thanks,
the rokester
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Unregistered(d) |
chemical warfare |
Lead | |
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Posts: 0 (01/12/04 12:46:48) |
why wasn't it used? If it was, why not as broadly as it was in ww1? I know it is unpredictable relying on wind and such but one would think that at dire times either side might have used it. Was it just not effective enough? I dont recal the standard issue field equip for any armies including masks. Whats up?
thanks, the rokester |
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Manstein001 |
Re: chemical warfare | ||
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Posts: 38 (01/12/04 17:30:32)
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Un sporty!!!!!!!!
'where Rommel is, there the front is.'
-Africa Korps saying |
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PanzerSchreck |
Re: chemical warfare | ||
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Posts: 201 (01/12/04 17:51:51) |
Manstein used chemical weapons in the Crimea in 1942, and the Germans certainly had large stockpiles of chemical weapons.
Maybe the Germans simply didn't use it more because it was not really part of their tactical and operational doctrine? It might be useful for hitting large concentrations of troops in the open, but it would tend to give away the element of surprise, and air bombardment would probably do the job better, faster and with more predictable results. The British used CW in the inter-war period to deal with troublesome natives, and the Italians of course used it in Abyssinia. Possibly, it was simply thought that a regular enemy would be well prepared to deal with a chemical assault, which would have been unpredictable in its results in the first case anyway? The armies of the 1940 campaign in the west were certainly well-equipped to deal with use of CW. This, however, is just idle speculation on my part - I am, however, fairly certain that gentlemanly considerations played no part in the very limited use of CW in WWII. |
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Manstein001 |
Re: chemical warfare | ||
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Posts: 38 (01/12/04 21:18:37)
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Oh i was just giving my opinion. I simply like the old fashion killing kind of thing. Guns, men, tanks [they come up later, but at least you can see the darn thing you know] and fre**ing charge up to the lines. LOL
'where Rommel is, there the front is.'
-Africa Korps saying |
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Unregistered(d) |
manstein and cw | ||
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Posts: 0 (01/13/04 02:20:18) |
i didnt know he used it? can u be at all more specific so i may find out more about this please? Manstein and hoth are two of my war heros. unfortuneatly this summer i found out both were rabid anti-semites.
the rokester |
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Manstein001 |
Re: manstein and cw | ||
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Posts: 38 (01/13/04 10:38:56)
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Manstein was i think not gulity in the first trail and the next was only one by the allied to show to the public that soviet union was't such a bad country and stalin was a cute little angel and that he was fighting evil manstein and other german panzer officers. So i don't think i can really see manstein as been anything but a good loyal solider.
Oh it was hoth who was with Guderian during the directive 21 [refering to the first moscow drive] right? I can't seem to remember the name. Now there were some great piececs of pincer movement and in these movement you really see the perfect use of all three ground forces by Guderian...and is it hoth? Right. Still not sure about the name. I will have to check the darn book again. Although i can't find anything more aganist Manstein or any german officer then i could fine about south african white and many american who were racist. In fact, when Rommel captured some of the south african officer, the refused to sit next to the back solider at which point rommel did exactly the same [which was to get them together]. However, in manstein memoirs and incidents which i have studied i find manstein to be a little more aganist blacks then anti-semtic[ its a very weird term -- anti-semites, i find the term weird because i know three languagues and all semites, yet i am not a jew]. In fact if you would i think read there is book regarding the France invasion [ the manstein plan], i don't seem to remember the books name in which there were first giving a small history of manstein and his career, when there was a quote by manstein regarding the hitler policy of moving out jews from the army. I believe the quote was around "The honor of these young men, is all our honor". To be clear Manstein was brought up in a military world, and that world only. To him a solider's honor was above all and that is exactly what manstein is referring to. However that solider's honor worked both ways for Manstein. The point is simply, Manstein was not good at tactics as he was on stratgedy. To be blunt, i would rather be under Guderian or Hoth's command then under Manstein or Rommel [ i would prefer him, but not when he loses his sight on things, which he does from time to time]. BUT god bless the 8th Army. Specially the 13th Corp!!!!!!!!!! For the recrod my favorite general is Rommel. However i think Manstein to be the greatest strategist. |
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PanzerSchreck |
CW in WWII | ||
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Posts: 201 (01/13/04 16:04:23) |
Ok, sources are limited, but Google brought up this:
www.cbwinfo.com/Chemical/...r/HD.shtml Apparently, the use of CW in 1942 is ill-documented, possibly because it was covered-up already by contemporaries because it was in violation of the Geneva conventions. Personally, I have no doubts that it would have been used in the right circumstances. Gentlemanly concerns and sporting behaviour have no place in modern warfare. |
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PanzerSchreck |
Another link | ||
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Posts: 201 (01/13/04 20:22:46) |
Rather less high brow, and I question the seriousity of the authors, it is interesting regardless.
www.vectorsite.net/twgas2.html#m1 Still a conspicous lack of info on CW use in the Crimea in 1942. |
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Sewer King |
Re: CW in WWII | ||
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Posts: 126 (01/13/04 21:10:35) |
One of Edward Jablonski's aviation histories, Flying Fortress, mentions in passing the lack of CW in World War II. It had in fact come up in public discussion right after the war.
There was more serious discussion and active consdieration of using it than most realize. Everyone knows that the Germans developed Tabun as the first organophosphate nerve gas, and their standard, with Sarin and Soman in pilot production. Hitler had proposed first use against the Soviet advance late in the war, but his generals didn't advocate it and the Fuehrer did not return to the subject. It's especially interesting when you remember Hitler wanted a scorched-earth policy for the loss of German territory; how much faith he put in various secret weapons; how he accused his generals of cowardice; how desperate the failing defense of the Reich; and how ill-tempered he was. It seemed like he would have used the one weapon the Allies had no defense against. But there are other likely technical reasons. Tabun was loaded into artillery shells and aerial bombs, but by that time the Luftwaffe was far less able to make wide use of the latter. There may also be the relative lack of antidotes to the new gas which was not widely known to the Germans themselves. Today we have atropine-based muscle relaxants for this, but was this as available as the gas? There were a few terrible accidents at the Tabun factory at Dyrenfurth, near Silesia where nerve gas plant workers got hit with the stuff, and they died before they could be treated -- I think the bodies made for useful autopsies of casualties. One of the creators of the nerve gases was Otto Ambros. He and a Dr Schraeder are the initials "S" and "A" in the name "Sarin". Reportedly he himself discouraged the first use of nerve gas because he thought the Allies had it too! This was said to be based on the finding that insecticide development had vanished from the Allies' scientific literature, and that was how nerve gases had begun in German research. In reality, the Allies had just meant to cover up the development of DDT. It's also known that Hitler himself was a gas casualty late in World War I, and he had an instinctive dislike of this kind of warfare. Besides, his generals' blitzkrieg tactics were based on speed and avoidance of the deadlocked battlefront that gave gas its first chance. I haven't seen it in print, but I fully expect also that the German generals simply did not want to be remembered as the ones who revived gas warfare. The Germans were hated enough for it in the first war. The officer corps had already plotted against Hitler's life; they had to worry about their own (surviving) necks for after the war. And even though war throws out gentleman's rules, there are still war-crimes trials -- and hangmen -- awaiting those who break some of them. Gas warfare was outlawed in the 1925 Geneva Protocols (little-known that Poland pushed to add Biological warfare to that, since they suspected the USSR of trying it on them). Roosevelt also disliked chemical warfare. Iwo Jima was the most famous of the Pacific WW2 victories, but it's not widely-known that the original US plan was to gas the island by naval bombardment before invading. Most of his officers approved it, but FDR expressly turned it down and Iwo Jima was conventionally taken. Japan also used chemical warfare as well as biological warfare in China. They had a secret CW arsenal on the island of Okunoshima, not far from Hiroshima. Only recently has there been some attention paid to this. The island is now a public park or attraction of some kind, and some displays there acknowledge what was done there during the war. A few Japanese veterans have come forward about their roles in using chemical and bio warfare in China. It's one thing when the victors accuse them of doing it, but quite another when former Japanese troops admit to it. This is still very much a live issue in both China and Japan! because even today, abandoned Japanese CW munitions are still being found buried in China when they leak and injure people. Japan has been named responsible for it in world forums and I think they are quietly addressing the problem, but this doesn't change how much they are despised in Asia. The infamous Unit 731 that conducted awful human BW experiments on many thousands of prisoners in Manchuria (mostly Chinese but some Allied) is also still a live issue. Just over a year ago Tokyo made its first official admission about it, although over time the Japanese people were already slowly learning what Unit 731 was. And like the CW munitions still being found, there were disease outbreaks where the Japanese released the agents before retreating. These outbreaks continued through 1947. There's another dark side to Japanese BW. The Tokyo war crimes tribunal didn't try anyone for it, because MacArthur made a deal with the Japanese doctors responsible. Turn over your BW findings and we won't prosecute in return, nor hand you over to the Russians (who tried 12 BW soldiers in 1949). S e w e r K i n g
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Manstein001 |
Re: CW in WWII | ||
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Posts: 38 (01/13/04 23:23:58)
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I think Sir Churchill's and allied carpet bombing was enough. Right?
I still think using harmful gases is unsporty in warfare. 'where Rommel is, there the front is.'
-Africa Korps saying |
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The Argus |
Re: CW in WWII | ||
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Posts: 917 (01/14/04 04:54:13) |
I don't believe the British actually used chemical weapons between the wars, but they certainly thought about it.
During WWII, the main reason that particular geni stayed in its box was quid-pro-quo. The allies had the resources to use chemicals against the whole of Germany, Hitler on the other hand lacked an effective delivery method for any more than minor quantites. And the only place he could hit (Britain) had made extensive preperations to deal with gas across the whole population, (Kids taking their gas masks to school) while Germany had not. In the end it was a) no one wanted to be the first to use it, b) no one 'liked' gas, c) on the battlefiled, gas was a double edged sword and there was no real advantage to it and d) if anyone did use it, there was every chance they would recieve more than they gave. shane Rule .303
Shoot straight, you bastards. |
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Maus 188t |
Re: CW in WWII | ||
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Posts: 353 (01/14/04 06:41:19) |
I don't believe the British actually used chemical weapons between the wars, but they certainly thought about it.
Right But the british developed Anthrax during WW2 |
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PanzerSchreck |
British use of CW | ||
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Posts: 201 (01/14/04 09:30:17) |
The Brits used air-delivered CW in Iraq in 1919. Iraq was supposed to be a 'model mandate' territory, being policed chiefly from the air. Dowding was C-in-C Iraq pre-war, but probably not as early as 1919 - which was also before the Geneva Protocal against chemical weapons was ratified (1925) Unsporting? Definately. Against the rules of warfare? No. Not in 1919. This puts the British use of CW in a different ball park than the systematic use of CW by the Italians in Ethiopia 1935/1936.
If I remember correctly, Churchill was Colonial Secretary in 1919. |
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Unregistered(d) |
RE :- Unsporty | ||
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Posts: 0 (01/14/04 11:23:14) |
I am not sure what the term unsporty means when you apply it to war.
Very often Western nations have not been involved in total war, whereby loss means the elimination or execution of large numbers of its population. Perhaps the term unsporty is less relevant, in a 'war of anihalation' ? It is also a mistake to assume that Britain is a more sporting nation than others when in war, I mean it doesn't have a higher ethical code. For example during the Boer wars in South Africa, it got to the stage that Britain didn't know what to do. And in total desperation they decided to intern the wives and children of the Boer farmers, in concentration camps, then systematically mistreat and starve them. This was completely unethical, and completely unsporting. But the British government obviously thought that they could get away with it, and it worked ! |
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PanzerSchreck |
RE :- Unsporty | ||
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Posts: 201 (01/15/04 03:13:07) |
As for the British use of mass internment camps in SA, I think it was more of a case of gross neglect and extreme incompetence (for which the British are often noted), rather than a policy of deliberate extermination. De-populating the veldt was seen as an efficient way of getting rid of the Boer commandos, but it turned out not really work as expected, amongst other things due to the massive public outcry, which was raised first in the UK, to be fair, by Emily Hobson. But I digress
My original point, and admittedly I've made it in very big letters by now, is that sporting concerns were not in any way reason why CW weren't used any more than the case was. Fear of retaliation, connected to a fear that the other side had better CW played part of it, as well as the fact that CW are really more part of static warfare than of modern mobile warfare. For example, I can't really see why Hitler's being a gas victim in WWI should be reason why he would abstain from using it in WWII; you might as well argue the exact opposite. |
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Unregistered(d) |
re :- panzershreck | ||
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Posts: 0 (01/15/04 06:27:57) |
Panzer, what a noble way of looking at this, i.e. 'de-populating the veldt'.
A more realistic way of looking upon this strategy, was hitting the boers in their soft spot, i.e. incarcerating their women, and children. And also don't believe that the British had any intention of taking care of these people. What happened to them was more than neglect. Don't rely on British history books to tell you what really hapened. |
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PanzerSchreck |
British in SA - getting OT | ||
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Posts: 201 (01/15/04 07:59:16) |
Ehm, Baggy, I never laid any claim to nobility. 'De-populating the veldt' is but one of a million euphemisms for displacing/killing/exterminating people. Possibly the irony went lost there. However, the object was not to exterminate the boer volk but rather to deny the commandos their sources of supply. This went hand in hand with deliberate and thorough burning of crops and wholesale slaughter of livestock, and of course nobody cared about the native population who got hit doubly hard by these measures. There was no spot in the camps for them, and certainly nobody cared to count the number of African dead.
I wouldn't dream of calling any of these measures noble, but the (ahem) eventual aim was to win the war against the boers, not exterminate them per se. The Boer War was marked by ill-administration and poor management from beginning to end - right from Lee-Enfields sighted as Lee-Metfords (going six feet off target at 100 yards), extreme mismanagement of supplies (SA being the horse graveyard of the world, literally, in the early 20th century, for example) and an absolute inability to understand the needs of warfare in a climate as unique as the SA one. Far more British soldiers died from disease in that war than from enemy action - hardly a good precursor for the internment camps that entered the picture later. |
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Unregistered(d) |
re :- panzer | ||
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Posts: 0 (01/15/04 10:18:30) |
panzershreck
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PanzerSchreck |
re :- panzer | ||
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Posts: 201 (01/15/04 10:27:41) |
Game, set, match I take it?
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Unregistered(d) |
re :- | ||
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Posts: 0 (01/15/04 10:41:33) |
Ok, I concede, because I am British,
and therefore a good sportsman.
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The Argus |
Re: re :- | ||
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Posts: 917 (01/20/04 20:47:12) |
Well I'm Australian and therefore no sportsmans at all, but I'm in general agreement with 'Shrekie.
My only real dispute is on British incompetance VS ignorance and that's more a matter of degree than anything else. shane Rule .303
Shoot straight, you bastards. |
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