This letter must be discounted as evidence for early German use of chlorine, however, because the date "2 January 1915" may have been hastily scribbled instead of the intended "2 January 1916," the sort of common typographical error that is often made at the beginning of a new year. It may appear from a feldpost letter of Major Karl von Zingler that the first chlorine gas attack by German forces took place before 2 January 1915: "In other war theatres it does not go better and it has been said that our Chlorine is very effective. In cooperation with Fritz Haber of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry in Berlin, they began developing methods of discharging chlorine gas against enemy trenches. German chemical companies BASF, Hoechst and Bayer (which formed the IG Farben conglomerate in 1925) had been making chlorine as a by-product of their dye manufacturing. At high concentrations and prolonged exposure it can cause death by asphyxiation. Chlorine is a powerful irritant that can inflict damage to the eyes, nose, throat and lungs. The first killing agent was chlorine, used by the German military. Instead of vaporizing, the chemical froze and failed to have the desired effect. The first instance of large-scale use of gas as a weapon was on 31 January 1915, when Germany fired 18,000 artillery shells containing liquid xylyl bromide tear gas on Russian positions on the Rawka River, west of Warsaw during the Battle of Bolimov. 1915: Large-scale use and lethal gases Russian Red Cross nurses tend to gassed Russians brought from the front lines, 1915 None of the combatants considered the use of tear gas to be in conflict with the Hague Treaty of 1899, which specifically prohibited the launching of projectiles containing asphyxiating or poisonous gas. In October 1914, German troops fired fragmentation shells filled with a chemical irritant against British positions at Neuve Chapelle the concentration achieved was so small that it too was barely noticed. As bromine was scarce among the Entente allies, the active ingredient was changed to chloroacetone. The stocks were rapidly consumed and by November a new order was placed by the French military. The small quantities of gas delivered, roughly 19 cm 3 (1.2 cu in) per cartridge, were not even detected by the Germans. During World War I, the French Army was the first to employ tear gas, using 26 mm grenades filled with ethyl bromoacetate in August 1914. The most frequently used chemicals during World War I were tear-inducing irritants rather than fatal or disabling poison. See also: Weapons of World War I 1914: Tear gas Widespread horror and public revulsion at the use of gas and its consequences led to far less use of chemical weapons by combatants during World War II. The use of poison gas by all major belligerents throughout World War I constituted war crimes as its use violated the 1899 Hague Declaration Concerning Asphyxiating Gases and the 1907 Hague Convention on Land Warfare, which prohibited the use of "poison or poisoned weapons" in warfare. The widespread use of these agents of chemical warfare, and wartime advances in the composition of high explosives, gave rise to an occasionally expressed view of World War I as "the chemist's war" and also the era where weapons of mass destruction were created. In the later stages of the war, as the use of gas increased, its overall effectiveness diminished. Gas was unlike most other weapons of the period because it was possible to develop countermeasures, such as gas masks. The killing capacity of gas was limited, with about 90,000 fatalities from a total of 1.3 million casualties caused by gas attacks. This chemical warfare was a major component of the first global war and first total war of the 20th century. The types of weapons employed ranged from disabling chemicals, such as tear gas, to lethal agents like phosgene, chlorine, and mustard gas. They were primarily used to demoralize, injure, and kill entrenched defenders, against whom the indiscriminate and generally very slow-moving or static nature of gas clouds would be most effective. The use of toxic chemicals as weapons dates back thousands of years, but the first large-scale use of chemical weapons was during World War I. Contains Chlorine, phosgene (a choking agent) and mustard gasĪ French gas attack on German trenches in Flanders, Belgium (1917).
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