Agents of War

A History of Chemical and Biological Weapons, Second Expanded Edition

Edward M. Spiers

• Publisher: Reaktion Books
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781789143546
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia mondiale

Often described as the misuse of science, chemical and biological weapons have incurred widespread opposition over the years. Despite condemnation from the United Nations, governments, and the disarmament lobby, they remain very real options for rogue states and terrorists. In this new edition of Agents of War, Edward M. Spiers has expanded and updated this much-needed history with two new chapters on political poisoning and chemical weapons in the Middle East. Spiers breaks new ground by presenting his analysis in both historical and contemporary contexts, giving a comprehensive chronological account of why, where, and when such weapons were used or suspected to be deployed.

1

The Legacy of Gas Warfare in the First World War

The First World War represented a watershed in the history of chemical (and to a lesser extent, biological) warfare. Although the use of chemical and biological weapons, including attempts to contaminate water supplies, had lengthy historical precedents, with examples or allegations from ancient warfare through the Middle Ages to the South African War (1899–1902), chemical warfare occurred in the Great War on a scale, and with a sustained application of scientific expertise and effort, never previously witnessed. This total war, then known as the war to end all wars, has been dubbed as the first ‘interstate industrial war’, with entire state economies and populations committed to the conflict.¹ Chemical weaponry represented only a part, and a relatively small part, of the weaponry engaged. It involved the expenditure of some 125,000 tons of poison gas compared with two million tons of high explosive and 50,000 million rounds of small arms ammunition,² but reflected a large-scale investment of scientific and industrial resources in an innovative form of warfare. The conduct of offensive biological operations took place on an even smaller scale and never required the construction of the large organizations that sustained the chemical conflict. The latter form of war evolved and adapted throughout three and a half years, arousing intense passions at the time, and in its aftermath, and provoking lasting debates about its utility and potential. ‘The history of chemical warfare’, wrote Major Victor Lefebure, a wartime CW authority and later an executive in Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) Ltd, ‘becomes one of continual attempts, on both sides, to achieve surprise, and to counter it by some accurate forecast in protective methods. It is a struggle for the initiative.’³

Historical Antecedents

However shocking the first major use of gas in 1915, chemical and biological warfare has an historical pedigree stretching back over several millennia. In ancient warfare European, Indian and Chinese commentators described the recurrent use of poisonous smokes, with Thucydides recounting how the Peloponnesians had tried to reduce the town of Plataea with sulphur fumes in the fifth century BC. The Byzantines employed Greek Fire, an incendiary weapon (possibly based on petroleum with resins added as a thickener) in naval and military battles, and it reportedly contributed to the salvation of Constantinople from two Arab sieges. Insect bombs were used in the defence of walled cities, with bees released in tunnels to disperse sappers or secreted in booby traps, while bombs containing ‘stinging’ insects were hurled at scaling parties (possibly including scorpions in the defence of Hatra against Roman assault). The Greeks and Romans also utilized a wide range of poisonous substances in military operations, notably the Athenians in dumping cartloads of poisonous hellebore into the river that supplied the besieged city of Kirrha, near Delphi in Greece (c. 600 BC). The contaminated water induced violent diarrhoea, incapacitating so many defenders that the Athenians were able to overrun the city and slaughter its inhabitants.⁴

The deliberate spreading of infectious disease assumed different forms in land battles and naval warfare as combatants sought to debilitate their adversaries. The catapulting of beehives recurred between 1000 and 1300 AD, exploiting the vulnerability of horses even when soldiers wore protection in heavy clothing and armour. In 1346 the besieged Genoese seaport of Caffa (now Feodosia) on the Crimean coast incurred a biological onslaught when plague-stricken Mongols began hurling infected cadavers over their walls (probably using the trebuchet, a much more powerful machine with a longer range than a catapult). As the disease took hold survivors fled by boat, constituting one of several sources of infection that spread the disease through the Mediterranean basin. Less well documented are the allegations and effects of similar tactics at other sieges, notably those of Karlstein (1422) and Reval (1710): at the former an epidemic did not erupt and city held out, at the latter plague did occur but its contribution to the fall of the city is not so clear.⁵

Where suitable poisons could be found, they were employed to enhance the effects of weapons such as arrows, spears and darts, and in this role remained a longstanding feature of combat in parts of the developing world. Limited in range and sometimes uncertain in effect, these tactics seemed eclipsed by the development of cannons and gunpowder and hardly appropriate within the rules of European warfare as codified by Hugo Grotius, De jure belli ac pacis (1625) and Emmerich de Vattel, The Law of Nations (1758). These works included strictures, condemning the use of poisoned weapons and the poisoning of water supplies, but they only applied to ‘just’ wars between ‘civilized’ nations. In wars against ‘savage’ or ‘heathen’ peoples European rules licensed extreme measures as reprisals to punish or even exterminate adversaries. Within this context came the best-documented account of biological warfare in North America, namely the distribution of blankets and a handkerchief infected with smallpox from Fort Pitt in June 1763 during Pontiac’s rebellion. The subsequent eruption of smallpox among the Delaware, Shawnee and Mingo Indians may have had other contributory factors but the epidemic accorded with the vituperative comments of Major-General Jeffery Amherst in his New York headquarters, exhorting the use of every method that would ‘extirpate this execrable race’. The recurrent outbreaks of smallpox during the American Revolutionary War also led to allegations of deliberate infection.⁶

Natural outbreaks of disease continued to afflict mass armies from the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars onwards, often accounting for the majority of casualties and fatalities incurred. The multiple infections known as ‘Walcheren fever’, with malaria as the major component, destroyed a British expeditionary force in 1809, while bubonic plague swept through Napoleon’s forces in his Egyptian expedition (1799), yellow fever devastated French forces in Haiti (1802–3), and various diseases, including typhus, accounted for over half of the 400,000 fatalities among the Grande Armée in Russia (1812). Whenever concentrated forces moved across terrain where disease was endemic, intermixed with other peoples, congregated at polluted supplies of water (like the British army outside Bloemfontein in 1900), and lacked high standards of hygiene and medical care, casualties from disease multiplied rapidly. Disease accounted for ten times as many men as the British lost in action during the Crimean War (1853–6), for nearly two-thirds of the fatalities on both sides in the American Civil War (1861–5) and for about two-thirds of fatalities in the South African War. In these circumstances, the deliberate spreading of poison was likely to arouse further ire. Raised as an issue at the peace conferences of 1868 and 1874, and at the Hague conference of 1899, all the principal belligerents, except Britain and the United States, agreed to ‘abstain from the use of projectiles the sole object of which is the diffusion of asphyxiating or deleterious gas’. Britain later adhered to a similar declaration at the Peace Conference of 1907.⁷

The First Major Gas Attack

In light of these pronouncements Germany incurred most of the opprobrium for initiating large-scale chemical warfare, but both Britain and Germany had conducted pre-war experiments with irritant agents while France had developed the first practical chemical weapon – a hand grenade containing a relatively mild tear gas (ethyl bromoacetate) for use by the French police from 1912. By August 1914, the French army had procured 30,000 26-mm cartridges filled with the liquid agent and fired them from special rifles (fusils lance-cartouches éclairantes) on the Western Front in 1914 and in the Argonne sector in March 1915. In September 1914 Lieutenant-General Douglas M.B.H. Cochrane, 12th Earl of Dundonald, informed Lord Kitchener of the plans left by his grandfather, Admiral Sir Thomas Cochrane, during the Napoleonic Wars for the use of sulphur dioxide clouds to drive an enemy from fortified positions. Although Kitchener discounted these, Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, kept the scheme alive and eventually the proposal, in a modified form, was implemented not as lethal gas clouds but as naval smoke screens.⁸

Yet the major innovation of the gas war was the first large-scale use of chlorine gas, discharged from cylinders at Ypres on 22 April 1915. German interest in chemical munitions had quickened after the onset of trench warfare, following their reverse at the Marne in September 1914. Early experiments with irritant agents proved ineffectual, notably the shelling of the French at Neuve-Chapelle with 3,000 rounds of Ni-Shrapnell (27 October 1914), the bombardment of the Russians at Bolimow with 18,000 T-Stoff shells (31 January 1915), and the firing of tear gas at Nieuport against the French (March 1915). However, Professor Fritz Haber convinced the German military authorities that cloud-gas attacks with chlorine launched from cylinders emplaced in the front line would prove more effective. Although the allied intelligence had detected preparations for the impending attack (they could hardly miss the installation of several thousand cylinders in the enemy’s trenches), they totally underestimated its potential effects and their forces lacked any form of protection. When the Germans released the chlorine from 5,730 cylinders along a 6-kilometre front, they precipitated the flight of the French forces (the 45th Algerian and the 87th Territorial Divisions), opening up a gap of some 8 to 9 kilometres and enabling their infantry to capture some 50 guns, 2,000 prisoners and a substantial tract of the Ypres Salient. But the Germans lacked reserves and dug in at night rather than press on to Ypres, only 2,500 yards away, thereby allowing the allies to regroup, to bring forward ten battalions to cover the gap and counter-attack.⁹

Like the allies, the German high command failed to anticipate the surprise effects of the first major gas attack. By approving the attack as an experiment that would divert attention from the transportation of German forces to Galicia,¹⁰ they wasted its potential. By 24 April, when the Germans launched another chlorine attack, the Canadians, aided by improvised protection, resisted with only minimal loss of ground, and neither this attack nor the four subsequent gas attacks in May broke the deadlock of the trenches. The Germans, as Brigadier Harold Hartley asserted after the war,

made almost every possible mistake in their earliest gas attacks. They chose a gas against which protection could be obtained with comparative ease, they used it in small quantities on narrow fronts in discharges of long duration and low concentration, thus losing the effect in depth, and finally they failed to exploit the partial advantage they gained. Within three weeks we were protected.¹¹

The Germans also handed the allies a propaganda coup. Both in the wake of these attacks, and after the war, the allies protested over the German initiation of ‘frightfulness’ (as gas warfare was dubbed) and about the breach of international law (the spirit, if not the letter, as projectiles were not involved). Although the number of gas casualties in the first attack could not be assessed accurately as the French failed to keep any records, and the Algerians retired too quickly to have lost many men, spurious accounts of the gas casualties were published. The claim that 5,000 men died out of 15,000 gas casualties, still reproduced in some histories of chemical warfare, is almost certainly an exaggeration as British field ambulances and casualtyclearing stations only treated about 7,000 gas casualties, of whom 350 died.¹² Numbers of casualties, though, were less important than the demonstration of large-scale gas warfare: as a German officer, Rudolph Binding, wrote in his diary on 24 April 1914, ‘I am not pleased with the idea of poisoning men. Of course, the entire world will rage about it at first and then imitate us.’¹³

Organization of the Gas War

Imitation involved the organization of scientific, military and industrial expertise to support the evolving gas war; the design, development and refinement of chemical protective kit, with the preparation of accompanying warning systems and anti-gas training; and the research, development and production of various methods to retaliate-in-kind. Based in the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry, Haber, promoted to the army rank of captain, had perceived the need to organize and concentrate German resources in the gas war. He drove forward the research and development of war gases, advised on the requirements for weapon-development, assisted in the formation of special forces (later Pioneer Regiments 35 and 36) to undertake gas operations in the field, and collaborated with industry in the design of protective devices against chemical agents, both Germany’s gases and later those of the enemy. His institute expanded steadily, became fully committed to the military in February 1916, and evolved into nine departments at various locations in Berlin and its suburbs. By the end of the war it employed 150 academically trained staff, 1,300 noncommissioned officers, soldiers, other workers and additional support personnel. Despite the commitment of skilled scientists, relatively simple lines of command and some delegation of responsibility to section heads in 1916, the organization reflected Haber’s autocratic, if inspiring, leadership, and the increasingly military tone, secrecy and compartmentalization of its activities. Although German research sometimes pursued unproductive lines of inquiry, relied excessively on diphosgene and responded slowly to the Livens projector, it seized the initiative repeatedly in the gas war, introducing chlorine, phosgene and later mustard gas.¹⁴

Neither Britain nor France possessed a commanding authority to lead, inspire and organize their chemical warfare responses. The extreme centralization of French science enabled scientists and laboratories to forge close links between the offensive and defensive research, with another department responsible for application and pilot-plant operation, and a third for purchases and dispatch. By contrast, the British organization evolved with entirely separate groups working upon the defensive and offensive aspects of gas warfare, according defensive research priority and leaving offensive research isolated, producing ‘duplication, vexation, and delay’.¹⁵ Despite even more problems in the production of chlorine, and the supply of cylinders, the British pressed ahead with plans to retaliate-in-kind, exploiting the generally favourable westerly winds in the cloud-gas war. Initially they formed four ‘Special Companies’ to undertake the gas operations in France. Under the command of Major (later Major-General) Charles H. Foulkes, Royal Engineers, who would become a doughty champion of cloud-gas warfare, the companies included soldiers posted from other units and men with scientific experience or qualifications, who were enlisted as corporals with higher rates of pay. Within five months of the first German use of gas, the British were able to retaliate at the battle of Loos (25 September 1915).¹⁶

In the following year the War Office acquired an initial 2,886 acres at Porton Down as an experimental ground with hutted laboratories. The site would be expanded steadily over the course of the war, eventually occupying 6,196 acres, with another 310 acres at the nearby Arundel farm for animal breeding. It enabled Britain to conduct field trials of chemical weapons (cylinders, shells and Livens projectors), the examination of 147 toxic substances, assisted by work in the first physiological laboratory erected on the site, a meteorological section, and individual and collective protection when the Anti-Gas Department was moved to Porton from the Royal Army Medical College in 1917. By the Armistice, Britain had 916 officers and other ranks, 500 civilians and 33 women of Queen Mary’s Auxiliary Corps working at Porton. Although there were frustrations in the British gas effort, reflecting the original separation of the offensive and defensive research, the wide range of departments involved, both at home and on the Western Front, and shortcomings in the productivity of the chemical and munition industries, this was a remarkable period of experimentation and often imitation in response to the German gas initiatives.¹⁷

In an industrial war, though, Germany possessed an indisputable advantage in the scale and productivity of its manufacturing plant. Of an estimated 150,000 tons of gases manufactured during the war, Germany produced 68,100 tons or about 45 per cent, with the Bayer plant alone producing 32,317 tons of gases – more than Britain (25,735 tons) and only marginally less than France (36,955 tons).¹⁸ Close contacts between Carl Duisberg, the chief executive of Bayer, with Haber and the military high command, facilitated the responsiveness of industry to the many demands of chemical warfare. Even so, the legendary organization of the German industry only evolved slowly and it was not until well into 1916 that Bayer and other dyestuf...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Praise for the First Edition
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 The Legacy of Gas Warfare in the First World War
• 2 Deterrence and Disarmament: Responses to Chemical and Biological Warfare, 1919–93
• 3 Chemical Warfare in Third World Conflicts
• 4 The Proliferation of Chemical and Biological Weapons
• 5 Iraq’s Chemical and Biological Warfare Programmes
• 6 Chemical and Biological Terrorism
• 7 The Recurrence of Chemical Warfare in the Middle East
• 8 Political Assassination by Poisoning
• Conclusion: The Evolving Nature of Chemical and Biological Warfare
• References
• Select Bibliography
• Acknowledgements
• Index