Understanding Chemical Warfare in WWII

so hello uh this is paul woodard again for world war two tv another evening discussion with a very exciting subject today of chemical warfare and so my guest tonight is um dan casita hi dan how are you doing hello good to be here and we're going to say discuss this interesting subject of chemical weapons and um it's a it's a subject that i found uh not interesting for but it was one of those subjects i always knew about but never really read much about until i read your book toxin which is um very good and of course you're covering right up to the putin here we're gonna focus on just the world war two part of it tonight because otherwise we'll be here for three or four hours and uh and we'll we can always come back and do that later on but um so i'm going to start by just saying that one of the things i've found the most fascinating about your book is that the idea that the 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 about the 20s and the 30s exactly how this came about and what was going on in germany okay one of the 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 very easily blockaded so germany can be very easily cut off from imports uh the other thing is the collapse the collapse of germany in 1918 uh had a lot to do with food shortages and sailors mutining because they weren't being fed and things like that uh 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 now also there's this idea that you know we're going to be cut off from uh foreign imports of things like petroleum and you know things that we yeah rubber things that are 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 this whole idea of you know well you know pesticides pesticides and fertilizers these are important things too okay uh 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 was something like 80 percent of it and there was this whole effort to look into pesticides uh 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 uh or it would the other great uh pesticide of the air was nicotine uh but nicotine which got extracted from tobacco was dispersed dissolved in kerosene okay which is 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 organo phosphorus compounds and in 1936 he found one that was um well very very effective uh pesticide but one that uh was actually too effective because it was too dangerous to handle even a very small dilution it was too dangerous to handle and so therefore you couldn't really use it in agriculture if you're gonna kill all the you know farm laborers um he viewed this as a actually a commercial disaster he had to move on to other things but uh the higher ups the management said ah you know i think the government might be interested in this uh and so there is where the nerve agents came from the very first nerve agent military nerve agency significance was this compound it was called le 100 at the beginning and then acquired this nickname taboon and it was eventually you know developed mass-produced in this large stockpile of nerve agents that the germans um sat on during the second world war uh over 12 000 tons of it manufactured i think we'll probably get back to that and yeah 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 uh yeah and actually a lot of pesticides a lot of legitimate pesticides including ones still in use today stem from this original research so so on the one hand you have this legitimate um interest in in promoting what i wouldn't 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 although we're not gonna focus very much on the first world war we just have to go back a little bit yeah and explain that during the first world war we had the development of the the military kind of gas programs and then but they kind of that that runs sort of in parallel or with the the the fertilizer kind of program how does that how do they kind of sell it when you're studying are they the same thing well it's it's so much the same thing that the the father of chemical warfare is a guy named fritz haber um a great uh german chemist uh 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 harbor bosch process which is work 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 the agricultural proceeds of haber's work but he's also the guy that figured out how to use chlorine and fosgene as weapons and tried a couple other chemicals too he tried a lot of different things uh so there is this mixed legacy i do these interesting lectures at ucl once a year with andrea seller who's uh he is to chemistry what you are doing world war two stuff uh you know uh you know talk about this mixed legacy um but you know the first world war is an interesting situation where we have this dual uh track stuff we have because we have all the it's it's a technological war yeah 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 uh aircraft uh telegraph and radio i mean telegraph have been used before but you know these things you know instantaneous communication you know uh 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 steam ships you know powered by coal and some are starting to be powered by oil and things like that you know so so chemical warfare is just another thing in that broad context of all these different new and interesting things in warfare and i would i'd actually i'm going to go out and make a make a claim here that um all those other things were broadly successes and you know the the future was seen for them the the the chemical warfare at the end of the war it was sort of not sure we want to do that again not sure it was worth the effort uh because i think the psychological footprint of chemical warfare in the first world war is a was a much broader thing than the actual practical uh effect uh 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 by chemical weapons and you look at the overall statistics i'm going to share my screen here if that's all right sure yeah i'm going to i'm going to share my screen here and can you see this uh this guy dr gilchrist a us army doctor colonel guilicas did this study in the 1920s and methodically went through the number of uh chemical warfare casualties uh from the first world war did huge amounts of stuff i wish i i should have i should have uh i could go through the whole gilker study he's got great handwritten data visualization he clearly had an art student um but you start looking at this you know the amount of deaths is not terrible 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 is is significant uh so but you look at the actual number of people dead you know uh germans 2280 over the course of the war um part of this is has to do with the fact that uh france britain germany the us very quickly developed effective countermeasures effective uh effective gas mass and the places we see a lot of these deaths and a lot of these casually the significant ones you know uh russia russia and italy because they didn't have a very good of ability to uh to rapidly field uh gas mass 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're using walnut shells as the filter media while everybody else is using activated charcoal um quite an artisanal solution that didn't work it also explains why in the italian campaigns the percentage of their their the death percentage as a percentage of casualties was actually quite quite high um but you know in the 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 um this legacy i mean i was just reminded that when he was 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 four line 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 they'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 inheritance 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 covig 19 now we're scared of things we can't see aren't we yeah but and so this is this duel this is sort of two sides of this because you look at robert graves and goodbye to all that his uh his memoir of the first world war he he rates chemical warfare rather low and amongst his uh sort of list of hazards that you know uh he's he's written it off as a battlefield sort of condition like rats in 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 he puts it in a context um i i think some of this had to do with some of this had to do with the fact that um particularly towards the end of the war uh when you do have mustard gas which is a misnomer mustard gas is an oily liquid uh it would contaminate terrain all right it would make it an equipment it would get your clothing dirty it would get your it would get the mud in your trenches dirty and 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 uh but it would leave these long lasting scars you know uh it was sort of and it was a it was an attrition weapon design yeah it's uh 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 um yeah but like other things in world war one you know like like the aircraft yeah and the submarine all these things it it's something that that all sides wish well not which they began to improve on and tweak and get better so you know we we're gonna focus as we you know by 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 all yeah 20s and 30s yeah there was a there was an arms control agreement the geneva protocol the 1920s whereby people basically force war first use of chemical weapons okay it didn't outlaw them uh 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 these had chemical warfare programs that were you know basically just extensions of the first world war once even the smaller countries had it too uh hungary greece uh poland uh sweden uh belgium the netherlands the the countries that you know you know we think of as uh yugoslavia is sort of second league players in the in this in the in the uh and the second world war in terms of you know stuff they don't want that they want their program 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 uh that's why the nerve agent thing with german uh the german chemical industry was actually uh it was a huge step change in the in the lethality of chemical weapons okay because suddenly and suddenly there is this new substance taboo which um is instantly well not instantly but lethal within minutes or an hour uh as opposed to a false gene and the other ones that might you know might kill you in a day or two um sort of thing so it would have an immediate casualty producing effect on the battlefield uh a little bit goes a long way in terms of how much agent you need to ha to kill people it's sort of a 10th or 100th of what you would need the equivalent in fosgene okay uh so you know it's it's 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 uh 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 okay um and that you know because you're dying to ask me you know you know why did the germans use it well i think we'll come to that bit later i think we want to i want to bring in the the use by the japanese first yes i think is yeah before we get to nazis i mean in the in the in the generally forgotten theater of world war two and in fact it actually technically predates for world war two because world war ii is 39 but we have the japanese and china well you'll find that that element from your book fascinating so let's let's talk about their use and that though i'm going to throw something in there too as well too that sort of leads up to that there are there are three great incidents of chemical warfare you know in the interwar period um [Music] 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 uh using it again in northern morocco and something called the rift war and where they actually pioneered aerial delivery of of of mustard uh as a counter insurgency weapon so there was that there is mussolini's campaign against ethiopia yeah or prolific use of several different types of chemical weapons against the ethiopians that's in 1935 1936 and then from 1937 onward although they're you know i i i made sure i researched to get the facts right i got i found a bunch of different things you know there there was a lot of there was a lot of stuff going on in manchuria you know we we think that you know you know the sort of really the chinese the sino-japanese war whatever you want to call the chinese front in the second world war which really started a lot earlier than 1939 started in 1930 1931. uh the japanese had a quite you know active chemical warfare program are not terribly technologically superior basically world war one era things um and they're fighting against a numerically superior but under equipped enemy the chinese now the chinese had some fri china was quite fragmented at the time you had warlords you had the the nationalist government the kuuman dong you had you you had the people's liberation army the communists the kuomintong uh at least in theory had a bit of a chemical warfare program itself although you know records of you know how much that they actually got to use and things like that is yeah i can only really point to a few incidents of chinese use versus japan and the japanese army was actually fairly well equipped with with uh protective equipment in fact i'm going to share my screen again because we got a great visual on this got a great visual here let's see if i can yeah there we go here we go yeah yeah this is the this is the battle of shanghai uh where where fosgene and you know uh chloropicrin and a few other chemicals were prolifically prolifically used by the japanese um there were there are many hundreds of incidents of chemical warfare use uh in the in the 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 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 in 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 uh 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 fine i knew i was just thinking flying tigers yeah we talk about the bit that connect us don't we the burma road are flying over 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 ground would do little but because the chinese funded the movie so anyway and yeah and i mean that so that used there was was you know was was on a seriously large scale if it was 10 000 deaths that's that's that's significant isn't it oh yeah and i find this there was this guy there was brigadier general john middleton of the u.s army chemical corps uh who was sent to be the chemical warfare adviser to the common sign to chiang kai-shek uh uh and it's interesting enough he was a member of my american legion post that's another story so 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 and uh abandoned chinese uh sorry abandoned japanese chemical munitions is a huge issue in chinese japanese relations to this day right because stuff gets dug up a lot all right a lot of stuff was simply abandoned but also famously chemical weapons you know chemical artillery shells and aerial drop bombs have a higher dud rate than their conventional alternatives right so if you fire 100 chemical shells in a battle some of them are going to be duds 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 song when they find that they still get spooky about isn't it they're not worried about grenades and things they use for that now but anything with mustard gas you get the problems you get the issues that's that's the first thing they yeah they're worried about so i mean this this is i'm finding this fascinating and and and we're going to bring it up later on but this i think you've already touched on it in there with the chemical weapons and nerve agents it's always the disposal after a conflict yeah if a war ends they've got lots of surplus battleships you can cut them up you can break them down or you can just leave them they're not gonna harm anybody yeah but with anything chemical and we'll touch on that as it goes on yeah it becomes a serious mess you know the the the legacy of it is is a problem you know chemical weapons are like landmines that yeah so yeah whatever utility they have on the battlefield is you know is is is what it is but you have this long shadow cast by them that you know that conventional weapons once you don't have a bayonet is a bayonet it's a knife you know a torpedo is a torpedo you know bullet is a bullet has been fired has been fired but this stuff casts a long shadow you know yeah so where do you want to go from here paul well let's let's let's talk about poland in 1939 i think is the next thing before we bring the nazis in and um and and talk about an incident that happened then that is is is relevant to our discussion yeah so again i i mean even with the chinese stuff i look i hope that i've put sort of put a fork in the idea that there wasn't chemical warfare in the second world war because there was uh but uh there largely wasn't in europe uh but we it almost went there okay uh poland had a chemical warfare program not a terribly big one but it had a chemical warfare program in the 1930s um in early 19th in the early early september 1939 a few days after the um the german invasion there was an incident this place called yaswal uh in sort of south it's it's it's inside at the time south central poland now it's sort of southeastern poland but the footprint of poland that was shifted after stalin numerous times some people the whole country got shifted um 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 um as best as anybody could tell it was actually quite deluded mustard uh and the german army immediately investigated uh in fact this whole thing comes out of this interesting book here the history of german chemical warfare this guy hermann oxner who was he was the head of chemical warfare offense and defense for the german army for the entire war all right so he said he immediately sent some scientists to go investigate this incident yeah indeed there were some guys i think there were 14 uh soldiers hospitalized with with mustard gas burns and all that but they actually quite quickly uh deduced that this is really a local initiative wasn't a polish you know wasn't a polish you know changing policy right that a particular local chemical unity of the polish army had some dilute mustard which they they would use for things like testing uh chemical detection or as a simulant in training okay uh 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 they did is general oxner and his guys very quickly tap this down hey this is a local thing this is a one-off incident you know uh 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 there was some sense prevailing here uh yeah in form of the you know the the german military saying you know yeah okay there was this incident but you know this is this really was a one-off i mean this when you talk about that you know the german sort of almost uh playing it down is that because some of these gentlemen well i'm going to use the word gentleman and it's lose his connotation because they're kind of fearful of of the of the escalation for their own safety or or is it more of a worried about what their implications for mankind where where does it sort of sit is it well it's it's interesting because you read this whole this this guy oxnard obviously got captured at the end of the war uh he got commissioned by this the the the historical office of the office of the chief of the chemical corps to write what was then his classified study uh about you know he 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 um he comes across as like having a little bit of an inferiority complex basically convinced that the french the germans the americans uh even the italians have got better offensive and defensive capability and that the germans are really pushing hard to catch up okay um he you know he knew even in 1939 he knew this thing called nerve age we also knew that they existed in sort of uh you know vials yeah you know not mass production that it was exactly at the point where this incident was going on that the the uh guys from ig farben are going up to berlin with you know you know suitcases full of uh you know uh presentation materials and all that saying now is your chance you're gonna give us a lot of money and we're gonna build a big uh we're gonna build a big uh chemical warfare factory for you uh but at this particular time uh you know oxner is struggling to field enough gas mass to his entire entire large army because guess what rubber is in short supply yeah um nobody had really figured out another thing is nobody really really figured out how really truly adequately to protect horses and and mules and donkeys and we forget at our apparel how much the german logistical stuff was uh oh on animals 800 german horses per division generally that's a normandy fact 864 i think yeah i i don't know 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 in the americas we don't have any he's like that's it we're done yeah yeah yeah for all 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 uh it's a difficult it's a difficult thing and the the german army relied heavily on it so if if part of your logistics relies heavily on equine you know uh resources is like you know what it's probably 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 let's talk about the fact that there obviously is a big a big chemical program how does that kind of start and who is the main person behind that and and just run through some of that with us all right i've changed the slide here but so what you have here is an aerial photo of the first nerve agent factory a place called uh dyer firth it's uh it's now in poland at the time it was a in an area called silesia which again due to shifts and borders is now in poland um ig farbin convinced the high command uh the german high command to underwrite a large scale program to well to do several things one was to greatly im greatly increase production of the first world war era chemicals false gene and mustard and hydrogen cyanide and all these other things that worked with varying degrees of success in the first war right um but also to plow a huge amount of money into uh this new nerve agent uh they had this they had this new nerve agent called taboon uh by the time the war started there was another more deadly one uh called sarin uh they hadn't quite figured out really how to mass produce it but they had worked out a mass production process for for taboo they just needed to scale it up uh and so there was this guy who might go down and i should have i should have brought up a photo of this guy otto ambrose uh he probably he's literally the a in siren sirens an acronym right okay yeah uh he goes down is quite literally you know i'm gonna stop sharing my screen here because i think i could probably find a 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 uh he he wasn't an inventor of any of this stuff but what he was he was the industrialist you know oh there i got i'm gonna i'm gonna i'm gonna share his uh i'm gonna share his uh his uh his um picture here all right let's see if i go back share screen share screen there we go there's otto ambrose 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 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 yeah i i rarely use the word cabal but i i think it really it fits here a cabal of other industrialists you know you know upper middle and upper management not the not those actual sort of frontline chemists but these middle and upper management guys formulated this big industrial scheme to suck money out of out of uh out of berlin and into their own pockets and part of that was what was this cunning wheeze 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 um 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 you know guess whose name is on all of it otto ambrose you know uh i say he's a wicked chemist because actually his legacy after the war was after you know he got out of jail he ended up being part of the guys that developed thalidomide oh okay right yeah wow yeah okay yeah fine well yeah okay so yeah yeah so there's a special place in hell for otto ambrose yeah let's hope so yeah uh you know it is it's interesting because uh chemical warfare wasn't his only wheeze uh one of his other reasons was synthetic rubber uh you know quite good at it but you know uh his synthetic rubber plant was at a place called auschwitz and he used an awful lot of slave labor yeah i i knew that was going to come up in the conversation yeah that's what did that's that's what did for auto was his slave labor use at auschwitz not any of his chemical warfare stuff uh because what you have is you have this as you know he was getting rich off of it but he's 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 um the you know the the contents of his waste paper bins uh are catalogued down in uh the national archives and queues so you can go through all his rubbish you know there it is his dry cleaning receipts you know wow he was very well dressed i've seen his receipts you know but i've seen you know know thousands of pages of documents that get captured off the guy um he he built this industrial empire that really did build uh make 12 thousand six hundred twelve thousand eight hundred the exact total is a little bit you know up in the air tons of taboon which is a lot of tavern they built this large factory in salishi 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 with how to make it and you know all that but so what they ended up doing they had a lot of stuff okay they had a you know they had a lot of this nerve agent taboo and they had it filled up 80 of it was filled into aerial bombs and about 20 of it was filled into 105 150 millimeter artillery shells um which and it was stockpiled but it was stocked 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 into the eastern front it stayed close to home in in in well-guarded secret depots um 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 well uh for for one thing um well there are several there are several there are several factors by the point of which i think it might have made a difference uh you have to under i have to understand this 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 eighty percent 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 loose wall is trying to do tactical work or it's trying to do reconnaissance is trying to protect the homeland you know uh you know uh strategic bombing is no longer really a thing that the luftwaffe does by 1943 1944 so you know because ig farmer is still working towards the original 1939 contract putting 80 percent of the stuff into aerial drop bombs okay uh and also 20 of it is in artillery shells but nobody in the german army is training on how to use these artillery shells uh you know i mean it could have been done but you know it would have been a this is also a point at which start 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 uh is that is this going to be discovered you know is this going to be interdicted by uh allied bombers and the answer is probably yes yes yeah okay so what you're saying is it's not necessarily because of um an unwillingness to use them it was just the practicalities of actually use them in the way they were developing them became became difficult for them and i guess as the war goes on you get to 45 yeah um by then the the battlefield is on your own doorstep so using chemical stuff then becomes much more risky because the the you know the wind changing kind of um ideas so yeah so so at the point at the point of which it could have made a difference saying normandy for example um first of all there was this great deceptive effort to you know you know hitler was convinced it was going to be the pot of clay not norman yeah 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 uh so even if they had forward deployed their nerve agent to the pot of calais they're stuck in the pot of clay they're not in normandy okay and eighty percent of the inventory is in these depots that go on to bombers that don't exist anymore they're flown by pilots that have long since been retrained to fly uh uh yeah [ __ ] wolf 190s and me 109s to protect the reich okay so there becomes this logistical impossibility to use it okay at least on at least on the western front you know um but then there's also there's 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 uh he's convinced that the advanced state of american industry is has probably come around to the same thing you know he he makes that assumption for the wrong reasons but you know he 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 the you know they're out of range of any sort of you know german you know attack yeah but also the germans the germans have spies okay uh and you know german espionage didn't live up to its uh its a reputation of war but certain things were going on you know you have places like bayern 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 are in burn go to the patent office yeah yeah uh and look at what's in the chemistry journals okay and these guys have a long you know they've got a long sort of you know fishing list if you will a shopping list of things that you know that they're scouring the western you know 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 auto 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 uh typhus you know all these things are spread by insects you know a pesticide like uh 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 brit named saunders that was doing some work roughly in organo phosphates before the war so he sort of puts this together and he he assumes that the americans must have this uh and actually you know he tells hitler this hitler puts a question straight to him otto you know by the way here's your here's your great you know here's a great medal and here's a huge cash bonus roll it's 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 that 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 um oh yeah yeah yeah yeah uh you know but clearly that's what he told his interrogators and his interrogator he had he had one of the great interrogators go out i'm a guy named edmond tilly who came at him several different ways uh this british guy edmond tilly you know really tripped him up a couple of times tilly believes that otto was sincere on this and not sincere on some other things but yeah um albert speer you know was full of yeah was full of sort of mistruths about chemical weapons of the war and all that too but you know um but you know so there's this idea that well we better keep these nerve agents as a reserve to retaliate against the americans in case they start um 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 the 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 well yeah if 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 yeah exactly and it's um and i 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 didn't um the question is the question comes up would have changed the war um you know the funny thing at the point at which it would have changed the war it would just delayed the inevitable uh but we have to also put these things in context there was this thing called the manhattan project okay so what does so look at the chronology of the second world war what does a four or five month delay in the defeat of germany get here it gets a first atom bomb on berlin instead of russia is exactly what it gets yeah at least theoretically yeah yeah yeah metal the threat of yeah yeah and so you know i i make a contentious point i think actually you know chemical warfare shortened the war in the west uh because the amount of resources that and and and capital and knowledge and technology was being sucked up into this uh into this chemical warfare program rates into them you know many billions of dollars and pounds by today's money it was a vast industrial complex uh so some of the best mines in germany were working on this stuff and basically taking these resources uh and sequestering them from from actual use in the war well that that's happening universally with the germans isn't it by ford and they've got at various points where they've had a nuclear probe or atomic program they've got their jets jet program they've got their super tanks they've got their they're working on so many different things of course they're just paying peter to pay paul right there they haven't got the money to work at all of them at the same level so they're all being pushed on a broad front any of them finished and some of them were really crazy there was this uh you know there was this other strain in the german chemical warfare program working this really really horrific chemical called chlorine trifluoride uh uh it it's put this way it burns glass and sets concrete on fire okay wow it's really horrific 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 it probably could have but you know my god you know just dealing with stuff you know i mean yeah 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 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 they're they're they're not they're struggling so um i've just i'm looking at the list of things you want to talk about so um let's talk about um the ss john harvey and i'm changing subject completely let's talk about that let's go to italy okay so the uh so so basically we had we and just the point we had some people on the youtube actually mentioning that so that's yeah yeah that's a good point all right so for for for what for your listeners who don't necessarily understand the ss john harvey uh was a was a u.s freighter full of mustard gas bombs the m47 aerial delivered mustard gas spawn and it was in bari harbor at a point in which the uh i'm going to go back at myself and say yeah i said that the germans didn't have much strike capability uh in terms of airstrikes but they scraped some up and did this excellent air raid on on bari harbor um and i'm not sure on the exact date of that uh off the top of my head i'd have to look it up uh but the the the barry harbor incident um you know this ship to john harvey got struck by bombs and sank and dispersed rather large amount of sulfur mustard which it was the proper name of mustard gas now why was it there it's because the have the us is forward deploying mustard uh in case it is needed because the us army chemical corps is on a hair trigger to switch over to offensive chemical warfare should the germans or the italians or some yeah you know decide to decide to get desperate and so the entire war in in europe the the the the the us the brits to the less extent of the soviets are basically just waiting for the germans to be desperate enough to use chemical weapons okay and and have their own chemical weapons ready to go just in case that happens okay so sticking to the 1920s kind of 1930s agreement that kind of the gentleman's agreement we won't use it first but we've got it in case you use it okay yeah and the us did a lot to forward deploy this stuff and in the air rate on barry harbor uh the germans got lucky and dropped some bombs on the ss john harvey uh 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 uh rather large i mean there were a lot of units of the us army chemical corps they were sort of dual dual purpose they were fielded in the they had these things called chemical mortars that chemical motors 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 mortars i could do an entire podcast with you on that someday with some great visuals but i mean just briefing 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 broken the story they all knew what paratroopers were and everybody didn't quite know what chemical waters were yeah well it's a water that fires chemicals and they're going no that's so just briefly just why 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 uh it was a 107 millimeter or 4.2 inch and also known as the four deuce it was designed by the us army to rapidly lay either smoke screens or mustard gas however it was quickly discovered that it was actually very very good at firing conventional rounds as well too so the us army rapidly developed a high explosive round for it uh 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 uh you know uh howitzer battalion or things like that uh the chemical mortars could be disassembled and you know you know carried around on jeeps or even man packed if necessary uh the the ammunition was lighter than uh than than regular sort of tube artillery you know stuffs and they could achieve a very high highly high rate of fire and very high accuracy so these chemical mortar rounds uh chemical mortar battalions were became very popular amongst sort of division and core level commanders as you know as a tactical acid plus the actual one of the original missions of being very good at a very quickly laying large areas smoke screens too which is something that yeah the smoke normally the 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 barrelled mortars they're like 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 harp going back to john harvey because he went off on tanzan there that was quite a tragic tragic loss of life there wasn't it yeah and the 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 i have to admit i don't i i have forgotten many of the details of the john harvey guys and i should have boned up on it for this uh so i'm gonna i'm gonna i'm gonna i'm gonna 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 uh well yeah and i i say um only a fraction that had to do with the john harvey because there if you look at the whole sort of butcher's bill from that uh dozens of ships were sunk uh dockyards were set on fire so uh a high percentage of that would be conventional i don't know where the great point is yeah it was yeah it was a quite it was quite uh successful air raid by the by the luftwaffe so let's let's bring it back to the um uh the the fact that germans didn't use these weapons thank thank god um so the the the war in the the west and the east coast in may 45 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 you know we now know you mentioned the manhattan project that we used atomic warfare against nagasaki hiroshima but if we had attacked japan over land might we have started using chemical weapons there so let's the two of the questions are what happened to the ones in stuff in europe and then what about the pacific okay uh i'm gonna i'm gonna i'm gonna go reverse order fine that's fine the pacific yes it was very much a serious consideration that chemical weapons were gonna be needed to invade the uh the the the japanese mainland um 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 um so there but there was look at there's there was talk about you know for example lots of fosgene okay but then this leaves and there are lots of plans now how elaborate these plans are is sort of a subject to debate there are 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 uh 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 uh everybody uh east and west is looking at this new nerve agent stuff that they just captured going holy [ __ ] what the hell is this we've never seen anything like this before oh my god what is this stuff okay uh one of the very first things that anybody does is the americans take some samples of taboo and sarin it wasn't much saturn to go around but you know they had they sort of a jug of it but yeah a bunch of artillery shells for the tablet and they sent it to boston okay they sent it to mit okay where uh the 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 um and so first of all they discovered actually your u.s or british gas masks will protect against the nerve agents so that's when these myths say oh my god the germans would have killed us all because the gas mask wouldn't work that turns out to not be true um interestingly enough i don't know how well they worked against the captured japanese mask because that bit of the study to this day is still redacted ah yeah wow so uh i 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 um so so there was definitely some consideration to using these captured german munitions in the pacific campaign uh but the planning didn't get very far on that because you know hiroshima nagasaki happened the yeah so so these planning efforts only got so far when they when they got you know overtaken by events yeah right but this leads to the other thing what you get is you get russians you get brits you get uh americans you get french all of whom are like looking at this nerve agent stuff uh with sort of you know envy okay um so you probably what you had it's a it's a it's a it's an oversimplification but i think i make it clear in the book um the both sides capture stuff both sides capture artillery shells and bombs and have physically have this stuff that doesn't mean you can make it okay the the soviets have captured the under construction you know siren factory which probably wasn't going to work anyway because they were going on kind of the wrong path on that uh but they didn't know it at the time uh more importantly the west didn't know that at the time either they also captured the taboon plant and iron firth 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 their own path but the americans and the brits don't know this what the americans the brits have they have the majority of the documentation because rather a lot of the documentation ended up in this place called raub camera north of munster okay uh 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 yeah uh 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 ages stuff he just wants to make pesticides so he sings like a canary to his interrogators you know as so as several the other guys do otto ambrose is running around hiding you know he makes a very good you know effort to hide you know uh 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 uh 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 uh you know but the thing also otto ambrose was the middle man the grifter the industrialist the accountant all that you know i think you could hold a gun to his head he wasn't going to tell you how to actually make sarin okay you know uh he is only going to tell you in broad terms how to make taboo so so what you had is both sides east and west you know they had part 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 the literally the next 30 to 40 years after that you know east and west are both convinced that the other side is further ahead in a chemical arms race in reality the west was further than 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 you know 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 it was shaped by the nuclear war and alexander von braun and the usm if i know it's i know this speculation game is just is this pointless but if we ended up using that 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 um i i think we don't actually know yeah yeah i mean there's a lot of what-ifs if the you know what if that first you know i mean history would have been fundamentally different if that if at the trinity site uh you know uh you know in in in new mexico they they they they like the fuse they press the button for that for the uh for the first test of a nuclear weapon and uh it goes poof yeah and it turns out to have been a wrong idea all along um where does history go with that you know uh that's you know you can yeah you know you know i'm not a huge fan of alternative history uh you know so but i i don't know i mean um i mean nerve agents pop up after after the after all this they pop up in the iran-iraq war in the uh the 1980s uh for similar reasons we have it's a similar rationale to the japanese vs the chinese the iraqis are facing a numerically larger enemy okay and are looking for ways to try to even up the score uh and it's an enemy that is less well prepared with defensive equipment so yeah yeah yeah uh you know you can make you can make it 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 it 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 still quite horrific i'm not but don't take me as any kind of apologist for chemical warfare because i'm not um but you know it's like i said you know have i shared the screen here am i showing you a picture of my book for your readers yeah no and i'm gonna thoroughly recommend your book because it just it highlighted lots of things i didn't know uh much about at all and uh and and and corrected my ideas and some of the stuff i didn't think i knew and it just it's a fascinating uh book we've only tackled the the world war two part of it so then the final question i'm going to leave you guys with otherwise we'll end up going on too long is is you just said you're you're not an apologist for chemical weapons but you know when when we look at other other aspects of technology and war and you know you could argue that the the the use of nuclear weapons has given us a safe power that we now i mean i mean i'm just down the road from cherbourg france gets have much of its power from nuclear power and that's that's a good thing and yeah and and rockets got us to the moon and then has there been any good to come out of the chemical i don't mean the fertilizer side of it i've been that chemical war for itself is it 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 started to discuss the sort of fertilizer and pesticide stuff and it really actually i know you don't want to go there but it it's very hard to disaggregate that out of the whole thing okay no i i can understand yeah yeah um i said i i i'd say it's 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 land mines before i don't see much good ever having come out of land mines 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 well come away from your book is that you know it's uh it 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 you know myself my friends who live in the somme 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 susan mustard gas oh out comes the the fear so um and every every major chemical weapons manufacturing program turned to be an environmental and health and safety nightmare yeah okay uh well i mean i i think i've had a fascinating chat i mean i think we we all i mean we haven't actually discussed what your background is because you know you you you know we've we just launched straight into 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 so i have a 30-year career in this field and i've sort of been sort of around the houses in it too having been started out as a us army chemical corps officer uh then just through sort of a what i can only describe as a forest gump set of circumstances ending up in the white house for 12 years you know advising the high and mighty then protecting the high and mighty and then you know working in private industry uh 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 that absolutely comes across in your book i mean i i it i would say it's gonna be definitive your book is going to be definitive i mean it just is i mean because we suppose boy went live there's not many people doing this work and then it it's and it's also i 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 reader it wasn't i didn't get bogged down in the science too much i had to go put it down and go oh my god it was it flowed like like a kind of a thriller um so i yeah i i can't recommend it enough so what we've done 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 the post war even though i'm a world war ii tv guy i can do sunny post war but uh hey i could give you a whole hour on chemical mortars if you gotta have chemical waters is interesting well i am gonna do a mortar show at one point i'm trying to i'm trying to find a panzerfaust expert now to talk about anti-tank weapons i've got my pet expert and i've got it i haven't found a panzerfaust expert yet but i will do but anyway dan it's been absolute pleasure talking to you for those watching i just want to mention the fact that i've had a uh the patreon contributions i i i'm taking to help fund this channel i want to mention a few people who've supported me recently that's brian fussfield jonathan bending brian yee eric adler tony suarez nigel barrett chris fenger nick lehrer 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 and and dan is prolific on twitter um in in 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 there and he's good at sourcing his um you know his information his so so follow down on twitter it's a it's an interesting read so well thank you very much dan i've i've really i'm not going to have enjoyed it because the discussing such painful ways to die and and before we went live i i said to dan my one of my abiding memories as a child is my father's great uncle bertie of den brighton who had been a victim of mustard gas in the first world war this horrific coffee had and he had got his yellow handkerchief he got a 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 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 out there i feel you're out there um protecting us with your information so um thanks very much dan have you enjoyed it as well yes and thanks for having me and i i'm going to sign off now because i i can smell my supper being cooked oh super okay well thank you very much dan then 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

so hello uh this is paul woodard again for world war two tv another evening discussion with a very exciting subject today of chemical warfare and so my guest tonight is um dan casita hi dan how are you doing hello good to be here and we're going to say discuss this interesting subject of chemical weapons and um it's a it's a subject that i found uh not interesting for but it was one of those subjects i always knew about but never really read much about until i read your book toxin which is um very good and of course you're covering right up to the putin here we're gonna focus on just the world war two part of it tonight because otherwise we'll be here for three or four hours and uh and we'll we can always come back and do that later on but um so i'm going to start by just saying that one of the things i've found the most fascinating about your book is that the idea that the 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 about the 20s and the 30s exactly how this came about and what was going on in germany okay one of the 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 very easily blockaded so germany can be very easily cut off from imports uh the other thing is the collapse the collapse of germany in 1918 uh had a lot to do with food shortages and sailors mutining because they weren't being fed and things like that uh 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 now also there's this idea that you know we're going to be cut off from uh foreign imports of things like petroleum and you know things that we yeah rubber things that are 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 this whole idea of you know well you know pesticides pesticides and fertilizers these are important things too okay uh 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 was something like 80 percent of it and there was this whole effort to look into pesticides uh 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 uh or it would the other great uh pesticide of the air was nicotine uh but nicotine which got extracted from tobacco was dispersed dissolved in kerosene okay which is 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 organo phosphorus compounds and in 1936 he found one that was um well very very effective uh pesticide but one that uh was actually too effective because it was too dangerous to handle even a very small dilution it was too dangerous to handle and so therefore you couldn't really use it in agriculture if you're gonna kill all the you know farm laborers um he viewed this as a actually a commercial disaster he had to move on to other things but uh the higher ups the management said ah you know i think the government might be interested in this uh and so there is where the nerve agents came from the very first nerve agent military nerve agency significance was this compound it was called le 100 at the beginning and then acquired this nickname taboon and it was eventually you know developed mass-produced in this large stockpile of nerve agents that the germans um sat on during the second world war uh over 12 000 tons of it manufactured i think we'll probably get back to that and yeah 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 uh yeah and actually a lot of pesticides a lot of legitimate pesticides including ones still in use today stem from this original research so so on the one hand you have this legitimate um interest in in promoting what i wouldn't 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 although we're not gonna focus very much on the first world war we just have to go back a little bit yeah and explain that during the first world war we had the development of the the military kind of gas programs and then but they kind of that that runs sort of in parallel or with the the the fertilizer kind of program how does that how do they kind of sell it when you're studying are they the same thing well it's it's so much the same thing that the the father of chemical warfare is a guy named fritz haber um a great uh german chemist uh 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 harbor bosch process which is work 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 the agricultural proceeds of haber's work but he's also the guy that figured out how to use chlorine and fosgene as weapons and tried a couple other chemicals too he tried a lot of different things uh so there is this mixed legacy i do these interesting lectures at ucl once a year with andrea seller who's uh he is to chemistry what you are doing world war two stuff uh you know uh you know talk about this mixed legacy um but you know the first world war is an interesting situation where we have this dual uh track stuff we have because we have all the it's it's a technological war yeah 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 uh aircraft uh telegraph and radio i mean telegraph have been used before but you know these things you know instantaneous communication you know uh 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 steam ships you know powered by coal and some are starting to be powered by oil and things like that you know so so chemical warfare is just another thing in that broad context of all these different new and interesting things in warfare and i would i'd actually i'm going to go out and make a make a claim here that um all those other things were broadly successes and you know the the future was seen for them the the the chemical warfare at the end of the war it was sort of not sure we want to do that again not sure it was worth the effort uh because i think the psychological footprint of chemical warfare in the first world war is a was a much broader thing than the actual practical uh effect uh 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 by chemical weapons and you look at the overall statistics i'm going to share my screen here if that's all right sure yeah i'm going to i'm going to share my screen here and can you see this uh this guy dr gilchrist a us army doctor colonel guilicas did this study in the 1920s and methodically went through the number of uh chemical warfare casualties uh from the first world war did huge amounts of stuff i wish i i should have i should have uh i could go through the whole gilker study he's got great handwritten data visualization he clearly had an art student um but you start looking at this you know the amount of deaths is not terrible 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 is is significant uh so but you look at the actual number of people dead you know uh germans 2280 over the course of the war um part of this is has to do with the fact that uh france britain germany the us very quickly developed effective countermeasures effective uh effective gas mass and the places we see a lot of these deaths and a lot of these casually the significant ones you know uh russia russia and italy because they didn't have a very good of ability to uh to rapidly field uh gas mass 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're using walnut shells as the filter media while everybody else is using activated charcoal um quite an artisanal solution that didn't work it also explains why in the italian campaigns the percentage of their their the death percentage as a percentage of casualties was actually quite quite high um but you know in the 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 um this legacy i mean i was just reminded that when he was 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 four line 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 they'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 inheritance 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 covig 19 now we're scared of things we can't see aren't we yeah but and so this is this duel this is sort of two sides of this because you look at robert graves and goodbye to all that his uh his memoir of the first world war he he rates chemical warfare rather low and amongst his uh sort of list of hazards that you know uh he's he's written it off as a battlefield sort of condition like rats in 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 he puts it in a context um i i think some of this had to do with some of this had to do with the fact that um particularly towards the end of the war uh when you do have mustard gas which is a misnomer mustard gas is an oily liquid uh it would contaminate terrain all right it would make it an equipment it would get your clothing dirty it would get your it would get the mud in your trenches dirty and 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 uh but it would leave these long lasting scars you know uh it was sort of and it was a it was an attrition weapon design yeah it's uh 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 um yeah but like other things in world war one you know like like the aircraft yeah and the submarine all these things it it's something that that all sides wish well not which they began to improve on and tweak and get better so you know we we're gonna focus as we you know by 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 all yeah 20s and 30s yeah there was a there was an arms control agreement the geneva protocol the 1920s whereby people basically force war first use of chemical weapons okay it didn't outlaw them uh 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 these had chemical warfare programs that were you know basically just extensions of the first world war once even the smaller countries had it too uh hungary greece uh poland uh sweden uh belgium the netherlands the the countries that you know you know we think of as uh yugoslavia is sort of second league players in the in this in the in the uh and the second world war in terms of you know stuff they don't want that they want their program 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 uh that's why the nerve agent thing with german uh the german chemical industry was actually uh it was a huge step change in the in the lethality of chemical weapons okay because suddenly and suddenly there is this new substance taboo which um is instantly well not instantly but lethal within minutes or an hour uh as opposed to a false gene and the other ones that might you know might kill you in a day or two um sort of thing so it would have an immediate casualty producing effect on the battlefield uh a little bit goes a long way in terms of how much agent you need to ha to kill people it's sort of a 10th or 100th of what you would need the equivalent in fosgene okay uh so you know it's it's 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 uh 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 okay um and that you know because you're dying to ask me you know you know why did the germans use it well i think we'll come to that bit later i think we want to i want to bring in the the use by the japanese first yes i think is yeah before we get to nazis i mean in the in the in the generally forgotten theater of world war two and in fact it actually technically predates for world war two because world war ii is 39 but we have the japanese and china well you'll find that that element from your book fascinating so let's let's talk about their use and that though i'm going to throw something in there too as well too that sort of leads up to that there are there are three great incidents of chemical warfare you know in the interwar period um [Music] 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 uh using it again in northern morocco and something called the rift war and where they actually pioneered aerial delivery of of of mustard uh as a counter insurgency weapon so there was that there is mussolini's campaign against ethiopia yeah or prolific use of several different types of chemical weapons against the ethiopians that's in 1935 1936 and then from 1937 onward although they're you know i i i made sure i researched to get the facts right i got i found a bunch of different things you know there there was a lot of there was a lot of stuff going on in manchuria you know we we think that you know you know the sort of really the chinese the sino-japanese war whatever you want to call the chinese front in the second world war which really started a lot earlier than 1939 started in 1930 1931. uh the japanese had a quite you know active chemical warfare program are not terribly technologically superior basically world war one era things um and they're fighting against a numerically superior but under equipped enemy the chinese now the chinese had some fri china was quite fragmented at the time you had warlords you had the the nationalist government the kuuman dong you had you you had the people's liberation army the communists the kuomintong uh at least in theory had a bit of a chemical warfare program itself although you know records of you know how much that they actually got to use and things like that is yeah i can only really point to a few incidents of chinese use versus japan and the japanese army was actually fairly well equipped with with uh protective equipment in fact i'm going to share my screen again because we got a great visual on this got a great visual here let's see if i can yeah there we go here we go yeah yeah this is the this is the battle of shanghai uh where where fosgene and you know uh chloropicrin and a few other chemicals were prolifically prolifically used by the japanese um there were there are many hundreds of incidents of chemical warfare use uh in the in the 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 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 in 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 uh 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 fine i knew i was just thinking flying tigers yeah we talk about the bit that connect us don't we the burma road are flying over 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 ground would do little but because the chinese funded the movie so anyway and yeah and i mean that so that used there was was you know was was on a seriously large scale if it was 10 000 deaths that's that's that's significant isn't it oh yeah and i find this there was this guy there was brigadier general john middleton of the u.s army chemical corps uh who was sent to be the chemical warfare adviser to the common sign to chiang kai-shek uh uh and it's interesting enough he was a member of my american legion post that's another story so 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 and uh abandoned chinese uh sorry abandoned japanese chemical munitions is a huge issue in chinese japanese relations to this day right because stuff gets dug up a lot all right a lot of stuff was simply abandoned but also famously chemical weapons you know chemical artillery shells and aerial drop bombs have a higher dud rate than their conventional alternatives right so if you fire 100 chemical shells in a battle some of them are going to be duds 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 song when they find that they still get spooky about isn't it they're not worried about grenades and things they use for that now but anything with mustard gas you get the problems you get the issues that's that's the first thing they yeah they're worried about so i mean this this is i'm finding this fascinating and and and we're going to bring it up later on but this i think you've already touched on it in there with the chemical weapons and nerve agents it's always the disposal after a conflict yeah if a war ends they've got lots of surplus battleships you can cut them up you can break them down or you can just leave them they're not gonna harm anybody yeah but with anything chemical and we'll touch on that as it goes on yeah it becomes a serious mess you know the the the legacy of it is is a problem you know chemical weapons are like landmines that yeah so yeah whatever utility they have on the battlefield is you know is is is what it is but you have this long shadow cast by them that you know that conventional weapons once you don't have a bayonet is a bayonet it's a knife you know a torpedo is a torpedo you know bullet is a bullet has been fired has been fired but this stuff casts a long shadow you know yeah so where do you want to go from here paul well let's let's let's talk about poland in 1939 i think is the next thing before we bring the nazis in and um and and talk about an incident that happened then that is is is relevant to our discussion yeah so again i i mean even with the chinese stuff i look i hope that i've put sort of put a fork in the idea that there wasn't chemical warfare in the second world war because there was uh but uh there largely wasn't in europe uh but we it almost went there okay uh poland had a chemical warfare program not a terribly big one but it had a chemical warfare program in the 1930s um in early 19th in the early early september 1939 a few days after the um the german invasion there was an incident this place called yaswal uh in sort of south it's it's it's inside at the time south central poland now it's sort of southeastern poland but the footprint of poland that was shifted after stalin numerous times some people the whole country got shifted um 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 um as best as anybody could tell it was actually quite deluded mustard uh and the german army immediately investigated uh in fact this whole thing comes out of this interesting book here the history of german chemical warfare this guy hermann oxner who was he was the head of chemical warfare offense and defense for the german army for the entire war all right so he said he immediately sent some scientists to go investigate this incident yeah indeed there were some guys i think there were 14 uh soldiers hospitalized with with mustard gas burns and all that but they actually quite quickly uh deduced that this is really a local initiative wasn't a polish you know wasn't a polish you know changing policy right that a particular local chemical unity of the polish army had some dilute mustard which they they would use for things like testing uh chemical detection or as a simulant in training okay uh 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 they did is general oxner and his guys very quickly tap this down hey this is a local thing this is a one-off incident you know uh 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 there was some sense prevailing here uh yeah in form of the you know the the german military saying you know yeah okay there was this incident but you know this is this really was a one-off i mean this when you talk about that you know the german sort of almost uh playing it down is that because some of these gentlemen well i'm going to use the word gentleman and it's lose his connotation because they're kind of fearful of of the of the escalation for their own safety or or is it more of a worried about what their implications for mankind where where does it sort of sit is it well it's it's interesting because you read this whole this this guy oxnard obviously got captured at the end of the war uh he got commissioned by this the the the historical office of the office of the chief of the chemical corps to write what was then his classified study uh about you know he 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 um he comes across as like having a little bit of an inferiority complex basically convinced that the french the germans the americans uh even the italians have got better offensive and defensive capability and that the germans are really pushing hard to catch up okay um he you know he knew even in 1939 he knew this thing called nerve age we also knew that they existed in sort of uh you know vials yeah you know not mass production that it was exactly at the point where this incident was going on that the the uh guys from ig farben are going up to berlin with you know you know suitcases full of uh you know uh presentation materials and all that saying now is your chance you're gonna give us a lot of money and we're gonna build a big uh we're gonna build a big uh chemical warfare factory for you uh but at this particular time uh you know oxner is struggling to field enough gas mass to his entire entire large army because guess what rubber is in short supply yeah um nobody had really figured out another thing is nobody really really figured out how really truly adequately to protect horses and and mules and donkeys and we forget at our apparel how much the german logistical stuff was uh oh on animals 800 german horses per division generally that's a normandy fact 864 i think yeah i i don't know 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 in the americas we don't have any he's like that's it we're done yeah yeah yeah for all 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 uh it's a difficult it's a difficult thing and the the german army relied heavily on it so if if part of your logistics relies heavily on equine you know uh resources is like you know what it's probably 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 let's talk about the fact that there obviously is a big a big chemical program how does that kind of start and who is the main person behind that and and just run through some of that with us all right i've changed the slide here but so what you have here is an aerial photo of the first nerve agent factory a place called uh dyer firth it's uh it's now in poland at the time it was a in an area called silesia which again due to shifts and borders is now in poland um ig farbin convinced the high command uh the german high command to underwrite a large scale program to well to do several things one was to greatly im greatly increase production of the first world war era chemicals false gene and mustard and hydrogen cyanide and all these other things that worked with varying degrees of success in the first war right um but also to plow a huge amount of money into uh this new nerve agent uh they had this they had this new nerve agent called taboon uh by the time the war started there was another more deadly one uh called sarin uh they hadn't quite figured out really how to mass produce it but they had worked out a mass production process for for taboo they just needed to scale it up uh and so there was this guy who might go down and i should have i should have brought up a photo of this guy otto ambrose uh he probably he's literally the a in siren sirens an acronym right okay yeah uh he goes down is quite literally you know i'm gonna stop sharing my screen here because i think i could probably find a 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 uh he he wasn't an inventor of any of this stuff but what he was he was the industrialist you know oh there i got i'm gonna i'm gonna i'm gonna share his uh i'm gonna share his uh his uh his um picture here all right let's see if i go back share screen share screen there we go there's otto ambrose 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 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 yeah i i rarely use the word cabal but i i think it really it fits here a cabal of other industrialists you know you know upper middle and upper management not the not those actual sort of frontline chemists but these middle and upper management guys formulated this big industrial scheme to suck money out of out of uh out of berlin and into their own pockets and part of that was what was this cunning wheeze 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 um 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 you know guess whose name is on all of it otto ambrose you know uh i say he's a wicked chemist because actually his legacy after the war was after you know he got out of jail he ended up being part of the guys that developed thalidomide oh okay right yeah wow yeah okay yeah fine well yeah okay so yeah yeah so there's a special place in hell for otto ambrose yeah let's hope so yeah uh you know it is it's interesting because uh chemical warfare wasn't his only wheeze uh one of his other reasons was synthetic rubber uh you know quite good at it but you know uh his synthetic rubber plant was at a place called auschwitz and he used an awful lot of slave labor yeah i i knew that was going to come up in the conversation yeah that's what did that's that's what did for auto was his slave labor use at auschwitz not any of his chemical warfare stuff uh because what you have is you have this as you know he was getting rich off of it but he's 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 um the you know the the contents of his waste paper bins uh are catalogued down in uh the national archives and queues so you can go through all his rubbish you know there it is his dry cleaning receipts you know wow he was very well dressed i've seen his receipts you know but i've seen you know know thousands of pages of documents that get captured off the guy um he he built this industrial empire that really did build uh make 12 thousand six hundred twelve thousand eight hundred the exact total is a little bit you know up in the air tons of taboon which is a lot of tavern they built this large factory in salishi 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 with how to make it and you know all that but so what they ended up doing they had a lot of stuff okay they had a you know they had a lot of this nerve agent taboo and they had it filled up 80 of it was filled into aerial bombs and about 20 of it was filled into 105 150 millimeter artillery shells um which and it was stockpiled but it was stocked 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 into the eastern front it stayed close to home in in in well-guarded secret depots um 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 well uh for for one thing um well there are several there are several there are several factors by the point of which i think it might have made a difference uh you have to under i have to understand this 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 eighty percent 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 loose wall is trying to do tactical work or it's trying to do reconnaissance is trying to protect the homeland you know uh you know uh strategic bombing is no longer really a thing that the luftwaffe does by 1943 1944 so you know because ig farmer is still working towards the original 1939 contract putting 80 percent of the stuff into aerial drop bombs okay uh and also 20 of it is in artillery shells but nobody in the german army is training on how to use these artillery shells uh you know i mean it could have been done but you know it would have been a this is also a point at which start 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 uh is that is this going to be discovered you know is this going to be interdicted by uh allied bombers and the answer is probably yes yes yeah okay so what you're saying is it's not necessarily because of um an unwillingness to use them it was just the practicalities of actually use them in the way they were developing them became became difficult for them and i guess as the war goes on you get to 45 yeah um by then the the battlefield is on your own doorstep so using chemical stuff then becomes much more risky because the the you know the wind changing kind of um ideas so yeah so so at the point at the point of which it could have made a difference saying normandy for example um first of all there was this great deceptive effort to you know you know hitler was convinced it was going to be the pot of clay not norman yeah 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 uh so even if they had forward deployed their nerve agent to the pot of calais they're stuck in the pot of clay they're not in normandy okay and eighty percent of the inventory is in these depots that go on to bombers that don't exist anymore they're flown by pilots that have long since been retrained to fly uh uh yeah [ __ ] wolf 190s and me 109s to protect the reich okay so there becomes this logistical impossibility to use it okay at least on at least on the western front you know um but then there's also there's 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 uh he's convinced that the advanced state of american industry is has probably come around to the same thing you know he he makes that assumption for the wrong reasons but you know he 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 the you know they're out of range of any sort of you know german you know attack yeah but also the germans the germans have spies okay uh and you know german espionage didn't live up to its uh its a reputation of war but certain things were going on you know you have places like bayern 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 are in burn go to the patent office yeah yeah uh and look at what's in the chemistry journals okay and these guys have a long you know they've got a long sort of you know fishing list if you will a shopping list of things that you know that they're scouring the western you know 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 auto 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 uh typhus you know all these things are spread by insects you know a pesticide like uh 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 brit named saunders that was doing some work roughly in organo phosphates before the war so he sort of puts this together and he he assumes that the americans must have this uh and actually you know he tells hitler this hitler puts a question straight to him otto you know by the way here's your here's your great you know here's a great medal and here's a huge cash bonus roll it's 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 that 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 um oh yeah yeah yeah yeah uh you know but clearly that's what he told his interrogators and his interrogator he had he had one of the great interrogators go out i'm a guy named edmond tilly who came at him several different ways uh this british guy edmond tilly you know really tripped him up a couple of times tilly believes that otto was sincere on this and not sincere on some other things but yeah um albert speer you know was full of yeah was full of sort of mistruths about chemical weapons of the war and all that too but you know um but you know so there's this idea that well we better keep these nerve agents as a reserve to retaliate against the americans in case they start um 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 the 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 well yeah if 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 yeah exactly and it's um and i 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 didn't um the question is the question comes up would have changed the war um you know the funny thing at the point at which it would have changed the war it would just delayed the inevitable uh but we have to also put these things in context there was this thing called the manhattan project okay so what does so look at the chronology of the second world war what does a four or five month delay in the defeat of germany get here it gets a first atom bomb on berlin instead of russia is exactly what it gets yeah at least theoretically yeah yeah yeah metal the threat of yeah yeah and so you know i i make a contentious point i think actually you know chemical warfare shortened the war in the west uh because the amount of resources that and and and capital and knowledge and technology was being sucked up into this uh into this chemical warfare program rates into them you know many billions of dollars and pounds by today's money it was a vast industrial complex uh so some of the best mines in germany were working on this stuff and basically taking these resources uh and sequestering them from from actual use in the war well that that's happening universally with the germans isn't it by ford and they've got at various points where they've had a nuclear probe or atomic program they've got their jets jet program they've got their super tanks they've got their they're working on so many different things of course they're just paying peter to pay paul right there they haven't got the money to work at all of them at the same level so they're all being pushed on a broad front any of them finished and some of them were really crazy there was this uh you know there was this other strain in the german chemical warfare program working this really really horrific chemical called chlorine trifluoride uh uh it it's put this way it burns glass and sets concrete on fire okay wow it's really horrific 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 it probably could have but you know my god you know just dealing with stuff you know i mean yeah 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 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 they're they're they're not they're struggling so um i've just i'm looking at the list of things you want to talk about so um let's talk about um the ss john harvey and i'm changing subject completely let's talk about that let's go to italy okay so the uh so so basically we had we and just the point we had some people on the youtube actually mentioning that so that's yeah yeah that's a good point all right so for for for what for your listeners who don't necessarily understand the ss john harvey uh was a was a u.s freighter full of mustard gas bombs the m47 aerial delivered mustard gas spawn and it was in bari harbor at a point in which the uh i'm going to go back at myself and say yeah i said that the germans didn't have much strike capability uh in terms of airstrikes but they scraped some up and did this excellent air raid on on bari harbor um and i'm not sure on the exact date of that uh off the top of my head i'd have to look it up uh but the the the barry harbor incident um you know this ship to john harvey got struck by bombs and sank and dispersed rather large amount of sulfur mustard which it was the proper name of mustard gas now why was it there it's because the have the us is forward deploying mustard uh in case it is needed because the us army chemical corps is on a hair trigger to switch over to offensive chemical warfare should the germans or the italians or some yeah you know decide to decide to get desperate and so the entire war in in europe the the the the the us the brits to the less extent of the soviets are basically just waiting for the germans to be desperate enough to use chemical weapons okay and and have their own chemical weapons ready to go just in case that happens okay so sticking to the 1920s kind of 1930s agreement that kind of the gentleman's agreement we won't use it first but we've got it in case you use it okay yeah and the us did a lot to forward deploy this stuff and in the air rate on barry harbor uh the germans got lucky and dropped some bombs on the ss john harvey uh 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 uh rather large i mean there were a lot of units of the us army chemical corps they were sort of dual dual purpose they were fielded in the they had these things called chemical mortars that chemical motors 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 mortars i could do an entire podcast with you on that someday with some great visuals but i mean just briefing 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 broken the story they all knew what paratroopers were and everybody didn't quite know what chemical waters were yeah well it's a water that fires chemicals and they're going no that's so just briefly just why 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 uh it was a 107 millimeter or 4.2 inch and also known as the four deuce it was designed by the us army to rapidly lay either smoke screens or mustard gas however it was quickly discovered that it was actually very very good at firing conventional rounds as well too so the us army rapidly developed a high explosive round for it uh 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 uh you know uh howitzer battalion or things like that uh the chemical mortars could be disassembled and you know you know carried around on jeeps or even man packed if necessary uh the the ammunition was lighter than uh than than regular sort of tube artillery you know stuffs and they could achieve a very high highly high rate of fire and very high accuracy so these chemical mortar rounds uh chemical mortar battalions were became very popular amongst sort of division and core level commanders as you know as a tactical acid plus the actual one of the original missions of being very good at a very quickly laying large areas smoke screens too which is something that yeah the smoke normally the 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 barrelled mortars they're like 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 harp going back to john harvey because he went off on tanzan there that was quite a tragic tragic loss of life there wasn't it yeah and the 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 i have to admit i don't i i have forgotten many of the details of the john harvey guys and i should have boned up on it for this uh so i'm gonna i'm gonna i'm gonna i'm gonna 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 uh well yeah and i i say um only a fraction that had to do with the john harvey because there if you look at the whole sort of butcher's bill from that uh dozens of ships were sunk uh dockyards were set on fire so uh a high percentage of that would be conventional i don't know where the great point is yeah it was yeah it was a quite it was quite uh successful air raid by the by the luftwaffe so let's let's bring it back to the um uh the the fact that germans didn't use these weapons thank thank god um so the the the war in the the west and the east coast in may 45 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 you know we now know you mentioned the manhattan project that we used atomic warfare against nagasaki hiroshima but if we had attacked japan over land might we have started using chemical weapons there so let's the two of the questions are what happened to the ones in stuff in europe and then what about the pacific okay uh i'm gonna i'm gonna i'm gonna go reverse order fine that's fine the pacific yes it was very much a serious consideration that chemical weapons were gonna be needed to invade the uh the the the japanese mainland um 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 um so there but there was look at there's there was talk about you know for example lots of fosgene okay but then this leaves and there are lots of plans now how elaborate these plans are is sort of a subject to debate there are 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 uh 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 uh everybody uh east and west is looking at this new nerve agent stuff that they just captured going holy [ __ ] what the hell is this we've never seen anything like this before oh my god what is this stuff okay uh one of the very first things that anybody does is the americans take some samples of taboo and sarin it wasn't much saturn to go around but you know they had they sort of a jug of it but yeah a bunch of artillery shells for the tablet and they sent it to boston okay they sent it to mit okay where uh the 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 um and so first of all they discovered actually your u.s or british gas masks will protect against the nerve agents so that's when these myths say oh my god the germans would have killed us all because the gas mask wouldn't work that turns out to not be true um interestingly enough i don't know how well they worked against the captured japanese mask because that bit of the study to this day is still redacted ah yeah wow so uh i 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 um so so there was definitely some consideration to using these captured german munitions in the pacific campaign uh but the planning didn't get very far on that because you know hiroshima nagasaki happened the yeah so so these planning efforts only got so far when they when they got you know overtaken by events yeah right but this leads to the other thing what you get is you get russians you get brits you get uh americans you get french all of whom are like looking at this nerve agent stuff uh with sort of you know envy okay um so you probably what you had it's a it's a it's a it's an oversimplification but i think i make it clear in the book um the both sides capture stuff both sides capture artillery shells and bombs and have physically have this stuff that doesn't mean you can make it okay the the soviets have captured the under construction you know siren factory which probably wasn't going to work anyway because they were going on kind of the wrong path on that uh but they didn't know it at the time uh more importantly the west didn't know that at the time either they also captured the taboon plant and iron firth 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 their own path but the americans and the brits don't know this what the americans the brits have they have the majority of the documentation because rather a lot of the documentation ended up in this place called raub camera north of munster okay uh 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 yeah uh 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 ages stuff he just wants to make pesticides so he sings like a canary to his interrogators you know as so as several the other guys do otto ambrose is running around hiding you know he makes a very good you know effort to hide you know uh 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 uh 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 uh you know but the thing also otto ambrose was the middle man the grifter the industrialist the accountant all that you know i think you could hold a gun to his head he wasn't going to tell you how to actually make sarin okay you know uh he is only going to tell you in broad terms how to make taboo so so what you had is both sides east and west you know they had part 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 the literally the next 30 to 40 years after that you know east and west are both convinced that the other side is further ahead in a chemical arms race in reality the west was further than 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 you know 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 it was shaped by the nuclear war and alexander von braun and the usm if i know it's i know this speculation game is just is this pointless but if we ended up using that 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 um i i think we don't actually know yeah yeah i mean there's a lot of what-ifs if the you know what if that first you know i mean history would have been fundamentally different if that if at the trinity site uh you know uh you know in in in new mexico they they they they like the fuse they press the button for that for the uh for the first test of a nuclear weapon and uh it goes poof yeah and it turns out to have been a wrong idea all along um where does history go with that you know uh that's you know you can yeah you know you know i'm not a huge fan of alternative history uh you know so but i i don't know i mean um i mean nerve agents pop up after after the after all this they pop up in the iran-iraq war in the uh the 1980s uh for similar reasons we have it's a similar rationale to the japanese vs the chinese the iraqis are facing a numerically larger enemy okay and are looking for ways to try to even up the score uh and it's an enemy that is less well prepared with defensive equipment so yeah yeah yeah uh you know you can make you can make it 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 it 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 still quite horrific i'm not but don't take me as any kind of apologist for chemical warfare because i'm not um but you know it's like i said you know have i shared the screen here am i showing you a picture of my book for your readers yeah no and i'm gonna thoroughly recommend your book because it just it highlighted lots of things i didn't know uh much about at all and uh and and and corrected my ideas and some of the stuff i didn't think i knew and it just it's a fascinating uh book we've only tackled the the world war two part of it so then the final question i'm going to leave you guys with otherwise we'll end up going on too long is is you just said you're you're not an apologist for chemical weapons but you know when when we look at other other aspects of technology and war and you know you could argue that the the the use of nuclear weapons has given us a safe power that we now i mean i mean i'm just down the road from cherbourg france gets have much of its power from nuclear power and that's that's a good thing and yeah and and rockets got us to the moon and then has there been any good to come out of the chemical i don't mean the fertilizer side of it i've been that chemical war for itself is it 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 started to discuss the sort of fertilizer and pesticide stuff and it really actually i know you don't want to go there but it it's very hard to disaggregate that out of the whole thing okay no i i can understand yeah yeah um i said i i i'd say it's 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 land mines before i don't see much good ever having come out of land mines 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 well come away from your book is that you know it's uh it 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 you know myself my friends who live in the somme 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 susan mustard gas oh out comes the the fear so um and every every major chemical weapons manufacturing program turned to be an environmental and health and safety nightmare yeah okay uh well i mean i i think i've had a fascinating chat i mean i think we we all i mean we haven't actually discussed what your background is because you know you you you know we've we just launched straight into 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 so i have a 30-year career in this field and i've sort of been sort of around the houses in it too having been started out as a us army chemical corps officer uh then just through sort of a what i can only describe as a forest gump set of circumstances ending up in the white house for 12 years you know advising the high and mighty then protecting the high and mighty and then you know working in private industry uh 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 that absolutely comes across in your book i mean i i it i would say it's gonna be definitive your book is going to be definitive i mean it just is i mean because we suppose boy went live there's not many people doing this work and then it it's and it's also i 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 reader it wasn't i didn't get bogged down in the science too much i had to go put it down and go oh my god it was it flowed like like a kind of a thriller um so i yeah i i can't recommend it enough so what we've done 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 the post war even though i'm a world war ii tv guy i can do sunny post war but uh hey i could give you a whole hour on chemical mortars if you gotta have chemical waters is interesting well i am gonna do a mortar show at one point i'm trying to i'm trying to find a panzerfaust expert now to talk about anti-tank weapons i've got my pet expert and i've got it i haven't found a panzerfaust expert yet but i will do but anyway dan it's been absolute pleasure talking to you for those watching i just want to mention the fact that i've had a uh the patreon contributions i i i'm taking to help fund this channel i want to mention a few people who've supported me recently that's brian fussfield jonathan bending brian yee eric adler tony suarez nigel barrett chris fenger nick lehrer 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 and and dan is prolific on twitter um in in 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 there and he's good at sourcing his um you know his information his so so follow down on twitter it's a it's an interesting read so well thank you very much dan i've i've really i'm not going to have enjoyed it because the discussing such painful ways to die and and before we went live i i said to dan my one of my abiding memories as a child is my father's great uncle bertie of den brighton who had been a victim of mustard gas in the first world war this horrific coffee had and he had got his yellow handkerchief he got a 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 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 out there i feel you're out there um protecting us with your information so um thanks very much dan have you enjoyed it as well yes and thanks for having me and i i'm going to sign off now because i i can smell my supper being cooked oh super okay well thank you very much dan then 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

Transcript for:Understanding Chemical Warfare in WWII

Transcript for:
Understanding Chemical Warfare in WWII