Not necessarily; it seems to me that if you knew where enemy troop concentrations are, more or less, and you’re fighting a blitzkrieg-style war of maneuver, then hitting them with chemical weapons makes a lot of sense.
The idea wouldn’t be to actually kill or soften them up for an attack, but rather to harass them and pin them and slow them down/reduce their effectiveness, while your armored forces go around them and get into their rear areas to tear up their logistics and communications.
If you’re not planning on fighting them head on, using chemical weapons to mess them up seems like a reasonable idea.
Britain did use some chemical warfare; it was only itching powder, suitably applied in brothels that the German military would frequent.
This tactic was included in ‘The Special Operations Executive (SOE): Lessons in Ungentlemanly Warfare, World War II’, set up by Winston Churchill shortly after he became Prime Minister in 1940.
Predecessor Neville Chamberlain was criticised by MPs who claimed the Government “would rather lose the war than do anything unbecoming to an absolutely perfect gentleman”.
So Churchill created the SOE with the aim of setting “Europe ablaze” with ungentlemanly conduct.
*MR. JUSTICE JACKSON: And your reasons, I take it, were the same as the military’s, that is to say, it was certain Germany would get the worst of it if Germany started that kind of warfare: That is what was worrying the military, wasn’t it?
SPEER: No, not only that. It was because at that stage of the war it was perfectly clear that under no circumstances should any international crimes be committed which could be held against the German people after they had lost the war. That was what decided the issue.*
So you (or Speer) are saying that the Nazis were very careful not to do anything that could be construed as being crimes against humanity, and that might be held against them if they lost the war. I see… :dubious:
The “front lines” of WW2 were not moving back and forth 10 to 30 miles per day, every day for 5-6 years. There were many places where advances were not made for weeks (and months), and the “lines” were static.
The siege of Leningrad, for example, and Sevastopol.
My ass-pulled guess is that chemical gas weapons weren’t perceived as all that effective, once the enemy has sufficient gas masks issued out (and properly used). It’s morale impact is much greater than it’s lethal effects might otherwise suggest they should be, granted. Also, chemical weapons don’t actually destroy the structures or equipment (like bunkers, radios, or artillery tubes) the enemy is using, so you might as well send over some HE if your going to all that trouble, anyway.
However, one weapon class that did seem to be effective was of the incendiary/flambe’ kind: specifically white phosphorus, and napalm.
But I don’t know if Germany had WP… and I’m reasonably sure they didn’t use napalm.
What the OP was no doubt referring to is that Germans invented the first weaponized nerve gases in the late 1930s.
That Wikipedia article has an informative quote from the book The Crime and Punishment of IG Farben. It supports the theory that Hitler wanted to use nerve agents, but was dissuaded because it was believed that the Allies could produce greater quantities of the same agents.
The book A Higher Form of Killing is a great (if grim) history of the subject.
Although Speer did a very good job dissembling at Nuremberg, that particular statement seems plausible. In fact, the SS went to great lengths towards the end of the war to destroy evidence of atrocities they’d committed.
