During WWI, Germany introduced the use of poison gas to the battlefield, with horrifying results. After the war, the use of poison gas was banned by the Geneva Convention.
Moving ahead to WWII, from 1944 on, Hitler and Germany were clearly fighting a losing battle against the Allies. Why then, did he never resort to using poison gas in an attempt to regain control of the war? I cannot believe that he had any qualms at all about violating the Geneva Convention. I know that Hitler himself was gassed in the trenches during WWI, but again, I don’t see that as a reason for him to not use gas in WWII, because that would assume that he had empathy for his fellow man. (And we all know that he was more than willing to use gas on helpless Jews.)
So. Does anyone have a theory or reasonable explanation for this rare act of humanity on Hitler’s part? I have read dozens of books on WWII and have never seen this issue addressed.
Fear of retaliation, mainly. Chemical warfare wouldn’t have changed the end results any, and any first-user faced immediate and massive retaliation but htier opponents. It just wasn’t worth it.
Both sides had the weapons, but decided that the cost was too high to use them.
Don’t remember where, but I read that the gas attack he sufferred not only temporarily blinded him, but affected his vocal chords as well. We all know, as well did he, that his spoken word was his greatest weapon…
By the time Germany had a reason to use poison gas, the Allies were bombing anywhere they wanted with, maybe not impunity, but certainly implacability. Hilter also knew that gassing soldiers was ineffective, but if he used gas on our troops, we’d use it back on his cities. Can you imagine what would happen if all of Berlin was covered in a cloud of Mustard Gas? It would be the end of the war right there.
And Hitler knew we had a huge stockpile of it ready and waiting.
What would be the advantage of using chemical weapons?
The delivery methods were the same as conventional stuff (aircraft bombs or artillery shell). Even if properly deployed, a shift in winds can imperil your own troops.
The effect would be horrific on the first few military units exposed to them, but gas masks would quickly be issued, and the overall impact strategicly would be nil.
Gas attacks don’t destroy factories and equipment, just people. Bombs, conveniently, destroy both.
No real long term gain for him to using chemical weapons, it seems to me.
WWI also differed in that it was full of battles in which thousands - millions at times - of troops crowded in a physically small and compact area and faced off against one another on foot. That made the use of poison gas feasible and reliable.
WWII troops were generally more spread out, more mobile, and more mechanized. They didn’t spend three years in France staring at one another. (Even in Russia there were few static long-term encounters.) Gas simply wasn’t as useful a weapon as it had been. The forms of battle were totally different.
I’m not sure I follow that reasoning. If we had the atomic bomb we would certainly have used that to obliterate a German city like we did in Japan and shorten the war. If we had a weapon that was that devastating I’m not sure why we wouldn’t use it to speed up the end of the war. I think the real reason is that you can’t really cover an entire city with mustard gas and there is a fairly simple defense for it (gas masks) that could be provided to everyone.
In addition, we had the bomb and no one else did, so nuclear retaliation wasn’t a problem. If Japan had had an A bomb, Truman would have thought twice about using it.
Slight nitpick: The Geneva Conventions regulating the laws of war weren’t signed until 1949. There’s an 1864 “First Geneva Convention” regulating the treatment of wounded soldiers and the privileges of medical units, but it doesn’t address the use poison gases.
Oddly enough, the rules for POWs were followed pretty well. Russians were mistreated, but that was because Stalin did not follow the rules for POWs. (Source: Slaughterhouse Five and the Gulag Archipelago.) The reason, I suspect., was fear of retaliation. The same reason the military isn’t nearly so gung-ho about torture as their civilian bosses.
If dropping mustard gas on Berlin would have ended the war, Roosevelt and Churchill would have ordered it in a second.
But it wouldn’t have ended the war. Gas attacks are horrible, but they can be protected against. If cities were regularly getting gassed, everyone in the air raid shelters would just put on their gas masks. It wouldn’t be foolproof protection against gas, plenty of civilians would die in gas attacks, but plenty of civilians were dying in conventional bombing. There’s no reason to believe that gas attacks would cause more casualties than conventional attacks, it’s more likely gas would cause fewer casualties.
Gas attacks can cause horrible casualties against unprepared troops, but mostly they are temporary area denial, or to force advancing enemy troops to take gas precautions, which will slow down or blunt an assault.
As Exapno points out, in WWI you had static trench lines. You just drop gas on the enemy trenches or when the enemy is making a push. But WWII was characterized by maneuvar warfare. And so if you dump a bunch of gas on a location a mechanized army can just go around. And of course, gas can be potentially as dangerous to your own soldiers as the enemy.
And not just fear of retaliation. Shooting and torturing enemy prisoners leads enemy soldiers to believe that surrender is pointless, so they fight to the death. In the process of fighting to the death, they are going to kill some of your soldiers. Allowing enemy soldiers to surrender isn’t just naive chivalry, it is a practical method for winning wars.
In addition, WWI was largely entrenchment fighting; the gas tended to collect in the trenches, and in fact, the purpose of using gas was to force troops out into the open. In WWII, positions were much more mobile, and armor played a substantially larger role. Gas deployed on an open field against a highly mobile opponent just isn’t that effective.
Unlikely. Setting aside the issue that Truman (likely) didn’t really understand the implications of atomic warfare, the fact is that the Japanese could not have conducted an air attack on the U.S. due to range. I suppose they could have attempted to detonate a weapon on a submarine that snuck into a port city like Seattle or San Francisco, but not with a great degree of confidence, while the bombing of Japanese cities from Tinian was relatively simple duty. It wasn’t until the deployment of the Tu-16 ‘Badger’ that another nation had a reasonable capability of effecting some degree of nuclear parity with the UK/UK bomber forces, and it was really the R-7 rocket (and the launch of Sputnik-1) which really brought home to the general population that the United States was no longer invulnerable to massive foreign attack from Europe or Asia, a position that had been accepted for over a century. On the other hand, the US was entirely capable of destroying every city on Honshu, and more or less did with the pre-Hiroshima firebombing attacks.
This is a super duper nitpick, but the Geneva Conventions had jack to say about chemical weapons, too. And still do.
Chemical weapons were outlawed by the Geneva Protocol (which I believe has been recently supplanted by the Chemical Weapons Treaty) which, despite the similarity of the name, is a totally different treaty.
No, the first Geneva Convention was signed in 1863, and has been added to at various times since.
What about using gas to stop the Allied invasion of France? Could a surprise gas attack have been effective at stopping the invasion? Germany knew it was coming and the general area. They could have held the beaches for as long as possible and let as many Allied troops get on the ground and then delivered massive gas attacks. Is there any reason this would not have been a devastating blow to the Allies?
You can’t just “deliver massive gas attacks” by snapping your fingers. If you can drop gas shells on allied troops on the beach, you could instead drop conventional shells.
If you were manning an artillery piece defending Normandy, and the allies are crawling up the beach, and an ammo trailer pulls up, which would you rather get…a load of gas shells, or a load of HE shells? I’d rather get the HE.
And what is the wind like? If the wind is coming off the English Channel, that gas is coming right back at the defending soldiers. Yes, it would have made the invasion more difficult if all those guys charging the beach had to wear gas masks as well. But the defenders would have to wear protective gear themselves.