The green cloud that rolled down the shallow incline from the German lines was chlorine gas. Chlorine is heavier than air, and it pours like water, seeking lower ground - like protective trenches and fox holes.Dusk was falling when from the German trenches in front of the French line rose that strange green cloud of death. The light north-easterly breeze wafted it toward them, and in a moment death had them by the throat. One cannot blame them that they broke and fled. In the gathering dark of that awful night they fought with the terror, running blindly in the gas-cloud, and dropping with breasts heaving in agony and the slow poison of suffocation mantling their dark faces. Hundreds of them fell and died; others lay helpless, froth upon their agonized lips and their racked bodies powerfully sick, with tearing nausea at short intervals. They too would die later – a slow and lingering death of agony unspeakable. The whole air was tainted with the acrid smell of chlorine that caught at the back of men's throats and filled their mouths with its metallic taste.—Captain Hugh Pollard, The Memoirs of a VC (1932)
German troops had hauled nearly 6,000 cylinders of chlorine gas weighing 90 pounds each to the front lines and uncapped the cylinders by hand. Some German troops died from the gas, but some 6,000 French and colonial troops perished within ten minutes of the attack. The rest fled along a four mile front, leaving the way open for Germans to advance. They did so gingerly, because the Germans themselves lacked effective protection against the gas and German officers had not assigned enough reserves to the line to exploit a breakthrough.
Near midnight, Canadian troops formed up and attacked the Germans, driving them back and halting the German advance.
This was the first effective use of gas in warfare. Three months earlier on the Russian front, Germany had used gas-filled artillery shells, but it was so cold the poisonous gas froze and did not vaporize.
For the remainder of World War I, both sides continued to develop new and deadlier gases, new methods of delivery and better defense methods.
The US chemical warfare program began just prior to American entry into the war in 1917. The program was directed out of offices and laboratories at American University in Washington, DC. Just a few years ago, gas warfare shells were found buried in a residential neighborhood near American University.
In 1948, when my family lived in a rural area east of Oklahoma City, our next door neighbor was a man who had been gassed in Europe during World War I. Thirty years later, he was still suffering the effects of that attack.
Outside Ypres, large tracts of former agricultural land remain unusable because of the effects of persistent chemical warfare agents.
Since that time, on only a few occasions have nations used lethal chemical warfare agents: Italy in Ethiopia in 1935, Japan in China, Saddam Hussein against Kurds and against Iran. Most uses have been against insurgents or unprotected civilians (like the alleged Syrian attack), though even that is rare.
The non-use of chemical warfare in Europe during World War II is something of a puzzle. One possibility is that the agents are effective only under very specific weather conditions. It is difficult to find such conditions at the right time, especially with a dynamic battlefield. Then there is this:
Stanley P. Lovell, Deputy Director for Research and Development of the Office of Strategic Services, submitted the queston "Why was nerve gas not used in Normandy?" to be asked of Hermann Goering during his interrogation. Goering answered that the reason gas was not used had to do with horses. The Wehrmacht was dependent upon horse-drawn transport to move supplies to their combat units, and had never been able to devise a gas mask horses could tolerate; the versions they developed would not pass enough pure air to allow the horses to pull a cart. Thus, gas was of no use to the German Army under most conditions.
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