Germans adopt chemical warfare in World War 2

Deleted member 1487

Alot of people that did serve in WW1 didn't consider chemical weapons taboo. Alot of it depended on where they served. Churchill served in WW1, but never had the same hostility towards using gas in open warfare Hitler had. I would put that down not to any kind of morality difference, but to very different experiences in WW1 between the two of them related to gas in the war.

You are right that most of those who served in the front in WW1 considered it taboo. But, most does not equal all and there were plenty of people with different experiences then Hitler in WW1 who came out supportive of using chemical weapons on the battlefield in WW2 on both the Allied side and the Axis side. The majority opinion did win out in the Allied countries. It won out in Germany as well, but I have little doubt it might not have if Germany's leader wasn't part of the majority opinion on the matter.

In fact the reason why my scenario even included a flase flag op by the SS was that its very much true that the majority of the leadership of the Army would have been strongly against using gas as a first strike weapon.

It wasn't that it was taboo; both sides planned for its use in bombing cities. The issue was the that the juice wasn't worth the squeeze. No one wanted to use it because the consequences, both politically and militarily (and economically) wasn't worth initiation of it. So both sides stockpiled the weapon just in case, but didn't want to use it, because it would seriously hurt both sides. Like now: no one wants to use chemical weapons in state-on-state warfare because of the cost of retaliation; same for nuclear weapons. They could really help that first time around, but after that they will be used on you and once that happens it isn't pretty.

I'm surprised too that you don't mention that Germany thought that Allies had nerve gas too, so being aware of its potency, didn't want to experience its use on themselves.
 

Kongzilla

Banned
Does anyone happen to know what the Nazi bioweapon programs the Germans would have moved into if the war had gone on longer. Or should I just use the American bio-weapon program
 
I'll repeat again, the lesson learned from WW1 was, for those involved and un-involved, was that the use of chemical weapons militarily would result in an equally damaging retaliation, and that with strategic bombing aircraft civilians would inevitably be targeted. Thus the reason why Hitler, and everyone else, wanted to avoid using chemical weapons except as a last resort (And even then probably not) specifically to avoid retaliatory attacks against German cities. Thus weapons were developed as deterrents, nothing more. Whether Hitler is gassed is meaningless; the international consensus was that in a war between major powers chemical weapons were off limits, and if one side used them it would escalate into attacks against civilians.

Majority opinion in the U.S. and the British Empire kept them from being used on Germany or Japan. Hitler didn't have to worry nearly as much about majority opinion so his view on its military effectiveness and its negative attributes in warfare from his experiences in WW1 were what mattered.

As for your view on the complete unthinkability of the use of gas in WW2 a full one fourth of the U.S. public according to polling at the time wanted to use it on the enemy even though Germany or Japan hadn't used it on American forces so 1 in 4 supported the U.S. breaking international law and using gas first. Oh and lets just look at the Allied political and military leaders who wanted to use it.

In a secret wartime memorandum, Winston Churchill told his advisers that he wanted to "drench" Germany with poison gas. Churchill's July 1944 memo to his chief of staff Gen. Hastings Ismay was reproduced in the August-September 1985 issue of American Heritage magazine.

"I you to think very seriously over this question of poison gas," the four-page note began. Britain's wartime leader continued: "It is absurd to consider morality on this topic when everybody used it [gas] in the last war without a word of complaint from the moralists or the Church. On the other hand, in the last war the bombing of open cities was regarded as forbidden. Now everybody does it as a matter of course. It is simply a question of fashion changing as she does between long and short skirts for women."

Churchill's directive bluntly stated: "I want a cold-blooded calculation made as to how it would pay to use poison gas ... One really must not be bound within silly conventions of the mind whether they be those that ruled in the last war or those in reverse which rule in this." Specifically he proposed: "We could drench the cities of the Ruhr and many other cities in Germany in such a way that most of the population would be requiring constant medical attention ... It may be several weeks or even months before I shall ask you to drench Germany with poison gas, and if we do it, let us do it one hundred per cent. In the meantime, I want the matter studied in cold blood by sensible people and not by the particular set of psalm-singing uniformed defeatists which one runs across now here now here now there."

Churchill's proposal, which would have meant violating the 1925 Geneva Protocol outlawing the use of poison gas, was never adopted. His military advisers argued that gas warfare would divert Allied war planes from the more effective strategy of bombing Germany's industries and cities. Gas attacks would not be decisive, they feared, and Germany would very probably retaliate with devastating effect against Britain. Churchill complained to an associate that he was "not at all convinced by this negative report," but he reluctantly gave in. "Clearly I cannot make head against the parsons and the warriors at the same time," he complained in private.

The American Heritage article, written by Stanford University history professor Barton J. Bernstein, also reported that top American military officials urged the U.S. to begin gas warfare against Japan. Maj. Gen. William N. Porter, chief of the Chemical Warfare Service, pleaded in mid-December 1943 with U.S. Army superiors to initiate gas warfare against the Japanese, and on several occasions in 1945 Gen. George C. Marshall, U.S. Army chief of staff, urged using gas in the Pacific.

The New York Daily News declared "We Should Gas Japan," and Washington Times-Herald agreed, explaining "You Can Cook `Em Better with Gas." But this was a minority view. About 75 percent of Americans reportedly opposed initiating gas warfare. The United States produced about 135,000 tons of chemical warfare agents during the war, while Germany turned out about 70,000 tons, Britain about 40,000 and Japan only 7,500 tons. Although the Allies had larger stockpiles of traditional chemical agents, Germany developed far more advanced and lethal nerve gasses, most notably the devastating agents Tabun, Sarin and Soman. They were never used.

After the war a British Army chemical warfare expert concluded that Germany could have delayed the June 1944 Allied cross-channel invasion by six months if it had gas. "Such a delay," he noted, "could have given the Germans sufficient time to complete their new V-weapons, which would have made the Allies' task all the harder and England's long range bombardment considerably worse."

Even in March and April 1945, when German military resistance was rapidly collapsing, Germany kept its pledge not to use gas. Hitler reportedly refused to consider using poison gas in part because of his recollection of the horror of his own gassing during the First World War, which temporarily blinded him.

http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v06/v06p501b_Weber.html

The use of gas in WW2 was not impossible, though it would have certainly required changes to the time line. Hitler using gas as a first strike weapon OTL was near impossible at least not without changes to his view of gas in war which is not impossible and as I said and showed there were other Nazi leaders in the direct chain of command had Hitler died fully supported using it against not just the Red Army, but the Western Allies as well.

WW2 not turning into a war where biological and chemical weapons are used on armies and cities was very much not a historical inevitability that requires the intervention of alien space bats to have happened.

I'm surprised too that you don't mention that Germany thought that Allies had nerve gas too, so being aware of its potency, didn't want to experience its use on themselves.

I said Hitler didn't want to be gassed again and I also said that they weren't sure what the other parties had in terms of agents and didn't want to find out the hard way that the enemy had more and better agents then they do. I couldn't get any more blunt then I did about the MAD component to Hitler not using WMDs, but I also made clear my view that his own very negative experiences with gas was the biggest factor in him never approving their use against the Soviet's or Western Allies.
 
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