German gas weapon saves Germany?

We know today how deadly the nerve gases are. A small drop on skin is enough, the antidote even today may not be enough, I think.

Sarin was discovered in 1938 in Germany, Tabun was discovered in 1936. Soman was discovered in Germany in 1944.It is both more lethal and more persistent that Sarin or Tabun.

Though Sarin, Tabun and Soman were incorporated into artillery shells, Germany ultimately decided not to use nerve agents against allied targets. German intelligence was unaware that the Allies had not developed similar compounds, and they were concerned that the Allies' ability to reach German targets would prove devastating in a chemical war.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarin

The amount created during the war probably would not have been enough but what if Germans had concentrated on production of nerve gases instead of V-1 and V-2 and other wonder weapons. The allied had no method to counter the gases except for the usual ways ( mask, coat ) and I don´t think that would have been enough.

In my view the Germans did have an awful weapon with which to attack the allied soldiers, and create panic and destruction. And to my knowledge the allied did not have similar nerve gases to be used.Fortunately Hitler decided not to use them.

But what if they did, and possibly kill hundreds of thousands of soldiers with a simultaneous gas attack on both fronts.Could Germany win? How would the allied response or could they only admit having been beaten? Use the A-bomb?

 

I would have to vote yes, nerve gas would save the Nazis from complete and utter destruction and possibly help them win the war. If in our moment of glory and victory the Nazis all of a sudden sprang upon us a new, terrible form of weapon at a consistent pace, I believe the Allies would be stunned at the devistating effect this weapon had on soldiers. It is possible that the Allies would have surrendered but reform and retreat to figure out a better battle strategy would probably be the more likely answer. Another possiblity as Kai mentioned is the use of the atomic bomb. If Germany had postponed our victory I believe they would have been in for it. This has been debated over and over but I think that the nerve gas Kai is talking about would have definetly at least postponed the war, possibly given Germany a victory.

 

I don't believe that the technology of the times would have enabled the use of these types of weapons. Even if produced in mass quantities.

Later

 

Gas is highly overrated as a weapon. It would have given the Germans a temporary advantage at best. First, it cannot be used in all weather conditions. Against prepared troops (those with masks and anti-gas clothing) it is essentially just an annoyance....chemical "mud" if you will.
And, given that both the Soviets and Western Allies had far more means of delivery than the Germans they would have gotten back far more gas than they dished out once the genie was out of the bottle.
By the by, it takes considerably more than a single drop of nerve agent to kill someone...not that it generally is applied as a liquid. Of the agents available in WW II Mustard is still probably the most pernicious being persistant and acting not just internally but on exposed skin equally well.
Just for comparison, of 34,249 KIA in the AEF in WW I only 200 were identified as due to gas. Another 1,221 died in hospitals due to gas. 70,552 out of 224,089 wounded were gas casualities. So, as a casuality causing weapon against prepared troops gas is not that effective.
What gas did was add a great burden on front line troops and the logistics system backing them up. It effected everything were ever it was used, food, materials, equipment were all touched by gas. It was as if the battlefield was drenched in deep mud making operations slower and more difficult. That is the effect of gas.

 

Agreed, but the psychological effect can still be powerful.

The old First World War joke went that if the man at the end of the Western Front at the Swiss Border shouted ' GAS! ' it would only take minutes for the word to spread to the other end on the Belgian coast, with millions of soldiers frantically pulling on their masks. Of all that war's horrors, gas was the most dreaded.

 

Slightly OT but have any of you read much about the allied use of mustard gas in the Med? A friend of my grandpa was an MTB commander (I met him on a few occaisions and discussed this incident) and apparently he was in harbour (Alexandria as I remember) guarding a group of boats when one was hit by a torpedo. The crews were ordered off the boats and people put on gas masks, he only learned later that the boat had been carrying Mustard gas to be used by the Allies in Italy, it was designated classified until about 10/15 years ago.Ironic really considering the number of allied troops who had already ditched their respirators, if the allies had used gas they would have had to re-issue masks to those men who had dumped theirs already.

 

Stefan, I think you're referring to the appalling 'Incident At Bari' which was the subject of a fascinating article in 'After The Battle' magazine some time ago.

For an online story of this, see :

http://www.history.navy.mil/faqs/faq104-4.htm

As far as I'm aware, mustard gas was kept onhand, certainly by the US Air Forces, in case of first-use by the enemy. It was stockpiled in the UK ( and there were one or two 'incidents' here, too - there was one in Cambridgeshire, for instance ) and there was a big scare about 8 years ago when traces of the gas were detected in the old bomb dump at Matching Green in Essex - an ex-9th Air Force B26 base.

 

I voted NO.

If Germany would have been still in the war by August 1945...boom, boom, boom...big seasons for atomic mushrooms in merry ol' Germany!

Cheers,

 

Just some thoughts on nerve gases...

The most important nerve agents are represented by sarin, soman and VX. Present antidotes (both civilian and military) are sufficiently effective against sarin and VX poisoning, however, they are not very effective against soman intoxication.

From the point of pharmacodynamics and therapeutic possibilities, soman represents the most serious poison: its toxicity is comparable with that of sarin and VX but therapeutic efficacy of antidotal treatment with present and perspective drugs is not good enough.

Soman is quickly resorbed at all routes of administration including percutaneous and oral administration.

Bearing in mind very low portion of the dose administered causing basic toxic effect (1-3%) , it is clear that releasing of a very small quantity of soman can influence significantly survival or death of intoxicated organism independently on the treatment.

http://www.lfhk.cuni.cz/periodik/actamed/39_3/anbajgar.htm

Lethal Dose

Tabun (GA)
Breathing
150-400 mg*min/m3)
Skin (mg) 1,000-1,700

Soman (GD)
Breathing
35-50 mg*min/m3
Skin (mg) 50-100

VX
Breathing (mg*min/m3) 10
Skin (mg) 6-10

http://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/weap.html


Soman mixes easily with water, so it could be used to poison water. Following release of soman into water, people can be exposed by drinking contaminated water or getting contaminated water on their skin.

A person’s clothing can release soman for about 30 minutes after contact with soman vapor, which can lead to exposure of other people.

Symptoms will appear within a few seconds after exposure to the vapor form of soman, and within a few minutes to up to 18 hours after exposure to the liquid form.

Because of its high volatility, soman is an immediate but short-lived threat and does not last a long time in the environment.

http://www.bt.cdc.gov/agent/soman/basics/facts.asp

Antidotes are not effective a few minutes after the exposure.

http://multimedia.belointeractive.com/attack/news/new_biochem/nerve.html

At room temperature, the G-series nerve agents are volatile liquids, making them a serious risk for 2 types of exposure: dermal contact with liquid nerve agent or inhalation of nerve agent vapor.

tabun (GA), sarin (GB), soman (GD)

Dispersal devices or an explosive blast also can aerosolize nerve agents. Nerve agent vapors are denser than air, making them particularly hazardous for persons in low areas or underground shelters. GB and GD are colorless, while GA ranges from colorless to brown. GB is odorless, while GA and GD smell fruity.

 

All too definitely the answer is NO. Germany was lost.

Use of poison gas would have caused many more deaths and terrible revenge on German civilians. There is a drawback about the A-bomb (it is not clear how much captured German technology and uranium accelerated the American finishing of the bomb), but the allies would have stroken back with gas bombs over German cities and any cruelty you can imagine.

 

Quite many are saying this, but to my knowledge the allied had only mustard gas in liquid form to be used.(Or that it would not matteror change anything ). And then again they were already bombing the cities to kingdom come. So actually mustad gas which is more clumsy to be used than the mentioned nerve gases, would not have brought any more or better results than the the way they already bombed.That´s my view.

The British biological weapons might have added a new dimension but they were still being researched and unfortunately would have stopped the allied attack because of the fear it woould hit back on them as they enetered deeper into Europe.

I don´t hope for a victory for Germany, never did, but we must be glad that they never put their trust in the nerve gases.

Just think about the US froces in Iraq and 1991 and this year ( the fear ), and the Kurdis in Northern Iraq Saddam killed with gas. The Germans had the weapon.

 

The use of nerve gasses by the Germans in the final months or even years of the second World war would have made no difference whatsoever to the outcome of the struggle. If anything, the retaliations might have even ended the war sooner than it did in reality.

While much is made of the lethal effects of nerve gas on the human body, little consideration is given to the practicality of deployment of such a weapon, in doses sufficient to turn the tide of a specific battle. In order to incapacitate an enemy army, one would have to drop enormous quantities of the substance, even considering its low dose: fatality ratio. This would have to be dropped in good conditions (warm to cool, dry, favourable wind) and spread in a massive area in order to have any significant impact.

Ignoring the fact that by mid 1944 the Germans were no longer competing for air control, the use of nerve gas as a battlefield weapon is simply not practical given the delivery systems and amounts to be used of the time.

I have heard people ask why the Germans did not use gas on the Normandy beaches, for example. Well, firstly, you have 5 beaches widely spread, covering miles and miles of ground. The Germans did not have our hindsight, of knowing that Omaha was the lynchpin, so they would have had to hit them all. These beaches were composed of wet sand and pounding surf, which would have absorbed small aerosol droplets. The Germans had no appropriate delivery system built, even if they could have managed to get aircraft over the target zones without being shot down. Lastly, favourable winds on the Normandy beaches were all fairly strong inland. Thus, a less appropriate venue can hardly be imagined.

In the East, against the Russians, there were 5 Russian Fronts over 2000 km, of which three were a serious threat. The Russians too had air control, though not air superiority as in the West. Assuming you fund an appropriate location (during the summer only, of course) and good weather, and managed to get an aircraft over the site and had developed a reasonable delivery system… then what is the best effect imaginable? To sicken a division? Best case imaginable, you manage to cover an entire division with the stuff, a significant percentage get sick, and probably a reasonable percentage die.

So what? The USSR massively increases front air power to prevent a repeat, and then retaliates with the thousands of tons of first generation chemical weapons it has. Stalin talks to Churchill, Churchill who has already suggested the use of chemical weapons follows their lead and drops thousands of tons of chemical weapons on Western cities.

Can you imagine the horror: RAF bombers sweep over a town dropping flares and HE bombs, damaging a major Ruhr city, but not severely. Several hours later, another massive wave of 600 Lancaster’s fly over at low altitude spreading thousands of tons of di-phosgene, an odourless invisible gas. The centre of the city is asphyxiated in concentrations sufficient to overcome the old charcoal gas-masks people are using, that is those lucky enough to get them on in time. Chemical weapons are dispersant, they enter bomb shelters and low lying areas where people hide, and they do not require a direct hit to kill. They are quite certainly far more dangerous than equivalent HE bombardments.

Two days later the experiment is repeated, but without HE, this time vast quantities of Mustard gas are dropped, both an inhaled and corrosive gas which burns exposed skin, regardless of use of gas masks. Germany cannot retaliate in kind, and the impact their use of nerve gas had on the front was insufficient to make any difference in the war.

The allies, with their enormous stockpiles of first generation chemical weapons, can keep doing this for months.

No, German nerve gas would have not allowed the Germans to win the war; rather it would have made them lose it faster.


As an aside, I must completely disagree with T A Gardner about the effectiveness of gas. Yes, only 1462 US deaths were attributed directly to gas, but as you said over 71,000 wounded (out of 224,000) were attributed to it, meaning gas accounted for 32% of all American battlefield injuries. That is ALSO considering that the US came in late, and thus could benefit from the improved gas doctrine and defences the British and French had developed after years of trial and error. I would say that gas has been UNDER-rated as a weapon in WWI. It was terribly effective at incapacitating and hospitalising enemy soldiers, which was the primary goal of any warring nation. (dead soldiers are dead, injured soldiers are incapacitated, but still take up resources and manpower)

In WWII, gas weapons were more effective (Not just nerve gasses, but improved first-generation weapons as well) while gas defences and preparations had hardly changed since 1918. Aerial use of First generation chemical weapons in quantity would have been devastating, while nerve gasses, for all their vaunted lethality, are only useful if effectively and appropriately deployed in large quantities. Otherwise they would have been a nuisance to the Allies, but hardly capable of turning the tide of war.

[ 14. October 2003, 02:47 PM: Message edited by: Vermillion ]

 

Actually it is extremely clear; these did not help in the slightest.


When the war ended, Germany had not even managed to make a sustainable reaction, and their plans for a reactor were not only non-functional, they were idiotic. The US had created its first sustainable reaction on December 2, 1942 at the University of Chicago. German technology was not only hopelessly behind, but their theoretical and practical models were entirely wrong. Had the Germans attempted to create a sustained reaction, they would have cascaded and irradiated the lab, likely killing its occupants. (The German ‘control’ process involved throwing lumps of coal into the reaction chamber)

As for extra Uranium, the Germans had a pitifully small amount of Uranium; in fact the reason they had not yet attempted a sustained reaction was a lack of fissile materiel. They DID have a great deal of Uranium Ore, but firstly most of this was taken by the Soviets, and secondly the US had more Uranium or than it could use, processing it into fissile materiel was the hard part.

The failed German atomic bomb project data contributed not at all to the Manhattan project.

 

What I meant by my earlier commentary is that gas is overrated as a casuality causing agent. Its primary effects are physical and mental strain. Wearing anti-gas clothing and a mask is physically straining. The psychological effects of gas are quite significant, even today. There are several documented "gas scares" with US troops in Normandy where a single incident spread across as much as several divisions with troops panicedly putting on their gas masks over supposed uses of gas by the Germans.
A favorite tactic today in my opinion for an army to use in chemical warfare would be to shoot tear gas and smoke mixed into the enemy positions. They initially won't know what they are being hit with so they suit up and don masks. Then you attack with your troops not suited up and suffering the debilitating effects of chemical suits giving you a big advantage. The worst that could happen is some of your troops get a snoot full of tear gas and require first aid on the spot.

 

What about bioweapons ? i saw documentary once about how the americans had an antharx program because they thought hitler would use anthrax against them.
and he did have one and managed to get it to weapons grade as did the US. After the war operation paperclip (i think) went in and captured a couple of Nazi scientist's and it they found by testing on the russian POW's and the poor jews they were leaps and bound's in front of the allies.
i dont think this would of saved nazi germany in the end though

 

I dont think gas would have saved Germany as the allies at the time of d-day had total air control of the channel and most of France. The retaliations of similar nerve gases that the Germans had would have caused far greater casualties on the German side. Also i dont think that the Nuclear bomb would have been the allies answer since theoretically by 1945 Germany might have finally started utalizing the ME 262s they had which would have caused total chaos for the allies and decrease their chances of dropping it by a massive amount.

 

About five different issus to address here...

The allies did not have nerve gasses at the time, it was a technological breakthrough unique to the Germans. However the Allies did have truly vast stockpiles of first generation chemical weapons, so your point is still valid.

Ah, the venerable Me262, beautiful, sleek, a technological marvel, and the most utterly overrated weapon of WWII.

The Me-262 would have made no difference in the European air war by 1945, even if deployed in numbers, even if the Germans had the fuel to fly them (which it didnt), even if the Germans had the trained pilots to handle such a difficult aircraft (which they didnt).

Each engine burned out after an average of 12 hours of flying time, meaning even maintaining these aircraft was an enormous industrial burden. Their ceiling was low, so had the Allies decided to drop the atomic bomb in Europe, they would have deployed the B-29 there, and been nearly immune to the German jet.

The plane was beautiful, but the landing gear were a disaster,and collapsed frequently on landing. Despite its vaunted speed, a P-51 on a dive was just as fast (which is how Yaeger shot down his 262s) and the 262 itself on a powerdive tended to go transonic and disassemble in mid air. It was hard to fly, and fatalities from crashes were common, also considering there was not enough fuel by 1945 to properly train people.

I do not mean to denegrate the achievement that this aircraft was, it was remarkable, but all to often I hear people talk about Germany winning the war if they just had a few more or deployed hem earlier, when in fact it would not have made any significant difference at all.

Keep this in mind, General Galland himself was asked if additional 262s would have changed the outcome of the war. His answer was:

"If the Luftwaffe had been able to field 300 Me 262 on a given day to attack the heavy bomber formations it is possible that daylight bombing would have stopped for a time. As a negative consequence, the war would most probably have been prolonged, and the Russians allowed more time to conquer further German territory. So let us now be satisfied with Hitler's mistakes towards the legendary Me 262."

Note, the best the Germans ever managed in a single sortie was 37 Me262s, so we are talking an increase of almost 10x in this hypothetical.
Look up the stats for combat effectiveness of the Me262 in combat, they were very disappointing The first ever unit to be equiped with them, the Kommando Nowotny was disbanded due to heavy losses, having lost 26 Me262s, (8 due to crashes and mechanical failures) and having recorded only 22 kills.

[ 15. October 2003, 12:07 PM: Message edited by: Vermillion ]

 

Galland is a smart guy, isn't he? I wonder why the heck he wasn't able to realize that until April 1945? To the contrary, he was VERY eager to "prolonge" the war by shooting down as many bombers as possible.

Not that I'm blaming him for that, after all this was his job, and shooting down bombers who wehre bombing cities was maybe the most (only) honorable thing in Nazi Germany one can do.

Cheers,

 

Who is to say he did not realise that? I rather suspect he did. However, the Top living ace and first man decorated with the Knights cross with diamond eyes cannot exactly go to Hitler, give him his hat and resign his commission on moral grounds.

So he flew. While flying he faced the enemy and fought them, and due to his near-superhuman skill, killed them.