StarDestroyer.Net BBS

Although Nazi Germany infamously had no compunction at all in using carbon menoxide and Zyklon B to kill its internal 'enemies', why didn't it liberally use chemical weapons on the frontlines and against enemy cities? Poison gas delivered in shells and bomblets would've been helpful in neutralizing large but immobile pockets of resistance, while a major military player like Great Britain was very fearful of gas bombs being dropped on London with the oversupply of gas masks to citizens. What was holding a ruthless warlord like Hitler back?

Big Orange wrote:Although Nazi Germany infamously had no compunction at all in using carbon menoxide and Zyklon B to kill its internal 'enemies', why didn't it liberally use chemical weapons on the frontlines and against enemy cities? Poison gas delivered in shells and bomblets would've been helpful in neutralizing large but immobile pockets of resistance, while a major military player like Great Britain was very fearful of gas bombs being dropped on London with the oversupply of gas masks to citizens. What was holding a ruthless warlord like Hitler back?

The same reason that the Japanese used biological warfare on the Chinese, but not the United State- they British would have retaliated.

Basically everything is against it, gas warfare could only favor the superior resources and strategic depth of the allies.

Aside from nerve agents, of which only Tabun was produced on a large scale, and even then not that much was made (Sarin production was less then 50 tons, a pilot program only), chemical weapons are statistically less effective at inflicting casualties then conventional weapons, often dramatically so. When you compared just deaths caused, chemical weapons sucked even more. The only reason so much was used in WW1 was because of a physical shortage of high explosives to full bombs and shells, and powder to fire them with. Chemical weapons were much less demanding on industry since you could just release them out of cylinders and use all sorts of chemicals with other large scale military applications.

To this you can add the fact that chemical weapons inherently slow down the pace of operations, and favor the defender more then the attacker. That’s crippling to a military like the Germans which based its WW2 strengths around fast moving operations to keep the enemy off balance, rather then raw firepower. Chemical weapons are all about volume. They also depend heavily on weather conditions, rain can make some agents useless, and you can’t have the wind blowing them back in your face.

Meanwhile the allies, in particular Britain, simply had much better civil defenses against gas attack (because they feared it so much) and often had better military protective gear as well. The German advantage of nerve gas didn’t exist even on paper for Hitler, because in fact, the nerve agents were patented by civilian German firms (remember, they got discovered as insecticides) in the US and Britain before the war. As it was the allies didn’t notice this, but the Germans had to assume they had. The US and much of the USSR would be completely out of bombing range, while no city in Germany was out of reach.

Hitler meanwhile also simply did not like gas one bit, having been blinded by mustard himself. He thought it beneath him to use such a foul weapon, he was willing to gas mental patients and Jews (though gassing them wasn’t his idea specifically) because he thought them subhuman and inherently unworthy of life, sucking food out of the food shortage ridden Nazi murder empire.

All this said, the Germans did in fact use chemical weapons on at least one occasion. Near the end of the siege of Sevastopol they used toxic smoke candles to kill Russian troops still holding out in several deep bunkers and Cliffside caves around the city. Presumably they assumed the allies would not find out about this limited use, and the only alternative would have been to pump in gasoline and burn the Russians out anyway, hardly a less horrible option. The US did that quite a bit, notably when retaking the Manila Bay forts.

Japan used similar toxic candles on a quite large scale in China, much more heavily then it used more potent chemical weapons like mustard and Phosgene. I don’t remember just what the chemical released was offhand.

Could you elaborate a bit more upon the toxic smoke candles? This is the first time I have heard from them.

It's in 1942 when the siege of Sebastopol was nearing an end, the Germans used toxic gas to kill the defenders of the Adzhimushkay quarry and in other sealed fortifications around Kerch.

Halder speaks about it on June 13, 1942 in his KTB.

Halder, Kriegstagebuch wrote:13 June 1942, 357th day of the war
[...]
General Ochsner. A report on the chemical forces' participation in the battles for Kerch. The attitude towards using chemical weapons in enemy nations. (A rising interest). The chemical defenses of troops in Volkhov...

According to Soviet reports, the Germans started using toxic gas to kill the defendants of the otherwise unaccessible tonnels on 24 May, presumably not wishing to incur further losses in trying to clear the tonnels and pathways of the quarry. They managed to kill most of the men there (initially, on 8th of May, the quarry and surrounding encampments housed 13000 fleeing men, soldiers and civilians, in two squads). When the quarry was finally taken, only 48 men survived from those 13000 who went into the quarry.

Toxic smokes are a somewhat broad category of chemical weapon. You don’t here much about them because they didn’t generally kill much on the open battlefield. Inside tunnels even a 'riot control' agent like CS tear gas will quickly become lethal.

They generally take one of three forms, a true smoke which is inherently toxic, a liquid suspended in a smoke, or a solid suspended in smoke, the last kind being by far most common. Many of the agents used are not lethal and may not even produce long term injury in reasonable battlefield concentrations, but are none the less effective as vomiting (yes, that is a kind of chemical weapon) or irritant agents. Some however are fairly deadly, a couple blood agents can be dispersed in smokes. The first toxic smoke agent used was the vomiting agent diphenylchloroarsine, deployed by the Germans using artillery shells in 1915. Arsenic compounds were another popular choice early on.

Toxic smoke agents can be dispersed by thee means mechanical, thermal or chemical. The first is simply a complex way of saying, blow it up with high explosives to scatter the agent in the air. The second means mix it with fuel, so the fuel burns and carries it aloft, this is what toxic smoke candles do. Chemical means an actual chemical reaction is used to generate a cloud of the crap. Thermal dispersion is most common, few agents can be deployed by the chemical method, mechanical dispersion can be used with any agent but usually you use deadlier stuff in artillery shells or aircraft bombs. It is possible to use smoke generator machines for thermal dispersion, fed from a nice big tank of chemical agent and fuel, but that usually didn’t happen.

So a toxic smoke candle is in general, a solid chemical agent suspended inside a smoke produced by combustion. However a number of agents actually take on a combination of forms and means of dispersal at once, and sometimes the term smoke candle is used for devices which employ a purely chemical reaction.

Several reasons exist to employ toxic smoke candles rather then more deadly and longer reach chemical weapons. The first is that they are typically very safe for the user; until you light them they present only a mild chemical hazard and no explosive risk. Being literally a giant candle you light, men need only minimal training to employ them. In addition, smokes penetrate gas masks quite effectively, as masks rely heavily on absorbing vapors. This required the introduction of a special smoke filter stage to gas masks in WW1. Even then, the act of filtering the smoke will often rapidly clog the filter, rendering it useless. The last big reason is that the use of toxic smokes will make the enemy fear any smoke cloud, and force them the don masks as a precaution in the absence of trained chemical warfare personal to identify that the smoke is not toxic.

The Japanese made great use of toxic smokes for the reason of ease of use and transport, and as the Chinese had no gas masks even a mere irritant agent was amply effective as routing them from prepared positions. In addition since many of the agents were not reasonably lethal, no evidence was produced of the use of chemical warfare. In some battles as many as 100,000 toxic candles were used simultaneously to overwhelm large stretches of Chinese lines. Japan is thought to have used chemical weapons at least 800 times in China by 1941, but most records were destroyed at the end of the war. China is riddled with buried stockpiles of chemical weapons to this day (they were buried as the Japanese withdrew in 1945), and has repeatedly reneged on or failed to fund promises to clean them all up. A couple Chinese get wounded by mustard gas each year thanks to this.

I don’t know the specifics of what agent was used at Sevastopol, Japan used a number of different ones in China though Diphenylchloroarsine was pretty common.

Thanks. That was very enlightening.

As a minor sitenote, adding a "chemical" component to smoke is a ancient tactic to clear out tunnels and other small rooms - there is solid evidence that the romans used this tactic, and its propably much older (simply adding brimstone and other stuff to a fire is not that hard).

Edit: Added a link - its only a newspaper article, and in german, though.

Oberst Tharnow wrote:As a minor sitenote, adding a "chemical" component to smoke is a ancient tactic to clear out tunnels and other small rooms - there is solid evidence that the romans used this tactic, and its propably much older (simply adding brimstone and other stuff to a fire is not that hard).

Edit: Added a link - its only a newspaper article, and in german, though.

For those who dont't speak german, articles in english: BBC and ScienceDaily.