So, hello, this is Paul Woodadge again for World War II TV, another evening discussion with a very exciting subject today of chemical warfare. And so my guest tonight is Dan Gazeta. Hi, Dan, how are you doing?
Hello, good to be here. And we're going to discuss this interesting subject of chemical weapons. And it's a subject that I found...
Not interesting for me. It was one of those subjects I always knew about, but never really read much about until I read your book, Toxin, which is very good. And of course, you're covering right up to the Putin era.
We're going to focus on just the World War Two part of it tonight, because otherwise we'll be here for three or four hours. And we can always come back and do that later on. But so I'm going to start by just saying that one of the things I found the most fascinating about your book is that the idea that the chemical warfare program that the Nazis set up wasn't all about.
killing people, there was a legitimate side to it of improving fertilizers for their self-sufficiency. So explain a little bit about the 20s and the 30s, exactly how this came about and what was going on in Germany. Okay.
One of the great lessons from the First World War was how easily Germany is blockaded. It's largely landlocked. It's a handful of ports are on the Baltic or Hamburg and Bremerhaven, very easily blockaded.
So Germany can be very easily cut off from imports. The other thing is the collapse of Germany in 1918 had a lot to do with food shortages and sailors mutinying because they weren't being fed and things like that. Germany has this idea and a valid idea that really they're only a bad harvest away from having to surrender because you have to be able to feed your people, you have to be able to feed your army. No.
Also, there's this idea that, you know, we're going to be cut off from foreign imports of things like petroleum and, you know, things that we, you know, rubber, things that have to be imported. So in the 20s and 30s, there's this whole idea that, you know, Germany has to have self-sufficiency in things. One of these areas was, you know, let's try to find import substitutions. Let's find ways to make things domestically with, you know. ingredients that we have at hand here.
And this combines with this whole idea of, you know, well, you know, pesticides, pesticides and fertilizers, these are important things too, okay? So the German chemical industry had been largely consolidated into a company called IG Farben. It wasn't all of the German chemical industry, but it was something like 80% of it. And there was this whole effort to look into pesticides.
At that time, the pesticides were either based on petroleum products, which needed imported oil, and oil was going to be needed for things like aircraft fuel and to go into tanks. Or the other great pesticide of the era was nicotine. But nicotine, which got extracted from tobacco, was dispersed, dissolved in kerosene, which again is a petroleum product.
So there's this whole idea. Let's look into, you know, pesticides that are based on, you know, things that we can produce, you know, ourselves. So there was this whole branch of work into a new area of chemistry called the organophosphates.
This work had started, you know, in the 1920s before the Nazis came to power. But there was this guy, Gerhard Schroeder. He was a pretty good chemist.
He had started his career working on dyes, you know, for clothing and things like that, but got put into this whole. you know, pesticide work. And he was working on these organophosphorus compounds.
And in 1936, he found one that was, well, a very, very effective pesticide, but one that was actually too effective because it was too dangerous to handle. Even in very small dilution, it was too dangerous to handle. And so therefore, you couldn't really use it in agriculture.
You're going to kill all the, you know, farm laborers. He viewed this as actually a commercial disaster. He had to move on to other things, but...
They hire up the management and say, oh, you know, I think the government might be interested in this. And so there is where the nerve agents came from. The very first nerve agent, military nerve agent significance was this compound.
It was called LE-100 at the beginning and then acquired this nickname, Tabun. And it was eventually, you know. developed, mass produced in this large stockpile of nerve agents that the Germans sat on during the Second World War. Over 12,000 tons of it manufactured.
I think we'll probably get back to that and all that, but that's, there's this, so. you know, we have this whole new family of chemical weapons that came about as a result, indirectly, of, you know, macroeconomic concerns about crop protection. And actually, a lot of pesticides, a lot of legitimate pesticides, including ones still in use today, stem from this original research. So on the one hand, you have this legitimate interest in promoting what I would call good science for increasing crop productivity.
But we haven't touched on, we all touch on the fact there's the sinister side as well. And although we're not going to focus very much on the First World War, we just have to go back a little bit and explain that during the First World War, we had the development of the military kind of gas programs. And then they kind of that that runs sort of in parallel or with the fertilizer kind of program.
How does that how do they kind of when you're studying it, are they the same thing? Well, it's so much the same thing that the father of chemical warfare is a guy named Fritz Haber, a great German chemist, got the Nobel Prize in chemistry, but also is the father of chemical warfare. He didn't get the Nobel Prize for that.
He got it for what's called the Haber-Bosch process, which is for making ammonia, which basically being able to make ammonia is the route to most of the modern fertilizers. You know, so billions of people have been fed on the on sort of the. the agricultural proceeds of Haber's work, but he's also the guy that figured out how to use chlorine and phosgene as weapons and tried a couple of other chemicals too. He tried a lot of different things. So there is this mixed legacy.
I do these interesting lectures at UCL once a year with Andrea Sella, who's he is to chemistry, what you are to the world war II stuff, you know, and talk about this mixed legacy. But, you know, The First World War is an interesting situation where we have this dual track stuff. We have, because we have all, it's a technological war.
We have the, it's the first war in which, you know, motorized vehicles really play a serious part, and particularly in logistics, you know, aircraft, telegraph and radio. I mean, telegraph had been used before, but, you know, these things, you know, instantaneous communication, you know, you know. aircraft, submarines, all the, you know, this is also the point at which, you know, sailing ships are no more.
They're now steamships, you know, powered by coal and some are starting to be powered by oil and things like that, you know. So chemical warfare is just another thing in that broad context of all these different new and interesting things in warfare. And I would, actually, I'm going to go out and make a claim here that all those other things were broadly successes in the... future was seen for them. The chemical warfare at the end of the war, it was sort of, oh, well, I'm not sure we want to do that again.
Not sure it was worth the effort. Because I think the psychological footprint of chemical warfare in the First World War was a much broader thing than the actual practical effect. It's very difficult to point to a single war, a single campaign, or a single battle in the First World War that was decisively influenced by...
by chemical weapons. And you look at the overall statistics. I'm going to share my screen here, if that's all right. Yeah, sure. Yeah.
I'm going to share my screen here. Can you see this? This guy, Dr. Gilchrist, a U.S. Army doctor, Colonel Gilchrist, did this study in the 1920s and methodically went through the number of chemical warfare casualties from the First World War, did huge amounts of stuff.
I wish I should have. I should have. I could go through the whole Gilchrist study. He's got great handwritten data visualization. He clearly had an art student.
But you start looking at this, you know, the amount of deaths is not terribly big compared to the, you know, 10 or 15 or 20 million people that died in that war. Now, a number of casualties, you know, people is significant. So, but you look at the actual number of people dead. you know, Germans, 2280 over the course of the war.
And part of this has to do with the fact that France, Britain, Germany, the US very quickly developed effective countermeasures, effective gas masks. And the places where you see a lot of these deaths and a lot of these casualties, the significant ones, you know, Russia, Russia and Italy, because they didn't have a very good ability to rapidly field gas masks. The first generation Italian gas mask had deficient filters and didn't really work terribly well because they were using, believe it or not, they were using walnut shells as the filter media while everybody else is using activated charcoal. An artisanal solution that didn't work.
It also explains why in the Italian campaigns, the percentage of their, the death percentage of casualties was actually quite quite high. But, you know, in the broad context of the First World War, that stuff is, that's a drop in the bucket. Yeah, but it's somehow it's left this, this legacy. I mean, I was just reminded that when we were talking about that, the only World War One film that I believe was that they got or the one they got the most complaints about when they showed it on the BBC back years ago was Fraulein Doctor made in 1968. because it had this horrific scene of horses wearing gas masks going across the front and all the yellow mustard gas going across and you've got more complaints than other films and the other films show way more death but somehow that gas thing was the one that people complained about so there's obviously this inherent effect that gas is scary gas is a killer and it makes complete sense that we're scared of it we could be well look at the fact we're in the middle of covid19 now we're scared of things we can't see aren't we yeah But and so this is dual, this is sort of two sides to this, because you look at Robert Graves, and goodbye to all that his, his memoir, the First World War, he rates chemical warfare rather low and amongst his sort of list of hazards that you know, he's written it off as a battlefield sort of condition like rats and cold weather and mud is just another annoyance on the Western Front.
You know, whether that's him being stoic, I don't think so. I mean, having read the whole book thoroughly, I mean, you know, It puts it in a context. I think some of this had to do with the fact that, particularly towards the end of the war, when you do have mustard gas, which is a misnomer, mustard gas is an oily liquid, it would contaminate terrain, all right? It would make an equipment, it would get your clothing dirty, it would get the mud in your trenches dirty, and it had a delayed effect, okay?
So you wouldn't form the... blisters till maybe hours or even a day after exposure. Hardly anybody died from it. But it would leave these long lasting scars, you know, it was sort of it was a it was an attrition weapon design.
You know, it's hard to actually kill anybody with mustard gas, but it's it's it's a it's an effective attrition agent in that it took it took guys out of the line for a month to recover. Yeah, but like other things in World War One, you know, like the aircraft, yeah, the submarine, all these things. It's something that all sides wish, well, not wish, they began to improve on and tweak and get better. So, you know, we're going to focus as we are advertising the show about the German use of chemical weapons. But they weren't the only country doing it.
I mean, no, no. Everybody was pretty much doing it, weren't they? Yeah.
Twenties and thirties. Yeah. There was a there was an arms control agreement, the Geneva Protocol, the 1920s, whereby people basically forswore first use of chemical weapons.
It didn't outlaw them in terms of development or possession. It outlawed first use. And you were allowed to have them as a retaliatory measure to keep the other guys from doing it. And so countries big and small had chemical warfare programs that were basically just extensions of the First World War ones. Even the smaller countries had it too.
Hungary, Greece, Poland, Sweden. uh belgium the netherlands the the countries that you know you know we think of as uh yugoslavia as sort of second league players in the in this in the uh in the uh and the second world war in terms of you know stuff they all had they all had their pro they all had their chemical warfare programs as well too uh which you know the thing is governments were putting a bit of effort into incremental improvements into these into these programs That's why the nerve agent thing with the German chemical industry was actually, it was a huge step change in the lethality of chemical weapons. Okay. Because suddenly there is this new substance, tabun, which is instantly, well, not instantly, but lethal within minutes or an hour, as opposed to a false gene and the other ones that might kill you in a day or two. sort of thing.
So it would have an immediate casualty producing effect on the battlefield. A little bit goes a long way in terms of how much agent you need to kill people. It's sort of a tenth or a hundredth of what you would need the equivalent in phosgene. Okay.
So, you know, it's a fundamental improvement. But, you know, the Germans amassed a massive stockpile of this stuff and largely didn't use it because they knew other people had chemical weapons. Everybody treated their chemical weapons program with a bit of secrecy, just like you would any military technology. So there's a lot of assuming that the other guy might have what you have. OK. and that you know because you're dying to ask me you know you know why didn't the germans use it well i think we'll come to that a bit later i think we want to i want to bring in the the the use by the japanese first yeah i think is before we get to nazis i mean and in the in the in the generally forgotten theater of world war ii and in fact it actually technically predates for world war ii because world war ii is 39 but we have the japanese and china well yeah i find that that element from your book fascinating.
So let's talk about their use. I'm going to throw something in there too, as well, too, that sort of leads up to that. There are three great incidents of chemical warfare, you know, in the interwar period. And one of, the first one is one that's not very well talked about.
It's the Spanish. It's the Spanish in the 1920s using it against, in Northern Morocco, in something called the Rift War. and where they actually pioneered aerial delivery of mustard as a counterinsurgency weapon. So there was that.
There is Mussolini's campaign against Ethiopia, or prolific use of several different types of chemical weapons against the Ethiopians. That's in 1935, 1936. And then from 1937 onward, although there are, you know, I made sure I research to get the facts right. I found a bunch of different things. You know, there was a lot of stuff going on in Manchuria.
You know, we think that, you know, the sort of really the Chinese, the Sino-Japanese War, whatever you want to call it, the Chinese front in the Second World War, which really started a lot earlier than 1939, started 1930, 1931. The Japanese had a quite, you know, active chemical warfare program, not terribly technologically superior, basically World War I era things. And they're fighting against a numerically superior but under-equipped enemy, the Chinese. Now, the Chinese had some, China was quite fragmented at the time.
You had warlords, you had the nationalist government, the Kuomintang, you had the People's Liberation Army, you know, the communists. The Kuomintang, at least in theory, had a bit of a chemical warfare program itself. Although, you know, records of how much that they actually got it to use and things like that.
I can only really point to a few incidents of Chinese use versus Japan and the Japanese army was actually fairly well equipped with protective equipment. In fact, I'm going to share my screen again because we've got a great visual on this. Got a great visual here.
Let's see if I can... Yeah, there we go. Yeah, this is the Battle of Shanghai, where phosgene and chlorpicrin and a few other chemicals were prolifically used by the Japanese.
There were many hundreds of incidents of chemical warfare use in the Sino-Japanese conflict. Various sources, you know, I mean, the sources vary on this. You know, I can't really effectively... do the historiography on this because I can't read Chinese or Japanese and that's where the that's where the info is yeah um but there are figures figures mooted like you know 10,000 deaths and 80,000 uh 80,000 wounded uh you know Chinese and you know hundreds of hundreds of Japanese dead and you know several thousand Japanese wounded in some cases by friendly fire or ships in the wind and things like that So when you get to levels like that, you get to a point where that's numerically as significant as the Western Front in the First World War.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We don't really talk about.
Well, generally speaking, this China, Japan stuff is not really talked about much. And, you know, when when when us sort of Westerners talk about the Second World War. Because they're not white.
Same with the Ethiopians. I mean, we tend to focus on our own our own cultures. And, yeah, the Japanese.
Chinese it's who cares I mean yeah yeah or we do talk about it we talk about you know the flying tigers I knew I was just thinking flying tigers yeah we talk about the bit that connect us don't we although of course now the Burma road or flying over the hump all that stuff yeah they're bringing the Chinese in now because they're funding war films aren't they so now there's always I mean Midway had the whole um Chinese on the on the ground with Doolittle but because the Chinese funded the movie so anyway yeah no I mean that so that use there was was you know was was on a seriously large scale. If it was 10,000 deaths, that's significant, isn't it? Oh, yeah. And I find this, there was this guy, there was Brigadier General John Middleton of the US Army Chemical Corps.
who was sent to be the chemical warfare advisor to the Kuomintang, to Chiang Kai-shek. And it's interesting enough, he was a member of my American Legion post. That's another story.
So, you know, there was this American advisory effort to help our Chinese allies. So, yeah, there is this whole thing out there. It has a legacy to this day because the issue of abandoned Chinese...
sorry, abandoned Japanese chemical munitions is a huge issue in Chinese-Japanese relations to this day. Because stuff gets dug up a lot. A lot of stuff was simply abandoned, but also famously chemical weapons, chemical artillery shells and aerial drop bombs have a higher dud rate than the conventional alternatives. Right. So...
If you fire 100 chemical shells in a battle, some of them are going to be done, stuck in the mud there. And, you know, mustard, for example, is famously persistent. You know, mustard sealed up in an artillery shell is still problematic to this day.
Yeah, well, that's the stuff on the Somme when they find that they still get spooky about it. They're not worried about grenades and things like that now. But anything with mustard gas, you get the problems, you get the issues.
That's the first thing they're worried about. So, I mean, this is... I'm finding this fascinating and you're going to bring it up later on, but this, I think you've already touched on it in there, that with the chemical weapons and nerve agents, it's always the disposal after a conflict.
If a war ends and you've got lots of surplus battleships, you can cut them up, you can break them down, or you can just leave them and not going to harm anybody. But with anything chemical, and we'll touch on that as it goes on, you can't just unproduce it. Yeah, it becomes a serious mess. The legacy of it is a problem. Chemical weapons are like landmines.
Whatever utility they have on the battlefield is what it is. But you have this long shadow cast by them that conventional weapons don't have. A bayonet is a bayonet. It's a knife.
A torpedo is a torpedo. A bullet has been fired, it's been fired. But this stuff casts a long shadow. So where do you want to go from here, Paul?
Well, let's talk about Poland in 1939, I think, is the next thing, before we bring the Nazis in, and talk about an incident that happened then that is relevant to our discussion. Yeah. So, again, I mean, even with the Chinese stuff, I hope that I've sort of put a fork in the idea that there wasn't chemical warfare in the Second World War, because there was.
But there largely wasn't in Europe. But we... It almost went there, okay?
Poland had a chemical warfare program, not a terribly big one, but it had a chemical warfare program in the 1930s. In early September 1939, a few days after the German invasion, there was an incident in this place called Jasło, in sort of south, it's at the time south-central Poland, now it's sort of southeastern Poland. the footprint of Poland was shifted after the war with Stalin. Numerous times. Some people, the whole country got shifted.
There was an incident where some mustard gas filled landmines were left to booby trap a bridge. And it's the very same bridge here pictured. All right. As best as anybody could tell, it was actually quite diluted mustard. And the German army immediately investigated.
In fact, this whole thing comes out of this interesting book here, The History of German Chemical Warfare. This guy, Hermann Ochsner, he was the head of chemical warfare, offense and defense for the German army for the entire war. So he immediately sent some scientists to go investigate this incident.
Yeah, indeed, there were some guys. I think there were 14 soldiers hospitalized with mustard gas burns and all that. But they actually quite quickly. deduced that this is really a local initiative, wasn't a Polish, you know, wasn't a Polish, you know, change in policy, that a particular local chemical unit of the Polish army had some dilute mustard, which they would use for things like testing chemical detection or as a simulant in training, okay?
And they use this for lack of anything else to sort of interdict this particular bridge. And so, you know, we're all about picking on the Germans in the Second World War, rightly so. But one good thing that they did is General Ochsner and his guys very quickly tapped this down. Hey, this is a local thing. This is a one off incident.
You know, you know, let's not you know, we're winning this war against Poland. Let's not just start dumping gas into this whole thing. Let's take a step back from it.
So there was a bit of. you know, there was some sense prevailing here, you know, in form of the, you know, the German military saying, you know, yeah, okay, there was this incident, but, you know, this really was a one-off. I mean, this, when you talk about that, you know, the Germans sort of almost playing it down, is that because some of these gentlemen, I'm gonna use the word gentlemen in this loose connotation, because they're kind of fearful of the escalation?
for their own safety? Or is it more of a worried about what the implications for mankind? Where does it sort of sit?
Is it? Well, it's interesting, because you read this whole, this guy, Ochsner, obviously got captured at the end of the war. He got commissioned by this, the historical office of the Office of the Chief of the Chemical Corps to write what was then a classified study about, you know, writes this sort of 80 page monograph. And a lot of questions are put to him.
And he sort of spills his, he's, you know, he's written, he's writing this several years after the war, he's spilling the beans, you know, he comes across as like having a little bit of an inferiority complex, basically convinced that the French, the Germans, the Americans, even the Italians have got better offensive and defensive capability and that the Germans are really pushing hard to catch up. Okay. He knew even in 1939, he knew these things called nerve agents.
He also knew that they existed in sort of vials, not mass production. It was exactly at the point when this incident was going on that the guys from IG Farben are going up to Berlin with suitcases full of presentation materials and all that saying, Now's your chance. You're going to give us a lot of money and we're going to build a big we're going to build a big chemical warfare factory for you.
But at this particular time, you know, Ochsner is struggling to field enough gas masks to his entire entire large army, because guess what? Rubber is in short supply. Yeah.
Yeah. Nobody had really figured out. Another thing is nobody really, really figured out how really, truly adequately to protect horses and mules and donkeys. and we forget at our peril how much the German logistical stuff was uh, 800 German horses per division generally, that's a Normandy fat 864 I think. Yeah I don't know if it's true but sort of the captured German staff officer looking at this invading army in Normandy saying where are your horses and the American saying we don't have any, he's like that's it we're done.
Yeah yeah yeah. For all the popular stuff about horses wearing gas masks and stuff like that, you know, it's hard to actually get a horse to exert heavily under a gas mask. It's a difficult, it's a difficult thing and the German army relied heavily on it. So if part of your logistics relies heavily on equine, you know, resources, it's like, you know what, it's probably in the best national interest that we really don't go into this mass chemical warfare thing.
But they do, though, don't they? So let's talk about the fact that there obviously is a big chemical program. How does that kind of start?
And who is the main person behind that? And just run through some of that with us. All right.
I've changed the slide here. So what you have here is an aerial photo of the first nerve agent factory in a place called Dierenfurt. It's now in Poland. At the time, it was in an area called Silesia, which, again, due to shifts and borders, is now in Poland.
IG Farben convinced the high command, the German high command, to underwrite a large-scale program to, well, to do several things. One was to greatly increase production of the First World War era chemicals, phosgene and mustard and hydrogen cyanide and all these other things that worked with varying degrees of success in the First War. But also to plow a huge amount of money into this new. nerve agent.
They had this new nerve agent called Tabun. By the time the war started, there was another more deadly one called Sarin. They hadn't quite figured out really how to mass produce it, but they had worked out a mass production process for Tabun. They just needed to scale it up.
And so there was this guy who might go down as, I should have brought up a photo of this guy, Otto Ambrose. He's literally the A in Sarin. Sarin is an acronym. Yeah. He goes down as quite literally, you know, I'm going to stop sharing my screen here because I think I could probably find a thing of him while we're talking here.
Otto Ambrose goes down in history as. perhaps one of the more wicked chemists, you know. He wasn't an inventor of any of this stuff, but what he was, he was the industrialist, you know. Oh, there I got it.
I'm going to share his picture here. All right. Let's see if I go back. Share screen. Share screen.
There we go. There's Otto Ambrose. Yeah. Yeah.
I wasn't expecting someone who looked quite like a kindly uncle like that. I was expecting someone looking really awful, but yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, he was the industrialist that made it all happen.
And he was also one hell of a grifter. All right. Here's the thing.
Once the war started, you know, anything that was defense related was really, was really like the money cow. Okay. Or for German industry.
Otto Ambrose and I rarely use the word cabal, but I think it really fits here. A cabal of other industrialists, you know, upper middle and upper management, not the actual sort of frontline chemists, but these middle and upper management guys formulated this big industrial scheme to suck money out of Berlin and into their own pockets. And part of that was... this is cunning weaves to make nerve agents and sort of working it out so that, you know, they didn't have to pay tax. And they set up a bunch of, they set up a bunch of front companies to circulate money in funny ways and use German corporate law to their own advantage.
You know, somehow Otto Ambrose had 16 jobs all in full salary during the war. He was very busy. Every one of these front companies had to have a board of directors. And guess whose name is on all of it? Otto Ambrose.
I say he's a wicked chemist because actually his legacy after the war was after he got out of jail. He ended up being part of the guys that developed thalidomide. Oh, okay.
Right. Yeah. Wow. Okay. Yeah.
Fine. Wow. Yeah.
Okay. Yeah. Yeah.
So there's a special place in hell for Otto Ambrose. Yeah. Let's hope so.
Yeah. You know, it's interesting because chemical warfare wasn't his only wheeze. One of his other wheezes was synthetic rubber. He was quite good at it, but, you know, his synthetic rubber plant was at a place called Auschwitz, and he used an awful lot of slave labor. Yeah, I knew that was going to come up in the conversation.
Yeah, that's what did for Otto was his slave labor use at Auschwitz, not any of his chemical warfare stuff. Because what you have is you have this, you know, I'm... He was getting rich off of it, and he did have his 16 jobs on paper, but he really was working very hard.
I've been through many hundreds of pages of his documents. I mean, I've been through the, you know, the contents of his waste paper bins are cataloged down in the National Archives in Kew. So you can go through all his rubbish. And there it is, his dry cleaning receipts. You know, he was very well dressed.
I've seen his receipts, you know, but I've seen, you know. you know, thousands of pages of documents that get captured off the guy. He built this industrial empire that really did build, make 12,600, 12,800. The exact total is a little bit, you know, up in the air. Tons of tabun, which is a lot of tabun.
They built this large factory in Silesia to produce it. And they were trying to mass produce sarin and just not getting there because sarin is a much more difficult, you know. It's a fundamentally more difficult process. And even at the end of the war, they were still struggling with how to make it and, you know, all that.
But so what they ended up doing, they had a lot of stuff. OK, they had, you know, they had a lot of this nerve agent taboo. And they had it filled.
80 percent of it was filled into aerial bombs. And about 20 percent of it was filled into 105 and 150 millimeter artillery shells. And it was stockpiled, but it was not forward deployed anywhere. They made sure it didn't leave continental Germany.
So it's not like stockpiles of this stuff went forward into France or into the Eastern Front. It stayed close to home in well-guarded secret depots. But also the burning question is then at this point is if they're producing all this stuff, you know, you know, I'm going to ask why didn't it get used? No. For one thing, well, there are several factors, by the point of which I think it might have made a difference.
You have to understand this total production figure dates up to about January 1945, but full production wasn't, initial production was going on in 1942 and they had a lot of problems. It wasn't until about 1943 when they're actually getting the full swing here. Okay.
All right. Now, and then 80% of it is going into aerial drop bombs at a point at which, you know, the Luftwaffe doesn't have much strike capability anymore. And what's left of the Luftwaffe is trying to do tactical work or it's trying to do reconnaissance, it's trying to protect the homeland, you know, strategic bombing is no longer really a thing that the Luftwaffe does by 1943, 1944. So, you know, because IG Farben is still working towards the original 1939 contract, putting 80% of this stuff into aerial drop bombs.
Okay. And also, 20% of it is in artillery shells, but nobody in the German army is training on how to use these artillery shells. You know, I mean, it could have been done, but, you know, it would have been a, this is also a point at which you get to 1943, 1944, American and British strategic bombing is really stressing the transportation networks.
You have to question whether, you know, a major effort to take new weapons out of depots in central Germany. and get them out to France or out to the Eastern Front. Is this going to be discovered?
You know, is this going to be interdicted by Allied bombers? And the answer is probably yes to both of them. Yeah.
Okay. So what you're saying is it's not necessarily because of an unwillingness to use them. It was just the practicalities of actually using them and the way they were developing them became difficult for them. And I guess as the war goes on, you get to 45. Yeah.
By then, the battlefield is on your own doorstep. So using chemical stuff then becomes much more risky because of the, you know, the wind changing kind of ideas. So at the point at the point at which it could have made a difference, say, Normandy, for example. First of all, there was this great deceptive effort to, you know, Hitler was convinced it was going to be the pot of clay, not Normandy. So, you know, a 105. Millimeter artillery shell only flies you know what eight nine miles something like that.
Yeah about that. Yeah. Yeah, yeah So even if they had forward deployed their their nerve agent to the pot of Calais, they're stuck in the pot of clay They're not in Normandy.
Okay, and 80% of the inventory is in these depots to go on to bombers that don't exist anymore They've flown by pilots that have long since been retrained to fly, you know Fuck wolf 190s and then me 109s to protect the Reich Okay, so There becomes this logistical impossibility to use it. Okay. At least on the Western front, you know.
But then there's also, there is a political factor involved too. That same guy, Otto Ambrose, he is absolutely convinced that the Americans and possibly the British have nerve agents. Right. Okay. Okay.
You know, he's convinced that the advanced state of American industry has... probably come around to the same thing. You know, he makes that assumption for the wrong reasons.
But, you know, he does understand that the likes of Monsanto and DuPont and Shell Oil are bigger and more technologically advanced than IG Farben. This is well established. Yeah, yeah. And they're far bigger. And, you know, they're out of range of any sort of, you know, German, you know, attack.
Yeah. But. Also, the Germans have spies, okay? And, you know, German espionage didn't live up to its reputation in the war, but certain things were going on, you know. You have places like Bern, Switzerland, and Buenos Aires, and Stockholm, where you have German diplomats and spies working under diplomatic cover in these embassies in these neutral countries.
And these guys can go down to the libraries, and the university libraries in particular. or in Bern, go to the patent office and look at what's in the chemistry journals. And these guys have a long, they've got a long sort of fishing list, if you will, shopping list of things that they're scouring the Western scientific publications for.
And interestingly enough, practically the minute after the US gets into the Second World War, Every article in all the American publications, all the technical publications on pesticides disappears. Ah, right. Yeah, okay. Okay, so Otto adds two and two and gets six.
Now the reason why that stuff all disappears is the Americans are safeguarding their method to mass-produce DDT. Now DDT is not an organophosphate, it's a different class of chemicals. But DDT is hugely beneficial to the American war effort because you start thinking about North Africa, the Panama Canal, the entire South Pacific, all these places where malaria, yellow fever, dengue, typhus, you know, all these things that are spread by insects, you know, a pesticide like DDT is absolutely critical to the war effort.
And so all the American stuff gets censored on the basis of protecting DDT. Now, Ambrose sees that, oh, my God, all the American stuff and pesticides dried up. Our stuff came out of pesticides. He sort of he also knows that there was this guy in Britain named Saunders that was doing some work roughly in organophosphates before the war.
So he sort of puts this together and he he assumes that the Americans must have this. And actually, you know, he tells Hitler this. Hitler puts a question straight to him.
Otto, you know. by the way, here's your great, you know, here's a great medal. And here's a huge cash bonus for all this lovely work you're doing.
What do you think? You think the Americans have this? He says, yeah, I think the Americans have this. Wow. Now that's fascinating.
Yeah. Yeah. Now how much of this is Otto bigging himself up after the war? Because, you know, Otto Ambrose's best fan was Otto Ambrose.
Yeah, yeah. You know, but clearly, that's what he told his interrogators and his interrogators. He had he had one of the great interrogators go at him, a guy named Edmund Tilly, who came at him several different ways. This British guy, Edmund Tilly, you know, really tripped him up a couple times.
Tilly believes that Otto was sincere on this and not sincere on some other things. But yeah, Albert Speer, you know, was full of, yeah, was full of sort of mistruths about chemical weapons in the war and all that too. But, you know, but, you know, so there's this idea that well we better keep these nerve agents as reserve to retaliate against the americans in case they start and then there's this whole idea well you know what our chemical industry our factories when we make this stuff we're hiding them but they're still in the range of allied bombers but we can't touch any american factory yeah you know as you were talking i was thinking that that germany's own geography is making them the most difficult nation to use chemical warfare because they're surrounded by the people they're trying to kill. So if a country was going to use it, the USA had more freedom to use it because they could have used it against Europe and said, okay, we don't care. It's miles away from us.
It's a, yeah. Yeah, exactly. And I think if the Germans were going to use it at all, they weren't going to use it in the West. They're going to use it in the East where they were greatly outnumbered. You know, so and they did it.
The question is, the question comes up, would have changed the war? You know, the funny thing is, the point at which it would have changed the war, it would just delayed the inevitable. But we have to also put these things in context. There was this thing called the Manhattan Project. Okay, going on.
So what does it? So look at the chronology of the Second World War. What does a four or five month delay in the defeat of Germany get you? It gets a first atom bomb on Berlin instead of Russia is exactly what it gets.
Yeah. At least theoretically. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. The threat of. Yeah. Yeah.
And so, you know, I make a contentious point that I think actually, you know, chemical warfare shortened the war in the West because the amount of resources and capital and knowledge and technology was being sucked. up into this chemical warfare program, raked into many billions of dollars and pounds by today's money. It was a vast industrial complex. Some of the best minds in Germany were working on this stuff and basically taking these resources and sequestering them from actual use in the war. RAOUL PAL, Well, that's happening universally with the Germans, isn't it, by Ford?
And they've got various points where they've had a nuclear program, atomic program. They've got their jet program. They've got their super tanks. They're working on so many different things. Of course, they're just paying Peter to pay Paul.
They haven't got the money to work all of them at the same level. So they're being pushed on a broad front, but not actually getting any of them finished. And some of them are really crazy.
There was this other strain in the German chemical warfare program working this really, really horrific chemical called chlorine trifluoride. uh it let's put it this way it burns glass and sets concrete on fire okay wow it's terrific stuff all right but they couldn't find a way to really sort of contain it or use it at all the idea was they originally were working on the idea that they could use it to uh reduce the maginot line you know literally burn holes in the bunkers and they probably could have but you know my god you know just dealing with stuff you know i mean yeah there are hundreds of millions of dollars equivalent when you know pissed away in that program So, you know, if if Otto Ambrose and his cabal of chemists had been working on, I don't know, something more sensible, like taking, you know, coal and turning it into petrol. Yeah, now that would have made a difference, wouldn't it?
Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. You know, they're spreading themselves too thin is what you're saying.
Essentially, they're not they're struggling. So I've just I'm looking at the list of things you want to talk about. So let's talk about the SS John Harvey.
And I'm changing subject completely. Let's talk about that. Let's go to Italy.
Okay. So basically... Just a point. We had some people on the YouTube actually mentioning that. Yeah, that's a good point.
All right. So for your listeners who don't necessarily understand, the SS John Harvey was a U.S. freighter full of mustard gas bombs, the M-47 aerial delivered mustard gas bomb. And it was in Bari Harbor at a point at which the...
I'm going to go back to myself and say, yeah, I said that the Germans didn't have much strike capability in terms of airstrikes, but they scraped some up and did this excellent air raid on Bari Harbor. And I'm not sure on the exact date of this off the top of my head. I'd have to look it up. But the Bari Harbor incident, you know, this ship, the John Harvey, got struck by bombs and sank. dispersed rather large amount of sulfur mustard, which was the proper name of mustard gas.
Now, why was it there? It's because the U.S. is forward deploying mustard in case it is needed, because the U.S. Army Chemical Corps is on a hair trigger to switch over to offensive chemical warfare should the Germans or the Italians decide to get desperate.
And so the entire war In Europe, the US, the Brits, to a less extent than the Soviets, are basically just waiting for the Germans to be desperate enough to use chemical weapons. Okay. And have their own chemical weapons ready to go just in case that happens.
Okay. Sticking to the 1920s kind of. 1930s agreement, the kind of the gentleman's agreement, we won't use it first, but we've got it in case you use it.
Yeah. And the U.S. did a lot to forward deploy this stuff. And in the air raid on Bari Harbor, the Germans got lucky and dropped some bombs on the SS John Harvey, which sort of exposed the fact that these chemical weapons were forward deployed, which I don't even think was a huge secret at the time because rather large. I mean, there were a lot of units of the U.S.
Army Chemical Corps. They were sort of dual. dual purpose they were fielded in these things called chemical mortars that chemical mortars yeah yeah i did a whole twitter thread in chemical wars i could do an entire entire if you really want to go down chemical mortar i could do an entire podcast with you on that someday with some great visuals but well i mean just briefly because it's one of those things i i long story short there was a there was a a fraudulent veteran in normandy who claimed to be 82nd airborne who wasn't and the case broke about 10 years ago and it turned out that he was in chemical mortars And all the people who had broke the story, they all knew what paratroopers were, and everybody didn't quite know what chemical mortars were.
Yeah. Well, it's a mortar that fires chemicals. And they're going, no, that's...
So just briefly, as it came up, just briefly in a nutshell, what's the layman's idea, description of what a chemical mortar is? A chemical mortar is like a normal infantry artillery mortar. It was 107 millimeter or 4.2 inch, and also known as the four deuce.
It was designed by the U.S. Army to rapidly lay either smoke screens or mustard gas. However, it was quickly discovered that it was actually very good at firing conventional rounds as well, too. So the U.S.
Army rapidly developed a high explosive round for it. And these chemical mortar battalions were very, very useful as sort of a division commander's sort of hip pocket artillery. Because. Their logistical footprint was less than a howitzer battalion or things like that.
The chemical mortars could be disassembled and carried around in jeeps or even man-packed if necessary. The ammunition was lighter than... regular sort of tube artillery, you know, stuff.
And they could achieve a very high rate of fire and very high accuracy. So these chemical mortar rounds, chemical mortar battalions, became very popular amongst sort of division and corps level commanders as, you know, as a tactical asset. Plus the actual, one of the original missions of being very good at very quickly laying large area smoke screens too which is something that yeah the smoke normally a particular smoke screens and uh yeah it was very important and i i always think they're very much like an equivalent of those sort of german heavy-barreled mortars they're like a a quick joker you can play in the car the game quickly as you say that you don't have to call up artillery they're they're they're they're a swift response to things so yeah but that's so the john harvey going back to john harvey because he went off on a tangent there that was quite a tragic tragic loss of life there wasn't it Yeah, and the US was paying off disability claims to Italian civilians for decades after that.
It was a bit of an embarrassment. I have to admit, I have forgotten many of the details of the John Harvey incident. I should have boned up on it for this. So I'm going to sort of... Dave Collins is one of my viewers, says it was over a thousand Allied soldiers and Italian civilians were killed during that raid.
Yeah, and I say only a fraction of it had to do with the John Harvey, because if you look at the whole sort of butcher's bill from that, Dozens of ships were sunk, dockyards were set on fire. So a high percentage of that would be conventional. I don't know where the break point is for that. It was quite a successful air raid by the Luftwaffe. So let's bring it back to the fact that the Germans didn't use these weapons, thank God.
So the war in the west and east ends May 1945. There's now, well, a shitload of chemical weapons that have been made and never used. What happened to them? And then also leading off from that, how might they have been used in the Pacific theater? We now know, you mentioned the Manhattan Project, that we used atomic warfare against Nagasaki and Hiroshima. But if we had attacked Japan over land, might we have started using chemical weapons there?
So the two of the questions are, what happened to the ones in stuff in Europe? And then what about the Pacific? Okay, I'm going to go in reverse order. Fine.
The Pacific, yes. It was very much a serious consideration that chemical weapons were going to be needed to invade the Japanese mainland. Not mustard, per se. Mustard is a persistent sort of contamination of terrain agent. It's not the sort of thing you want to advance into.
You don't ever want to use mustard on stuff. Mustard is like this truly pessimistic weapon. So there, but there was look at, there was, there was talk about, you know, for example, lots of phosgene.
Okay. But then this leaves into, there were lots of plans. Now, how, how elaborate these plans are is sort of a subject to debate.
There were some white papers in the archives with sort of, to this day, you know, you know, paragraphs blanked out, but this is going to lead into the, this is going to lead into the next discussion because, you know, as you know, the war in Europe ends before the war in Japan. Yeah. So. It's April 1945. The war is almost over.
Everybody, East and West, is looking at this new nerve agent stuff that they just captured going, holy shit, what the hell is this? We've never seen anything like this before. Oh my God, what is this stuff?
Okay. One of the very first things that anybody does is the Americans take some samples of tabun and sarin. There wasn't much sarin to go around, but they had sort of a jug of it.
a bunch of artillery shells from the tavern, and they sent it to Boston, okay? They sent it to MIT, okay, where a chemistry lab there has effectively been nationalized during the war, and a captain and a lieutenant with the Army Chemical Corps evaluate this stuff. One of the things they evaluated against is, let's evaluate this stuff against all of our own and all of our allies and all of our known chemical protective equipment and detection equipment and decontamination, all that.
And so first of all, they discovered, actually, US or British gas masks will protect against the nerve agent. So that's one of these myths. Oh, my God, the Germans would have killed us all because the gas masks wouldn't have worked. That turns out to not be true.
Interestingly enough, I don't know how well they worked against the captured Japanese mass because that bit of the study to this day is still redacted. Yeah. Wow. I don't really know how good Japanese gas masks were. It's not a.
field of, you know, inquire I've gone down, you know. So there was definitely some consideration to using these captured German munitions in the Pacific campaign. But... Planning didn't get very far on that because Hiroshima and Nagasaki happened. So these planning efforts only got so far when they got overtaken by events.
But this leads to the other thing. What you get is you get Russians, you get Brits, you get Americans, you get French, all of whom are looking at this nerve agent stuff with sort of envy. Okay. So you probably what you had. It's an oversimplification, but I think I make it clear in the book.
Both sides capture stuff. Both sides capture artillery shells and bombs and physically have the stuff. That doesn't mean you can make it.
The Soviets have captured the under-construction Sarin factory, which probably wasn't going to work anyway. Because they were going down kind of the wrong path on that. but they didn't know it at the time. More importantly, the West didn't know that at the time either.
They also captured the Tabun plant in Dyingerfurt. Now, the West assumes that these plants were in more useful shape than they actually were. They were both quite heavily demolished. And not only that, the Germans left a fake notebook for the Russians to find, so the Russians are going down the wrong path. But the Americans and the Brits don't know this.
What the Americans and the Brits have, they have... the majority of the documentation, because rather a lot of the documentation ended up in this place called Raubkammer, north of Münster, okay, which is the testing ground and proving ground for these things. And they have most of the scientists, because most of the scientists, you know, fled west.
They've got Gerhard Schroeder, the guy who invented the nerve agent. And he's, yeah, he's actually a, he's not a bad guy. You know, I think he's quite embarrassed about his role in the nerve agent stuff. He just wants to make pesticides. So He sings like a canary to his interrogators, you know, as several of the other guys do.
Otto Ambrose is running around hiding, you know. He makes a very good effort to hide, you know. I strongly suspect that the French actually had him for a bit and were interrogating him.
He was probably, I think he sold a lot of stuff to the French. Not stuff, but ideas. There was a cunning plan, you know, there was a cunning plan.
This American guy, Colonel Tarr. wanted to spirit him away to the US. The British weren't having it. But also, Otto Ambrose was the middleman, the grifter, the industrialist, the accountant, all that. I think you could hold a gun to his head.
He wasn't going to tell you how to actually make ceremony. He's only going to tell you in broad terms how to make taboo. So what you had is both sides, East and West, they had part of the...
They had part of the picture and assumed that the other side had a bigger part of the picture. And so what you get for literally the next 30 to 40 years after that, East and West are both convinced that the other side is further ahead in a chemical arms race. In reality, the West was further in the chemical arms race all the way up to 1970. And then it was the other way around.
But that, I think, might be a story for another day. Yeah, we'll do that. And that's covered. to some extent it's covered in your book as well and i think i mean there's a couple of things rattling through my brain because of the conversation we've had and one is this because we now know that the war ended because of the use atomic weapons and of manhattan and hiroshima and nagasaki so that's how the 50s and 60s and 70s shaped was shaped by the nuclear war and brown and the usm if i know it's i know this speculation game is just a is just pointless but if we'd ended up using some of the German captured nerve agents against the Japanese, might that have entered a completely different era of the chemical race becoming more important for us over the next 30, 40 years than the nuclear race?
I mean, that's the thing that's floating around in my head. Yeah. I think we don't actually know.
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of what ifs. I mean, history would have been fundamentally different if that if it. the Trinity site in New Mexico, they light the fuse, they press the button for the first test of a nuclear weapon, and it goes poof.
Yeah. And it turns out to have been a wrong idea all along. Where does history go with that?
I'm not a huge fan of alternative history. No. You know.
So, but I don't know. I mean, nerve ages pop up after. After all this, they pop up in the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s for similar reasons.
It's a similar rationale to the Japanese versus the Chinese. The Iraqis are facing a numerically larger enemy, okay, and are looking for ways to try to even up the score. And it's an enemy that is less well prepared with defensive equipment.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, you can make an argument, actually, that... If you look at the broad history of chemical warfare, it was probably most effective in the Iran-Iraq war, you know, in terms of actual battles that were won and things like that and forcing, you know.
So, you know, and there was probably the most, you know, tactical thought being put into how it was being used and all that. And it's still quite horrific. I'm not, don't take me as any kind of apologist for chemical warfare because I'm not.
But, you know, it's. Like I said, you know, have I shared the screen here? Am I showing a picture of my book for your readers? Yeah, no, and I'm going to highly recommend your book because it just highlighted lots of things I didn't know much about at all and corrected my ideas of some of the stuff I did think I knew.
And it's a fascinating book. We've only tackled the World War II part of it. So the final question I'm going to leave you because otherwise we'll end up going on too long is, because you just said you're not an apologist for chemical weapons, but...
You know, when we look at other aspects of technology in war, and, you know, you could argue that the use of nuclear weapons has given us a safe power that we now... I mean, I'm just down the road from Cherbourg. France gets however much of its power from nuclear power, and that's a good thing.
And rockets got us to the moon. Has there been any good come out of the chemical... I don't mean the fertilizer side of it, but the chemical warfare itself. Is there...
anything that we can look at and say well at least it's given us that or well you know i mean we've already sort of discussed the sort of fertilizer and pesticide stuff and it really actually i know you don't want to go there but it's very hard to disaggregate that out of the whole thing okay no i can understand yeah yeah um i'd say i i'd say it's difficult to point to where where the good is in this you know and i'm gonna i'm gonna put it out there with the sim i mentioned landmines before i don't see much good ever having come out of landmines and it's the same it's the same sort of thing you know uh you know it's it it it's a form of it's a form of warfare that leaves a much longer after action footprint than whatever the heat of battle use is okay yeah no definitely that's what i've come away from your book is that you know it's a it is opening a pandora's box that once you've opened it you can't just put the lid back on it quickly and walk away it's leaving this this legacy and and this these dangerous substances now you know i take myself my friends who live in the psalm you know when as i said i said earlier when they when they discover something mustard gas it's something that gets people alarmed they don't care about artillery shells they find them every day but as soon as they muster the gas oh outcomes that the fear so um Every major chemical weapons manufacturing program turned to be an environmental and health and safety nightmare. Yeah. Okay. Well, I mean, I think I've had a fascinating chat. I mean, I think we all, I mean, we haven't actually discussed what your background is because, you know, we just launched straight in talking about it.
You've been working. You've worked for government, security agencies, and now in the private sector. You've been dealing with this for a long, long time, haven't you?
I have a 30-year career in this field, and I've sort of been sort of around the houses in it, too, having started out as a U.S. Army Chemical Corps officer, then just through sort of what I can only describe as a Forrest Gump set of circumstances, ending up in the White House for 12 years, you know, advising the high and mighty, and then protecting the high and mighty, and then, you know, working in private industry and all that. So, I mean, yeah, I mean, I've worked in this field for 30 years.
I've had enough time to think about this. Most people think about chemical weapons for five minutes. I've thought about them for three years, you know? Yeah, yeah. Well, that, I mean, that absolutely comes across in your book.
I mean, I would say it's going to be definitive. Your book is going to be definitive. Oh, thank you, Paul. I mean, it just is. I mean, because we spoke before you went live.
There's not many people doing this work. And it's also... I found it, and I'm not going to say an enjoyable read, because, I mean, it's quite horrific, but it was a very easy read.
I didn't get bogged down in the science too much. I had to go put it down and go, oh, my God. It flowed like a kind of a thriller.
So, yeah, I can't... recommend it enough so well we've done up we've done our hour and i think there's definitely a a room to come have you on again and talk about something else and uh branch out and talk about the post-war, even though I'm a World War II TV guy, I can do something post-war. Hey, I could give you a whole hour on chemical mortars if you've got it. Chemical mortars is interesting.
Well, I am going to do a mortar show at one point. I'm trying to find a Panzerfaust expert now to talk about anti-tank weapons. I've got my Piat expert, and I haven't found a Panzerfaust expert yet, but I will do. But anyway, Dan, it's been an absolute pleasure talking to you. For those watching, I just want to mention the fact that I've had the Patreon contributions I'm taking to help fund this channel.
I want to mention a few people who've supported me recently. So that's Brian Fussfield, Jonathan Bending, Brian Yee, Eric Adler, Tony Suarez, Nigel Barrett, Chris Fenger, Nick Lahure, David Patterson and John Randolph. Thank you very much for your contributions towards funding this channel.
And for those who aren't finding it, you can find the link to Patreon below and the link to Dan's book. And Dan is prolific on Twitter. arguing against people who bring up chemical weapons in stupid ways. He's always there to jump in and say, no, no, this is right. And he's good at sourcing his, you know, his information.
So follow Dan on Twitter. It's an interesting read. So, well, thank you very much, Dan.
I'm not going to say I've enjoyed it because discussing such painful ways to die. And before you went live, I said to Dan, one of my abiding memories as a child is my... Father's great uncle Bertie of Dunbrighton, who had been a victim of mustard gas in the First World War, and this horrific cough he had, and he had got his yellow handkerchief he got to hide in his pocket.
So it brought up some of that, that idea. And I think that's why we need to talk about it. It's a horrible subject, but the more you talk about it, the less, perhaps the less scary it becomes.
And certainly, I think with someone like yourself studying it, I feel we've got a better chance. So thank you very much. I feel you're out there protecting us with your information. So thanks very much. Dan, have you enjoyed it as well?
Yes, and thanks for having me. And I'm going to sign off now because I can smell my supper being cooked. Oh, super. Okay, well, thank you very much, Dan.
And thanks for watching. So I'll see you again on World War II TV. So thank you very much for watching. Good evening, everybody.
Keep up the good work.