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Three thousand tons of mustard gas

Chemical weapons are not new. In ancient times there were primitive flame throwers hurling Greek Fire at wooden ships in naval battles in the fabled waters of the Aegean and Mediterranean Seas.
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Chemical weapons are not new. In ancient times there were primitive flame throwers hurling Greek Fire at wooden ships in naval battles in the fabled waters of the Aegean and Mediterranean Seas. In the Middle Ages boiling oil was a weapon used by the defenders of castles under siege.

Mustard gas, so-called, was first used by the German army during the Great War as a weapon that might break the stalemate of horrific trench warfare. Mustard gas was chlorine gas, delivered by artillery when wind was blowing in the right direction to carry it across enemy trenches. It was considered to be an incapacitating rather than a lethal weapon.

When I was a little boy, I knew a former British soldier with skin like old leather who was capable of only the lightest physical exertion. For him, as for others exposed to mustard gas, incapacitation continued for the rest of his shortened life.

When the guns fell silent in 1918, it was inevitable military leaders and their political masters would realize advances in aviation had made it possible for poison to rain down from the skies on civilian populations. In 1925 the Geneva Protocol outlawed the use of chemical and bacteriological weapons. This did not mean the knowledge of chemical weapons gained during the 1914-18 war was discarded. In response to production of mustard gas and lethal nerve gases such as tabun and sarin in Nazi Germany, experimentation in, and production of, gases that could be used as weapons began in the former Allied nations.

In 2018, a huge tract of grassland in southeastern Alberta is, and long has been, a place where foreign armies train on rented battlegrounds. People who had taken up homesteads on land fit only for grazing leases were evicted early in the Second World War and by 1943 a few lonely buildings near Medicine Hat had become what was to be the Suffield Chemical and Biological Research Station. It was fully operational in 1945.

In that same year I was a high school student wondering how long the war would last and whether I would soon be in uniform as either a hero or a coward. I knew nothing of the sinister work that was going on dangerously close to my home. In fact, I knew nothing of the dangers of chlorine until years later when, as a school trustee, I became aware of the hazardous nature of carbon tetrachloride. This liquid was used to fill shaped glass containers which were suspended on interior walls of schools by fusible links designed to be melted by heat, causing the glass container to drop and break. This simple device could extinguish small fires but the poison gas it generated could also destroy the liver of anyone who inhaled it.

John Bryden, born in Dundas, Ont,, in 1943, is a distinguished journalist who has also served as a member of parliament. His book, Deadly Allies, is the definitive record of Canadian involvement in the grim work of producing chemicals and organisms that kill. Everything in his book, except what might be concealed by an unknown shroud of secrecy, is derived completely and accurately from official records.

Deadly Allies is still in print. Anyone who reads it will learn that the deadly work also went on at Grosse Ile in the St. Lawrence River. The island was no stranger to death. There were old graves there, the last resting places of passengers from the infamous “cholera ships” that sailed from Ireland and starvation. This was the isolated place where anthrax spores were produced. Sir Frederick Banting, co-discoverer of insulin, became an army officer and was involved in the anthrax production program. He died in a plane crash when returning from consultations with biological warfare experts in Britain.

The Suffield base was the place where aerial delivery of poison gases and toxins was concentrated. Long after the war ended, I met an army veteran who told me of an experiment with the aerial delivery of mustard gas. There were still scars on his body from burns caused by the gas. Another veteran was sprayed from the air with an unknown crowd control gas. He had primitive equipment for determining the concentration of gas in the air that would produce panic. It consisted of a long-stemmed vacuum bottle, a mouse trap and a gob of softened putty. When the gas concentration became unbearable, tripping the mouse trap was supposed to break the stem of the bottle to draw in the gas and the putty was for plugging the broken stem. My informant didn’t trip the mouse trap. He merely inhaled deeply and then found himself running blindly until he injured himself in a rock pile.

John Bryden either found no record of this bizarre experiment or else he decided not to include it in his book.

Neither poison gas nor bacterial agents were deliberately used in any of the battles of the Second World War. They were involved incidentally in 1943 when supply ships for the British 8th Army in the Italian harbour of Bari were attacked by German dive bombers. (The Stuka dive bombers were identified incorrectly as Ju-88s. The correct designation is Ju-87). Among the ships sunk was one carrying a cargo of mustard gas. Seamen who swam ashore from the sinking vessel all showed the classic manifestations of mustard gas. Nazi Germany did not dare to use its lethal nerve gases in battle. They were unleashed instead in the murder camps that ended the lives of millions of innocent Jews.

Among the illustrations in Bryden’s book is a photograph of 3,000 tons of mustard gas in 45-gallon drums in a field near Cornwall, Ont., in 1946. The whole lethal load was taken by rail through unsuspecting cities to be dumped into the Atlantic Ocean. This was a heedless disregard for the health of the natural world that sustains all life, as shameful as the pitiful residues of warfare on land.

Human beings have been, and continue to be, the most destructive life form on a beautiful planet. Nobody in the human race can claim complete lack of culpability for the frightening future that is unfolding.