Hamilton’s words arrived just as humankind was experiencing another impetus for the realization of early visions of the lethal chamber. That new crucible was the battlefield of modern war.
CHAPTER 2
FASHIONING A FRIGHTFUL WEAPON OF WAR
The Great War that began in August 1914 ushered in deadly new weapons, including modern artillery, tanks, airplanes, and machine guns. It was the moment when Franz Kafka in Prague wrote his prescient short story “In the Penal Colony,” in which he describes the unveiling of a terrifying new execution apparatus.
Eight months into the fighting, the nature of warfare took yet another horrific turn. On April 22, 1915, Allied soldiers—French Algerians and territorial division troops—were dug into their trenches around the village of Langemarck, in Flanders, facing four German divisions that were hunkered down a few hundred yards away. At five o’clock in the afternoon, three red rockets streaked into the sky, signaling the start of a deafening artillery barrage, and some of the high-explosive shells began pounding the deserted town of Ypres and surrounding villages. From their distant vantage point, Allied officers observed two curious greenish-yellow clouds arise from the German line and get picked up by the approaching wind, gradually merging to form a single bank of blue-white mist, such as schoolboys might see over a swamp on a frosty night.1
According to one British soldier’s eerie eyewitness account, the French divisions were “utterly unprepared for what was to come.” They gazed spellbound at the strange specter they saw creeping slowly toward them. Within a few seconds the sweet-smelling stuff tickled their nostrils, without any effect. “Then, with inconceivable rapidity, the gas worked, and blind panic spread.” Hundreds fought for air and fell dying, suffering “a death of hideous torture, with the frothing bubbles gurgling in their throats and the foul liquid welling up in their lungs.” One after another, they drowned. Others staggered and lurched, trying to move away from the gas. As they did so, many were shot down in a hail of fire and shrapnel, leaving their defensive line broken. Suddenly their flank was exposed, and the northeast corner of the salient around Ypres had been pierced.
Six miles away, Anthony R. Hossack of the Queen Victoria Rifles observed a low cloud of yellow-gray vapor hanging over the area struck by the bombardment. Suddenly, from the Yser Canal down the road galloped a team of horses, lashed by riders making a frenzied retreat. “Plainly something terrible was happening,” Hossack thought, wondering what could have caused such a panicked reaction. Officers and staff stood staring at the scene, dumbfounded not only by the sight but also assailed by a pungent nauseating smell that tickled their throats and stung their eyes. As horses and men poured down the road, Hossack noticed two or three men clinging to one mount, while many soldiers cast off their equipment, tunics, and rifles in order to hasten their retreat. As Hossack later recalled about one man who came stumbling through their lines, “An officer of ours held him up with leveled revolver, ‘What’s the matter, you bloody lot of cowards?’ says he. The Zouave was frothing at the mouth, his eyes started from their sockets, and he fell writhing at the officer’s feet.”2 “It was the most fiendish, wicked thing I have ever seen,” another British veteran later exclaimed.3 After about fifteen minutes, the German troops rose from their trenches and cautiously but freely advanced across ground that until recently had been fiercely contested, stepping over enemy corpses as they moved ahead.4
History had been made. The terror of modern chemical warfare had been unleashed on the world. Under the cover of darkness, German troops had clandestinely buried thousands of canisters along the lines at Ypres. When the wind was right, the Germans had moved with perfect precision to simultaneously open the valves on 5,700 high-pressure steel tanks containing four hundred tons of deadly chlorine gas, a highly poisonous substance that strips the bronchial tubes and lungs, blocks the windpipe with fluid that fills the lungs, and causes its stricken victims to gasp for breath and fall dead.5
The Germans estimated that by the time the attack was over they had inflicted fifteen thousand casualties, five thousand of them deaths—a significant toll. Two days later the Germans mounted a second devastating gas attack. The use of gas provided the Germans with the advantage of being able to render battlefields uninhabitable for six to twenty-four hours after an assault, thereby enabling them to stall likely Allied advances. But its greatest impact was psychologicaclass="underline" the specter of poison gas constituted the most powerful weapon of mass destruction and terror yet devised. Although gas ultimately didn’t prove to be the breakthrough weapon that some had hoped, it still changed the nature of warfare.
Since antiquity armies had occasionally tried to employ poisonous or noisome gases, vapors, and smoke to defeat or incapacitate their enemies. In the fifth century B.C. Thucydides wrote that the Spartans used arsenic smoke during the Peloponnesian War. In the fifteenth century, Leonardo da Vinci sketched plans for smoke weapons formed of sulfur and arsenic dust. In the sixteenth century, an Austrian chemist, Veit Wulff von Senftenberg, wrote about stink bombs containing horrid mixtures of feces and blood, saying, “It is a terrible thing. Christians should not use it against Christians, but it may be used against the Turks and other unbelievers to harm them.”6 In modern times before World War I, however, the use of gas and poisons generally had been regarded as dishonorable under the laws of warfare. During the American Civil War, a Confederate officer, Brigadier General W.N. Pendleton, had considered manufacturing “stink shells” to utilize the “suffocating effect of certain offensive gases,” but he decided against it; even in that bloody conflict the combatants opted against introducing such weapons.7 International conventions of 1899 and 1907 had banned their use. The Hague signatories, including Germany and the Allied powers (except Great Britain and the United States), had pledged to “abstain from the use of projectiles the object of which is the diffusion of asphyxiating or deleterious gases.” (Technically speaking, the Germans’ cylinders were not “projectiles.”)
In the wake of the Ypres attack the Allies discussed what to do in response, but in the end they “realized there was no choice on their part and that they had to retaliate in like manner.”8 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. German chemical productive capacity, so vital to the manufacture of explosives and other military items, was unmatched, and Germany had a corps of top-flight chemists. They included Fritz Haber, the scientific genius who had personally directed the Ypres attack, which the Germans had code-named Operation Disinfection.9
Haber was an extraordinarily ambitious German patriot of Jewish descent who had converted to Christianity. In 1905 he published his most important book, Thermodynamik technischer Gasreaktionen (The Thermodynamics of Technical Gas Reactions), a pioneering work that exerted considerable influence in teaching and research. In 1911 Haber had been appointed to direct the world-leading Kaiser-Wilhelm Institut für physikalische Chemie in Berlin-Dahlem, a government-sponsored and privately funded research organization that was modeled after the Carnegie Institution in the United States. Haber’s invention with Carl Bosch of a process to produce ammonia from the nitrogen in the air not only benefited the manufacture of fertilizer, but it also had enormous strategic value, because ammonia was essential in the production of nitric acid, which was necessary for making explosives.10 When the fighting started, Haber threw himself into the war effort. He was, one German who knew him wrote, “above all concerned with the effectiveness of the new weapon; science, he once said, belonged to humanity in peacetime and to the fatherland in war.”11 Haber didn’t invent the use of poison gas as a weapon of war, but he took the idea to new levels.12 “We could hear the tests that Professor Haber was carrying out at the back of the institute,” one of his colleagues said, “with the military authorities, who in their steel-gray cars came to Haber’s Institute every morning…. The work was pushed day and night, and many times I saw activity in the building at eleven o’clock in the evening. It was common knowledge that Haber was pushing these men as hard as he could.” (His laboratory assistant died in an explosion during one of these experiments.)13