German soldiers and dogs don gas masks in Reims, France during World War I in 1916. Only one year earlier, poison gas was deployed for the first time in war on a mass scale by the Germans in Ypres, Belgium. The battle marked the birth of weapons of mass destruction.
A Revolution In Killing: The Technological Innovations Of WWI -- Felix Bohr, Spiegel Online
A new era in warfare was born on the battlefields of Flanders in 1915. German troops launched a chlorine gas attack in the first ever large-scale use of chemical weapons. It was but one of the technical innovations seen during World War I, and not all of them were as deadly.
The man who would go down in history as the father of chemical warfare acted as his own guinea pig to test his invention. On April 2, 1915, Fritz Haber, the head of Berlin's Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Physical Chemistry, rode through a yellow-green cloud of chlorine gas on grounds used for troop exercises.
The experiment was successful. The scientist, himself a war enthusiast, began coughing convulsively; he grew pale and had to be carried away on a stretcher.
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My Comment: Tanks and armored vehicles, airplanes, WMDs (chemical weapons) .... World War I certainly did spun an entirely new generation of weapons.
2 comments:
We are today on the edge of great changes in not only with what we wage war with, but how we actually do war. This is how today compare to WWI. Also no one, not I, or anyone else can predict with much accuracy how the future of war will develop anymore than the officers and men at Hampton Roads when the CSS Virginia first hove out of the mist.
Ypres: I don't know of many places (maybe Khmer Rouge camps, SS death camps) that more qualify for hell on earth. My experience as a soldier doesn't come remotely close.
My father .... if he was alive today .... would say Stalingrad. He was in the northern pincer attack that broke the Italian lines thereby cutting off the Germans.
When the Germans surrendered .... he entered the city and was overwhelmed by the smell of death everywhere. He told me that it was worse than the one camp that he entered after it was liberated by Soviet forces a day earlier in Poland.
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