Secret Warriors

by Taylor Downing

  During the summer of 1915, Lord Kitchener instructed the British commander-in-chief in France to plan a new autumn offensive around the coal mining town of Loos to support a major French offensive on their right. General Sir Douglas Haig, the man in command of First Army, was to lead the attack, but he felt that Loos was the wrong place to launch an assault and was not keen. When, however, in late August, Foulkes laid on a demonstration of the use of chlorine gas, Haig was enormously impressed. He put his initial qualms about the use of gas to one side and, having apparently convinced himself that it might be the device to bring a breakthrough on the Western Front, decided to use it during the attack.

  In the weeks leading up to the offensive Haig became more and more enthusiastic and wrote to the Chief of Staff that ‘decisive results are almost certain to be obtained’ by the ‘Very extensive’ use of gas. He wrote to his wife even more enthusiastically predicting that within a month the British Army might be ‘a good distance on the road to Brussels’.9 Of course, the successful use of gas depended on the wind. But Foulkes continued to impress Haig with his confidence, telling him that the men of the special companies would always make the final decision as to whether or not wind conditions were right to use the gas. A mood of excited optimism prevailed at GHQ in the period before the attack.

  When dawn came up on the day selected to launch the offensive, 25 September, the wind was blustery and conditions varied along the front. Haig was uncertain whether to launch the gas attack but knew the British had to keep in step with the French offensive. At about 5 a.m. he stood outside his headquarters and his ADC lit a cigarette. The two men watched as the cigarette smoke drifted in little puffs towards the north-east, in the direction of the German lines. This simple test to check the direction of the wind is often said to exemplify Haig’s naivety and folly, but in reality it seems to have done little to convince him. Foulkes’ guarantee that the men launching the gas would be able to use their initiative seems to have given him more reassurance that it would only be discharged where conditions were favourable.

  However, almost everything went wrong that morning. Some of the cylinders still leaked and in places gas poured out into the British trenches. So many different types of gas canister had been called into use that frequently the chemists from the special companies found they had been issued with the wrong-sized spanners to turn the release valves. Moreover, although the specialists were supposed to decide if the wind was right, staff officers repeatedly overruled them and insisted that they launch the gas regardless. In one case the operator was told he would be shot if he did not release his gas.10 Consequently, while in some places the gas blew straight into the enemy trenches as intended, in other places it hovered in no man’s land, then blew back into the British trench as the wind changed direction. The men ended up being poisoned by their own gas. As if all this was not bad enough, troops had been issued with a new form of helmet, known as the P Helmet, supposed to give greater protection and allow them to advance close behind a cloud of poison gas. It involved breathing in through the nose and out through a valve held in the mouth, but it proved difficult to use and men wearing it quickly became exhausted. Moreover, thanks to the rain that fell that morning, chemicals in the fabric leached out on to the wearers’ skin. Many men experienced throat problems and thought mistakenly they had been gassed; when others lifted the helmets to get some fresh air, they breathed in the gas that had blown back into their trenches and so were poisoned.

  If there was chaos in the British trenches, however, there was panic in the enemy lines. It was the first time the Germans had found themselves on the receiving end of a gas attack. In many places the line broke, and the British made considerable advances during this first day, capturing the town of Loos during the morning. But it was the same old story of trying to advance on the Western Front. Haig did not have sufficient reserves to turn the breakthrough into a rout. When the reserves were finally drawn up and deployed, the Germans had recovered and fought back fiercely, and the balance by then had shifted back in their favour. The French attack on the right also failed. Within three days most of the fighting was over and any chance of a decisive victory had passed. Haig had worn down the enemy but his soldiers had suffered further considerable loss of life. And the Allies had lost any moral superiority they could have claimed against the Germans for their use of chemical weapons. Both sides would now be in a race to develop ever more ghastly and harmful forms of this new kind of killing.

  The reality was that from 1916 onwards, poison gas simply became another weapon in the arsenal of war. Its use became a familiar tactic in the process of attrition, intended to maximise casualties and lower the morale of the enemy. Sometimes the Germans released gas simply to cause casualties and made no attempt to advance in its wake. Often gas was used at night when it was more difficult to detect. Sometimes, at dawn, smoke was released first. The troops in the opposing trenches would race to put their masks on. When they realised it was only smoke they would take their masks off, and then poison gas would be released. But neither side had a monopoly of success or deviousness in the use of gas. On one occasion in April 1916, the wind changed direction when the Germans were releasing cylinders of gas and the cloud was blown so quickly back into their lines that even the members of the Pioneer Regiment discharging the gas were poisoned. Increasingly there was competition for scientists on both sides to come up with more lethal forms of gas than chlorine and to find better ways of delivering it into the enemy’s lines, a sort of chemists’ arms race.

  Fritz Haber, the man who had pioneered the use of poison gas in the war, was put in charge of development and supply for the chemical section of the German War Department. He built up a staff of some two thousand, many of whom were trained chemists, and advised the General Staff on all matters relating to the policy and supply of gases. The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute became the principal centre for experimentation and Haber’s close links with the German chemical industry enabled him to draw upon the expertise of industrial chemists when it came to placing orders for a new poison. Haber appears to have been proud of his wartime work and later became justly known as the ‘father of modern chemical warfare’.

  In Britain, no single chemist had an equivalent central role in the development of poison gas. A testing ground was established at Porton Down on Salisbury Plain, where the terrain was thought to be closest to that of Flanders, but many scientists grew frustrated that there was no central body to coordinate and advise on the development of chemicals for war. As Professor Starling of the Royal Society complained, there would always be delays as long as ‘we have no head of the gas services [for military supplies] in England’.11 It was clear that Germany would lead the next stage of the use of gases in the war and that the French and the British would largely be playing catch-up.

  After a particularly virulent attack on their lines near Verdun in November 1915, French chemists detected the use of phosgene. Elements of it were found on shell fragments and during postmortems performed on some of the dead. Phosgene, the chemical carbonyl chloride, is over ten times more toxic than chlorine. Far more difficult to detect as it had only a mild smell of fresh hay, what was even worse was that phosgene did not always have an immediate effect and victims were often unaware they had inhaled the gas. Sometimes it would take several hours for symptoms to appear. Its use marked a deadly new escalation in chemical warfare.

  One month after detecting its first use by the Germans, the French government itself authorised the manufacture of phosgene. This time, instead of releasing it from cylinders, it was incorporated into shells in liquid form that vaporised when the shell landed. The first phosgene shells were fired by French artillery in the Battle of Verdun in February 1916, while the British used phosgene shells during the Battle of the Somme in the summer of that year. The Germans also began to use phosgene in shells rather than releasing it from cylinders as it meant they were no longer dependent on wind conditions.

  Even more lethal was the
compound known as diphosgene, a chemical containing twice as many chlorine atoms in each molecule as phosgene. Both sides used this in artillery shells from 1917 onwards. Diphosgene could also be made in liquid form and simply poured into shells. When the shell exploded it released a heavy vapour that would stay on the ground in the vicinity of the explosion for up to thirty minutes without dispersing. German chemical giants Bayer and Hoechst produced more than four hundred tons of the gas every month, and diphosgene became the most common form of shell gas to be used in the war.

  It was clear that a more effective form of mask or respirator than the hoods distributed in 1915 was needed for protection from these more lethal gases. Once again the Royal Society was called upon to advise the Royal Army Medical College at Millbank in London on defences against ‘poisonous and irritant gases and corrosive fluids’.12 Bertram Lambert, a chemistry lecturer at Oxford, and Edward Harrison, a pharmaceutical research chemist, came up with a form of respirator that offered increased protection. This entailed wearing a satchel containing in a box a filter of charcoal and lime permanganate granules, connected by a corrugated rubber tube to a tight-fitting mask. Boots the chemists in Nottingham started to manufacture the new respirators for artillerymen and machine gunners, but they were too large and cumbersome to wear in the trenches. So, in 1916, Harrison designed a smaller version which went into mass production and eventually came into use throughout the British Army, where every soldier was personally fitted with his own respirator. Harrison became famous for designing the respirator, which saved many lives. And the familiar shape of the gas mask that everyone would carry in the Second World War had been born.

  In 1917 there was a further escalation in the development of chemical warfare with the use of dichlorethyl sulphide, a combination of chlorine and sulphur better known as mustard gas. The Germans first used mustard gas that summer in the Third Battle of Ypres, firing fifty thousand shells of the gas into the British lines on the single night of 12 July. Mustard gas is in fact an oily liquid that forms droplets in the air when the shell carrying it explodes. It was toxic not only when breathed in, but also when the droplets soaked into uniforms or even boots, attacking the skin and causing horrible burning blisters. None of the gas masks available by the end of the war offered any protection against mustard gas; it often blinded the soldiers it affected, burnt the skin, created a choking sensation and caused internal bleeding.

  Adding to the horror of an attack was the fact that it could be many hours before symptoms appeared, and the accounts of those suffering from mustard gas are dreadful. After a few hours men would start to feel a terrible pain in their eyes. Often blindfold, they would be evacuated, each man’s hands on the shoulders of the next man in a line led slowly by an orderly. Then the victims would start to suffer from the appearance of a series of horrible, yellow, oozing blisters. Their lungs would fill with a frothy and bloody liquid which, after a few days, they might start to choke up. If the contamination was severe enough, the gas would kill very slowly and painfully; it might take four or five weeks to die, and to see a friend die such a death must have been truly shocking. Mustard gas was the most horrific of the First World War gases.

  Vera Brittain was a VAD, a voluntary nurse, serving in the Base Hospital at Etaples during the Third Battle of Ypres. At any one time she had up to ten tragic victims of mustard gas to care for, and she described ‘the poor things’ as ‘burnt and blistered all over with great mustard-coloured suppurating blisters, with blind eyes – sometimes temporally [sic], sometimes permanently – all sticky and stuck together, and always fighting for breath, with voices a mere whisper, saying that their throats are closing and they know they will choke.’ Brittain wished that those who thought that ‘God made the war’ could see the victims of ‘such inventions of the Devil’.13

  The Germans fired around 5000 tons of mustard gas in the last sixteen months of the war and the British suffered around 125,000 casualties from it, although the vast majority of these survived. Mustard gas was slow to clear and would remain in the soil and the landscape for days after being used. Fritz Haber considered it be ‘a fantastic success’ and the ‘king of all the battle gases’.14

  Although by 1917, the Germans much preferred the use of shells to spread gas than cylinders as they were not dependent upon wind conditions and could reach targets several miles behind the front lines, a British Royal Engineers officer named Captain William Livens, an engineering graduate from Cambridge, invented a new method of firing gas, flammable materials and high explosives into the German lines. He devised a heavy mortar with a 4ft-long steel barrel and an 8in diameter, buried in the ground at an angle of 45 degrees. A huge drum of 40 lb of liquid gas and high explosives, fitted with handles, was dropped down the barrel and was fired by electrical ignition with a dramatic flash. The bomb could only be projected a few hundred yards and so the device, simple to build and able to be manufactured in large numbers – was called the Livens Projector. A special brigade was trained to use them and the Livens Projector was first fired in anger at the Battle of Arras in April 1917. Hundreds of Projectors lined up along the front line were capable of simultaneously propelling thousands of tons of toxic gases over the enemy lines. They could not hit precise targets but could saturate an area of the enemy front. In March 1918,3730 Livens gas bombs were to be fired into the German lines around the town of Lens in a single day.15

  In October 1917, Winston Churchill, now Minister of Munitions, at last created a Chemical Warfare Committee drawing together the expertise of scientists from the Royal Society, the universities and industry. But it was too late to fundamentally change the direction of the chemical war and create an Allied advantage over the Germans in chemical weapons. There were never enough gas shells available to meet the demands of the British generals and so a favourite remained SK, the tear gas developed in 1914. Although less toxic, it was slow to disperse and forced enemy troops to keep their respirators on for long periods, reducing both their efficiency and their morale. Meanwhile, British chemists disagreed about the best way to manufacture mustard gas and the delay meant that the British Army only started to use it in the last six weeks of the war.

  The Germans, in contrast, used vast numbers of gas shells in their offensive on the Western Front in 1918. They coded them according to colour: a green cross indicated lung irritants, a blue cross sensory irritants and a yellow cross mustard gas. Green and blue shells were fired against defending infantry, while yellow shells were fired against artillery as mustard gas remained in the vicinity for longer. At one point, four out of every five shells fired against the British artillery were mustard gas shells, and it was reported that after the German bombardment of Armentières, the gutters of the town were running with the liquid.

  Chlorine, phosgene, diphosgene and mustard gas were the principal poison gases used during the First World War. But many more were tested, tried out or occasionally thrown at their enemy by all sides. They included chemical variants of cyanide that got into the bloodstream and created heart failure; a form of arsenic gas developed in the United States and thought to be the most powerful killing agent of the war; and chloropicrin, a chemical first developed by the Russians but later used by the Germans. British soldiers called this the Vomiting gas’, as it induced nausea and vomiting and injured the stomach and intestines.

  In fact the various participants used forty-six gases, thirteen smoke agents and nine different chemical incendiaries during the course of the hostilities, in an ever more hideous escalation of the chemists’ war. And by the end of the war, it has been estimated, between them the participants had manufactured an extraordinary 176,200 tons of chemical gases, while about 65 million chemical shells had been fired – though remarkably this huge number equates to only about 5 per cent of the artillery shells fired on all fronts during the course of the war. Historians have argued about the effectiveness of the poison gases used during the war and there is a problem with analysing the records. Not only is it difficult to obt
ain accurate casualty figures from the Russian armies that fought on the Eastern Front, it is also thought that the Germans might have reduced the numbers of their own casualties. In addition, it is impossible to know how many of those wounded during the course of the war died years later of respiratory or other diseases as a consequence of being gassed. As a very rough approximation, however, there were between 1.2 and 1.5 million gas casualties in all the armies of the First World War. Of these, about 93 per cent survived, although roughly 10 per cent of survivors had some permanent disability caused by the gas. So the total number of terrible deaths due to gas in the war was somewhere between 80,000 and 100,000.16

  Of the hundreds of thousands of casualties caused by the use of these shells, one has a particular resonance. Four weeks before the end of the war, a barrage of mustard gas shells fired by British gunners temporarily blinded a lance corporal who was a runner in a Bavarian infantry regiment serving on the German front line south of Ypres. Many of his associates were killed in the bombardment. By the time the war came to an end he had been evacuated to a convalescent hospital in Pasewalk, Germany, where he recovered his eyesight. The lance corporal’s name was Adolf Hitler. In the war that he unleashed, two decades later, as Chancellor of Germany, despite the appalling atrocities that otherwise took place, Hitler never ordered the use of chemical weapons on the battlefield.17