World War II and the Cold War.
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World War I taught several lessons to the armies of the world about chemical warfare, two of which - the value of protection and the value of retaliation in kind - may have prevented the wide use of gas in the Second World War. Everybody now understood that gas slowed down operations not only for the attacker, but also for the defender, but it was also now known it didn't keep defenders from holding their position if prepared. Finally, while casualties among those properly prepared were few, those that did occur, were nasty.
The biggest advance in chemical warfare agents of the period was the development of the nerve agents by the Germans. They were never used because the Germans had no practical defense for troops in the field, and the Germans believed the Allies had to have their own nerve agents, leading to an antipathy to their use in the German High Command. The agents were first found during pesticide research in I.G. Farben Bayer Labs, and a patent covering Tabun had been issued before its effects on mammals were recognized. When it was realized that Tabun also affected mammals, this was duly reported to the German government under a law requiring that it be advised of any discovery with potential military applications (in December of 1936). A curtain of secrecy was placed over the materials, but by then the pesticide patent was already available to the public. (They kept Sarin, identified as potentially useful in 1939, much quieter.) By the end of World War II, the Germans were to have a handful of organophosphorus nerve gases that were completely unknown to the Allies. All of the major Allies were to obtain this technology after the war, with the UK and the USA obtaining more of the scientists, and the USSR obtaining more of the chemical plant.
At least three of the future belligerents: Japan, Great Britain and the United States, were to develop biological warfare programs. (The Soviet Union had several years lead at this point.) In 1932 the Japanese established the infamous biological warfare research organization Unit 731 in occupied China (Manchu-Kuo, later known as Manchuria).
Unit 731 was a particularly gruesome operation under the command of a Major (later Lieutenant General) Shiro Ishii that conducted experiments on humans - mainly native Chinese of the region often termed "bandits" and referred to in institutional records as Maruta or logs, the organization had been set up in a former paper mill, but also to include Allied prisoners of war. Many subjects were deliberately infected with agents causing diseases such as cholera and typhus and denied treatment. Progress of the disease was monitored by methods including exploratory surgery with the minimum of safeguards. The knowledge gained was put to use as the Japanese used mustard gas, plague and anthrax as they expanded further into China.
In a curious parallel to the spy scares of Edwardian England that had led to the establishment of the British intelligence services MI5 and MI6 before World War I, a fanciful account of German evil-doing stimulated the formation of a British biological warfare effort as World War II approached. The role of the fantasist played by William Le Queux at the turn of the century was taken by the journalist Wickham Stead who claimed that German officers had released samples of Bacillus prodigiosus (now known as Serratia marcescens) in the tunnels of the London Underground and the Paris Metro (the subway systems of the two cities) and had monitored its spread.
Stead's allegations were never proven, and the Germans never developed much of a biological warfare program. By 1934 the British had established a formal interest in bacteriological warfare that was to lead to the setting up of a research station at Porton Down in 1940. A few months before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, US Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson had commissioned a study of biological warfare that led to the establishment of a formal research program in early 1942.		The closest Germany came to the use of biological weapons in World War II was the deliberate fouling of a reservoir in Bohemia (part of the Czech Republic) with raw sewage. However, the failure to control disease in concentration camps could be seen as biological warfare by malign neglect.
British and American programs focused on weapons including anthrax, botulinus toxin and brucellosis. Field tests of anthrax on an island (Gruinard Island) just a few hundred yards from the Scottish coast led to it being uninhabitable for at least 50 years and a case of the disease escaping to the mainland. Churchill was prepared to do just about anything to stop Nazi Germany and plans were made to saturate Germany with anthrax (or mustard gas) and cattle cake and bomblets laced with anthrax spores were stockpiled for a massive response. Gruinard island was eventually decontaminated in the 1980's by treating the affected areas with formaldehyde vapor.
The Allies prepared for chemical warfare with mustard gas and several million tons were stockpiled in the course of the war. The British had expected gas attacks from the outset and began to stockpile gas masks in the late 1930's. Almost immediately upon the declaration of war, a small cubical gas mask box was to be seen hanging from the shoulders of military and civilian and young and old alike and gas mask drills were commonplace.
All the major combatants had supplies of chemical, and in some cases biological, agents, but only the Japanese appear to have made significant use of biological agents against the Chinese (who were unable to retaliate in kind). Ken Alibek, the former Soviet biological weapons expert, believes that the Soviets used Q fever and tularemia against German forces.
There were intense arguments among the Allies about the use of these agents. Churchill was relatively sanguine about their use should it become necessary. President Roosevelt was adamantly opposed to their use.		US mustard gas was impure and unstable, containing up to 30% impurities. It was manufactured by the Levinstein H process that may also have been used by the Iraqis in the early 1980's.
All combatants kept stocks of chemical weapons, especially mustard, near the front lines. There was a major, but unintended, release of mustard gas in Bari, Italy. It resulted from a German air raid on the night of December 2, 1943 which led to the destruction of a U.S.merchantman, the "John Harvey." Part of the cargo of "John Harvey" was 100 tons of mustard gas, intended for use in the event the Germans used chemical weapons. There were at least 628 casualties from exposure to the mustard, and at least 69 deaths.
The Germans not only had mustard, but they also had a significant supply of one of the nerve agents (Tabun -12,000 tons) that could well have tipped the balance at several strategic points. Hitler refused to use it at a number of crucial junctures, including the invasion of Normandy and during the Battle of Stalingrad. It was believed that the Allies had nerve agents and could retaliate in kind and Germany was not prepared to defend itself against such an attack. The German army did not itself have suitable protective equipment. In fact, despite a number of publications from IG Farben chemists discussing the toxicity of organophosphates, nobody had assembled the fragments into a coherent picture. The discovery of the Tabun stockpile mystified Allied scientists, even though a related compound (diisopropyl fluorophosphate - formerly used as a pesticide and at one time tried as a treatment for glaucoma) had been proposed as a chemical weapon in Britain before World War II.		Adolf Hitler himself had been a victim of mustard gas when the Belgian village of Werwick was bombarded by British artillery on 14 October 1918. Hitler was a 29-year-old corporal message runner in the Bavarian Reserve Infantry. It is thought that his experience with gas played a role in the fact that it was never used.
Britain was also beginning to look into anti-crop chemical agents. Scientists looking into weed control at ICI had stumbled across the first plant hormone mimicking-herbicides. These herbicides, now widely used by gardeners and farmers, stimulate the plant to grow faster than its physiology can support. At the time they were judged too inefficient to be used on a large scale. They were used to be used in Vietnam in operation Ranch Hand, not so much to destroy crops, but to defoliate jungles and deprive the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese army of cover.
Nerve agents were one of the great surprises of chemical and biological warfare in World War II. The other great surprise was that the existence and function of Unit 731 was covered up. In the paranoid early days of the Cold War, the data on biological weapons was judged too important to be compromised by a war crimes trial and the United States covered up the unit, with several of its members going on to senior positions in the Japanese biomedical establishment, in return for their data. In fact, the data were too crude to be useful and the Japanese had the better end of the deal. The Soviet Union was less pragmatic and prosecuted several members of Unit 731 for war crimes.
Ancient Times to the 19th Century| 19th Century and World WarI| The Inter-War Years| Post World War II| Disarmament and proliferation| The Terrorists
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