British-made mustard gas was once used by the Poles against the Germans during the invasion of 1939, though the only further release of mustard gas was accidental and a casualty of war. In December 1943, a squadron of Junkers Ju-88 bombers bombed the southern Italian port of Bari. The attack was later described as the ‘Little Pearl Harbor’ and several United States warships were sunk, including the SS John Harvey, which was moored in the port, ready to be unloaded. This vessel was carrying a large secret consignment of mustard gas shells to be available for possible use in the Allied action against Italy. The bombers struck the ship amidships and blew apart the poison-gas weapons, releasing a vast cloud of mustard gas. So top-secret was this kind of weapon that no mention of it had been made outside the security services. As a result, the doctors had no knowledge of what caused the terrifying symptoms and none of the victims were given suitable treatment. About 70 American servicemen died of the gas; large numbers of civilians ashore were also affected, though no attempt was made to collect figures and the security about the nature of the agent was maintained until long after the war had ended.
The Allies maintained huge stockpiles in case gas weapons were used by the Axis forces against the Allied troops. Australia secretly and illegally imported a total of one million chemical weapons from the British throughout the war, and at the end of hostilities there were large stockpiles of poison gas around the world. Mustard gas weapons were later used against Yemen by Egypt in the 1960s and by Iraq in their war with Iran as recently as the mid-1980s.
Lewisite is a similar blistering gas that was first developed from an idea found in a research chemistry thesis at The Catholic University of America in Washington DC. It was developed further as a top-secret weapon by the United States military and experiments were carried out in the 1920s, when it was known as the Dew of Death. A total of 20,000 tons of Lewisite were produced by the Americans but by the end of World War II it was obsolete and, in any event, a British discovery, dimercaprol, was an effective agent to counteract its effects and became known as British Anti-Lewisite. During the 1950s, most of the United States’ stockpiles of the weapon were neutralized and dumped into the Gulf of Mexico though some were kept as a more modest reserve. Indeed, Lewisite from World War II has turned up in the United States capital, Washington DC, as recently as 2011. The Army Corps of Engineers, while digging out a site near the American University, found glass storage vessels filled with Lewisite dating back to the 1940s. More are awaiting discovery. The problem of poison gas, it seems, is still with us today.
But the most dangerous secret chemical weapons of all were the nerve-gas agents developed in Germany. The first was tabun, discovered in 1937, and sarin, first synthesized in 1939. Both were discovered by Dr Gerhard Schrader, a research chemist at the IG Farben Company in Frankfurt am Main. These deadly agents were followed by soman, invented in Heidelberg by a Nobel Prize laureate, Dr Richard Kuhn, at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Medical Research early in 1944. These light liquid agents were the making of terrifying secret weapons with appalling effects on victims. Nothing may be observed after exposure for up to half an hour. Early effects include a runny nose followed by intense pain in the eyeball and blurred vision. The chest becomes tight and breathing difficult; the victim starts to perspire profusely and vomit. Twitching and convulsions occur in the muscles, the victim hallucinates and a sense of fear becomes overwhelming. These gases act by interfering with the transmission of impulses along the nerve pathways of the whole body, and so breathing become impossible and the patients die in unimaginable distress.
During the 1950s, NATO recognized sarin as a useful weapon of war and large amounts were stockpiled by the Soviet Union and the United States. Experiments in chemical warfare also secretly continued in Britain at Porton Down, Wiltshire. In 1953 a young volunteer, who had been asked to participate in tests to ‘cure the common cold’, was killed by being exposed to British-made sarin. Both Chile and Iraq have subsequently been reported to use sarin. The regime of Saddam Hussein used this gas in attacks against Iraqi Kurds in 1988. It was manufactured from raw materials supplied by the United States.
These agents arose from German research into insecticides during the 1930s. We know that Germany was, for many decades, the world’s leader in chemical innovation. During the post-war years, further research at Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) in Britain led to the discovery of other potent agents. They were too toxic to be released for general use as insecticides, but the toxicity was of immediate interest to the secret weapons scientists at the Porton Down research facility. The result was a new, even stronger class of nerve poisons, the VX agents. Within a few years, the British officially renounced chemical and biological weapons and their research on the VX weapons was passed to the United States under a technology exchange scheme. Throughout the 1960s, large amounts of the VX agents were manufactured in the United States and stockpiled.
Many of the warmongers during World War II looked on their subjects as inferiors, as persons who hardly warranted the category of fellow human being. We know that they were conscripted to become slave workers; but many were also used for terrible medical experiments. Some were used for vivisection and for experiments of obscene brutality, and all because the aggressor had constructed a culture of invincible and inhuman superiority. Although the name of Dr Josef Mengele comes immediately to mind, the dawn of medical experimentation lies not with Germany, but with Japan.
In the years leading up to the outbreak of World War II, the Japanese occupied Manchukuo in north-eastern China. There are stories told to this day of disease-infected fleas and of bombs of bacteria that were used by the Japanese against their Chinese foes during these invasions of Chinese territory. As many as 50,00 °Chinese are believed to have died as a result of these biological attacks, and it is said that some areas are still regarded as dangerous, lest there be a further outbreak caused by germs lying hidden in the ground.
In the Pingfang district of Harbin the Japanese organized scientific research through a body code named Unit 731. It was embraced by the Kwantung Army, and was officially known as the Epidemic Prevention and Water Purification Department. The authorities of the Empire of Japan set up this Unit under the Kempeitai military police with the covert purpose of developing weapons that could be used against the Chinese, Koreans and other peoples whose territory they wished to invade. Although it was officially designated as an institute focusing on the health of the population, it was really devoted to the development of top-secret chemical and biological weapons.