A Higher Form of Killing (44 page)

Except for the use of poison gas by Japan in China, neither the Axis nor Allied powers used gas militarily in the Second World War. (One of the reasons for Japan using gas against the Chinese but not against the other Allies was that, in an echo about the debate about whether warfare could be conducted on a different basis with a “barbarian” nation than with a “civilised” one, the Japanese considered the Chinese an “inferior race.” Such racism may also have influenced the Italian attacks in Abyssinia.)

Immediately after the end of the First World War, Fritz Haber had fled to Switzerland, at one point using a beard as a disguise because he feared arrest as a war criminal. However, he soon returned to Germany and to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry. There he assisted continuing research on the military use of gas, despite this being prohibited to Germany by the Versailles Treaty. The research was ostensibly aimed at pest control. In 1919 he learned that he had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for his work on the synthesis of ammonia. The Nobel Committee for Chemistry—citizens of neutral Sweden—considered Haber’s achievement so significant that they did not allow his wartime work on poison gas to influence their decision. However, the award was widely condemned outside Germany. Theodore Richards, a Quaker who in 1914 had been the first American winner of the Nobel chemistry prize, turned down his invitation to the ceremony to avoid coming into contact with Haber.

The same year, 1919, Haber’s institute developed a cyanide-based gas, Zyklon-A, actually for use in pest control. In 1924, others would modify it to produce Zyklon-B, thereafter used extensively against insects. Ultimately, however, it was the main gas used in the holocaust gas chambers. Haber himself throughout the 1920s continued to defend the use of gas in warfare while often suffering bouts of near nervous collapse as he had done earlier in his life—frequently feeling he was living “under a great boulder.” A second marriage ended in divorce at the end of 1927 after ten years and two children. When Hitler came to power, as he was Jewish by birth, Haber was forced to leave Germany. He settled in Britain where the nuclear scientist Ernest Rutherford, a tireless worker for Jewish academic refugees, defended his right to asylum but refused to shake his hand because of his First World War work on gas. Haber died on a visit to Switzerland at the end of January 1934.

Some three years after his death another German scientist, Dr. Gerhard Schrader, again researching insecticides for I. G. Farben, discovered tabun, the first nerve gas. Further research led in 1938 to the discovery of the nerve gas sarin, more toxic and odorless. The German authorities quickly realized the military potential of both these gases and set up production facilities that came into operation in 1942 after many difficulties in construction and commissioning. Germany could have used tabun or sarin as well as the modified forms of mustard gas it had developed, weaponized, and stored in large quantities, against the Allies. For example, there was enough tabun available to kill the whole population of London, and the Luftwaffe had nearly half a million gas bombs of various types. Later in the war German engineers even produced warheads capable of carrying the gases on the V1 and V2 rockets launched against Britain in 1944 and 1945. Given that the V2, the world’s first ballistic missile, even with only a conventional payload, unnerved Londoners at least as much as the Blitz, how much greater would the effect of nerve gas-carrying rockets have been?

The German army could have also used gas to deadly effect against the D-day landings in France. U.S. General Omar Bradley wrote, “When D-Day finally ended I was vastly relieved. For even a light sprinkling of persistent gas on Omaha Beach would have cost us our footing there.”

Both Churchill and later Roosevelt publicly warned that if the Axis used gas so would the Allies and that they had the means to do so. Churchill had plans drawn up in 1940 for the possible use of poison gas as a last resort against any German invasion of Britain. Later in the war he shot off a memo to his advisers which came to nothing: “I want you to think very seriously over the question of using poison gas. I would not use it unless it could be shown that (a) it was life or death for us, or (b) it would shorten the war by a year. It is absurd to consider morality on the topic . . . In the last war the bombing of open cities was regarded as forbidden. Now everybody does it as a matter of course. It is simply a question of fashion changing as she does between long and short skirts for women.”

President Roosevelt resisted popular U.S. calls for the use of gas against the Japanese, expressed in press headlines such as
WE SHOULD GAS JAPAN, YOU CAN COOK ’EM BETTER WITH GAS
, and
SHOULD WE GAS THE JAPS
? However, when plans were being made for the invasion of Japan after Truman had succeeded Roosevelt, the U.S. Army Chemical Warfare Service made detailed proposals for the use of gas in the invasion of the island of Kyushu, scheduled for November 1, 1945, and against Tokyo during the invasion of Honshu planned for a little later. Japan surrendered well before any such plans could have been put into effect, even if President Truman had authorized them which he had not.

That no side used gas in the Second World War is perhaps the first example of the effectiveness of mutual deterrence. The German authorities erroneously believed the Allies like themselves had nerve gases. Neither they nor the Allies saw the benefits of their first use of the weapon as outweighing not only the consequences of the inevitable retaliation but also the massive international condemnation.

Even though neither Germany nor Japan used gas against the British and Americans, that is not to say that the latter two countries did not suffer casualties due to poisonous gas in the Second World War. The Allies always wanted to have gas stocks close at hand to retaliate against any Axis use. In December 1943, the SS
John Harvey
lay in Bari harbor in Italy with a cargo of U.S. mustard gas aboard—part of a provision designed to ensure that the Allies could wage gas warfare for a month and a half if required in their Italian campaign. That evening in the space of twenty minutes, one hundred German bombers attacked the harbor. The
John Harvey
was hit and much of its cargo of mustard gas released. Nearly two thousand people, both military and civilian, died in the raid, many as a result of the gas. The Allied governments unsuccessfully tried to cover up that gas had been involved. By their refusal to acknowledge this fact, some casualties died needlessly through lack of proper medical treatment.

The 1925 Geneva protocol prohibiting the use of chemical and bacteriological weapons including poison gas remains in force. One hundred thirty-eight states have now adhered to it, the last being El Salvador in 2010. Nevertheless, poison gas has been used since the Second World War—in the Yemen civil war in the mid- to late 1960s and by Iraq in the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s, when according to some sources 5 percent of Iranian casualties were due to Iraqi gas. In both cases mustard gas was one of the main gases used. The most infamous use of gas by Iraq was against its own Iraqi Kurdish civilians at Halabjah on March 16, 1988, when five thousand of the town’s population of fifty thousand were killed. A British reporter wrote, “Like figures unearthed in Pompeii the victims . . . were killed so quickly that their corpses remained in suspended animation. There was a plump baby whose face froze in a scream stuck out from under the protective arm of a man feet away from the open door of a house that he never reached.” Iraq undoubtedly possessed poison gas during the 1991 Gulf War but did not use it. The Allied commander in chief General Norman Schwarzkopf suggested the Iraqis feared retaliation with nuclear weapons. After the war Iraq agreed to give up its “weapons of mass destruction” and many were destroyed. However, Allied suspicion that Iraq retained some was the key stated justification for the 2003 invasion of Iraq. After this second Gulf War, the only WMDs discovered were some five hundred old mustard gas shells.

In 1994 terrorists first used poison gas when Aum Shinrikyo, a Japanese sect, released sarin gas in Matsumoto, killing eight and injuring two hundred. A year later they released the same gas in the Tokyo subway, killing twelve and injuring up to five thousand.

In 1997, the United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, and other countries brought into force a chemical weapons convention prohibiting research on and the use of such weapons and mandating the gradual destruction of existing stocks. By 2012 some 90 percent of the U.S. stockpile had been destroyed.

With the recent outbreak of civil war in Syria, reports that government troops were firing rockets filled with sarin nerve gas on civilian populations focused international attention on that country’s large stocks of chemical weapons. A team of UN chemical inspectors found proof of one such attack having taken place in an agricultural area outside Damascus on August 21, 2013. The number of dead was put at some 630. Addressing the UN Security Council, UN secretary general Ban Ki-Moon called it a war crime and said that, according to the inspectors’ report, this was the most significant confirmed use of chemical weapons since Saddam Hussein’s deployment of them in Halabjah in 1988.

Under intense international pressure, the following month the Syrian government agreed to a deal brokered by Syria’s ally Russia with the United States under which all of its estimated thirteen hundred tonnes of chemical weapons, which include mustard gas, would be removed and destroyed by June 30, 2014. The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), headquartered in The Hague, would oversee the removal and destruction of the stockpile—mostly chemicals stored in liquid form. At the time of writing, this process seemed on the way to completion.

Chlorine, the first gas used as a military weapon at Ypres in April 1915, has many legitimate industrial uses and it was not included in the list of toxic agents declared and handed over by the Syrian government. Although its use as a weapon is of course banned, in August 2014, the United Nations  reported allegations of the use of bombs containing chlorine gas by the Syrian government against civilians on eight occasions in April and May 2014. OPCW are investigating.

Although attention has focused on Syrian use of chemical weapons, bombing with explosives has caused the greatest number of civilian deaths in the conflict. Barrel bombs—oil barrels or metal cylinders filled with petrol, nails or shrapnel, and explosives—have been reported to have been frequently rolled out of helicopters on to undefended civilian areas.

Looking back over the century since those six weeks in spring and early summer 1915, the first use of poison gas, the sinking of the
Lusitania
, and the first aerial bombing of London remain resonant milestones in the development of warfare and of attempts to constrain it within a legal framework. In 1918 American philosopher John Dewey presciently commented, “The one phase of Prussianism which is likely permanently to remain is systematic utilisation of the scientific expert.” In spring 1915, high science put itself unequivocally at the service of the military—a fact only underlined by the Manhattan atomic bomb project during the Second World War and the potential today for the use of biological and genetic weapons.

Each of the three new weapons of 1915 was designed to have a psychological effect beyond the actual damage created and thus to cause panic and a loss of morale among both troops or civilians. Each would know that death could come without warning, at any time, however far they were from the battlefield. The anxiety of waiting for the next attack, uncertain of where and when it might occur, and the scale of the precautions and constant vigilance required, such as the need to carry gas masks and the use of blackouts on a daily basis, have echoes in the present age of terrorism, with airport and public building scanners and so forth ever present reminders of an unseen threat.

Gas inspired (and retains), as the world’s horror at its use in Syria shows, a particular revulsion—as nuclear and biological weapons have come to—as the first weapon not all of whose effects were immediately apparent. Victims could appear healthy only to succumb hours, months, and sometimes even years afterward.

Bombing and the submarine in particular introduced a disconnect between the perpetrator of an action and its victim. The zeppelin commander would never see the result of his bombing. This clinical or dehumanizing effect is now more extreme when a ballistic missile or pilotless drone is deployed. Similarly, these weapons marked a step change even over the machine gun and artillery in the small number of military personnel required to kill a large number of the enemy, civilians or otherwise. Simultaneously, they placed a heavier moral burden on the individual warrior while leaving society more vulnerable to an individual’s actions. One man, Raimund Weisbach, pressed a torpedo firing button on the
U-20
and as a consequence 1,198 people on the
Lusitania
died while another
U-20
submariner, Charles Voegele, refused to be involved in the attack.

The three events of 1915 combine with those of later years to suggest that in the continuing absence of globally accepted, effective, impartial enforcement measures, well-intentioned international conventions regulating warfare only have full impact when either there is an element of mutual deterrence or if adversaries perceive they have less to gain in either military or political terms than to lose by international condemnation or retaliation. In each case in 1915, the German authorities believed they would secure greater advantage by flouting international law than respecting it. The British in particular, and perhaps a little hypocritically, gained more in propaganda terms, especially in wooing the United States, by retaining the moral high ground.