Medical Aspects of Chemical Warfare (2008) - The Black Vault

History of Chemical WarfareTable 2-2 continuedCyanogenbromideCyanogenchlorideMaybe used as early as July1916; exclusively used byFrench army in WWI; oftenmixed with arsenic trichloridePhenylcarbylaminechlorideCe (Austrians); CB(British); Campillit;Campilite; E-StoffCNBrSeptember1916(Austria)Vitrite; Mauginite CNCl October1916(France)PhenylisocyanidechlorideC 6H 5CNCl 2May 1917(Germany)CWS: Chemical Warfare ServiceWWI: World War IHowever, the potential for future chemical wars nowloomed, as expressed by one US Army officer:Gas was new and in an experimental stage throughoutthe war and hence the man who plans for futureExhibit 2-9HOW TO TELL THE GASES, by MajorFairfax Downey, Field ArtilleryGrandma smelled geranium,Started feeling kind of bum,Sure, you guessed the trouble right—Grandma whiffed some lewisite.Don’t you find my odor sweetish?Said flypaper to the fly.I smell just like chloropicrin,And you’ll think you’d like to die.Maud Miller on a summer day,Smelled the odor of new-mown hay,She said to the Judge who was turning green,“Put on your mask! That there’s phosgene!”Apple blossoms, fresh and dewy?Normandy and romance? Hooey!For the charming fragrance then known,Now is chloracetophenone.Never take a chance ifGarlic you should strongly sniff.Don’t think Mussolini’s passed,Man, you’re being mustard-gassed.Reproduced with permission from: Waitt AH. Gas Warfare: theChemical Weapon, its Use, and Protection Against it. New York,NY: Duell, Sloan, and Pearce; 1943: 4–9.defense must consider the use of gas to have been inits infancy. He must draw very few lessons for the futureuse of gas based on past performances. He mustonly use those lessons as pointing the way and not asapproaching a final result. The firing of steel as shellpassed its zenith with the passing of the Argonne fight.Never again will the world see such a hail of steel onbattlefields, but in its place will be concentrations ofgas and high explosives as much greater than theWorld War as that was greater than the Civil War. 51(p4)In contrast, Fritz Haber, the Nobel laureate chemistwho, more than anyone else, was responsible forthe development and fielding of chemical weaponsfor use by Kaiser Wilhelm II’s army, downplayed theimportance of chemical warfare as a weapon of massdestruction. In an interview published in New York in1921, he concluded, “Poison gas caused fewer deathsthan bullets.” 52(p10) General Pershing summed up hisopinion of the new chemical warfare shortly after theconclusion of World War I, saying, “Whether or not gaswill be employed in future wars is a matter of conjecture,but the effect is so deadly to the unprepared thatwe can never afford to neglect the question.” 48(p77)A comprehensive list of chemical warfare agentsused by and against the AEF during World War I, alongwith their dates of introduction, is provided in Table2-2. A more humorous description of the major gasesexperienced by the AEF in World War I can be foundin Major Fairfax Downey’s poem, How to Tell the Gases(Exhibit 2-9). 9American Expeditionary Forces Chemical WarfareCasualtiesGas was responsible for approximately 2% of thedeaths in World War I, but it caused considerablygreater numbers of battlefield casualties (Figure 2-32).Nevertheless, it is difficult to account for the total num-41