Search Results

The anticipation and fear of what chemical weapons might do to a civilian population haunted the interwar imaginary in the aftermath of the introduction and widespread use of poison gas on the battlefields of the First World War. In no place, perhaps, was this more apparent than France, one of the few nations whose civilian and combatant populations bore direct witness to this innovative weaponry. One object—the gas mask—emerged to mitigate the physical effects of gas warfare. It would come to play a crucial role in the calculated management of the destabilising emotions of anxiety and fear that accompanied the deployment of chemical arms, but its emotional life extended beyond its intended aims. This chapter combines the material and emotional history of total war by using a single object to uncover more fully the dislocation and devastation wrought by modern, industrial war. It does so by analysing key aspects of the life of the civilian gas mask from its first appearance in France during the First World War to its symbolic power in interwar civil defence and war resistance.

The Great War that began in August 1914 ushered in deadly new weapons, including modern artillery, tanks, airplanes, and machine guns. The terror of modern chemical warfare was unleashed on the world when German troops clandestinely buried thousands of canisters containing the poisonous chlorine gas along the lines at Ypres. As a result of Germany's actions at Ypres, previous agreements had gone out the window, and the resulting arms race to devise more and deadlier gases would transform the nature of war itself and have many profound implications for the development of the gas chamber. Germany's first use of poison gas in World War I reflected its global dominance in the field of chemistry. Not to be outdone by the Germans, Britain set up a massive chemical warfare center at Porton Down. The Allies also established gas schools in France to train every soldier in chemical warfare tactics. In the United States, plants were built to manufacture poison gases for its troops or its allies.

This chapter focuses on the American Expeditionary Force's (AEF) experiences with poison gas on the Western Front and the logistical effort made by the United States to support chemical warfare during World War I. The nascent Chemical Warfare Service (CWS) had to support battlefield operations in 1918 as the AEF faced poison gas in Europe. On the whole, the CWS found itself seriously challenged by conditions on the Western Front and dependent on U.S. allies for information and equipment. This chapter examines the CWS's efforts to train the AEF, manufacture chemical weapons, and use poison gas on the battlefield throughout 1918. It discusses the comparatively heavy gas casualties suffered by the AEF in the fighting due to the inadequacy of the gas-mask training that its soldiers were given. It also considers the AEF's limited use of chemical weapons against the Germans and the U.S. Army's inability to organize for chemical warfare jeopardized the gas warfare program's status after World War I ended.

When World War I ended, the United States shut down its poison gas plants for a time. But General Amos Fries and the chemical industry vowed to fight the dismantling of the precious apparatus they had worked so hard to build. Due to their efforts, despite overwhelming public opinion against gas warfare and strong political opposition from his own commanders, Fries and his allies somehow succeeded in gaining passage of the National Defense Act of 1920, which not only saved the Chemical Warfare Service (CWS) from extinction, but also turned it into a permanent part of the army. Under Fries's leadership, the CWS publicly turned its attention to undertaking cooperative enterprises with various government departments to harness the fruits of wartime gas research in constructive, peaceful ways. A fierce industrial and political battle ensued over one of the world's deadliest and more useful poisons: cyanide. The mining industry relied on cyanide's ability to separate silver, gold, copper, lead, and other ores. Fries and his allies lobbied against America's support for the Geneva Protocol, which sought to outlaw chemical warfare.

Armed with the discovery that the louse was the carrier of typhus, Nazi Germany's military hygienists set out to ameliorate the squalid conditions in the trenches on the Western Front during World War I. They built up defences against incursions by rats, lice, and mosquitoes, and derided North African French troops as typhus carriers. The confrontation with alien species of disease carriers led to draconian delousing of civilians and racial stigmatization; in the Near East, German hygiene experts came to the threshold of genocide. The network of hygiene institutes was rapidly mobilized for strategic tasks. The shock of encountering typhus in Serbia forced the disease onto the Allies' medical agenda. But two elements were distinctive on the German side — the German interest in the use of poison gas for delousing and mounting racial prejudice against the Polish Jews. Typhus worsened as the military situation deterioriated, and medical animosity against the eastern Jews — derided as treacherous vermin — intensified. Epidemics provided a pretext for genocide.

Campaigns against insects in the east became entwined with preparations for biological warfare. The idea of unleashing disease pathogens to destroy Nazi Germany's enemies fascinated disinfection experts, for it seemed to them that if a disease could be prevented, it should also be possible for epidemics to be deliberately spread. The fear that Germany's opponents were stockpiling arsenals of biological and chemical weapons spurred on offensive preparations. Consequently, disease control programmes became radicalized, shifting from containment and prevention to strategies for total eradication of pathogens and their carriers. Whereas the Germans clung to delousing by poison gas, the Allies adopted innovative DDT-based methods, and accelerated louse- and mosquito-control studies. Ironically, Germany's development of biological warfare remained stunted. Leading figures in biological warfare profoundly disagreed over theoretical approaches to epidemiology. As the German sanitary measures became more draconian, they accelerated genocide.

Nasser’s “long-breath strategy” from 1966 through the end of 1967 was focused on maintaining the security of the strategic triangle while using fewer troops. Instead, an intensive bombing campaign that included poison gas was used to target the vast royalist cave network in North Yemen. Despite Egypt’s violation of the Geneva Protocols of 1925, the international community failed to condemn the use of chemical weapons, demonstrating the tenacity of the poison gas taboo. Saudi Ambassador Jamil Baroody’s fierce campaign against UN Secretary General U Thant’s inaction failed to persuade the UN to act. The ICRC, NATO, United States, and UK refused to openly criticize Egypt, as they did not want to fall out of favor with Nasser and suffer economic or political repercussions.

In July 1941, Adolf Hitler declared the Jews as the ‘ferment of social decay’ and boasted that he had discovered how the ‘Jewish race’ as a ‘bacillus’, ‘virus’, ‘toxin’, or consumptive ‘parasite’ poisoned and infected Nazi Germany's body politic. Convinced that infectiousness was an attribute of Jewish racial inferiority, the lethal threat of the Jewish pathogens justified resort to a strong antidote: Hitler prescribed the elimination of ‘Jewish bacteria’ to revive the vitality of the Aryan race. The Nazi war machine mobilized tropical medicine and bacteriology to provide a shield of immunity against lethal diseases in the east. Hitler's sense of continuing the legacy of Robert Koch's bacteriological breakthroughs was consistent with camouflaging genocide by means of the terminology and technologies of disinfection. Expertise in hygiene and liberal notions of social reform facilitated the development of the lethal trinity of showers, crematoria, and poison gas chambers to sweep away lice and other insect pests.

This chapter examines the United States' chemical warfare program as it developed before the nation began sending soldiers to fight in France during World War I. In 1917, the United States was rapidly and haphazardly putting together a chemical warfare organization capable of a variety of responsibilities that included performing research, manufacturing war gases and gas masks, training the soldiers of the American Expeditionary Force (AEF) to defend themselves against enemy gas, and deploying gas on the battlefield. While the members of the chemical warfare program performed well under the circumstances, more advanced preparation would have improved readiness and mitigated the need for emergency measures. This chapter discusses the use of poison gas and gas masks and the United States' chemical weapons manufacturing operations during World War I.

This chapter discusses the Chemical Warfare Service's (CWS) struggle to continue chemical weapons work in the face of a hostile political environment as the U.S. Army sought to digest the lessons learned from World War I under the budget constraints of the postwar period. It considers the uncertain future of the CWS and chemical weapons after the war as the American public reacted against modern weapons in general and poison gas in particular because of the battlefield suffering it had caused. It also discusses the attempts of policymakers in the Department of War and the U.S. Army to limit all chemical warfare activities in the armed forces after the armistice. Finally, it examines how the CWS, primarily under the leadership of Amos A. Fries, tried to counter anti-gas sentiment and promote chemical weapons and manage to lay a foundation that would allow them to continue improve their reputation through the 1920s.

This chapter investigates violent acts committed by the new religious movement Aum Shinrikyo during the 1980s and 1990s. Most studies portray Aum Shinrikyo’s development from the hindsight of the poison-gas attack, thereby suggesting that it was an internal and consequent process initiated in the very beginning and “necessarily” by its leader, Asahara Shoko, and his teachings. In contrast to such monocausal explanation attempts, the present study traces the internal (organizational and doctrinal) developments of the group in historical order and in their social context. It is the process of reciprocal interactions with contemporary society in Japan that triggered and accelerated the group’s violent potential.

This chapter evaluates the successes and failures of the Chemical Warfare Service (CWS) during the second half of the 1920s, in light of the organization's ultimate incapacity to influence foreign policy. By 1926, the CWS was a well-established organization capable of supporting the continuation of poison gas work into the foreseeable future. It had successfully influenced public policy to continue chemical warfare research after World War I. However, the CWS and its supporters failed to convince people to believe that gas warfare was humane. Public hostility toward chemical weapons ultimately led to the signing of international agreements prohibiting chemical warfare. This chapter discusses the CWS's sustained accomplishment during the period 1926–1929, with particular emphasis on its new chemical weapons initiatives in partnership with other departments and branches of the military; the United States' continued support for international efforts to prevent chemical warfare; and the CWS's reorganization into the U.S. Army Chemical Corps after World War II.

This book documents the institutional history of the Chemical Warfare Service (CWS), the U.S. Army organization responsible for chemical warfare, from its origins in 1917 through Amos A. Fries's departure as CWS chief in 1929. It examines the U.S. chemical warfare program as it developed before the nation began sending soldiers to fight in France during World War I; the American Expeditionary Force's experiences with poison gas on the Western Front; the CWS's struggle to continue its chemical weapons program in a hostile political environment after the war; and CWS efforts to improve its public image as well as its reputation in the military in the first half of the 1920s. The book concludes with an assessment of the CWS's successes and failures in the second half of the 1920s. Through the story of the CWS, the book shows how the autonomy of the military-industrial complex can be limited when policymakers are confronted with pervasive, hostile public opinion.

This chapter presents systematic overviews of Aum Shinrikyo, its historical development, and the significant body of scholarship that has been carried out on the movement. Analyses of Aum Shinrikyo—or Aleph as it is now called—must necessarily come to grips with the task of explaining the 1995 poison gas attack on the Tokyo subway system. This and other criminal acts became known as the Aum incident. The discussion is built around the question: How did a group that began life as a peaceful yoga group transform into an apocalyptic doomsday religion, capable of acts of terrorism?

Much of Buster Keaton’s slapstick comedy revolves around his elaborate outdoor sets and the crafty weather design that destroys them. In contrast to D. W. Griffith, who insisted on filming in naturally occurring weather, and the Hollywood norm of fabricating weather in the controlled space of the studio, Keaton opted to simulate weather on location. His elaborately choreographed gags with their storm surges and collapsing buildings required precise control of manufactured rain and wind, along with detailed knowledge of the weather conditions and climatological norms on site. Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928) is one of many examples of Keaton’s weather design in which characters find themselves victims of elements that are clearly produced by the off-screen director. Keaton’s weather design finds parallels in World War I strategies of creating microclimates of death (using poison gas) as theorized by Peter Sloterdijk.

Nasser’s decision to completely withdraw from Yemen was brought about by Egypt’s defeat in the June 1967 war with Israel. Egyptian military officials have often blamed their 1967 defeat on Yemen, citing spurious statistics on troop numbers abroad and Field Marshal Abdel Hakim Amer’s misdirected attention from the Sinai border with Israel. While most of these assertions lack credibility, there was in fact a direct connection between Yemen and June 1967. British mercenaries organized a clandestine group of Israel Air Force pilots and navigators to airlift weapons and supplies to royalist tribal armies behind enemy lines. Israeli decision makers were given front-row seats to Egypt’s expanding air power and weapons capabilities—the use of poison gas in particular—providing further encouragement to preemptively strike Egypt’s air force and avoid the same fate as the northern highlands of Yemen.

Bradley held clinics across France for families in flight, with special attention to tuberculosis victims. The great influenza pandemic brought new treatment challenges. When the only son of her closest friends was killed in the battle of the Argonne, Bradley again grieved deeply. Upon return from France, she did a Children’s Bureau study of over five hundred mothers in Georgia’s mountains, diagnosing and treating wherever possible.