by P. D. Smith
In Roy Norton’s The Vanishing Fleets, published in 1907, a scientist discovers ‘the most powerful force the world has ever known’.52 Using radium, he and his assistant-daughter have found a way of defeating gravity. The President of the United States tells them: ‘In our hands has been given by a miracle the most deadly engine ever conceived, and we should be delinquent in our duty if we failed to use it as a means for controlling and thereby ending wars for all time.’53
The President orders the construction of anti-gravity aircraft at the American naval base of Guantanamo Bay. They are built in secret in a government programme to exploit radioactivity. Faced with the anti-gravity planes, the most sophisticated weapon systems of the day – battleships – become redundant overnight: they can be lifted straight out of the water and dropped where they can do no harm. The Vanishing Fleets showed its readers how ‘science was bringing an end to brute force’.54
Published in the same year as Norton’s novel, Hollis Godfrey’s The Man Who Ended War is a gripping scientific thriller. Both writers were probably inspired by sensationalist 1903 press reports that radium had the power to blow the British navy out of the sea. Godfrey, a lecturer in engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, tells how a German scientist’s discovery of a new radium-like element becomes ‘one of the greatest things in modern science… a force greater than anything yet obtained’. John King, a science journalist with pacifist tendencies, uses its ‘radio-active energy’ to create a superweapon.55
In the year before Godfrey’s novel appeared, the British Royal Navy had launched what was thought to be the ultimate war machine – the battleship HMS Dreadnought. Its steel armour made it impervious to most shells, and its guns could bombard targets eight miles away. Such ships were the most fearsome fighting machines on the planet. Britain and Germany were locked in a costly arms race to build the biggest and the best ships. A country’s battleships, writes Godfrey, ‘seemed to personify the might of the nation’. But not for long. John King’s new radioactive element emits rays which ‘decompose’ metal and paralyse people. Battleships exposed to the rays simply ‘vanished like a bursting soap-bubble’, the sailors falling senseless into the waves.56
Armed with this weapon, the pacifist John King issues an ultimatum to all the nations of the world, ordering them to disarm or lose their fleets. He travels round the world in a submarine armed with his superweapon, sinking a ship from each navy until they agree to his demands. After the loss of many ships, even the world’s most notorious ‘war lord’, the German Kaiser, finally agrees to disarm. Having won his prize, John King makes the ultimate sacrifice for the good of humanity: he destroys both himself and his device. ‘The world and the man who stopped all war were both at peace,’ writes Godfrey. John King had saved the world with science.57
The narrator of Hollis Godfrey’s The Man Who Ended War (1908) watches as the ‘radio-active energy’ of John King’s superweapon makes battleships vanish like a ‘bursting soap-bubble’.
Godfrey’s novel was one of many promoting the idea that through revolutionary science and the actions of an idealistic scientist, war could be made a thing of the past. It’s unsettling today to find the rhetoric of the cold war (and even of post-9/11 America) in fiction written before World War I. As historian H. Bruce Franklin commented, American popular fiction from this time gave birth to ‘a cult of made-in-America superweapons and ecstatic visions of America defeating evil empires, waging wars to end all wars, and making the world eternally safe for all democracy’.58
The fascination with super-scientists and superweapons in the years before World War I also gave us the name of the weapon that would overshadow the second half of the twentieth century – the atomic bomb. It is not surprising that it was H. G. Wells who came up with the phrase. He was, after all, the writer who made the scientific romance his own. As we shall see, when his novel The World Set Free was read by Leo Szilard in 1932, it filled the young scientist’s imagination with both fears of the atomic bomb and hopes for a world liberated by atomic energy. In Wells’s novel, world peace comes about only after a global atomic holocaust. As in all these fictional views of science and war, it is the superweapon that brings peace and, ultimately, utopia.
In the Allied nations, the public was outraged by the use of chemical weapons, an attitude encouraged by anti-German propaganda. The shock at their use is comparable to the reaction to the dropping of the atomic bomb in 1945. Both weapons represented a step change in the conduct of war and in particular its implications for civilians. Poison gas and atomic bombs were both indiscriminate weapons, designed to kill and maim over large areas of territory. Mustard gas (first used by the Germans in July 1917) could even be used to render tracts of ground uninhabitable for months. The Chief of Staff of the American army, Peyton C. March, was appalled to see almost two hundred ‘small children brought in from about 10 miles from the rear of the trenches who were suffering from gas in their lungs, innocent little children who had nothing to do with this game at all’.59
After the use of the new gas weapon at Ypres, rumours spread among civilians about further secret weapons. An article published in The Times within a few weeks of the Ypres attack purported to be a news report by ‘a neutral’ in Germany. But in style and content it is indistinguishable from the scientific romances from the pages of Strand Magazine or McClure’s. Titled ‘Fog Bombs for London’, it tells the reader all of Germany is ‘talking of the coming invasion of London by a fleet of Zeppelins’. While drinking in a Munich bar, the reporter learns that the Germans were keen to exploit ‘the power of the latest creations of Count Zeppelin, aided by a highly trained staff of scientists’. The reporter notes that Germany’s use of ‘death-dealing gases’ proves that she is ‘fully alive to the part which chemical research can play in twentieth-century warfare’. Now, thanks to that expertise, her ‘highly skilled scientists’ have produced Nebelbomben, ‘fog bombs’, which hide the Zeppelins from the ground, making them invisible to searchlights at night or even the human eye in daylight.
Then, during a train journey, the reporter meets a conveniently loquacious young German. He is surprisingly keen to spill the beans about this new wonder weapon which explodes in the air to cloak the approach of Zeppelins from guns and aeroplanes. ‘I saw it myself,’ the young German tells the undercover journalist, who in reality probably had not left the shores of England to get his story. ‘It was grand. The fog spread for many kilometres nearly instantaneously. With several bombs 20 kilometres square could be covered.’ The talkative young man ends with a threat that must have had Londoners glancing nervously up at the sky which, thanks to the English weather, was of course cloudy, even without Nebelbomben. ‘You will soon hear more of it,’ he warns, no doubt with a Prussian click of the heels. Within a fortnight of this article appearing in The Times, London was hit by its first Zeppelin air raid.60
In 1906, 12-year-old amateur photographer Jacques Henri Lartigue snapped images of balloons at the start of the inaugural Gordon Bennett balloon race in the Jardin des Tuileries, Paris. It was a memorable sight for the boy. In his diary entry for 30 September 1906, he reported the common view that balloons and airships would soon become ‘one of the most powerful weapons of war’.61 Two years later, H. G. Wells depicted just such a scenario in The War in the Air. In 1915 such machines – no doubt already familiar to young Lartigue from Jules Verne’s stories – brought a new terror to the streets of London, dropping ninety bombs.62 Some historians have argued that these bombs should also be classed as a form of chemical weapon, one which would become in World War II the most lethal weapon of all: the incendiary bomb.63
In World War I, chemical warfare did not prove to be the decisive weapon that Fritz Haber had dreamed of. At Ypres it only temporarily broke the stalemate of trench warfare. Once the element of surprise was lost and defensive measures introduced, the only effect of poison gas was to increase the suffering of soldiers, adding one more terrible way in which to kill and be kille
d. Advocates of chemical warfare claimed that it was a more humane weapon than high-explosive shells. They quoted death rates showing that there was a relatively low proportion of fatalities among gas casualties; you were less likely to kill your enemy using chlorine than high explosive, they said. It didn’t take the military analysts long to decide that this was in fact an advantage: ‘the wound-producing weapon has a greater strategic value than the one which kills outright’.64 But this had nothing to do with humanitarian concerns. The dead were promptly buried, but the wounded had to be cared for. This placed demands on fellow soldiers, thus preventing them from fighting and slowing down an advancing army.
Five months after Fritz Haber’s first gas cloud was released at Ypres, the German secret weapon was turned on its inventors by the British army at the Battle of Loos, albeit with mixed success: there were over two thousand British casualties from their own poison gas. But an arms race had begun in which the scientists and soldiers joined forces. As soon as effective gas masks were available for the troops, scientists found chemicals that attacked the skin, or they added sneezing powders into gas shells. These entered the mask and forced the wearer to remove it, thus exposing himself to other lethal gases. When the Germans first used mustard gas, they combined the relatively slow-acting agent with chloropicrin, a strong lachrymator (tear gas). As one American chemist said angrily, ‘Soldiers were thus intended to weep at their own funerals.’65
Germany led the world in chemistry at the start of the twentieth century and so had a head-start in the search for new chemical weapons. After chlorine, the more lethal phosgene gas was used on the battlefield. This smelled deceptively of new-mown hay, but killed every creature exposed to it by corroding the lung tissue and causing asphyxia. Mustard gas (which is really an atomized liquid) smells of garlic and attacks the skin, causing terrible blisters, as well as fatally damaging the throat and lungs. It is so toxic that during post-mortems, medics were often affected by gas remaining in the lungs of victims. Mustard gas was used by Saddam Hussein’s army during Iraq’s war against Iran. Most notoriously, Iraq’s military used it against its own people in the Kurdish town of Halabja in 1988. Aircraft dropped a mixture of bombs filled with chemical and nerve agents on the town, killing an estimated five thousand civilians.
Germany was the first to use both phosgene and mustard gas. The battlefield around Ypres became a testing ground. Mustard gas was first used there in July 1917. American artist John Singer Sargent’s painting Gassed records his experience of visiting a medical post after an attack in July 1918 and depicts a line of blinded men shuffling along, helplessly holding on to the man in front. Within days of the first use of mustard gas, British scientists had determined that the chemical was a dichloroethyl sulphide. The race was then on to find a way of weaponizing it for the Allies. In America, one of the key chemists in this race was James B. Conant, a man who would later play a pivotal role in the development of the next generation of weapons of mass destruction – the atomic bomb.
By November 1918, the French alone had produced nearly three million shells filled with mustard gas. In the event that the war should last into 1919, the Allies had prepared for a massive assault using gas cylinders mounted on tanks which would have advanced during an artillery barrage, saturating the ground and air with poison. Haber’s superweapon had been turned against his own soldiers with devastating effect. One German corporal, gassed in the final year of the war, would never forget his experience. His name was Adolf Hitler.
By the end of the war a total of 75,000 people – scientists and service personnel – were engaged in chemical weapons development. (The Manhattan Project would employ the efforts of twice that number.) Both Britain and America had set up specialist facilities dedicated to the new form of scientific warfare, at Porton Down and Edgewood Arsenal respectively. In the last year of the war almost a third of all German shells contained chemical warfare agents. But it is a sign of how far the Allies had progressed in chemical warfare that it wasn’t Haber who discovered the ultimate chemical weapon. That distinction went to W. Lee Lewis, who before the war had been employed monitoring water quality in public swimming pools in America. Although it was discovered too late to be used in World War I, ‘Lewisite’, as the gas came to be known, marked America’s rise to world dominance in the field of scientific superweapons.
Lewisite was actually a relatively simple compound containing chlorine and arsenic, made from three easily available and cheap chemicals. Like mustard gas, it destroyed skin tissues and was fatal if inhaled. But it was also a systemic poison and could kill merely by being deposited on a person’s skin. Excruciating pain in the eyes and skin was followed by vomiting. It could kill a man in a minute, after exposure to a concentration of just 50 parts per million. Although it was not deployed in Europe, the Japanese used it against the Chinese in 1934, and the Soviets developed it in various forms during the cold war. For Lewis, his terrifying gas represented ‘the most efficient, most economical, and most humane, single weapon known to military service’.66 But once the war was won, the public on both sides of the Atlantic began to worry that in the next war ordinary civilians would be on the receiving end of these indiscriminate weapons.
No major airborne gas attacks had been launched during World War I. Fritz Haber and Count Zeppelin had both been keen from the beginning to experiment with dropping gas bombs from the air, but the commander of Germany’s military, Erich von Falkenhayn, had ruled this out.67 In 1917, the British War Cabinet thought it likely that a Zeppelin gas raid would happen, but they didn’t want to alarm Londoners by issuing gas masks. ‘It would be impossible to train the London population to put on their masks even if they had them,’ said Lord Derby, Secretary of State for War.68 As the war reached its conclusion, the American commander of Edgewood Arsenal, William Walker, was itching to drop his one-ton mustard gas bombs on German cities: ‘not one living thing, not even a rat, would live through it’, he boasted.69
The American journalist Will Irwin had reported on the 1915 Ypres gas attacks for the New York Tribune. Appalled by what he had seen, after the war Irwin warned the American public what the effects of Lewisite would be in a future conflict:
it was invisible; it was a sinking gas, which could search out the refugees of dugouts and cellars; if breathed, it killed at once… Wherever it settled on the skin, it produced a poison which penetrated the system and brought almost certain death. It was inimical to all life, animal or vegetable. Masks alone were of no use against it… An expert said that a dozen Lewisite bombs… might with a favorable wind have eliminated the population of Berlin.70
Lewis angrily protested that his weapon didn’t kill vegetation. But for many people, after World War I it was easy to imagine themselves in a future war living in constant fear of the sound of aircraft engines overhead and the invisible poisons that might be carried on the wind.
In the early days of the war, scientists such as Rutherford’s colleague Henry Moseley were sent to the front line as ordinary soldiers. The death of the gifted physicist at Gallipoli, aged just 28, convinced Frederick Soddy that political and social progress was even more urgent than scientific advances. He turned increasingly away from scientific research and towards economic and political theory.
The introduction of U-boat warfare and the first German gas attack in early 1915 led the editor of Nature to demand that the British military exploit the expert knowledge of ‘the men of science’.71 The authorities soon agreed that scientists were more useful in a laboratory than in a trench. ‘Man invents: monkeys imitate. The war is going to be won by inventions,’ said Admiral Lord Fisher, the first chairman of the British Board of Invention and Research, in his 1916 letter accepting the post.72
Like Haber in Germany, most scientists were keen to contribute to the war effort and to raise the profile of their disciplines. Only one scientist in America refused to take part in chemical warfare research.73 Most believed that warfare actually accelerated scientific discovery and that
this in turn would lead to benefits for society. It was a classic Faustian bargain: you sold your scientific soul to the military for the promise of a better society in the future.
In an article on ‘The Man of Science after the War’, a scientist at Dalhousie University posed the question that was in many of his colleagues’ minds: ‘If it was in the power of science to make war so frightful, is it not within her essentially beneficent capabilities to make the coming day of peace fuller, richer and more glorious than ever day in the past has been?’74 Science was, after all, the engine of social progress. Hadn’t it given us anaesthetics to ease pain, and electricity to bring light into the darkness?
Many scientists also believed that applying science to warfare would lead inevitably to more humane weapons. But ordinary people, especially soldiers returning from the front line, often saw new weapons as merely increasing the suffering of war. An article in the American weekly The Nation condemned science for becoming obsessed with ‘the will to destroy’. Science had become a ‘mad dog’ that needed to be muzzled. In the future it should restrict itself to the ‘work of peace’, not war.75
A writer for the Boston Sunday Herald felt similarly betrayed:
For half a century we have liberally endowed, supported, and encouraged the scientists. Community funds paid for the institutions in which they were educated and underwrote their experiments. And all the while, we believed that these endeavors were promotions in the interest of civilization… Today we stand horror-stricken before the evidence of inhumanities only made possible through scientific advancement… Chemistry, you stand indicted and shamed before the Bar of History! You have prostituted your genius to fell and ogrish devices… You have turned killer and run with the wolf-pack.76
