FIVE: The War That Never Was
... it may be several weeks or even months before I shall ask you to drench Germany with poison gas, and if we do it, let us do it one hundred per cent. In the meanwhile, I want the matter studied in cold blood by sensible people and not by that particular set of psalm-singing uniformed defeatists which one runs across now here now there.
-- Winston Churchill in a 'Most Secret' minute to the Chiefs of Staff. 6 July 1944. [1]
Hours after war was declared, in September 1939, the British ambassador in Berne paid a brief visit to the Swiss Foreign Ministry. He delivered a short message from the British and French governments to be passed on to Hitler. The two countries promised to abide by the Geneva Protocol and refrain from using poison gas and germ warfare, provided the Nazis undertook to do the same. A few days later the German ambassador signalled his country's agreement.
Neither side placed much faith in the bargain. Mention the word 'gas' to any British man or woman over the age of fifty and you are likely to trigger off a series of memory associations: the voice of Neville Chamberlain at the time of the Munich crisis, the sight of children and babies in respirators, the suffocating feeling of first trying on the standard civilians gas mask, the inconvenience of having constantly to carry this strange metal and rubber object in its fragile cardboard box. Crouched in the dark, through innumerable air raids, they waited for a gas attack which in the end never came. At the end of the war, the British alone had manufactured 70 million gas masks, 40 million tins of anti-gas ointment and stockpiled 40,000 tons of bleach for decontamination; 10 million leaflets had been prepared for immediate distribution in the event of chemical attack, and by a long-standing arrangement the BBC would have interrupted programmes with specially prepared gas warnings. [2] Contingency planning ran down to the smallest details. Civilians 'lightly contaminated by gas spray or mustard gas bombs' would have been advised 'to go home, discard their clothes, take a bath and put on a complete change of clothing'. More serious casualties would be sent to special clearing stations, undressed and 'issued with a simple form of garment to enable them to reach home and would be given a small bag in which to take their personal valuables'. Their contaminated clothes would be sent to dry cleaners - specially requisitioned for the purpose - decontaminated and returned. [3]
Over forty years later it is difficult to appreciate just how great the fear of gas was. It was not a fanciful 'terror weapon' - virtually everyone in the country knew someone who had been gassed in the First World War, and knew also that the modern bomber now made it possible for the frightfulness of Ypres to be delivered into the living room. In the early months of enemy bombing, when no one knew what to expect, gas was the most dreaded horror of all.
Chemical warfare loomed equally large in military minds. Right from the start each side worked on the assumption that the other would initiate chemical warfare. When the British Expeditionary Force went to France at the beginning of the war, the General Staff reckoned the Germans would use 160 heavy bombers to deliver 18,000 gallons of mustard gas every twenty-four hours; a third of the entire force was expected to be contaminated daily.4 Throughout the war, chemical weapons and stocks of anti-gas equipment were moved on to every major battlefield: there were gas dumps in France in 1940, in North Africa, in the Far East, the Middle East, in Italy, on the Russian Front and finally in 1944 in France once again. For six years the introduction of gas warfare continued to be regarded as a day to day possibility by both sides. As a result, poison gas factories swallowed up the war effort of tens of thousands of scientists, technicians and skilled workers. Production never slackened, and by 1945 the world's major powers had amassed around half a million tons of chemical weapons, five times the amount used in the whole of the First World War. Why these enormous reserves were never used has intrigued soldiers and historians ever since. Contrary to most expectations, in this one aspect of warfare - often by the thinnest of margins - the world managed to preserve a precarious peace.
The success of the German Blitzkrieg through the Low Countries and northern France in May 1940 at first made worries about gas warfare irrelevant. It did not fit into the strategy of rapid armoured thrusts supported by air strikes which the Germans used to win the Battle of France: gas slows down armies by forcing them to don respirators and decontaminate their vehicles constantly. Using chemical weapons would in fact have favoured the British and the French, but there is no evidence to suggest that they ever considered doing so. Their stocks could not have lasted for more than a few days, and their commanders - still reeling in shock at the scale of the Wehrmacht's successes - were in no state to add further to the chaos by introducing gas. The campaign ended in four weeks without either side resorting to gas. Only against the stricken British army on the beaches of Dunkirk would an aerial attack using mustard have made sense, but by then Hitler was eager to arrange a peace treaty; gassing helpless soldiers would have destroyed the chances of any negotiations before they even started.
It was the British, in the summer of 1940, who drew up the first serious plans for using gas. On 15 June 1940, only two days after Dunkirk, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Sir John Dill, circulated one of the most explosive memoranda of the war. Restricted to a few of the country's top military commanders, shrouded in secrecy for over thirty years, it was entitled 'The Use of Gas in Home Defence's - a brief and cogent military argument in favour of spraying an invading German army with mustard gas.
'So far during this campaign,' began to Dill, 'Germany has not used gas. We may assume that this omission is not from humanitarian reasons but because up to the present it would not have been to her advantage to do so ... ' In the event of an invasion this might well change, and Dill suggested that the War Cabinet be asked to allow the armed forces 'to anticipate the use of the gas by the enemy, by ourselves taking the initiative in our defence against invasion, even if Germany or Italy has not by that time started chemical warfare.'
There are strong military arguments in favour of such action. Enemy forces crowded on the beaches, with the confusion inevitable on first landing, would present a splendid target. Gas spray by aircraft under such conditions would be likely to have a more widespread and wholesale effect than high explosives. It can moreover be applied very rapidly, and so is particularly suitable in an operation where we may get very little warning.
. . . Besides gas spray, contamination of beaches, obstacles and defiles by liquid mustard would have a great delaying effect. The use of gas in general would have the effect of slowing up operations, and we believe that speed must be the essence of any successful invasion of this country.
There are of course grave objections to taking this step ...
Dill mentioned two 'grave objections' in particular. 'We have bound ourselves not to use gas except in retaliation. To break our word may tend to alienate American sympathy.' In addition, British use of gas would 'immediately invite retaliation against our industry and civil population.' Dill nevertheless considered the risks worth taking and he ended his advocacy of the initiation of gas warfare in ringing tones:
While the probable repercussions must be fully realised I consider that the military advantages to be gained are sufficient to justify us in taking this step. We must expect the Germans to spring one or more surprises on us as part of their invasion plan. We may be sure that every detail of that plan has been meticulously worked out. Some unexpected action on our part, taken promptly and vigorously, might throw all their arrangements out of gear. At a time when our National existence is at stake, when we are threatened by an implacable enemy who himself recognises no rules save those of expediency, we should not hesitate to adopt whatever means appear to offer the best chance of success.
Desperate though the British plight was in June 1940, Dill's proposal ran into a wall of opposition from the military establishment. The Director of Home Defence, on the same day he received the memorandum, scrawled Dill a curt handwritten note:
I do not agree that this is a sound suggestion.
We should be throwing away the incalculable moral advantage of keeping our pledges and for a minor tactical surprise; & the ultimate effects of retaliation by the enemy would be very serious in this overcrowded little island. [6]
Even stronger condemnation came from one of Dill's own staff, Major-General Henderson, who described it as a 'dangerous' proposal: 'such a departure from our principles and traditions would have the most deplorable effects not only on our own people but even on the fighting services. Some of us would begin to wonder whether it really mattered which side won.' [7]
In the face of such strong opposition, Dill withdrew his memorandum. But two weeks later, on 30 June, his views suddenly found the backing of the most powerful man in the country - Winston Churchill. After the war, in considering what might have happened if the Germans had invaded, Churchill wrote: 'They would have used terror, and we were prepared to go to all lengths.' [8] 'All lengths', recently declassified documents show, would have included initiating gas warfare:
Let me have [he instructed General Ismay] a report upon the amount of mustard or other variants we have in store, and whether it can be used in air bombs as well as fired from guns. What is our output per month? It should certainly be speeded up. Let me have proposals. Supposing lodgements were effected on our coast, there could be no better points for application of mustard than these beaches and lodgements. In my view there would be no need to wait for the enemy to adopt such methods. He will certainly adopt them if he thinks it will pay. Home Defence should be consulted as to whether the prompt drenching of lodgements would not be a great help. Everything should be brought to the highest pitch of readiness, but the question of actual employment must be settled by the Cabinet. [9]
It is conceivable that Churchill's instruction was the result of a private approach from Dill; at any rate, the anti-gas lobby were immediately swept aside. Within a week, Britain had scraped together her meagre stocks of gas and had them loaded into aircraft spray tanks and bombs at more than twelve RAF bases from Scotland to the South Coast: all were operationally ready to mount a chemical attack by the end of the first week of July. [10]
Had the German invasion come it would have been met by squadrons of Lysander, Blenheim, Battle and Wellington bombers loaded with spray tanks holding between 250 and 1,000 lb of mustard. 'Low spray attacks,' wrote the Inspector of Chemical Warfare, 'on an enemy approaching our shores in open boats or after landing are likely to be effective if frequently repeated, and will ultimately result in 100 per cent casualties among the men hit by the spray. If the enemy are not wearing eyeshields, a considerable number will be blinded unless they cover their eyes. They cannot do this and use their weapons at the same time. Low spray attacks are therefore likely to reduce the risk to other low-flying aircraft in bombing and machine gunning.' [11]
Britain had only 450 tons of mustard gas in stock (less than one-twentieth of the amount held by the Germans) and the effort would have been concentrated on trying to deliver the whole amount in a single day, to drive the invading Germans straight back into the sea. It was thought that the Germans would not be coming ashore with any spare clothes: 'repeated low spray attacks will leave him defenceless against blistering'. The RAF thus planned to mount the maximum possible number of sorties in a single day. Having made its bombing run over the beach-head and released its gas, it was calculated that each aircraft 'should be able to return the empty tanks to a landing ground near the charging station, and pick up full tanks without delay. Refilling of tanks should only be a matter of hours.' [12]
In addition to spray, 30 lb and 250 lb gas bombs would have been used against 'quays or other areas where stores are being landed'. Although there would be some shelling using gas, and there were 6,000 Livens drums ready to be fired, the main effort would have been delivered by air. 'I consider the results to be obtained from air attack to be so much greater than any other method that, with the limited quantities of gas now available, every gallon should be used for the air arm.' [13]
Dill told Churchill that from the 5 July onwards Britain would be able to mount an aerial gas attack 'on a considerable scale for a limited period' - in all, Bomber Command could carry enough mustard 'to spray a strip 60 yards wide and some 4,000 miles long'. Apart from around 50 tons of phosgene, this represented the whole of Britain's offensive capability, and Dill estimated the spring of 1941 as the earliest possible date on which the country could wage a chemical war using land weapons. [14] In other words, had an invasion actually been mounted by the Germans and Churchill had carried out the plan to use gas, he would have been staking everything on one throw of the dice: he would have to defeat the Wehrmacht in a single day. If he failed the Germans would be able to use chemical weapons without fear of retaliation, possibly as a terror weapon against civilians to try and break the country's will to carry on fighting.
For Churchill it was an intolerable situation. As far back as 1938 the Cabinet had asked for a productive capacity of 300 tons of mustard gas per week and a reserve of 2,000 tons. On 13 September 1939 this target has been reaffirmed by the War Cabinet of which he had been a member. Now he was being told that the RAF had stocks for only one or two days' action. The situation, he wrote, caused him 'grave anxiety': 'What is the explanation of the neglect to fulfil these orders, and who is responsible for it?' [15] The Chiefs of Staff blamed the Ministry of Supply, and Churchill promptly ordered an inquiry. 'I feel this is a very great danger ... I am determined to proceed against whoever was responsible for disobeying War Cabinet orders without even reporting what was going on.' [16]
The inquiry was headed by Clement Attlee, leader of the Labour Party and Lord Privy Seal in the coalition government. He traced the fault to Sir William Brown, Permanent Secretary to the Ministry of Supply, but wrote that 'it would not be right to attribute to anyone individual the responsibility for failure'. Brown kept his job. [17] Instead - in a move which showed the importance Churchill attached to a ready supply of poison gas - the Prime Minister ordered weekly reports of gas production to be submitted personally to him. Every Friday the Secretary to the Cabinet brought the Prime Minister a set of typed figures. For more than two years, Churchill anxiously scanned them, generally scrawling a comment on the bottom sheet: 'Press on' (IS November 1940); 'Press on. We must have a great store. They will certainly use it against us.' (20 November); 'Presson' (13 February 1941); 'Those concerned should be beaten up' (5 April). [18] By January 1941 production of mustard was still only running at 130 tons a week, a third of full capacity, and Churchill asked Lord Beaverbrook, the dynamic Minister for Aircraft Production, to ginger things up. Beaverbrook sacked one official and stopped all holidays. In July 1941, after yet another fall in production, Churchill wrote in exasperation:
The absolute maximum effort must be used with super priority to make, store and fill into containers, the largest possible quantities of gas. Let me know exactly who is responsible for this failure. At any moment this peril may be upon us. [19]
By the autumn of 1941, although the threat of invasion had receded, the production of chemical weapons, under Churchill's relentless pressure, began to accelerate. By 31 October, Britain had built up a reserve of 13,000 tons of poison gas. To boost production further, Beaverbrook authorized an additional expenditure on gas installations of £3,500,000. [20] There were soon to be almost 6,000 people employed in researching and manufacturing chemical weapons in Britain.
They worked in four main centres, protected by military guards and armed factory police. The chief mustard gas plant was at Randle, near Runcorn in Cheshire - hundreds of tons of mustard were stored in five-ton steel 'pots' encased in concrete. Phosgene was manufactured at the nearby Rocksavage works and stored 'in drums in splinter-proof trenches'. Runcorn and Rocksavage are in well-populated areas, and were vulnerable to air attack. The Government even issued the local inhabitants with special army gas masks. To try and reduce the danger, a third great storage depot was tunnelled into the Welsh hills in the county of Flint: the installation was codenamed 'Valley'.
A second Welsh chemical warfare establishment was at Rhydymwyn, near Mold in Clwyd. Here, the Ministry of Supply built a gas factory which was joined, in 1942, by an even more secret installation: an isotope-separation plant, part of the British project to create an atom bomb. The atomic plant employed over one hundred people, supervised by twenty Oxford scientists from the Clarendon Laboratory. Employees from one site were not allowed into the other, but as workers at both had to carry gas masks it was assumed by the local inhabitants that they were all engaged on the same project; this, it was rumoured, was a scheme to manufacture synthetic rubber.
While thousands of munition workers toiled in the factories, Porton Down designed new weapons:
... there was the 'Flying Cow', a gliding bomb which rained gobbets of thickened mustard gas on the ground during its flight (another version with unthickened mustard gas was known as the 'Flying Lavatory'); the 'Frankfurter', an elongated mortar bomb for smoke; the 'Squirt', a portable high pressure projector which threw 2 gallons of liquid hydrogen cyanide in a jet to a range of about 25 yards ... Perhaps the most ingenious of all the offensive devices was an anti-tank projectile which first pierced a small hole through armour-plate by means of a hollow charge of explosive and then squirted through the hole into the tank enough liquid hydrogen cyanide to kill all the crew. (No acceptable nickname was ever found for this unsporting weapon). [21]
All the while, Churchill continued to pound the Ministry of Supply with threats, instructions, exhortations and advice, normally in the form of 'Action This Day' memoranda. By the end of 1941 he had transformed the situation. The Chiefs of Staff were told on 28 December that Britain could now take offensive action with mustard gas at five hours' notice. [22] Four Blenheim and three Wellington squadrons were trained in the use of aerial spray. 15 per cent of the British bomber force could be employed in chemical warfare. By the spring of 1942 - thanks chiefly to the extraordinary time and trouble Churchill had gone to - Britain had almost 20,000 tons of poison gas.
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1. Casualties of one of the first German chlorine attacks, April 1915. The victim could take anything up to two days to die, coughing up pint after pint of yellow liquid - hence the basin by the patient's side.
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2. The first British respirators, May 1915. Each man carried a bottle of soda solution with which he was supposed to moisten the flannel. The masks were little protection: on 24 May, 3,500 men were gassed in a single four-hour attack.
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3 & 4 The British chemical weapon which the Germans feared most. Above, Livens Projectors, fired in batteries of 25 at a time; each sent a drum of 30 lbs of liquid phosgene hurtling into the enemy's lines. Below, on impact a burster of TNT releases a dense cloud of gas. At the Battle of Arras in 1917, the British fired over 2,000 Livens bombs simultaneously in one mass attack.
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5. Ambulance men drilling in the standard British gas mask, the 'P Helmet', July 1916. The bag of flannel made the face sweat and the chemical which impregnated it then ran, stinging the eyes and trickling down the neck. In addition to the discomfort, the masks often leaked, the eyepieces cracked, and a lethal amount of carbon dioxide could build up inside the helmet.
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6. The Battle of the Somme, July 1916. Machine gunners were frequently issued with oxygen cylinders to enable them to withstand a long gas attack and mow down the first waves of the enemy's assault troops.
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7 & 8 The men who pioneered the Allies' wartime germ weapons programme. Above, a rare photograph taken near the Scottish isle of Gruinard in 1942, where the scientists first tested the anthrax bomb. L to R: David Henderson, Donald Woods, O. G. Sutton and W. R. Lane. Right, Dr Paul Fildes, leader of the British biological warfare team.
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9 & 10 Opposite, in a large shed at Porton Down in 1942, munitions workers using specially designed equipment were to fill five million small cattle cakes with anthrax - almost certainly the world's first mass-manufactured germ weapon. These photographs are at odds with Britain's 1980 claim never to have possessed 'biological agents ... in quantities which could be employed for weapon purposes'.
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11, 12, 13 & 14 Civilians prepare for gas warfare. Opposite top, German High School students are given a lesson in gas precautions. Opposite bottom, a dance marathon in a bomb shelter in London's East End provides useful publicity for civil defence. Above, Windmill girls rehearse wearing gas masks, April 1941. Right, a child's gas mask. The British also developed 'cot respirators' for babies and hood-type gas masks for invalids.
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15 & 16 Right, the unprimed grenade recovered by the Nazis in May 1942 after the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich. The twin of this specially modified British anti-tank grenade was the weapon which killed Heydrich. Did it contain a filling of lethal germs? Above, Heydrich's bomb-damaged Mercedes a few hours after the attack. The Nazi leader suffered relatively minor splinter wounds, but mysteriously died a week later.
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17 & 18 The justification for continuing biological and chemical warfare research after the Second World War. Above, a Soviet soldier on exercise in anti-gas suit and mask, and left, Hungarian troops training against gas. Western intelligence believed the Warsaw Pact was prepared to use gas and germ warfare in any future confrontation.
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19, 20, 21 & 22 Four of the diseases chosen as weapons. Opposite top, the effects of anthrax. Had the Second World War continued into 1946, the Allies expected to be capable of saturation anthrax bombing of six major German cities. Opposite bottom, Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, one of the most severe of infectious diseases, and extensively researched during the 1950s and 1960s. Above, facial paralysis caused by encephalomyelitis, several forms of which were refined as 'humane' weapons. Left, an early symptom of plague. As the Black Death it had killed nearly one third of the population of Western Europe: during the 1960s it was still being developed as a weapon.
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23, 24 & 25 The 1950s and 1960s saw a resurgence of gas and germ research. Opposite top, in one of thousands of experiments at Edgewood Arsenal designed to discover a method of waging 'war without death', a dog is injected with an LSD-type chemical. Opposite bottom, the effect of only one drop of mustard gas administered to a volunteer at Porton Down. Above, a 1960s test of suit and gas mask designed to resist nerve agents. In the UK and USA thousands of servicemen were used to test potential new weapons.
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[i] 26. Decontaminating a casualty during British exercises in Germany. Nerve agents developed during the 1940s and 1950s are capable of penetrating through the skin itself to attack the nervous system. Casualties - even of bullet wounds - must be 'dusted' all over before being admitted to field hospitals.
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[i]27 & 28 Chemical warfare in Vietnam. Top, part of Operation Ranch Hand, the huge defoliation campaign which was intended to strip the jungle bare. Bottom, a 'tunnel rat' emerges from a Viet Cong bunker. US forces used CS gas to flush out the enemy, arguing that, like the defoliation campaign, this was not, despite appearances, chemical warfare.
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29. A CIA poison dart gun produced during 1975 Senate hearings into why the agency had disobeyed presidential orders to destroy stocks of biological weapons.
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30. British soldiers training against gas attack, 1980. The new gas training range at Porton Down was evidence of mounting alarm at the prospect of chemical warfare in Europe.
Churchill forged the production programme and Churchill rewrote the country's gas policy. In January 1941, during the 'Victor' anti-invasion exercise, the War Cabinet sanctioned the use of gas. [23] In March 1942, an official minute to the Chiefs of Staff laid down the British position quite clearly: 'It has been accepted that we should not initiate the use of gas unless it suited our book to do so during the invasion.' [24]
The events of 1940 and 1941 showed that when a country has its back to the wall it is unlikely to put obligations like the Geneva Protocol ahead of military expediency. If a nation's survival is at stake this is perhaps understandable. But as Britain's military position improved, Churchill's willingness to use gas did not diminish. On the contrary - within two years he would actually be pressing for the initiation of gas warfare.
As in every other sphere in the Second World War there was close cooperation between Britain and the United States over chemical warfare. Long before she entered the war, back in the winter of 1940, the Americans secretly began to supply poison gas to the United Kingdom. To preserve her image of neutrality the gas was manufactured in private US plants (which were financed by the British) and then carefully shipped to Europe in foreign-registered vessels; technically the American Government's only official connection was the granting of export licences. At least 200 tons of phosgene a month were being made available to the British using this ruse by the summer of 1941. [25]
It was a remarkable political gamble by the Americans for the deal would have been a propaganda gift to the Germans if they had discovered what was going on. Churchill had opposed the initial approach to the US fearing the repercussions on American public opinion if he should have to use the US gas to repel a German invasion. He was, however, assured that there was strong support in Washington for gassing an invading German army. 'The initial defensive use of gas,' wrote Colonel Barley, the British officer who negotiated the phosgene deal, 'would receive almost universal approbation in America ... The argument that we had signed a convention did not appear to be a good one either to army officers or prominent industrialists.' [26] Barley's report convinced Churchill. Britain took the gas.
The Americans had a different attitude to chemical warfare from the British. Every city in Europe was vulnerable to gas attack, and millions of civilians learned to live with the fear that one day what the enemy's bombers brought might not be high explosive, but mustard gas, phosgene or some new 'super gas'. America was out of range of bomber attack - safe from the fear of airborne chemical retaliation against her cities, the US could contemplate the use of poison gas more dispassionately. Unlike Britain, Germany and Russia there were no legal restraints upon the US to prevent her using gas - the Senate had still not ratified the Geneva Protocol. At the same time the existence of an independent Chemical Warfare Service meant that a powerful pressure group was always around to put its case for an increased Congressional appropriation. In 1940 the US spent $2 million on its Chemical Warfare Service; in 1941 when the chemical rearmament programme was launched, this was increased more than thirty-fold, to over $60 million; in 1942 expenditure reached a staggering $1,000 million. There was a corresponding increase in personnel- from 2,000 to 6,000 to 20,000 in 1942. If the Army, Navy and Air Force were all getting more money, so the argument ran, the CWS should surely get some too. As a result America soon had a poison gas-producing capacity vastly in excess of anything she really needed.
In the three years from 1942 to 1945, the US opened thirteen new chemical warfare plants. The most ambitious was the $60 million Pine Bluff Arsenal in Arkansas. Construction work began on 2 December 1941, five days before Pearl Harbor, on a 15,000 acre site. Within eight months an army of labourers and construction experts had laid miles of road and railway track, built factories, storage depots, laboratories, shops, offices, a hospital, a fire station, a police building, water, gas and electricity supplies and a telephone exchange.
After a time, the statistics of the size and scope of the American poison gas programme begin to glaze the eye. [27] Pine Bluff alone, at its peak, employed 10,000 men and women; it even made use of the labour supplied by a nearby prisoner of war camp. From 31 July 1942 when it first went into production, through to 1945, the Arsenal produced literally millions of grenades, bombs and shells filled with chemical agents, as well as thousands of tons of chlorine, mustard gas and Lewisite. At the end of the war most of it had to be dumped in the sea; its manufacture had cost the American taxpayer $500 million.
In 1942 another $60 million installation was opened near Denver in Colorado. The Rocky Mountain Arsenal occupied 20,000 acres, employed 3,000 people and produced 87,000 tons of toxic chemicals by the end of the war. The same year, the Americans opened a test site worthy of their vast investment in chemical warfare - one of the largest gas weapons trial areas in the world, more than a quarter of a million acres on the edge of the Great Salt Lake Desert, in Utah. Known as the Dugway Proving Ground, it was forty times the size of Porton Down and housed test facilities that were a veritable dream for the men of the CWS. Replicas of German and Japanese houses were constructed to examine how well they could withstand chemical attack. Caves were dug into the mountains to see how a well-entrenched enemy might survive a gas shell and bomb barrage. The Americans also acquired from the British an interest in spraying mustard gas from the air; Dugway was so vast there was even room for the USA AFto experiment with high altitude spray. The tests were successful, and the United States, which had entered the war with 1,500 spray tanks, ended it with 113,000.
The Chemical Warfare Service's empire grew huge despite the opposition of the President. Unlike Churchill, Roosevelt had a particular aversion to poison gas, regarding it as barbaric and inhuman. His attitude was well expressed by Admiral Leahy, his senior naval advisor and later President Truman's Chief of Staff. Using gas, said Leahy, would 'violate every Christian ethic I have ever heard of and all of the known laws of war'. [28] Right up until Roosevelt's death, the CWS complained that any proposal they put forward for using poison gas would not be 'seriously considered', but 'immediately rejected due to personal bias' by the President. [29]
Roosevelt was prevailed upon to authorize the giant US programme only because of the widely-held fear that Japan was prepared to initiate gas warfare. Like America, Japan had not ratified the Geneva Protocol, and reports from China continued to suggest that the Japanese were using gas against Chinese soldiers and civilians. One account suggested that 'up to the end of June 1941 the Japanese had used gas 876 times' in their war against Chiang Kaishek. [30] In October 1941, for example, during a battle in the suburbs of the city of Ichang, Japanese planes were said to have dropped more than 300 gas bombs, many filled with mustard, killing 600 Chinese soldiers and wounding more than 1,000. Photographs of the casualties were published in American newspapers.
Gas atrocity stories make good propaganda, and throughout the war there were regular calls by the US press for America to use gas in revenge. Public opinion polls suggested that as much as 40 per cent of the population favoured the use of gas against Japan, and newspaper headlines screamed their support: 'We Should Gas Japan' (1943); 'You Can Cook 'Em Better With Gas' (1944); 'Should We Gas the Japs?' (1945). [31]
Roosevelt resisted the pressure, although he did issue a series of stern warnings to Japan. 'I desire to make it unmistakably clear,' he stated in June 1942, 'that if Japan persists in this inhuman form of warfare against China or against any other of the United Nations, such action will be regarded by this Government as though taken against the United States, and retaliation in kind and in full measure will be meted out.' [32] The warning was reissued the following year to embrace Germany as well, and expressed in even more sombre language:
I have been loathe to believe that any nation, even our present enemies, could or would be willing to loose upon mankind such terrible and inhumane weapons ... We promise to pay any perpetrators of such crimes full and swift retaliation in kind and I feel obliged now to warn the Axis armies and the Axis people in Europe and in Asia that the terrible consequences of any use of these inhumane methods on their part will be brought down swiftly and surely upon their own heads. [33]
It was not to be until the end of the war that the Americans discovered just how exaggerated had been their fears of Japanese gas stocks. Japanese offensive work had actually reached its peak in 1935. After that it had gone into decline, until by 1941 it had virtually stopped. In 1942 all offensive training at the Narshino Gas School was ended. In 1944 all stocks of gas were recalled by the Japanese High Command. US investigators reported that Japan had developed no gases other than those 'which had been known to the world for 20 years', they had used haphazard research methods, been given no help by the Germans, and that both offensively and defensively the country's supplies were 'inadequate for waging gas warfare on a modern scale'. [34]
At the end of the war, set against just 7,500 tons of Japanese poison gases, the Americans had 135,000 tons: 20,000 tons more than the combined total used by every nation fighting in the First World War. Early in November 1943, First Lieutenant Howard D. Beckstrom of the US 70Ist Chemical Maintenance Company based at Baltimore received orders to prepare to go abroad. He was one of an elite group of chemical warfare experts. Trained at a special centre at Camp Sibert in Alabama, it was one of Beckstrom's jobs to supervise the movement of chemical munitions. His destination on this occasion, he was informed, was the main supply point for the Allied armies in Italy: the Adriatic port of Bari. His cargo was part of the vast American chemical stockpile: 100 tons of mustard gas.