Because Schrader had gone out of his way to cooperate with FIAT, he began to resent his prolonged detention at Dustbin. On April 9, 1946, Edmund Tilley wrote in a memo to Lieutenant Colonel Wilson:
SCHRADER has been one of the most co-operative Germans at Dustbin. He has written many useful reports and has volunteered information on anything that he thought might be of use to us. He had been recommended for transfer to England for work on insecticides and possibly poison gases there, and he probably would have been very useful to us. . . . As a reward for his co-operation SCHRADER feels he has received eight months imprisonment. His resentment may have turned him, or may turn him from a collaborator into an enemy. I hope his speedy transfer to Britain or his immediate release pending such a transfer may be arranged as soon as possible. Many other C.W. experts were released months ago and SCHRADER wonders what crime he has committed to warrant his continued detention.
The charges against Schrader were finally dropped and he was released from the internment camp in mid-1946. Although the British were interested in his research and invited him to England for a month, Schrader turned down a job offer and returned to his laboratory at the Bayer company in Leverkusen. There he worked intensively on a new organophosphate pesticide known as E-605, which was marketed in 1947 under the trade name Parathion. Over the next few years, Schrader sought to develop analogues of the pesticide that were less toxic to humans but more persistent in attacking insects.
Meanwhile, the top executives of IG Farben were put on trial at Nuremberg. After the high-profile tribunal for the major Nazi war criminals, the United States, France, and Britain disagreed over how to treat lower-ranking officials and collaborators. Neither the British nor the French wished to prosecute the German industrialists who had supported the Hitler regime, so the U.S. military government established its own tribunals for this purpose. The IG Farben trial was the second of three trials of leading industrialists; the other two involved the firms of Flick and Krupp. In October 1946, Military Tribunal No. VI was established at Nuremberg to try the principal officers of IG Farben for crimes against peace, humanity, and property rights. The presiding judge was Curtis Shake, a former chief judge of the Supreme Court of Indiana; the chief of counsel for the prosecution was Telford Taylor; and his deputy was Josiah E. DuBois, a lawyer from Cam-den, New Jersey.
At Military Tribunal No. VI at the Palace of Justice in Nuremberg, Germany, the twenty-three principal officers of IG Farben were tried in 1947–1948 for crimes against humanity and the planning and waging of aggressive war. In this photograph, eight of the defendants wait for the indictments to be handed out. Seated in the front row (from left to right) are August von Knieriem, Fritz ter Meer, Christian Schneider, and Otto Ambros.
Although the American prosecutors issued a warrant for Otto Ambros’s arrest, he was safe as long as he remained in the French occupation zone. A FIAT report noted, “He is wily and will remain there, as he knows the hunt for him is on in the U.S. Zone.” Ambros remained at large for several more months, but eventually he grew cocky and dared to travel outside Ludwigshafen. His luck finally ran out on January 17, 1946, when he was arrested by the American occupation forces and handed over to the prosecutors at Nuremberg.
On May 1, 1947, in a sworn deposition in his own defense, Ambros argued that his briefing at Wolf’s Lair on May 15, 1943, had aroused doubt in Hitler’s mind about whether the Allies had independently discovered nerve agents. “I believe,” Ambros said, “through my objective description of the production situation and above all through my objective reference to the possibilities of the enemy side, I significantly contributed to the fact that Germany did not make any use of chemical weapons.” This self-serving interpretation conveniently sidestepped the fact that Ambros’s negative depiction of Germany’s chemical warfare capabilities had been intended to persuade Hitler to expand the production capacity for Tabun and Sarin and thereby ensure a qualitative advantage over the Allies. Indeed, after the meeting at Wolf’s Lair, Hitler had increased funding for nerve agent production. As historian Peter Hayes later wrote about Ambros and his fellow executives, “Lacking the courage of moral conviction almost as a condition for their professional success, they shut off their consciences, which was tantamount, in this instance, to having no consciences at all.”
The IG Farben trial ran from August 27, 1947, to June 11, 1948—152 working days. Although the trial began with twenty-four defendants, it ended with twenty-three because one case was discontinued due to illness. Organized into five main points and 147 individual charges, the prosecution’s case was that the company had established an alliance with Hitler and the Nazi Party to become the unchallenged leader of the world chemical industry.
During the trial, the prosecution presented 2,282 documents, 419 sworn depositions, and 87 witnesses, while the defense presented 4,102 documents, 2,394 sworn depositions, and 102 witnesses. Ambros was accused of having personally selected the Auschwitz concentration camp as the site of IG Farben’s synthetic rubber plant so that the inmates could be exploited for slave labor. Survivors of Auschwitz testified about the grim conditions at the rubber plant, including beatings, ill treatment, and summary executions.
When the IG Farben tribunal reached its judgment on July 29–30, 1948, the Nuremberg judges found thirteen of the accused directors guilty and the other ten not guilty. Ambros was convicted of the use of forced labor at the Auschwitz plant and sentenced to eight years in prison, minus time already served. All the other charges against him were dropped, however, including the planning, preparation, and execution of offensive war, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. Deputy Prosecutor DuBois considered Ambros’s sentence “light enough to please a chicken thief” and later wrote an angry book on the IG Farben trial titled The Devil’s Chemists.
ALTHOUGH THE ORIGINAL justification for the British to keep a large number of German Tabun-filled bombs at an RAF base in Wales had been the need for a chemical retaliatory capability during the war against Japan, the emergence of the Cold War created a new rationale. The continued stationing of large numbers of Soviet troops in the “satellite” nations of Eastern Europe created a military threat to Western Europe and its isolated outpost in West Berlin. Accordingly, the British government came to view the German nerve agent bombs at Llandwrog as a contingency stockpile in case the East-West confrontation ever turned hot. A 1947 report from Porton Down concluded, “It is believed that the Russians know that we possess this gas; therefore, its retention by us in some form of storage as a potential threat or bargaining agent, is recommended, even if present weapons are not very effective.”
Brigadier General Telford Taylor, chief counsel for the prosecution, delivers the opening statement in an all-American court at Nuremberg, Germany, charging IG Farben executives (including Otto Ambros) with war crimes and crimes against humanity, September 1947.
The feasibility of actually using the German Tabun bombs stored at Llandwrog was doubtful, however. Because the weapons had not been designed for delivery by British bombers, they would first require modifications to their suspending lugs. On July 18, 1950, the British Defence Research Planning Commission asked the Air Ministry to determine the amount of effort and cost that would be required to make the bombs deliverable by British aircraft. The ministry estimated that the modification parts for the 71,000 bombs would cost about 500,000 pounds sterling, and that the new lugs would not be available for nine to twelve months after the order was placed. This estimate did not include the expense of installing the parts, as well as new fuses. Some British military planners argued that because the operational value of the German bombs was limited, the high cost required to modify them was unwarranted; others countered that the bombs represented the only stock of nerve agent in British hands and that scrapping them would be unwise.
In 1952, British officials decided to modify nine thousand of the bombs by March 1954 to improve the country’s readiness for chemical warfare. This order was later rescinded, however, becaus
e the stocks at Llandwrog were showing signs of corrosion and leakage and the Tabun fill had deteriorated over nearly a decade of storage. Britain was also acquiring nuclear weapons, which were considered to be a far better strategic deterrent than poison gas. Accordingly, in June 1954, the British government decided that the Tabun stockpile had outlived its usefulness and should be disposed of at sea. Under Operation Sandcastle, which lasted from January 1955 to July 1956, the seventy-one thousand German bombs were loaded onto rusting hulks, which were towed out into the North Atlantic and scuttled in deep water.
Meanwhile, the chemical warfare establishments of the Allied powers strove to assess and exploit the German nerve agents. The discovery of Tabun and Sarin had reduced the most effective chemical weapons of World War I—phosgene and mustard—to secondary status, if not obsolescence. Until persistent nerve agents could be developed, mustard would retain some utility for long-term terrain denial, but it had clearly lost its status as “the king of the war gases.” The nerve agents’ extreme toxicity, rapid action, and difficulty of detection offered new possibilities for offensive use, while posing unprecedented challenges for chemical defense.
Military strategists also debated the role of gas in future conflicts. For most of World War II, the strong personal antipathy of President Roosevelt and many of his top generals toward chemical weapons had limited their integration into U.S. force structure and military doctrine. Strategic considerations also played a role. During the bloody battles for the Pacific islands, where the use of gas against Japanese soldiers holed up in caves and tunnels offered undeniable tactical advantages, Pentagon planners feared that initiating chemical warfare against Japan would give the Germans an excuse to employ gas in the European theater. After Roosevelt’s death on April 12, 1945, the inauguration of Harry Truman, and the German surrender in May, U.S. chemical warfare planning against Japan advanced significantly. Pentagon strategists drew up plans to drop mustard and phosgene bombs on Japanese citities in October 1945, prior to an invasion scheduled for early November. But the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 ended the war without the need for a land invasion.
Now, with the discovery of the secret German breakthrough in chemical warfare, several important questions remained to be answered. Although nerve agents had not been used during World War II, would they have a place in future wars? What military missions could these weapons fulfill? And how would the problems of chemical defense be solved with respect to detection, prophylaxis, and therapy?
CHAPTER SIX
RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT
IN 1945, in the immediate aftermath of World War II, the U.S. Army Chemical Warfare Service decided to focus its research and development efforts on the German nerve agents, the technological challenges of which promised to ensure the organization’s survival through the period of postwar demobilization and declining military budgets. The CWS closed its Development Laboratory at MIT and transferred the scientific staff back to the main research and development center at Edgewood Arsenal, located on a secluded peninsula jutting into Chesapeake Bay some twenty miles northeast of Baltimore. Beginning in 1940, a major construction effort had greatly expanded the size of the base, and about ten thousand civilian personnel had been stationed there during the war. Surrounded by high fences to keep out intruders, the sprawling arsenal included laboratories, engineering shops, a facility for making chlorine (a key ingredient of many chemical warfare agents), a pilot plant for developing manufacturing processes, and several large test ranges. Even so, much of the peninsula remained undeveloped, with more than three thousand acres of forest, fields, and wetlands inhabited by a rich array of wildlife, including bald eagles and osprey.
Although the scientists and engineers at Edgewood spent their days researching poisons of unprecedented power, they lived quiet, middle-class lives in nearby suburban Maryland communities such as Aberdeen and Bel Air. Few of them experienced pangs of conscience about their work, which they justified as creating a credible deterrent against chemical attack. Moreover, many Edgewood scientists considered chemical weapons to be a more humane means of putting enemy soldiers out of action than blasting them to bits with high explosives or incinerating them with napalm.
Edgewood Arsenal, near Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland, in the late 1950s. The Pilot Plant building is at center-left. A production process for Sarin nerve agent was developed here from 1948 to 1951.
In parallel with Porton Down, Edgewood Arsenal conducted a detailed technical assessment of the captured German stocks of Tabun. The CWS research-and-development program for fiscal year 1946, approved on July 5, 1945, included a new activity called “Project A1.13.” This effort involved determining the physical constants and characteristics of Tabun, preparing analogues of the compound for toxicity studies, devising new methods of detection and decontamination, and developing an industrial manufacturing process for Tabun “in case field tests indicate its usefulness as a chemical agent.” Edgewood also began a program of static testing with several types of Tabun-filled bombs and mortar shells to determine how much of the agent was destroyed during explosive dissemination, the distribution of drop sizes and vapor concentrations, and toxicity under various atmospheric and weather conditions.
A SMALL BUT significant step forward in the study of the German nerve agents was the adoption of a standard nomenclature. Immediately after the war, the American, British, and Canadian armies used different code names for Tabun, Sarin, and related compounds, which frequently gave rise to misunderstandings. Whereas the U.S. Chemical Warfare Service referred to Tabun as “MCE,” the British called it “T-2104” or “MCP.” Similarly, the U.S. Army code name for Sarin was “MFI”; the British used a different designation. On October 16, 1945, Colonel Jack H. Rothschild, the chief of the CWS Technical Division, proposed creating a uniform system for assigning symbols to the various nerve agents so as to minimize confusion. Drawing on the existing system of letter codes for chemical warfare agents (such as HD for distilled mustard and CG for phosgene), he suggested that the German nerve agents be code-named with the letter “F,” followed by another letter of the alphabet. Tabun, Sarin, and Soman would therefore be designated “FA,” “FB,” and “FC,” respectively.
Major James E. McHugh, the head of the CWS Training Division, agreed on the need for a uniform naming system but took issue with Rothschild’s proposal; FA, he noted, could be confused with the abbreviation for “Field Artillery,” while FD might refer to “Finance Department.” McHugh suggested avoiding these misleading code names by referring to Tabun, Sarin, and Soman as “FB,” “FC,” and “FE,” respectively.
Rothschild responded with a memo noting that other abbreviations involving the letter “F,” such as “FM,” could be problematic. He therefore proposed that the major German nerve agents and their analogues be designated with the letter “G,” followed by a second letter not previously associated with it. (“GC” was excluded because it was too easily confused with CG, the existing Army code for phosgene.) According to Rothschild’s scheme, Tabun would be designated by the code name “GA,” Sarin by “GB,” Soman by “GD,” Ethylsarin by “GE,” Cyclosarin by “GF,” and Isopentylsarin by “GH.” (Although the Germans had used letter codes to refer to the two formulations of Tabun and the solvent chlorobenzene, with “G” standing for 95 percent Tabun and “GA” for 80 percent, there was apparently no connection between the German codes and the ones devised by Rothschild.)
The Chemical Warfare Service and the British Army signed off on the new naming convention, and the CWS’s Chemical Warfare Technical Committee formally approved it on December 20, 1945. This committee also agreed that if the letter codes were used in conjunction with the chemical names or formulas of the nerve agents, they would be classified Secret, but if the code names were unaccompanied by any specific means of identification, they would remain unclassified so that useful information about the nerve agents could be listed in Army field manuals. Rothschild’s naming system wa
s widely adopted and is still in use today.
Another shift in nomenclature came in 1946, when U.S. Secretary of War Robert Patterson asked Congress to change the name of the Chemical Warfare Service to the Chemical Corps. This change had been proposed several years earlier, without success. On August 4, 1937, President Roosevelt had vetoed Senate Bill 1284 to establish an Army Chemical Corps because he believed it would institutionalize chemical warfare, which he considered immoral. In 1946, however, Roosevelt’s successor, Harry Truman, approved the change in name and status. One reason was that the mission of the Chemical Corps was no longer limited to the military use of chemicals on the battlefield but also encompassed civilian activities such as the development and production of DDT and other pesticides.
Although the Chemical Corps focused its initial research-and-development activities on Tabun, the recognition that Sarin offered superior military characteristics soon led to a change in emphasis. In 1946, the Chemical Corps established Project A1.13-2.1, the development of a method for the mass production of Sarin. Despite the fact that small amounts of the nerve agent could be synthesized fairly easily in the laboratory, scaling the process up to the industrial level posed major technical challenges.
ADDING SPECIAL URGENCY to the U.S. Army’s research-and-development program on nerve agents was the fact that the Soviet Union had obtained a significant head start. In September 1946, with the aid of captured German scientists, Soviet engineers and pipe fitters had systematically dismantled the Tabun and Sarin plants at Dyhernfurth, which the Red Army had seized as war booty, and shipped the production equipment to Stalingrad. Much of the German apparatus was custom-made and of high quality, including chemical reaction vessels and pipes lined with silver or nickel to resist corrosion, as well as specialized filters, evaporators, driers, pumps, compressors, distillation columns, and valves of several gauges. The Soviets also confiscated air-handling and containment systems for work with highly toxic chemicals, such as control systems, fans, ducts, and hermetically sealed production compartments made of glass and steel.
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