This Day in World War I History (Poison Gas Introduced as Terror Weapon)

April 22, 1915—The Second Battle of Ypres began at dawn, as the German Fourth Army peppered French and Algerian divisions with bombardment by 17-in. howitzers. Then, suddenly, a greenish-yellow mist drifting toward the French positions signaled a deadly and terrifying innovation in modern warfare: poison gas.

The Flemish market town of Ypres would witness four battles, more than a half million dead that would fill 40 cemeteries, and the destruction of much of its Old World-style architecture from shelling in the course of World War I. But gas warfare posed a unique horror.

The chlorine gas in the second battle at this dangerous point—5,700 canisters containing 168 tons—was unexpected and, at least at first, effective. Lance Sergeant Elmer Cotton described, in chilling detail, how the gas worked on those exposed to it:

“It produces a flooding of the lungs - it is an equivalent death to drowning only on dry land. The effects are these - a splitting headache and terrific thirst (to drink water is instant death), a knife edge of pain in the lungs and the coughing up of a greenish froth off the stomach and the lungs, ending finally in insensibility and death. The colour of the skin from white turns a greenish black and yellow, the colour protrudes and the eyes assume a glassy stare. It is a fiendish death to die.”

Across four miles of trench lines, 5,000 French troops fell dead within 10 minutes. The rest, temporarily blinded, coughing, and coughing, broke and ran, leaving a five-mile gap and 2,000 men who were captured.

France and allies Great Britain and Russia had only one consolation that day: German troops were almost as frightened by this new form of warfare as they were. It didn’t escape their notice that this wind-borne weapon could be blown back on them.

For that reason, the Fourth Army’s advance was uncharacteristically tepid. The German high command, which had not ordered reinforcements, believing that no troops on earth could fail to exploit this situation, were, thus, unable to reap the advantage of what turned out to be their best chance to crack open the Western front in 1915.

As awful as it was, the truly terrible thing about poison-gas warfare turned out to be that both sides began to use it. Not even a full year into the war, the Allies eventually decided that, since theirs was a war over the meaning of civilization itself, they could not allow this weapon to be used against them without retaliation.

By the fall, the British were releasing gas canisters at Loos. Later, the French used phosgene, which was even worse than chlorine gas.

But the Allies would tell you that Germany got there first. They introduced not only chlorine gas, but mustard gas, which resulted in blistering skin, vomiting, temporary blindness, and difficulty in breathing.

Both sides eventually came up with gas masks to counteract the danger. Before that, though, the victims were many—and, in a couple of cases, already prominent or about to be so.

It was the misfortune of New York Giants pitching immortal Christy Mathewson to become exposed to poison gas before he even went into battle. His exposure, though only occurring in a training exercise, had the same deadly effect as in other cases, though more slowly: he ended up contracting tuberculosis as a result, dying seven years later.

Another victim of gas warfare was a corporal in the German army exposed to it under British fire at Flanders in 1918. In an American Heritage article from 1985 on why America didn’t use poison gas in World War II (even though we resorted to the atomic bomb), historian Barton J. Bernstein speculated that the WWI experiences of gas victim Adolf Hitler made him reluctant to expose his troops to the same danger he’d experienced more than two decades ago. The same article noted that Winston Churchill, worried that Hitler would launch gas warfare against Russia, warned that the British would retaliate by using it against German cities, while FDR announced a no-first-use policy.

(The image in this post, by the way, is called Gassed, by John Singer Sargent. The painter created it after visiting a casualty station shortly after a mustard gas attack.)

This Day in WWI History (Germany Declares War on France as WWI Readies to Explode)

August 3, 1914—World War I, the conflict that all the major nations of Europe planned for but that none actually believed would ever occur, assumed irresistible momentum, as Germany declared war on France and rebuffed attempts to assure the neutrality of Belgium.

Late on that long day’s journey into war, watching the street lamps below his Whitehall office being illuminated on what would otherwise have been a serene banker's holiday, British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey (in the image accompanying this post) made a remark that would forever sum up an entire era coming to an end: “The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime."

The June 28, 1914 assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, was typical of the unexpected nature of the war to come, including the ironies cascading upon ironies. In school, the man who killed him, 20-year-old Gavrilo Princip, had been ridiculed as a horrible shot.

Had Princip attempted the killing on the archduke’s own estate, he might have found himself prey rather than predator: The Archduke, a handy man with a gun, had, by his own estimate, bagged more than 5,000 animals, many of which now were hanging stuffed on the walls of his house. More important, when unexpected intruders ventured onto his estate, Franz Ferdinand was not reluctant to fire shots in their direction.

On the day Franz Ferdinand was murdered, Princip and two co-conspirators had already missed one opportunity—the grenade they throw at the archduke’s slow-moving car bounced off and hit the one behind it—when a second chance practically fell into Princip’s lap.

The archduke’s entourage had just left City Hall in Sarajevo, but his driver didn’t learn about the change away from the city center. As the driver maneuvered the royal vehicle, Princip, incredibly enough, had a second appointment with destiny. This time he didn’t miss.

The world exploded by the shots that killed the archduke and his wife was not merely one filled with monarchs, but one in which these royals were cousins who could remonstrate with each other in a cajoling, familial fashion, addressing each other as “Nicky” (Czar Nicholas II of Russia) and “Willy” (Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany).

In the end, these two monarchs helped precipitate a war in which they lost their thrones—and wrecked the lives of millions of their countrymen, both in the conflict itself and in the totalitarian regimes that succeeded the royals.

“History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors and issues,” T.S. Eliot wrote in his poem “Gerontion.” What the poet probably had in mind were the secret alliances that put the entire continent on the brink of war after the assassination—even though most of the countries had no strategic interest in the quarrel between the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Serbia.

When Woodrow Wilson proposed his “Fourteen Points” for concluding “the Great War,” its first diplomatic reform called for “Open covenants of peace, openly arrived at…diplomacy shall proceed along frankly and in the public view.” The President hoped to eliminate the system of alliances that split the continent in two opposing camps for two generations following the Franco-Russian War that ended in 1870. France and Russia stood on one side; Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy on the other. (In the end, Italy found an escape clause in its treaty obligations that enabled it not to join in the conflict in August 1914; it would not become involved in the war--and then would do so on the side of France, Russia and Great Britain--until a year later.)

The diplomats of Europe had such a tightly interlocking defensive machine that, once set in motion, nobody seemed able to halt it. Dwight D. Eisenhower could have applied the phrase “domino theory” more properly to the precarious state of affairs in Europe in early summer 1914 than he did to Southeast Asia in 1954.

The prewar crisis began within a week after Sarajevo, behind closed doors, only to burst out on a surprised continent nearly a month later. The key move belonged to Germany, which replied affirmatively to an inquiry from its junior partner in the Triple Alliance, Austria-Hungary, if the Kaiser would support eliminating Serbia “as a political factor in the Balkans.”

The Kaiser’s assurance emboldened the Hapsburg monarchy to present an ultimatum to Serbia on July 23 that amounted to total cession of the smaller country’s sovereignty. News of the crisis found numerous heads of state and diplomats off on holiday, scrambling to get up to speed (and often unable to do so) on events getting out of control:

* July 25—Austria-Hungary severs relations with Serbia after the republic accepts all its demands but two: a) the empire would be empowered to interfere with the assassination investigation, and b) it could interfere with Serbian affairs.

* Jul 26-28: Great Britain proposes conference to settle the Serbian crisis; Germany refuses, and Austria-Hungary declares war on Serbia.

* July 29—Russia tries to induce Germany to curb Austria-Hungary’s demands on Serbia, and orders partial mobilization.

* July 30-31—Germany warns Russia to stop mobilization; instead, Russian proceeds to general mobilization.

* August 1—With Germany refusing to offer a non-invasion pledge about crossing Belgium’s border on its way to France, Belgium mobilizes; Germany declares war on Russia; with Russia threatened, its ally France orders general mobilization.

* August 2—Germany not only demands the right to pass through Belgium unimpeded, and actually does invade Luxembourg.

This chronology only hints at one of the aspects of the war that distinguished it from earlier ones: the fear that a nation not only had to act, but act now, before a rival could fully mobilize and transport troops to the front by train.

Forty years ago, historian A.J.P. Taylor argued in War by Timetable that railroad schedules played a crucial role in hastening the pace of events. In his view, putting an entire nation on battle alert in the modern era was so hideously complicated that it took months to be ready.

One event in particular illustrates his thesis pretty well. Early on August 1, his communications with “Cousin Nicky” had evidently caused the normally impulsive Kaiser Wilhelm to have cold feet about invading Russia. He asked his generals about simply halting. They said no—10,000 trains were already on the move.

Britain now had the choice about joining the larger conflict. Grey indicated to the House of Commons that day that the nation had no vital interest at play in the Balkans, nor was it obligated by secret codicils to any treaties.

However, Prime Minister Herbert Asquith's government was following with special interest what was happening in Belgium. National opinion, the Prime Minister and his Cabinet concluded, would not support intervening solely on the side of France.

The violation of Belgian neutrality, on the other hand, portended a decisive change in the balance of power on the Continent toward Germany. Even in this instance, six Cabinet officials agreed on August 2 that it would require a wholesale invasion of Belgium to precipitate a British intervention.

That is what Germany ended up doing. When the British ambassador told the German Chancellor, Bethman-Hellweg, about his government's decision to honor Belgian neutrality, the German minister--who'd been on the nerve of a nervous breakdown for the past few days over the escalating tensions--sputtered that he couldn't believe Britain would risk war over "a scrap of paper."

That phrase, along with another--"the Rape of Belgium"--provided British propagandists handy recruiting tools in the early days of the conflict.

The next day, Britain declared war on Germany.

An entire generation—the best men of the major countries on the continent—would lose their lives in the war to come.

This Day in WWI History (German Commander Ludendorff Dismissed)

October 26, 1918—With his psyche collapsing faster than the war effort he had spearheaded, German commander Erich Ludendorff resigned under pressure from Kaiser Wilhelm II and his new Chancellor Max von Baden.

Some might say that this is pushing a little too far, but I think that Ludendorff is one of those leaders who bear the responsibility for the loss of the finest young men of not one, but two generations of his country. His errors as, in effect, “national commander” of Germany in World War I—going beyond the Prussian tradition of obedience to rulers, since the general played a key role in the making of that policy—would have been grievous enough. But even worse might be his postwar furtherance of a demagogue who brought not merely ruin but also shame on Germany.

In the past half-century, three fine military minds achieved impressive, even astounding tactical successes, but steered their country toward severe or even catastrophic reverses because of blindness to larger strategic goals. Let’s take them in reverse chronological order—from most to least famous, but also from least to most interesting (at least, to me):

* Douglas MacArthur, in the first year of the Korean War, threw Communist forces on the defensive with a daring amphibious landing on the Inchon peninsula. But, claiming that he knew “the Oriental mind,” he blithely dismissed warnings that North Korea’s ally, Communist China, would intervene in force if the United Nationals troops he commanded crossed the Yalu River. The resulting counterattack wiped out virtually all the gains MacArthur made, prolonged the war for another two-and-a-half years, roughed up his pristine image of infallibility—and contributed to his loss of command.

* Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto believed that, if U.S. forces were to be fought, as the Japanese government had decided, then the American fleet at Pearl Harbor needed to be struck without warning so that naval operations in the Pacific could be totally disabled. (“"We can run wild for six months or a year, but after that I have utterly no confidence.”) The Japanese attack on December 7, 1941 did come off as a total shock and did deal America stunning losses at its Hawaii base. But the consequent furor in the U.S. wiped out all isolationist sentiment at a stroke, united the public behind four years of remorseless combat, fueled an anger that contributed to the decision to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and led air force planes to intercept and kill the Japanese naval mastermind in 1943.

* Erich Ludendorff made sure that Russia ceased hostilities on the Eastern Front by secretly allowing V.I. Lenin to pass through Germany by armed train car from exile in Switzerland through neutral Sweden, where he eventually made his way back into Russia to foment a revolution. Lenin’s revolution did, as Ludendorff hoped, enable the movement of German troops toward the Western front—but it also installed a totalitarian Marxist regime that threatened German security for more than seven decades.

A second Ludendorff decision was less justified and produced more immediate dire results. Against the opposition of Baden, Ludendorff backed the Imperial Navy’s campaign to renew unrestricted submarine warfare, even though the initial effort to do so had only tilted American popular opinion sharply toward Great Britain’s.

Just as MacArthur pooh-poohed the idea of a Chinese intervention, Ludendorff professed not to fear an American entrance into the war. (Dutch or Danish intervention worried him. Go figure.) But, once Woodrow Wilson secured a declaration of war from Congress, the President was able to put at the disposal of the Allied high command four fresh divisions in the field by July 1918—the beginning of the end for Germany.

Nearly three weeks after his exit from the military, with his patron the Kaiser having abdicated and Germany concluding an armistice with the Allies to end the First World War, Ludendorff made one of the more ignominious departures from the stage of any defeated soldier—donning civilian clothes, a fake beard and blue spectacles as he took a train into Scandinavia. From there he wrote his wife: "My nerves are too much on edge and sometimes my speech gets out of control. There is no help for it, my nerves have simply gone to pieces!"

I ask you: Doesn't this all sound a bit like Captain Queeg and his strawberries in The Caine Mutiny? You half expect him to say next something like, "Where are my strawberries?"

In his article "Ludendorff: Tactical Genius, Strategic Fool" in the September/October 2008 issue of Military History Magazine, Williamson Murray credits the German with implementing effective, at times brilliant, innovations (developing the first modern defensive warfare doctrine for the era of machine guns and artillery) but also some terrible ideas, such as advocating the resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare.

Perhaps Ludendorff’s reputation as the prime mover behind victory on the Eastern Front gained him a reprieve from popular revulsion over the war’s misery, because—at least with the far-right nationalist movement growing in Germany—few blamed him for the sorry outcome of the conflict.

Part of this had to do with his successful if shameless identification of scapegoats who could divert attention from his own actions. The war had not been lost by Germany’s brave soldiers nor their commanders, he said. Rather, it was the fault of Catholics, Communists and Jews—leftists who’d undermined the war effort.

Charles Bracelen Flood's Hitler: The Path to Power (1989) relates the key moment in this mythology. General Neill Malcolm, leader of the British Military Mission in Berlin, wanted to clarify Ludendorff's remarks about who was responsible for ending the war. In the early summer of 1919, the British general asked point-blank, “You mean that you were stabbed in the back?”

“That’s it exactly,” Ludendorff responded with the alacrity of one sensing a lifeboat. “We were stabbed in the back—stabbed in the back.” Before long, that notion of a Dolchstoss, or “stab in the back,” was being adopted wholesale. It became one of the foundation tenets of Nazism.

As a rewriting of history, however, Ludendorff’s statement is breathtaking in its hypocrisy and gall. None of the common soldiers at the time—including Adolf Hitler—knew that Ludendorff and General Paul von Hindenberg had pushed for an immediate end to hostilities at the end of September.

Moreover, Ludendorff made this statement while under the care of a psychiatrist. Nothing wrong with that (in fact, I'll bet it was close to a first, since Sigmund Freud's theories were still relatively unknown to much of the general public). It's just that he had pretty much come undone by this point. "He had never seen a flower bloom, never heard a bird sing, never watched the sun set. I used to treat him for his soul."

It was probably fortunate for the general that the Allies put him on a list of people they'd like to try on war crimes. The resulting outcry united the populace against the victors of the war.

In 1923, Ludendorff, having thrown in his lot with radical nationalists, lent his remaining prestige to Adolf Hitler's "Beer Hall Putsch." The Prussian general sided with the anti-democratic forces in his country at a critical time, doing his nation an even worse disservice than before.

Ludendorff's critical mistakes, before and after the war, illustrate why it's best that generals confine themselves to the battlefield and leave the formation of war aims and overall strategy to democratically elected civilian authority.