As a blueprint for war it was bold, clear, and seriously flawed. Germany’s military leaders had convinced themselves that France’s army would be no more able to withstand the destructive power of sophisticated weaponry than it had been a generation earlier and would consequently surrender within a few weeks. But though this optimism initially seemed justified—Brussels fell quickly and Paris soon came within striking distance—the kaiser’s generals had badly underestimated the enemy’s determination. At the Battle of the Marne in September 1914, the French, supported by a small British expeditionary force, launched a desperate counterattack that stopped the imperial army’s advance dead in its tracks. When the same thing happened at Ypres a few weeks later, both sides began digging trenches and the Schlieffen Plan started to dissolve into the Flanders mud.
The war of attrition that now loomed spelled disaster for Germany’s armed forces. Their attempt at avoiding a fight on two fronts had failed and, with the Russians pressing hard in the east and the British gaining time to mobilize in the west, a war that was meant to be over in weeks looked set to stretch into years. Germany had prepared meticulously, but it had manufactured and stockpiled only enough arms, ammunition, and equipment for a rapid campaign. With no contingency plans for a more protracted conflict, it was left dangerously exposed to the harsh realities of nature. The fatherland was very poor in essential raw materials. Nitrates, oil, metals, and rubber, all vital for sustaining manufacturing and fighting a longer war, were available only from abroad. But Britain’s Royal Navy controlled the sea routes and was already implementing a strategy used successfully against Napoleonic France a century earlier—a maritime blockade aimed at starving Germany of vital resources.
An astute industrialist was one of the first to spot the potential consequences of the general staff’s oversight.* Walter von Rathenau was among his country’s leading businessmen, a director of dozens of major corporations across Europe and head of the A.E.G., Germany’s electrical power combine, and he was used to being taken seriously. Before the conflict reached the end of its first week he forced his way in to see the kaiser’s war minister, General Erich von Falkenhayn. The army was heading for catastrophe, Rathenau warned him bluntly. Unless immediate and decisive action was taken to maintain a continuous supply of basic materials, Germany’s forces would be unable to stay on the battlefield for any length of time. Defeat was certain.
To his great credit, Falkenhayn listened. Although he had his doubts about Rathenau’s bleak prognosis, he was not completely convinced by the exhilarating reports he was getting from the Western Front either. He decided to hedge his bets, appointing the industrialist to run a new agency, the War Raw Materials Office, and charging him with making an accurate survey of the supply situation. Much to the minister’s disquiet, Rathenau’s hastily assembled team of civilian experts uncovered a resources crisis that was even worse than anyone anticipated. The survey questioned almost a thousand businesses engaged in war production; they confirmed that the deficit in raw materials was a disaster waiting to happen. Within six months—perhaps even earlier if the fighting continued at its current level of intensity—strategic stocks would be completely depleted. Particularly worrying was the critical shortage of saltpeter and its precious nitrate, essential for the manufacture of gunpowder. It could be obtained only from Chile, now thousands of miles away across oceans controlled by the enemy.
At first, few of Falkenhayn’s peers in the aristocratic upper echelons of the high command seemed very concerned by these reports; the confidence generated by Germany’s early success on the battlefield was such that pessimistic forecasts from a civilian (and a Jewish civilian, at that) could easily be dismissed as an attempt by a noncombatant tradesman to interfere in operational matters well beyond his competence. Rathenau must leave such matters to the military, they insisted, and keep his nose out of their affairs. Then came the Battle of the Marne and the horrible dawning realization that perhaps Rathenau was right after all. The industrialist’s stock rose dramatically. As the man who had so presciently identified the problem, he was clearly also the man to solve it. Whatever he wanted he could have, he was told, but the fatherland’s supply of munitions must be maintained. His response brought the chemical industry right to the heart of Germany’s war effort.
* * *
RATHENAU’S FIRST ACT was to call on one of Germany’s keenest minds, Fritz Haber, now director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry and the creator of synthetic ammonia. Haber agreed to set up a new division within the War Raw Materials Office to address a range of chemical supply matters but suggested that Rathenau also recruit Carl Bosch, the young engineer at BASF whose achievement of mass-producing ammonia had gained him the reputation of being a miracle worker.
At his first encounter with the officials at Germany’s War Ministry in late September, Bosch was taken aback at their ignorance about the scale of the saltpeter crisis and their naïve assumption that he could come up with a solution. With so much of his attention in recent years focused on meeting the challenges at Oppau he had almost forgotten that most people knew little about the complex practicalities of industrial chemistry. He was aware of what was going on in the wider world, of course: so many of his key technicians had been called up for military service that his beloved new plant had been forced to shut down temporarily. He was also alert to the gunpowder problem, which he had independently concluded might be just around the corner. Unfortunately—as he patiently explained to the assembled soldiers and civil servants—while it was true that the Haber-Bosch hydrogenation process produced a nitrate in the form of synthetic ammonia, the compound had to undergo a further stage of conversion, to nitric acid, before it could be used in the manufacture of explosives. The principles of doing that conversion were reasonably well understood but to adapt it to mass production would be huge undertaking. He would need a great deal of money, machinery, materials, and men—especially the men who had been drafted from the Oppau plant into the armed forces. Without their expertise, any attempt at producing weapons-grade nitric acid would come to naught. Moreover, it would all take time. He appreciated that this wasn’t a plentiful commodity at that moment, but he couldn’t work miracles overnight. And even with time he could not guarantee success.
The War Ministry officials agreed to his demands, but they insisted that BASF make a binding commitment in return. The government would give the company the six million marks it needed to build a new plant; for its part BASF must promise to produce at least five thousand tons of nitric acid a month by May 1915. Officially, at least, Bosch’s superiors on the board (including some who had previously questioned the huge capital investment at Oppau) were delighted by the deal and said that they hoped it would lead to a “permanent arrangement extending beyond the war, which would make it possible for us to supply the military for years to come.” Bosch himself was far less sanguine. He knew there was every chance that he would fail in the endeavor and he made sure that Haber quietly passed on a more sober assessment to wiser ministry heads.
In truth, some in the War Ministry also had doubts about the arrangement. Even as Bosch returned to Oppau to begin his one-man mission of saving the German high command from the consequences of its shortsightedness, they set about drawing up alternative plans for dealing with the munitions crisis. Strict rationing of agricultural fertilizers was immediately introduced and the country was searched from top to bottom for any nitrogen supplies that could be added to the dwindling reserves. A brief respite came when a hundred thousand tons of Chilean saltpeter were discovered in the holds of ships moored in the occupied Belgian port of Antwerp; a little more was scrounged from the Austro-Hungarians. But it was becoming clear that the unprecedented ferocity of the fighting on the Western Front alone—which now stretched from the North Sea coast to the Swiss frontier—would soon exhaust these stocks.
Military options, too, were under consideration. With the outcome of Bosch’s project so uncertain, planners began to cast hopeful and covetou
s eyes across the world at Chile, the principal source of natural saltpeter supplies. Only the Royal Navy blockade stood in the way of obtaining sufficient quantities to ensure a German victory. Surely something could be done to reestablish such a vital link?
For a few tantalizing weeks this ambition seemed realizable. On November 4, 1914, Berlin received news to lift the spirits of even the gloomiest civil servant: some days earlier, ships of the imperial German navy had won an apparently decisive victory against a major British force at Coronel, off the coast of Chile. The report was greeted with euphoria in the German high command, because it now seemed possible that the vital trade route could be reopened. But the optimism soon faded. One month later, at a battle near the Falkland Islands, the Royal Navy took revenge and overturned its earlier defeat. Germany’s last chance of reestablishing the flow of Chilean saltpeter had gone. Now only Carl Bosch at BASF stood between the kaiser’s armies and seemingly inevitable catastrophe.
Things at Oppau, however, were not going smoothly. The production of nitric acid from synthetic ammonia required high-pressure ovens that had to be designed and built from scratch. New catalysts had to be found to make the resultant process efficient. Bosch had sought to speed things up by skipping the normal laborious experimental stage and going straight to build a full works, but the engineering techniques involved were also new and untried. It quickly became clear that BASF could not solve these problems on its own. Blueprints for parts of the plant were sent to the company’s allies in the chemical industry and both Agfa and Bayer became involved in the race. But the weeks were slipping by. Every day brought further reports of the dispiriting deadlock in Flanders as the two sides fought bitter local battles, trying to wear each other out. The disappointing news from the South Atlantic only added to the pressure and led to renewed demands for progress reports at Oppau from nervous supply officials at the War Ministry. Repeatedly they worried away at the same old questions: Could Bosch really pull it off? When would he be ready? The replies they got back from BASF were equally predictable: These things cannot be hurried any more than they are already. Given time, it might work, but you’ll have to be patient. Time was a luxury that Germany could not afford. Another way would have to be found to break the stalemate.
* * *
ON APRIL 22, 1915, Field Marshal Sir John French, commander in chief of the British army, cabled London with disturbing news.
Following a heavy bombardment the enemy attacked the French Division at about 5 p.m.… Aircraft reported that thick yellow smoke had been seen issuing from the German trenches between Langermarck and Bixschoote. What follows almost defies description. The effect of these poisonous gases was so virulent as to render the whole of the line held by the French Division mentioned above practically incapable of any action at all. It was at first impossible for anyone to realise what had actually happened. The smoke and fumes hid everything from sight, and hundreds of men were thrown into a comatose or dying condition, and within an hour the whole position had to be abandoned, together with about fifty guns.
The use of poison gas as an offensive weapon of modern warfare was the brainchild of the father of synthetic ammonia, Fritz Haber. At the age of forty-six he was too old for active military service and, being Jewish, he was ineligible for any sort of home front reserve commission. But he was deeply patriotic and eager to get involved in the war effort. He had been one of the first signatories to the Fulda manifesto, an inflammatory document signed by many of Germany’s intellectual elite—though not Albert Einstein—that insisted Germany wasn’t responsible for the war and that the country’s militarism was the only thing that prevented the destruction of German civilization. When approached by Rathenau, Haber readily agreed to put his talents to work at the behest of the War Ministry and set up an office, the Bureau Haber, to facilitate cooperation between academic and industrial chemistry and the armed forces. His principal contact in the high command was Major Max Bauer, the military’s liaison with industry, an influential but shadowy figure who would go on to form strong personal links with Bayer’s Carl Duisberg and other leading industrialists. Although not a scientist himself, Bauer was interested in the role that chemistry might play in the development of new military materials and prompted Haber to see what he could come up with. As the saltpeter crisis worsened and Carl Bosch struggled to find a solution at Oppau, Haber began looking into the potential of weapons that weren’t reliant on nitrates.
Chlorine gas was an obvious choice. It was highly toxic and, if inhaled, attacked the mucous membranes of the mouth, nose, and throat, causing asphyxiation, blindness, and eventually death. It was also widely available. The German chemical industry, particularly BASF, Haber’s erstwhile partner in developing synthetic ammonia, often used it as an intermediate in the manufacture of indigo and other dyes. As the war had interrupted the export trade in these commodities, the plants that produced chlorine gas were being underutilized and so there would be no problem making sufficient quantities for the armed forces. Of course, there were some risks to be considered. There had been numerous workplace accidents involving the gas over the years and the industry had learned to treat it with great respect. Haber’s research work was consequently quite dangerous (one of his assistants at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute was killed in a laboratory explosion involving pressurized canisters) and his difficulties were compounded by the fact that all his tests were conducted under conditions of great secrecy. But gradually he was able to devise a workable and reasonably safe method of diffusion that he could demonstrate to the senior army officers who crept in at the back door of the institute at strange times of the day and night.
Their discretion wasn’t due only to a desire to retain the element of surprise. Poison gas had been proscribed under the Hague Convention of 1907, to which Germany and all the other World War I combatants were signatories. “The Contracting Powers,” the relevant article stated, “agree to abstain from the use of projectiles; the object of which is the diffusion of asphyxiating or deleterious gases.” In other words, gas weapons were effectively outlawed by the civilized world and their deployment went against all accepted norms of modern warfare. But a Germany alarmed by the dangerous military impasse was prepared to set such troubling ethical questions aside.
In April 1915, Fritz Haber, chewing a cigar, attired in a baggy military tunic, and accompanied by an eager team of young researchers (among them Otto Hahn, a scientist who would later win a Nobel Prize for discovering nuclear fission), arrived at the front line at Ypres in Belgium. With them they brought some five thousand cylinders of chlorine gas in liquid form. Haber supervised the digging of deep, narrow slits just beneath the top lip of the main trench, leaving room for three layers of sandbags to protect the cylinders from enemy shelling and for small sacks stuffed with potash and peat moss to absorb any leaks. A select squad of troops known as the Pionierkommando 36 (most of whom had been secretly trained at BASF’s plant at Ludwigshafen) then took up positions along a four-mile stretch of the line, facing a division of the French army. For two days German artillery pounded the enemy lines and the town beyond. Then at 5:00 p.m. on April 22, the order came to attack. After distributing cumbersome protective masks to the assault infantry waiting around them, the operators donned their own, opened the cylinder valves, and watched for ten minutes as a strong westward breeze took the thick yellow and green cloud out over no-man’s-land.
The results, as Field Marshal French explained in his cable to London that evening, were devastating. Within a few seconds the throats, noses, and eyes of the unprotected soldiers in the Allied trenches were smarting agonizingly. Shortly thereafter the men began to cough and vomit blood, their chests heaving as they tried to draw breath, but only managing as they did so to suck more of the deadly poison down into their lungs. Those who didn’t suffocate immediately broke and ran, terrified and retching, to the rear—and away from the masked Germans advancing through the noxious murk. By sunset an estimated five thousand Allied troops had died a
nd another ten thousand or so were barely hanging on to life in field medical stations. In the courtyard of one Ypres hospital, doctors and nurses watched helplessly as hundreds of gagging, gasping men lay writhing in death throes. Nothing they could do seemed to make any difference; emetics of salt and water, ammonia salves, all failed. Later that night, a Scottish surgeon carried out a postmortem on one of the dead and removed a set of lungs. They were inflated to four times their normal size and full of a watery fluid. The victim had literally drowned in the gas.
The panic and mayhem caused by this first attack allowed the Germans to breach the Allied defenses, but remarkably they had neglected to amass a sufficient concentration of troops to make good their advantage. Within days a Canadian division, at an enormous cost in lives, managed to check the German advance and recover much of the lost territory. The battle continued with great intensity for another three weeks and gas was used again, but the Canadians, who were its next intended victims, were saved when the wind changed and blew the toxic clouds in another direction.
Haber was not the only German chemist involved in developing gas weapons, nor was BASF the only company involved in their manufacture. Weeks before the attack at Ypres, Haber’s unit had experimented with a limited release of Bayer-produced bromine (code-named T-Stoff) on the Russian front, although the attempt failed when the severe winter weather froze the gas. Nevertheless, bromine was clearly a potent substance, as a letter from Carl Duisberg to Max Bauer attested: “How well it works you may best gather from the fact that for eight days I have been confined to bed, although I inhaled this horrible stuff only a few times.… If one treats the enemy for hours at a time with the poisonous gas-forming product, then in my view he will not be going home.”
Any reservations about the use of chemical weapons seemed to be felt more by Germany’s soldiers than by her scientists. A few weeks after Ypres, Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria, commander of the German Sixth Army, confided to his diary, “I made no secret of the fact that the new gas weapons seemed not only disagreeable but also a mistake, for one could assume with certainty that, if it proved effective, the enemy would have recourse to the same means, and with the prevailing winds he would be able to release gas against us ten times more often than we against him.”
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