“Did technically violate the Hague Convention,” which only specifically banned projectiles filled with poison gas? “No. The British reaction to the German gas attack was “outrage,” says Marion Dorsey, a history professor at the University of New Hampshire and author of A Strange and Formidable Weapon: British Responses to WWI Poison Gas. Many of the deaths occurred when panicked victims rushed to drink water for relief from the burning gas, which only made the chemical reaction worse, flooding their throats and lungs with hydrochloric acid. None of the British soldiers at Ypres had gas masks, resulting in 7,000 injuries and more than 1,100 deaths from chlorine gas asphyxiation.
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You see if you got to the bottom of the trench you got the full blast of it because it was heavy stuff, it went down.” Well then of course you immediately began to choke, then word came: whatever you do don’t go down. But immediately it got there we knew what to think, I mean we knew what it was. It wasn’t very high about I would say it wasn’t more than 20 feet up. “he next thing we heard was this sizzling-you know, I mean you could hear this damn stuff coming on-and then saw this awful cloud coming over. British officer Martin Greener described the horror of that first large-scale gas attack to the Imperial War Museum. After early failed efforts by the French and German armies to use tear gas and other irritants in battle, the first successful gas attack was launched by the Germans against the British at the Second Battle of Ypres on April 22, 1915.Īs the battle began, the Germans released 170 metric tons of chlorine gas from more than 5,700 cylinders buried in a four-mile line across the front. Yet from the very start of World War I, both the Allies and Central Powers deployed noxious gasses to incapacitate the enemy or at least strike fear into their hearts. At the dawn of the 20th century, the world’s military powers worried that future wars would be decided by chemistry as much as artillery, so they signed a pact at the Hague Convention of 1899 to ban the use of poison-laden projectiles "the sole object of which is the diffusion of asphyxiating or deleterious gases."
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