1915

Chemical Warfare

François-Auguste-Victor Grignard (1871–1935), Fritz Haber (1868–1934), Winford Lee Lewis (1878–1943)

World War I was a catastrophe from any perspective, and it triggered a chain of disasters that disfigured the rest of the twentieth century. Within a relatively short time, and despite international agreements banning the use of poison and poison weapons in warfare, its participants found themselves doing things that once would have seemed unimaginable—such as opening up the stopcocks on over 3,700 gas cylinders and sending a deadly stream of chlorine off into the spring breeze.

That was the scene near Ypres, Belgium, in April 1915. The French and Germans had both experimented with tear gas the year before, but to little effect. The German chemical industry, though, had plenty of chlorine, and German scientists began researching ways of delivering it in battle. On April 22, 1915, 168 tons of it were deployed in a drifting green cloud that opened a huge hole in the French line. The German troops were unable to exploit it, however, fearing the effects of the gas themselves.

This scene repeated itself many times, but in progressively less effective ways. The Ypres attack was the biggest success that gas warfare achieved, if “success” is the right word. Despite the use of chlorine, the still more poisonous (and harder to detect) phosgene, and the awful, persistent mustard gas (actually an oily liquid), advances in protective gear and gas masks kept things at a stalemate. Chemical weapons did not end the war, or even speed it up; they just made it even more horrible.

The chemistry behind these weapons is depressing. Everyone involved devoted time and effort to finding the most poisonously effective compounds and the most lethal ways of delivering them. At least twenty different agents were deployed in battle by all sides, and their uses were supervised by eminent chemists like the German Fritz Haber and Frenchman François-Auguste-Victor Grignard. American chemists, among them Winford Lee Lewis, developed still worse compounds, such as the arsenic-containing lewisite. Chemical warfare was not important in World War II, but it has made several horrible comebacks nonetheless in both warfare and terrorism, usually in the form of nerve gas.

World War I was already sufficiently inhuman before poison gas was introduced. Here, soldiers on the frontlines protect themselves with gas masks in 1918.