Allies Chemical Warfare

Chemical warfare has its roots in antiquity. Periodically, armies have used dmgs, mostly extracted from poisonous plants, against their opponents. In more recent centuries, chemical laboratories have gone on to produce new and more sophisticated compounds along with more effective devices for their delivery. The American army paid little or no attention to this type of weapon, however, until the 20th century. When German troops used toxic gases in World War I, they found the U.S. and its allies almost totally unprepared. 

Somewhat surprisingly, following the end of the First World War, the Allied governments almost immediately seemed to forget what they had learned during the war about being prepared for future chemical warfare. The first major concerns for the chemical warfare detachments of the Allied forces then were to ensure they survived demobilisation. In both Britain and the United States cases were presented for the need for a permanent chemical warfare research establishment. In 1920 A.A. Fries proclaimed ... 

In May 1936 the Italian Army completely routed the Ethiopian Army and, indeed, Italy controlled most of Ethiopia until 1941 when the British and other Allied troops re-conquered the country. Major Norman E. Fiske, an observer with the Italian Army, commented with regard to the role of chemical warfare that the Italians were clearly superior and victory for them was assured no matter what. According to Fiske, the use of chemical weapons was, however, nothing more than an experiment. 

There is no doubt that by the middle of the war the Nazis had acquired vast, hidden armouries of chemical weapons and the Wehrmacht still found millions of marks to pump into the testing and production of poison gas. Indeed, the effort put by the Germans into chemical warfare research was considerable with them employing double the number of scientists than Britain,12 and their twenty factories were capable of producing about 12,000 tons of poison gas a month.13 Indeed, the Allies believed, in a report issued after the war, that the Germans had about 70,000 tons of poison gas stockpiled at various... 

Certainly Speer, believing that should such an attack be launched in 1945 it would cause the Allies to retaliate in kind, had been going to great lengths to divert raw materials away from the chemical warfare factories.28 As he later testified at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials in 1946 ... 

The Chief of the US Army Chemical Warfare Corps, writing in 1946, expressed the view that heavy gas attacks on the Allied beachheads might have delayed the invasion of Europe for up to six months and, indeed, have made landings elsewhere a necessity.32 Certainly, had the invasion been delayed the Germans would have had the time to complete... 

The Allied armies began demobilisation activities almost immediately after the victory in Japan in August 1945, and by early 1946 chemical warfare personnel (now renamed chemical defence) numbered approximately the same as in the pre-war period. One contemporary observer commented, Gas warfare is obsolete Yes, like the cavalry and horse-drawn artillery, it is outmoded, archaic and of historical interest only. This is the atomic age 74... 

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