WMDs Existed In WWII-Why Wern't They Used?

Before and during WWII, both the Germans and the Allies had and were developing Weapons of Mass Destruction-chiefly biological agents and poison gas. For example, the French developed TABUN and Sarin gases in the 1930’s-both are very poisonous nerve agents.
The Germans and the Soviets both experimented with anthrax, plague, and other bacterial diseases…I don’t know if anybody ever manufactured LARGE quantities of these , though.
Given the primitive technology of the 1940’s, were large quantities ofpoison gas capableof being manufactured and dispersed?
If so, why didn’t Fascist Germany USE them? Seems like by 1944 they were desperate-wouldn’t a Soviet attack on berlin have been broken by a large-scale attack with poison gas?

Chemical agents were used extensively in WWI. It was horrific. I always assumed a treaty was passed after that banning such things in future wars, which includes WWII.

As I’m sure you are aware, the US did in fact use the only WMD ever deployed in war at the end of WWII.

A “weapon of mass destruction” is a weapon that destroys mass to unleash energy, either by fission (split apart…nukes) or fusion (crush…hydrogen bomb.) “Mass” is not an abbreviation for “massive”, it is in fact literally referring to mass.

It is unfortunate that even our President misuses the term to include chemical and biological weapons.

The error is made more laughable by the fact that chemical and biological weapons are actually weapons of zero destruction. That is the whole point of them. Carpet bombing destroys the infrastructure, whereas chemical and biological leaves all the infrastructure unharmed; left to be used by the conquering army.

Sorry Ellis Dee, but thats remarkably ill-informed. WMDs do indeed refer to “mass” meaning in large quanitites. Einstein will tell you that mass can neither be created or destroyed.

To the OP, as you likely are aware, the US did indeed use WMD’s (Fat Man and Little Boy) to end the Pacific theater.

I’m not able to cite any specifics, but I’m fairly certain that the Japanese did use biological and chemical weapons in Manchuria and China during the early stages of the war. They were one of the most aggressive nations in developing it, are accused of testing it on POWs and civilians, and they set up a large concentrated development center in the mainland. It was largely destroyed before Japan fell because this was a direct violation of the Geneva convention, a treaty signed at the end of WWI which sought to outlaw chemical and biological weapons as a result of the destruction caused by those weapons in the first world war.

I believe part of the reason Hitler didn’t order the use of chemical weapons was because he feared that the allies would retaliate…with chemical weapons of our own.

Indeed, as I recall, the U.S. did move Mustard Gas into the European theater, but we never actually used it.

I also seem to recall reading “somewhere” (Speer’s book?) that, in the very last days of the war, Hitler did order the use of chemical weapons, but that the orders never made it past his innermost cadre.

And here’s some info about Japanese use of chemical and biological weapons, against the Chinese, and the “exploits” of the infamous Unit 731.

It’s really a pity that the war in Manchuria isn’t better remembered in the west, today. And it’s a damned stain on the honor of Japan and the U.S. that 731’s members weren’t punished as well as they should have been.

As said in roundabout terms above, given Hiroshima and Nagasaki it’s somewhat bizarre thing to say ‘WMD weren’t used in WW2’.

Anyway, to the above I’d just add that it’s widely known Churchill was fully prepared to use gas against the Germans had they tried to invade in the late summer of 1940 – last resort, last country in Europe standing, etc. Deployed and ready to go along the south coast.

Gas was very popular in WW1, both sides used it with very mixed (wind-changing) results.

I’ve heard it said that Hitler was reluctant to use gas because of his own experiences in WWI.

Anyway, yeah, everyone didn’t use gas because they were afraid the other guys would start using it too.

To correct the OP, it wasn’t the French who had nerve gases. Only the Germans had nerve gas during WWII. The rest of the world didn’t know about them. They would have made a perfect payload for the V-1s and V-2s.

Omniscient wrote:

That has to be the funniest thing I’ve read all day!

That is how I have kept my girlish figure…

Up through the 1980s, what we’ve lately taken to calling WMDs were usually referred to as “NBC”, for “Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical” weapons. Of the three categories (politely avoiding Ellis Dee’s odd tangent):

Nuclear weapons – were used by the US just about as soon as they became available. In fact, we used every one we had. I believe it took some months after Nagasaki before any were produced. Without opening a debate on the ethics of the issue, suffice to say that no other participant in the war would have hesitated to use them if it had had them, for “humanitarian” or any other reasons.

Biological weapons – I believe the Germans may have carried out some haphazard research in the concentration camps, and I wouldn’t put it past the Soviets to have done so in theirs, but only the Japanese, as cited by Ranchoth, above, carried out truly systematic research. They never managed any really effective “weaponizations”, though likely thousands of deaths of Chinese soldiers and civilians can be attributed to “field testing”, while still more, including some western POWs, died as guinea pigs. I don’t believe other nations took biologicals seriously as weapons until they examined Axis research notes after WWII, though they had been used sporadically and unsystematically for centuries prior. The most “professional” attempt pre-WWII was a half-hearted German scheme to decimate allied draft animals during WWI. Anthrax spores found in a vial in a Norwegian museum in the late '90s were found to still be viable.

Chemical weapons – everyone had them, and kept them close at hand, ready for use. A combination of diplomatic concerns and the “balance of terror” kept the major powers from using them against each other – Even as their respective fronts collapsed, the Axis judged that the benefits of using them were less than the detriment of having them used in retaliation. Remember that the worse things got for the Germans and Japanese, the more likely that their chemical weapons production would be dwarfed by that of the allies, and their woes only compounded.

Japan appears to have actually used gas, but only against the Chinese, who had no real means to retailiate (Italy had similarly used gas against the Ethiopians in the '30s). While the final collapse of Germany occurred relatively swiftly in 1945, if an invasion of Japan had had to be undertaken, I think there’s a good chance gas would have been used by both sides.

McLink

Capt B. Phart – Good catch. Obviously the British remembered the WWI German Anthrax plot, and had some interest in being able to retaliate in kind. Still, I don’t think any nation matched Japan’s interest, to the point of undertaking serious production of biological weapons, or thinking systematically about how to employ them, until the Cold War.

I believe the balloon bombs the Japanese employed in a substantial, but mostly ineffectual strategic terror bombing campaign against the US were originally intended to spread biological weapons, or perhaps even radiologial “dirty bomb” materials. Only fear of retaliation in kind lead the Japanese to arm them with conventional incendiaries, to which they were already being subjected in substantial quantity.

The fact the US used atomic weapons “at the end” of WWII wasn’t a coincidence :smack: they would have been used as early as possible, or even earlier, but they weren’t invented yet. Had they been, they still would have been used “at the end” of WWII.

:dubious:

What about all that Xclon-B?

See if you can find a copy of Deadly Allies by John Bryden. The author found declassified documents detailing the Canadian involvment in allied biological and chemical research during the war, including anthrax production at Grosse Ile, Quebec, gas testing on recruits(!) at Suffield, Alberta, and insight into the extent of the British and American research.

At Suffield, there was extensive testing of airborne delivery systems for both gas and biological weapons. Sir Frederick Banting (the discoverer of insulin), was, until his death, one of the chief proponents of biological and chemical weapons research in Canada. A full scale anthrax production facility was set up at Grosse Ile. All of this was done with cooperation from the US and the UK. The details in the book were amazing.

Shortly after publication, the government reclassified the documents.

Do you mean destroying mass as in ‘becoming lighter’? Remember that even in conventional reactions the chemical energy beforehand shows up as mass, just not very much of it. The difference is that we’re used to a lot of energy being locked up in petrol, but not in Uranium.

Eh? Did Ellis imply otherwise?

Also, at the beginning of WW2 the possibility of the use of gas was very much on everybody’s minds. However, in part the very experience of WW1 tended to point in the direction that when deployed by combatants who were equivalently prepared, they did not provide a truly decisive advantage, but just made things nastier, for longer, for everyone. Thus no WMD use among the Big Boys until near the end, when a new WMD was developed for which nobody then had any defense or capability to proportionately retaliate.
(Besides, the tactical thought in WW2 tended to favor fast movement, the chemicals of the time – and the protective measures available to deal with your own – were not the best for a fast-moving battlefield. As for WMDs suitable for strategic use (wiping out your enemy’s industry or labor force), the agents available were insufficient or not cost-risk-effective).
Oh, and BTW, Ellis, in languages other-than-English where we add distinguishing tags to differentiate “mass=matter” from “mass=large quantity”, it is indeed the latter that is used to describe NBC weapons. (“Armas de Destrucción Masiva”, or “Armas de Destrucción en Masa”) It’s as in “Mass Communications”.

This is the silliest thing I’ve heard all day… :dubious: Where on Earth did you get this piece of misinformation from?

Mass/energy is conserved. Matter can be converted to energy, and vice versa. Considering matter by itself, it can certainly be created and destroyed; mass is therefore not conserved. However, this is only measurable for nuclear reactions.

There was an incident at the little italian port of Bari in 1943. The US(possibly the british as well) had captured and were occupying the port, and among the ships in the harbor was a fairly large quantity of mustard gas. The Luftwaffe(I believe), attacked and destoryed the ship(among others), releasing the gas and injuring a lot of US troops, most of which were unaware there was any mustard gas in the vincity until the symptons of exposure became apparent.

I hadn’t heard of the Bari incident. Was the ship carrying the Mustard gas Italian or Allied? Your post implies it wsa one of those captured (Italian) but I’m not quite sure.