The chemical weapons attack in Syria has reminded the world just how horrific the use of poison gas in conflict can be. Of course the use of gas as a method of mass killing has been around since the First World War. Who could fail to be moved by Wilfrid Owen’s description of the victims ‘drowning’ through the effects in his poem Dulce et Decorum Est.
Yet somehow, amid all the carnage of the Second World War, we were spared a spectre similar to that of the trenches where gas was used on the battlefield by both sides resulting in more than a million casualties.
But it was a close run thing. And it wasn’t only Hitler and the Nazis that might have unleashed them.
By the time Britain declared war on Germany in 1939 the Japanese had already used mustard gas against the Chinese in their war which had started in 1937. And few realise that when Britain was facing the prospect of invasion in 1940 Churchill and his military chiefs planned to use mustard gas to repel German forces as they landed on the beaches.
Later in the conflict, when Britain was again facing another grave threat, that of the V-1 rocket campaign against civilians, Churchill again considered using chemical weapons. In 1944 he wrote: “I want a cold blooded calculation made as to how it would pay us to use poison gas…”
While the Germans had developed deadly nerve agents like Tabun, the Allies had stockpiled toxins too and stationed them around the world in case the chemical warfare broke out. A tragic accident in Italy in 1943 showed how close we came when an American ship carrying mustard gas was damaged in a German air raid with 600 casualties.
US President Barack Obama says that the use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime would be a “red line”. But there were many in America towards the end of the Second World War who were calling for gas to be used in the Pacific theatre. While President Roosevelt had famously declared that the US would never use chemical weapons in a first strike, the huge losses suffered by US forces taking islands like Iwo Jima led some military chiefs to consider just that as a way to speed up victory over Japan. Public opinion was moving in favour too with newspaper headlines screaming: “We should gas Japan.”
It’s unclear why Hitler did not use his chemical weapons. Some say that he had an abhorrence of the weapons from his own time as a soldier in the trenches. More likely is that he had judged that the Allies had weapons just as potent as his own, while his own population was also short of gas masks.
Whatever the reasons the mass use of chemical weapons between 1939-1945 was avoided. Let us hope the same remains true in the years ahead.
Find out more about potential historical disasters which were narrowly avoided with History’s Narrowest Escapes by Paul Nero and James Moore