiroshima_ The World's Bomb - Andrew J. Rotter [12]
Neither were the Germans alone in the work. The French, as Haber seems to have anticipated, were at the time of the chlorine cloud attack at Ypres at work on tear-gas bullets and grenades. Prominent Britons condemned the use of gas—Arthur Conan Doyle charged that the Germans had ‘sold their souls as soldiers’, and Lord Kitchener insisted that ‘these methods show to what depths of infamy our enemies will go’—but the British quickly set to the task of manufacturing chemical weapons and masks to protect their solders against their use. The Allied response-in-kind to the German attacks was uncoordinated and fitful. The British worked hard at developing chemicals, but their way to success was slowed by bureaucratic competition, panic-induced haste, and an official willingness to entertain, at least, crackpot suggestions by amateurs that the British set fire to the atmosphere or spray German lines with amyl nitrate, an inflammable liquid. Hand grenades filled with what were described as ‘annoyers’ were rushed to France in May 1915, and the Scottish physiologist J. S. Haldane devised defenses against gas that involved breathing through a bottle loosely filled with dirt or a urine-soaked sock. French military headquarters, as L. F. Haber (Fritz Haber’s son) has described it, ‘was all energy and valorous sentiments’, but was unable to produce much: the French lacked chlorine to make that gas, and plans to retaliate against the Germans with gas-cloud attacks foundered on command’s decisions to build gas squads largely from wounded soldiers. The French did manage to fill some 50,000 shells with a tear gas that dispersed so rapidly that the targeted Germans appeared not to notice they had been gassed. Even the Russians blustered about making gas clouds—threats, as Haber notes, that were never taken seriously by anyone.
The US president Woodrow Wilson entreated the European belligerents not to use chemical weapons in May 1915. But the United States itself had not signed the 1899 Hague Convention; its delegate, Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan, said then that he could see no distinction between killing unsuspecting men by explosive or gas. The United States did ultimately agree to an international ban on the use of poison (codified in Hague II, 1907, and signed by the United States soon after), but, like the other signatories, the Americans found ways to evade the ban, and, once the United States had entered the war in April 1917, the Wilson administration, as Haber writes, ‘took gas very seriously indeed’. Responsibility for developing chemical weapons and protection against them was at first given to the US Bureau of Mines, though in June 1918 it was taken on by the Chemical Warfare Service, which undertook both research into and the production of chemicals. American University in Washington DC became in mid-1917 the center of chemical investigation, absorbing work done previously at other universities, though retaining branch laboratories at several. In marshland 20 miles east of Baltimore, the Americans built an enormous chemical manufacturing complex called ‘Gunpowder Reservation’, later the Edgewood Arsenal. The plant employed thousands of men and women, and produced chlorine, phosgene, chloropicrin (which caused weeping and vomiting and which defeated then-existing gas masks), mustard, and several others. By the summer of 1918, Edgewood was contributing heavily to gas warfare on the Western Front. As the Armistice neared that fall, an American observer could not conceal his dismay: ‘Here is a mammoth plant’, he wrote of Edgewood, ‘constructed in record time, efficiently manned, capable of an enormous output of toxic material, and just reaching its full possibilities of death-dealing at the moment when news is hourly expected of the signing of the Armistice. What a pity we did not possess this great engine of war from the day American troops first sailed for France.’18
Casualty figures for those gassed during the First World War are elusive.