Not only America and the Nazis

It’s surely erroneous to say that only Nazi Germany and America used chemicals on a large scale in war. Japan used blister agents against the Chinese around 400 times in the Second World War era. In the Iran-Iraq War, it’s estimated that 5 per cent of all Iranian casualties, maybe 100,000 men, resulted from chemical attacks. Other examples include Italy mass-gassing Ethiopians in the 1930s and the British dropping mustard gas on Bolshevik troops and in Mesopotamia.     

Although the Nazis used chemical agents to murder millions in the death camps, there is only fragmentary evidence they ever did so in battle, possibly once or twice against the Russians and never against the Western allies. When asked at the Nuremburg trials to explain this “reluctance”, Hermann Goering answered that horses were still widely used for transport and no effective gas masks for animals had been devised.

Barry Kenyon

Pattaya