WWII was not a static war like WWI and gas would primarily be used in defensive engagement. It was also illegal by WWII.
Total ass-chatter here, but I feel like I heard at some point that gas didn’t come out of the Great War with a terribly great reputation. It just wasn’t all that effective. It was used, because this was a war where everyone threw absolutely everything at the wall to try to get some advantage, and once folks started using it, there wasn’t really any going back–both sides included gas shells as part of the standard mix for a bombardment. But it won no battles; indeed, it made no significant impact on any after the initial surprise of its first use.
Not really a record that cries out to bring it back for the sequel, even aside from all of the various differences in battlefield conditions that would’ve had the effect of making it even less effective than it had been originally.
Is this a specific kind of oil?
I don’t think they’ve ever stopped being issued as standard equipment; but one of the reasons they are less identifiable in pics is that while they were all issued them, in the field they often discarded them and no longer carried them. Even the lightweight gas masks used by the US Army in WW2 for example weighed 3 1/2lbs and were as a practical matter for soldiers marching and fighting on foot across France or Italy or North Africa or wherever nothing but 3 1/2 lbs of deadweight.
It was illegal in WWI.
i dunno.
i was posting in answer to message 52 which stated it.
Except post 52 mentions Romanian oil, and you mentioned Romanium oil. I thought you were mentioning a specific kind of oil, as opposed to a specific origin for oil.
in a history lesson, my friend said that hitler didnt use gas bombs because the person who made them was a jew.
Fritz Haber, the guy who invented the first poisonous gas used in WWI was Jewish. But there were other gases available if that was Hitler’s problem.
Sarin gas (the same used by Assad against the rebels in Syria) was developed by German chemists in the 1920s. Is there any evidence that Hitler stockpiled large quantities of sarin, for possible use? As I understand it, sarin is much dealier than the WWI gases (chlorine, phospnine, arsine, etc.)
The British Expiditionary force which was in Belgium and France took stocks of their gas weapons with them (mustard gas and Lewisite)
At that time Britain had the capacity to manufacture small but effective quantities of gas weapons. They also had well developed plans for their retaliatory use.
The gas stocks were returned to storage sites in Britain before the Dunkirk evacuation.
Britain ( mainly Churchill ) made it very clear that they would not hesitate to use gas weapons in retaliation to any first strike from Germany.
There were also firm plans to use gas weapons if there was an invasion (civilian caualties would have been regretable but accepted for victory.)
All these matters are recorded in period documents now stored and accessable in the (UK) national archives.
Incredibly interesting guy. He basically invented chemical warfare. He also invented the process for synthesizing ammonia used to make modern fertilizers, which is the basis for half of today’s food supply.
As for Hitler not using poison gas because of its inventor being Jewish: Haber’s research led directly to the development of Zyklon B, the gas used in the death camps. It was based on a pesticide developed at his institute. And I don’t recall the Nazis having any qualms about using that.
Haber’s life is so full of contradictions and ironies that it makes your head spin. It’s like some kind of weird Greek tragedy. Recommended Radiolab episode for anyone who is interested.
This did not escape the notice of Bill Mauldin:
I posted this elsewhere in the SDMB. But it bears reposting:
“On a related note, during the campaign to push the Germans out of France one night there was a “Gas Panic” in the American forces. Someone sounded the gas alarm and it threw the American forces into complete terror and confusion. Later on, it was said that if the Germans had attacked that night, they would have routed a huge section of the allied lines and done god knows how much more damage after breaking through. After the panic was discovered to be a false alarm, SHAEF had all gas warning devices, those ratchet-clacker type things you see in English Football crowds, confiscated. They said the actual damage from a real gas attack would be far less than that caused by the panic.”
One of my teachers who was a soldier in WWII said when they captured German soldiers they had food and other goodies in their gas mask kits. No one on either side wanted anything to do with poison gas was his assessment.
I love reading old threads where somebody says something wrong, and you wish you could comment on it, but you can’t since it happened eight years ago, and then you keep reading and find that your past self posted the exact thing you wanted to post.
Thanks, past self.
You’re welcome, future self.
Let’s go somewhere quiet and make out with each other.
I thought you’d never ask.
Soldiers are eminently practical is probably a better assessment. The canister itself made for a useful container, being fairly light and waterproof. The gas mask itself was useless deadweight and got chucked because nobody was using poison gas. Soldiers wanting or not wanting anything to do with poison gas didn’t matter; if poison gas was being used they’d have carried their masks just like in WWI, but when the war had been going on for years and nobody was using poison gas no soldier was going to hump around the extra 3 1/2-5lbs of a gas mask.
By the time Hitler would have ordered gas attacks, how many generals on the front lines would have followed that order? Were the generals still afraid of of him in late 1944 - early 1945?
Not digging deeper than the wiki page it wasn’t discovered until 1938. It looks like it had some pilot plants that did see weaponization. The full scale production plant was captured before it was operational. Tabun on the other hand got produced in bigger numbers.
Tabun, Sarin, and Soman (yet another agent invented later in the war) were all nerve agents that could be absorbed by the skin. You didn’t need to breathe them to be killed. That was a pretty significant step when you consider that the existing protective clothing was not a full suit.
That would have been difficult. I don’t think any Japanese submarine was large enough to hold a 1940’s atomic weapon. And given the distance, would they even have had enough oil to have made the journey?
Little Boy was about 3 meters long, 0.7 meters wide and weighed 4400 kg. It could easily fit in a submarine. And Japanese had some seriously long range subs, which also shelled the US Mainland