At that point, Walker indicated, the United States would have had thousands of tons of mustard gas in France for the assault. “We could have wiped out any German city we pleased… and probably several of them, within a few hours of giving the release signal.” Walker concluded that the Germans’ knowledge of Allied plans was “a very big factor in [their] capitulation.” On Armistice Day, the CWS shuttered its Edgewood operations with 2,500 tons of mustard gas sitting on the piers ready for shipment. “Somehow we had been cheated of our prey,” Walker regretted, but he took comfort in his belief that the gas had expedited Germany’s surrender.87
In the 1920 Army Reorganization Hearings, Assistant Secretary of War Benedict Crowell made clear how central the use of chemical warfare had been to the United States’ planned 1919 offensive. Crowell testified, “Our offensive in 1919, in my opinion, would have been a walk to Berlin, due to chemical warfare. Of course, that was kept as a secret.”88
During the war, the combatants used a total of 124,000 metric tons of thirty-nine different toxic agents, dispersed, for the most part, by 66 million artillery shells. Among the German casualties in October 1918 was Lance Corporal Adolf Hitler, who described the incident in Mein Kampf: “My eyes were transformed into glowing coals and the world had grown dark around me.”89
Barry reported that when he visited the Edgewood plant in December 1918, it was “being dismantled. The machinery is being carefully taken apart, oiled, and wrapped and stored away—ready for the next war, should there ever be one.” Disposing of the contaminated parts and gas would be a little more complicated, he mused, especially because the United States had produced enough gas to kill everyone in both North and South America.90
Walker understood that chemical weapons could be made much more deadly if dropped by airplanes. Science fiction writers like Jules Verne in his novel Clipper of the Clouds (1886) and H. G. Wells in The War in the Air (1908) foresaw the frightening potential for conventional aerial bombardment in future wars. The world got a small taste of what this would be like prior to World War I: aerial attack from hot-air balloons can actually be traced back to late-eighteenth-century France, and Austria later used hot-air balloons to bomb Venice in 1849. Between 1911 and 1913, Italy, France, and Bulgaria employed aerial bombardment on a small scale in local skirmishes.91 The prospect of using planes to drop chemical weapons was even more frightening.
World War I provided the first real showcase of air warfare, though it only offered a small glimpse of what was to come. Germany struck first on August 6, 1914. Its zeppelins dropped bombs on Liège, Belgium. Germany was the first country to bomb civilians from the air when an August 1914 attack on a Parisian railway station missed its target and killed a woman. In September, during the First Battle of the Marne, German airmen bombed Paris on several occasions. The first Allied urban aerial bombing came in December, when French airmen bombed Freiburg. By spring 1918, German bombing had injured over four thousand British civilians and left more than one thousand dead. Though used on a limited scale, the potential for air warfare was apparent. British forces had only 110 warplanes when the war began. But Great Britain, along with France, produced 100,000 more before the war was over. Germany produced 44,000.92
During the 1920s, Great Britain made extensive use of aerial bombardment to defend and police its far-flung empire in places as disparate as Afghanistan, Egypt, India, Yemen, Somaliland, and especially Iraq, which British forces occupied following the defeat of the Ottoman Empire. Under the euphemism of “air policing,” the Royal Air Force conducted an extensive bombing campaign against Iraqis resisting British colonialism. The commander of the 45th Squadron reported, “They [i.e., the Arabs and the Kurds] now know what real bombing means, in casualties and damage; they now know that within 45 minutes a full sized village… can be practically wiped out and a third of its inhabitants killed or injured by four or five machines.”93
In the 1920s, Italian airpower strategist Giulio Douhet argued that aerial bombing now held the key to military victory and differentiating between soldiers and civilians was no longer possible. The United States’ leading advocate of airpower, General William “Billy” Mitchell, was thinking along similar lines. In his 1925 book Winged Defense, he warned, “If a nation ambitious for universal conquest gets off to a ‘flying start’ in a war of the future, it may be able to control the whole world…. Should a nation, therefore, attain complete control of the air, it could more nearly master the earth than has ever been the case in the past.”94 Others tried to couch their fascination with aerial warfare in more positive terms. CWS director General Amos Fries coined the following fanciful slogan for his agency: “Every development of science that makes warfare more universal and more scientific makes for permanent peace by making warfare more intolerable” (italics in original).95
While some planned for war, others planned for peace, fearing that another war augured even greater devastation. Will Irwin’s 1921 book The Next War went through twelve printings that year. Irwin, a journalist who had worked with the Committee for Public Information, painted a bleak picture of future prospects. He reminded readers that at the time of the armistice, the United States was manufacturing lewisite gas. He described the qualities that made it so effective and so terrifying:
It was invisible; it was a sinking gas, which would search out the refugees of dugouts and cellars; if breathed, it killed at once—and it killed not only through the lungs. Wherever it settled on the skin, it produced a poison which penetrated the system and brought almost certain death. It was inimical to all cell-life, animal or vegetable. Masks alone were of no use against it. Further, it had fifty-five times the “spread” of any poison gas hitherto used in the war. An expert has said that a dozen Lewisite air bombs of the greatest size in use during 1918 might with a favorable wind have eliminated the population of Berlin. Possibly he exaggerated, but probably not greatly. The Armistice came; but gas research went on. Now we have more than a hint of a gas beyond Lewisite…. A mere capsule of this gas in a small grenade can generate square rods and even acres of death in the absolute.96
Chemists, the most conservative segment of the scientific community and, not coincidentally, the one most closely tied to industry, took pride in their contribution to the war effort. That contribution didn’t go unnoticed by others. The New York Times announced that chemists’ efforts “should be gratefully acknowledged by the lay public. Our chemists are among the best soldiers of democracy” and “the most effective of our national defenders.”97
Chemists joined with their military and industrial allies in resisting postwar efforts to ban future uses of chemical warfare. In 1925, the League of Nations adopted the Geneva Protocol, outlawing the use of chemical and bacteriological weapons in war. The Coolidge administration supported it. Veterans’ groups, the American Chemical Society (ACS), and chemical manufacturers led the opposition. Meeting in Los Angeles in August, the ACS council unanimously resolved to go “strongly on record against the ratification of the Geneva protocol on poisonous gases, as against both National safety and on the grounds of humanity.” The chemists, five hundred of whom were still in the Chemical Warfare Officers’ Reserve Corps or the CWS, tried to convince the public that chemical weapons were actually more humane than other weapons, that the United States needed to be prepared for their use in the next war, and that the treaty might place the League of Nations in control of the U.S. chemical industry. Senator Joseph Ransdell of Louisiana hoped that the resolution would “be sent back to the Committee on Foreign Relations and buried so deep it would never appear before us again.”98 He got his wish. The committee never released it for a floor vote. In the ten years that followed, forty countries—including every great power besides the United States and Japan—ended up ratifying the treaty.99