British Special Brigade

There are many detailed accounts of the use of gas in the First World War a number are contemporary or nearly so, and include books by men who had been closely involved in gas warfare C.H. Foulkes, who had charge of the British Special Brigade S.J.M. Auld Amos Fries of the US Gas Service. Of more modern accounts. The first volume of the SIPRI study. The Problem of Chemical and Biological Warfare, contains much material, as does L.F. Haber s excellent book based on the papers of the late Harold Hartley (one of the first Chemical Advisers appointed to the British Armies in... 

Smoke was also wddely employed by the British and by our own gas troops in conjunction with their gas attacks. In smoke operations the British Special (Gas) Brigade used over 40,000 4-in. Stokes smoke lK>mb.smoke candles were lighted by a single company. 

Richter s recent book [1711a] focuses specifically on the British use of gas warfare, and the Special Brigade, and so this aspect of the subject will only be mentioned here en passant. 

In the first eighteen days of the Somme Battle, the Special Brigade carried out fifty gas attacks. Phosgene became the main British chemical weapon. Over the next nine months almost 1,500 tons of it were discharged. 

To the British - the public, the army, even the men of the Special Brigade - gas was universally known as Frightfulness . Even after years of war and atrocity which had seen the introduction of such terrifying new weapons as the tank, the Zeppelin and the U-boat, gas was still the most hated and feared of them all, with a complete demonology to itself. Chemical weapons came to epitomise all that was most disgusting and evil about the war, a mood captured best in Wilfred Owen s famous poem ... 

This became the prevalent mode of British attack from 24 June 1916 to 19 March 1917 when 110 cloud attacks were made. C. H. Foulkes, Report on the Activity of the Special Brigade During the War , 19 December 1918, Foulkes Mss, Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives, University of London, King s College, J-30. For a critical account of cylinder attacks see Gen. G. de S. Barrow to Adviser, GHQ, 18 August 1916, PRO, WO 158/270. See also Gen. E. Ludendorff, My War Memories, vol. 1, pp. 141-2 and C. H. Foulkes, Gas , pp. 176-8. 

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