Bulletin Board Pix

A Higher Form of Killing: Six Weeks in World War I That Forever Changed the Nature of Warfare

by Diana Preston

© Diana Preston 2015

Maps © Jeffrey L. Ward 2015

CHAPTER FIVE: "The Worst of Contrabands"

BUT THE TROOPS were not even home by Christmas. In the first few days and weeks of the war, Germany's armies advanced through most of Belgium and into France, despite stronger resistance by the Belgian army than expected that allowed the leading elements of the British Expeditionary Force time to join the fighting. The German advance deprived France of 10 percent of its territory and a third of its industrial capacity.

On September 9 the usually cautious von Bethmann Hollweg, elated by the speed and scale of Germany's advance, listed extravagant war aims for Germany. The overall goal was "Security for the German Reich in west and east for all imaginable time. For this purpose France must be so weakened as to make its revival as a great power impossible for all time. Russia must be thrust back as far as possible from Germany's eastern frontier." More specifically, France should be forced to give up the iron ore fields of Briey "which is necessary for the supply of our industry" and pay a large war indemnity. A treaty should make France economically dependent on Germany, excluding British commerce from French markets. Belgium, if allowed "to continue to exist" should be a "vassal state" with Germany taking military control over the Belgian coastal ports, perhaps with the French ports of Dunkirk, Calais, and Boulogne being added to the vassal state. Luxembourg should become part of Germany. Colonial concessions should be forced from the defeated, Germany should be dominant in "a central European economic association through common customs treaties to include France, Belgium, Holland, Denmark, Austro-Hungary, Poland, and perhaps Italy, Sweden, and Norway ... All its members would be

"THE WORST OF CONTRABA OS"
formally equal but in practice would be under German leadership and [this
will] stabilise Germany's economic dominance over Mitteleuropa."
Other influential German leaders proposed even more far-reaching
war aims, demanding greater territorial concessions by France and land
seizures from Russia. One politician demonstrated Germany's detestation
of being patronized by Britain by including among his principal war aims
"elimination of the intolerable tutelage exercised by Britain over Germany
in all questions of world politics." In a memorandum submitted to government
on the same day as von Bethmann Hollweg dispatched his war aims,
the powerful German industrialist August Thyssen demanded the annexation
of Belgium, much of northern France inclucling the Pas de Calais,
and in the northeast the territories on which stood the French frontier
fortresses. To the east he demanded the Baltic states and perhaps the Don
Basin, the Caucasus, and the Crimea for Germany. His prime justification
was to secure "Germany's supply of raw materials." Noteworthily, none of
these various submissions spelled out what would be the strategy toward
Britain, merely implying it should be humble toward Germany and as a
result of other changes commercially and militarily less powerful.
Von Bethmann Hollweg and the others were to be disappointed in
their dreams of a speedy victory. The German armies in the west were held
and in places pushed back at the battles of Mons, the Marne, and the first
battle ofYpres. Thereafter the front lines quickly began to stabilize even if
at Ypres the British were left in an exposed salient. By ew Year's Day
1915, a line of trenches 450 miles long stretched from Switzerland to the
North Sea, across which 110 Allied divisions-as yet only ten of them
British-faced 100 German ones. Over three hundred thousand Frenchmen
and nearly a quarter of a million Germans were already dead. Britain had
lost some thirty thousand men, nearly one fifth of its small regular arnly.
The war of movement on the western front was over. Stalemate had begun.
In the east too stalemate was approaching. The Austro-Hungarian army
had lost over a million and a quarter men and the Russians one and a half
million.
Across the Atlantic the world's other emerging great power had
watched Europe's disintegration into war with both alarm and a degree of
detachment and disbelief. The North Dakota Daily Herald said of Franz
52 A HIGHER FORM OF KILLING
Ferdinand's assassination, "One archduke more or less makes little difference."
The Philadelphia Public Ledger quipped in addressing
Austro-Hungary: "If the Serbs defeat you it will 'Servia right'!" The Dallas
Ncu;s joined many in Europe in thinking the war would soon be over, suggestingit
would be "long before the cotton season is." A more selious
commentator considered that the great safeguard "against the armies and
navies Europe has gathered for war is that Europe is not I;ch enough to
use them and is too human and humane to want to use them." However,
Germany's im'asion of neutral Belgium turned sympathy toward the Allies.
"As if by a lightning flash," wrote a columnist, "the issue was made plain;
the issue of the sacredness of law; the rule of the soldier or the rule of the
citizen; the rule of fear or of law."
Such emphasis on the rule of law chimed well with the views of
fifty-seven-year-old Woodrow \Vilson, then in the second year of his first
term. He had been a student of law and history, and suhsequently a professor
at Plinceton and then president of the university. His secretmy of
state, William Jennings Bryan, defeated three times for the presidency, had
been essential to Wilson securing the Democratic presidential nomination.
Like Wilson a lawyer, but also a lifelong fundamentalist Christian and teetotaler
and more radical than \\Tilson, he championed labor lights against
big husiness,
A strong supporter of the J Iague Treaties and of arbitration, Blyan
saw the United States as a "republic ... becoming the supreme moral factor
in disputes." One of his first acts as secretmy of state in 1913 was to persuade
most of the major powers (including Great Britain and France but
not Germany) to agree to treaties committing themselves, to some extent
at least, to the use of cooling-off perious and of arbitration to settle international
disputes, At the signing ceremony he presented the diplomats with
papelWeights cast in the symbolic form of ploughshares from old swords
from Washington Naval Yard. He supplemented his income by frequent
performances on the lecture circuit. His audiences' response convinced
him they shared his love of peace, but many American commentators
doubteu \vhether Blyan's intellect and political acumen matched his eloquence
and undoubted sincerity-a view shared by diplomats with whom
he came into contact. British ambassador Sir Cecil Spring-Rice thought
"THE WORST OF CONTRA BANDS" 53
talking to Bryan was "like wliting on ice" and Bryan himself"a jellyfish ...
incapable of forming a settled judgement on anything outside party politics."
Continental Europeans gagged when served nonalcoholic grape juice
by the teetotaler as a substitute for wine at his diplomatic receptions.
Immediately before the outbreak of war Wilson was preoccupied with
the illness of his wife Ellen, who was dying of kidney disease. They were a
devoted couple-he referred to them as "wedded sweethearts." When he
first heard of Austro-Hungary's declaration of war on Serbia, Wilson put
his hands to his face and said: "I can think of nothing, nothing when my
dear one is suffering." Ellen died on August 6. When the Blitish foreign
secretary Sir Edward Grey, who had lost his own wife in a carriage accident
a few years before, wrote him a letter of condolence, Wilson replied, "My
hope is that you will regard me as your friend. I feel that we are bound
together by common principle and purpose." One of Grey's main aims in
the early years of the war would be to maintain that sense of shared understanding
and empathy with Wilson.
Nevertheless, Wilson was as committed as Bryan to maintaining U.S.
neutrality and, if possible, to mediating peace. On August 3 he told a press
conference that America stood ready to help the rest of the world resolve
their differences peacefully and to "reap a permanent glory out of doing
it." On August 18 he asked his people to be "neutral in fact as well as in
name during these days that are to hy men's souls ... impartial in thought
as well as in action" so that the United States could "speak the counsels of
peace" and "play the impartial mediator." Early in September he would
make his first tentative offer to Germany to mediate, which would be
rebuffed on the grounds that Germany had had war forced on it and that
accepting mediation at this stage would be "interpreted as a sign of weakness
and not understood by our people."
Even before war had begun, Wilson had shown his determination to
ensure neutrality among his officers and offlcials by muzzling the now
retired Admiral Mahan, who had long warned Britain through the press of
the need to thwart German commercial and colonial ambitions before it
was too late. On August 3 he advised the British navy to strike at once, or
Germany would defeat France and Russia and turn on Britain. He also
suggested that Britain should immediately make a preemptive attack on
54 A HIGHER FORM OF KILLING
Italy, then teetering on the brink of joining Germany and Austro-Hungary
because of a previous alliance. Under pressure from public opinion, not
least from Italian Americans, Wilson initiated a special order on August 6
that prohibited officers of the navy and army of the United States, active
or retired, from commenting publicly on the military or political situation
in Europe. Mahan asked to he exempted from the order and was refused.
He died less than four months later on December 1, 1914, before he could
see many of his ideas on sea power vindicated.
Sharing a language and increasingly a common popular culture, the
American public with the exception of nearly all German Americans and
some Irish Americans were generally sympathetic to Britain. The kaiser
would complain in early October, "England has managed to make the
whole world believe that we are the guilty party." However, in reality the
actions of his troops were mainly responsihle for increased anti-German
sentiment in the United States and elsewhere as reports emerged of war
crimes committed by them during the early days of the German invasion
of Belgium and France. Fearing or believing they were under attack by
"citizen guerrillas," German troops routinely took hostages to ensure good
behavior. They shot at least 110 citizens at Andenne Seilles near amur and
hurned the to\ovndown. At Lerfe on the outskirts of Din ant, German soldiers
lined up hostages-men, women, and children-in the town square and
executed them by firing squad. The dead exceeded six hundred.
The most well-publicized atrocity was at Louvain in Belgium. After
German troops had occupied the city, the Belgian army launched a counterattack
on August 25. The German soldiers panicked and over the next five
days burned down much of the city including its world-famous ancient
library with its 230,000 precious volumes, killed more than two hundred
civilians, and ejected the remaining forty-two thousand inhabitants by force
including sixteen hundred men, women, and children they deported to
Germany. A German officer told an American diplomat who visited Louvain
on August 28: "We shall wipe [Louvain] out, not one stone will stand upon
another! Not one, I tell you. \Ve will teach them to respect Germans. For
generations people will come here to see what we have done!"
Such actions were of course in direct breach of the laws of war agreed
to internationally at The Hague. British prime minister Herbert Asquith
"THE WORST OF CONTRABANDS 55
claimed it was "the greatest cri me against civilisation and culture since the
Thirty Years War-the sack of Louvain ... a shameless holocaust ... lit up
by blind barbarian vengeance." Many in Britain called for an announcement
that when the war was won the kaiser would be exiled to Saint Helena
as apoleon had been after his defeat at Waterloo. Others called for those
responsible to be tried as war criminals. The dean of Peterborough
Cathedral in England encapsulated this view: 'We may be far still from the
final abolition of war, but we should not be far from the end of atrocities
in war if those responsible for them in whatever rank had the risk before
their eyes that they might have to suffer just penalties as 'common felons.' "
Unwilling for their nation to be seen as book burners and murderers,
ninety-three German academics, scientists, and intellectuals, including the
Nobel Prize winner vVilhelm Rontgen and future winner Max Planck, as
well as the composer Engelbert Humperdinck and the theater director
Max Reinhardt, signed a "Proclamation to the Civilised World" protesting
Germany's right to have carried out reprisals and claiming that "if it had
not been for German soldiers, German culture would long have been swept
away."
The most likely source offriction between the Allies and the United
States and other neutrals early in the war was action by the Btitish navy to
enforce a blockade against goods being shipped to Germany. On August 6
the U.S. government asked all belligerents to commit themselves to following
the rules laid down for the conduct of maritime warfare in the
Declaration of London which-though not ratified by either the United
States or the United Kingdom-represented in their view the consensus
of world opinion. In line with Grey's \vish to do all that he could to preserve
friendly relations with the United States, Britain responded on behalf of
the Allies with a note that seemed on the surface an affirmative until, in
what could be construed as "small print," it reserved rights "essential to the
conduct of naval operations."
On the second day of the war, August 5, the German navy sent out a
requisitioned excursion steamer, the KOnigin Luise, crudely disguised as a
British North Sea ferry. In direct contravention of the agreement at the
Second Hague Conference which prohibited the use of unattached mines
that would not become harmless after being in the sea for an hour, she
A HIGHER FORM OF KILLING
began laying her cargo of 180 mines in the North Sea. HMS Amphion, a
British light cruiser, caught up with and sank her but as she was returning
to port hit one of the floating mines the Konigin Luise had laid and herself
sank with considerable loss of life including most of the survivors she had
picked up from the Konigin Luise.
In the years immediately before the war German engineers had
achieved a breakthrough in submarine design. Beginning with the Danzigbuilt
U-lg class, all German suhmarines were fitted with diesel engines.
Diesel was cleaner than the petrol or paraffin that fueled earlier U-boats
and had made them, when running on the surface, "almost as visible as
a smoke-belching steamer." It also had a higher flashpoint which made it
safer. However, the major advantage was the reliability, power, and endurance
of the new engines. Designed by MAN of Augsburg, they gave the
submarines the best range-some five thousand miles-and depth performance
in the world, meaning they could now be exploited as
independent, offensive, strategic weapons rather than primarily defensively.
The German navy began the war with twelve such newly built
diesel-powered craft.
An event on September 22, 1914, revealed the potential of even its
older submarines. Otto Weddigen, captain of the U-g patrolling off the
Dutch coast, spotted three four-funneled British cruisers steaming line
abreast straight toward him at a modest ten knots. They were the obsolescent
British cruiser HMS Cressy and her sister ships, the Aboukir and the
Hogue. ''''eddigen immediately attacked. Hit by a single torpedo, the
Aboukir hegan to list as water Howed into the longitudinal coal bunkers
running the length of the ship which had been designed to withstand shells
not torpedoes. She capsized within twenty-five minutes. The Hogue,
believing a mine had caused the explosion, approached to pick up survivors
only to be hit by two torpedoes and sink in ten minutes. The Cressy then
also tried to rescue the drowning and was torpedoed in turn. Within barely
an hour, a single unseen enemy-an old German submarine-had destroyed
three cruisers and killed 1,459 British sailors, about a thousand more than
the number Nelson lost at Trafalgar.
Since in 1914 few effective devices existed to prevent either submarine
or mine attacks, the British navy early recognized the impracticality of
"THE WORST OF CONTRA BANDS" 57
maintaining the close blockades of enemy ports to interrupt trade in contraband
generally accepted as legal. Strangling seaborne trade into
Germany, however, remained crucial to the navy's war strategy and the
British quickly instituted what was in effect a distant blockade by patrolling
the exits from the North Sea and in particular the two hundred miles
between the Shetland Islands and the Norwegian coast. The patrol squadron
initially comprised twelve old cruisers. After sighting a merchant ship the
cruiser dispatched a boarding party to look for contraband. If they found
anything suspicious they escorted the merchant vessel into a British POlt
for more thorough examination. Commercial passenger liners requisitioned
into the navy as armed merchant cruisers, given naval crews, repainted "vith
camouflage paint, and fitted with a couple of four- or six-inch guns soon
replaced the old cruisers.
On November 2 Britain issued a declaration that the whole of the
NOlth Sea must henceforth be considered "a British military area" and that
as a consequence of previous and continuing illegal German mining, Britain
would mine pmts of this zone. This would be the first but not the last time
in the war that one country claimed "necessity" forced it to follow its enemy
into conduct or the use of weapons banned by international law. If neutral
shipping vessels wished to avoid the petils of mines they should approach
the military area through the English Channel, where they would be
stopped and searched for contraband and then escorted safely through
British minefields to resume their journeys.
Even before November 2, the distant blockade together with British
unilateral expansions of the definition of "contraband"-for example, by
including goods judged by Britain to be going to Germany through neutral
countries in "a continuous voyage"-had caused friction with neutral maritime
nations. One American paper claimed that Britain not only ruled the
waves but waived the rules. However, Foreign Secretary Grey's determination
to restrict the blockade to "the maximum that could be enforced
without a rupture "vith the United States" had resulted in soothing responses
from Britain which, helped by Britain's willingness to pay top prices for any
goods brought into its ports whatever their original intended destination,
meant relations were not too heavily strained. At the same time as declaring
the military zone, Britain wrote to the U.S. State Department explaining
58 A HIGHER FORM OF KILLING
that only recently Germany had illegally scattered mines in the northern
sea route from New York to Liverpool and that the yVhite Star liner Olympic
had "escaped disaster" only by "pure good luck." Therefore, the Admiralty
had concluded that it was "necessmy to adopt exceptional measures appropriatc
to the novel conditions under which this war is being waged." The
United States did not even formally protest to Britain about the declaration
despite being pressed to do so by Norway and Sweden, hvo of the other
leading neutral maritime nations.
Just a few days before the declaration of the militmy zone another
issue had been delicately solved between the United States and the Allies
using the niceties of language and legal drafting. In August 1914 the French
government had attempted to raise loans through J. P. Morgan and
Company to finance its arms purchases. However, Secretary of State Bryan,
believing money to be "the worst of contrabands ... it commands all other
things," persuaded President Wilson that for American banks to lend
money to governments at war would be "inconsistent with the tme spirit
of neutrality." J. P. Morgan Jr., the head of the company following his
father's death in 1913, determined to overturn this ruling by an administration
that he despised: "A greater lot of perfectly incompetent and
apparently thoroughly crooked people has never, as far as I know, run or
attempted to run a first-class countIy."
He approached Robert Lansing, the fifty-year-old ew York-born
legal counselor to the State Department. An anglophile and ambitious
light-wing Democrat, Lansing was unkindly described by a colleague as
"meticulous, metallic and mOl1s)'-"Neveltheless, many found him easier
and more clearheaded to deal with than Bryan. Morgan and a fellow New
York banker, Samuel McRobelts of National City Bank, soon persuaded
Lansing of the advantages to U.S. commerce of a more flexible approach
toward the financing of Allied purchases, warning that without it the Allies
might buy elsewhere leaving the United States in its present economic
depression. On October 23, 1914, McRoberts provided Lansing with a
helpful note on the subject. In Blyan's absence from Washington, Lansing
quickly copied the phraseology into a memorandum, only inserting a few
first-person pronouns to claim the ideas as his own, then rushed ,vith his
memo to the White House at eight thirty the same evening and easily
"THE WORST OF CONTRABANDS" 59
secured Wilson's approval. HencefOlth, American banks would not Olake
loans to warring governments; they would extend them credit.
The hairsplitting distinction between credits and loans was typical of
lawyers like Wilson and Lansing. "An arrangement as to credits has to do
with a commercial debt rather than with a loan of money" and therefore
was "not a matter for Government," they concluded. Lansing's stock rose
with both Wilson and Wall Street. The Allies quickly agreed to large credits
with American banks, who in turn eagerly advanced money to fund contracts
with American munitions manufacturers. The Nell; York Sun rejoiced,
"All talk of stagnation in our export trade has ceased." J. P. Morgan and
Company was soon playing a pivotal and highly profitable role in keeping
Britain and its allies supplied with American munitions. In 1915, Britain's
imports of £238 million hom America were 68 percent greater by volume
and 75 percent greater by value than in 1913. French imports rose
similarly.
Appalled by the growing trade between the United States and the
Allies, the kaiser refused to see the American ambassador, James Gerard:
"I have nothing against Mr. Gerard personally, but I will not see the
Ambassador of a countJy which furnishes arms and ammunition to the
enemies of Germany." Von Tirpitz thought the United States "contrary to
the whole spirit of neutrality ... an enemy arsenal." The German government
continued to press the Wilson administration but it remained
unsympathetic. By JanualY 1915, Germany was pursuing another and
illegal method of redressing what it perceived as an unfair balance-sabotage.
A German Foreign Office telegram to its \Vashington embassy stated,
"The sabotage in the United States can extend to all kinds of hlctories for
war materiel" and named several contacts who could suggest "suitable
people for sabotage." German agents quickly infiltrated the ew York
docks and manufactured novel cigar-shaped fire bombs designed to be
smuggled about merchant ships and to explode when the vessel was at sea.
Elsewhere agents plotted the sabotage of infrastructure and munitions
plants such as the "Black Tom" hlCility in New Jersey, destroyed in 1916.
At the end of October 1914, Winston Churchill had called seventythree-
year-old Sir Jacky Fisher out of retirement and appointed him First
Sea Lord once more. "Lord Fisher can only think on a Turkish rug," a
60 A HIGHER FORM OF KILLING
subordinate claimed after Fisher on his return demanded improvements
to his Admiralty offices. Fisher began firing off his characteristic scrawled,
heavily underlined memos in green ink designed to shake up the navy. ''I'm
exceeding busy!" he wrote. 'Tve just told Garvin that war is 'Great
Conceptions' and 'Quick Decisions'! 'Think in Oceans,' 'Shoot at Sight.'
I'm stifling up accordingly'" However, Fisher knew that in practice, he
could do little to defend against the submarine threat.
One area where Britain and, in particular the intelligence unit headquartered
in Room 40 of the Admiralty building, was making progress was
in reading German codes. On August 11 the Royal Australian Navy captured
the German merchant shipping codebook and soon after the Russians
took the signal book of the Imperial Navy hom a grounded German cruiser
in the Baltic. Both were sent to London. On November 30 a British trawler
fishing off the Dutch coast hauled up a lead-lined chest in its nets. Inside
was the Imperial German Naval codebook-the so-called Traffic Book used
to communicate \.vith overseas naval attaches and warships. The captain of
a German destroyer had jettisoned the chest in desperation while under
attack by British ships. Room 40'S personnel called the discovery "The
Miraculous Draught of Fishes" since it provided the last remaining information
they needed to decode messages between German warships,
submarines, and their bases-an invaluable asset in thwarting German
plans to disrupt Britain's mastelY of the seas.
CHAPTER SIX
"England Will Burn"
As WELL AS the control of the seas Churchill and Fisher were battling
with another issue, which had, perhaps surprisingly, become part of the
Admiralty's remit-the control of British airspace. Developments in both
zeppelin and airplane technology had been rapid. In ovember 1908, the
kaiser traveled to Lake Constance to see for himself what Count von
Zeppelin's LZ3 airship was capable of. Though with tme Pmssian hauteur
he privately considered von Zeppelin "the greatest donkey" of all southern
Germans, his airship's performance so impressed the kaiser that he awarded
him the Order of the Black Eagle and hailed him as "the greatest German
of the twentieth century" and "the Conqueror of the Air."
That same year the German army ordered the 450-foot-long LZ4 from
von Zeppelin, but after only her second Hight she broke her moorings and
burst into flames. David Lloyd George, then Britain's chancellor of the
exchequer, visiting Germany shortly after the incident, recalled how "disappointment
was a totally inadequate word for the gl;ef and dismay" that
swept Germany. "There was no loss of life to account for it. Hopes and
ambitions far wider than those concerned with a scientinc and mechanical
success appeared to have shared the wreck of the dirigible ... What spearpoint
of Imperial advance did the airship pOJiend?" A public appeal
launched in the aftermath of the disaster raised six million marks to allow
the now impoverished von Zeppelin to continue his work.
The army purchased further zeppelins-by the outbreak of war it had
seven-as well as airships from the Schiitte-Lanz company, established in
1909, whose machines had plywood rather than aluminum frames. The
61
A HIGIIER 1"01'\:\1 OF KILLING
army believed airships' chief value in wartime would be in scouting and
ohservation. However, the Naval Airship Division, set up in 1912, foresaw
a more attacking role. A naval officer invited his Kiel audience to "imagine
a war with England, which from time immemorial has had an unwarlike
population. If we could only succeed in throwing some bombs on their
docks, they would speak with us in quite different terms. With airships we
have ... the means of carrying the war into Britain." British planes-unlike
zeppelins-could not fly at night and thus conld "afford no protection
against airships."
The aval Airship Division suffered several early disasters. In the first
fatal zeppelin accident, its inaugural airship plunged into the North Sea in
bad weather in September 1913, taking the first head of the Naval Airship
Division \vith it, though six crewmen survived. Five weeks later another
exploded: "We could recognise the men looking out of the cars," an eyewitness
desclibed. "At about fifteen hundred feet up, one of the crew tried
to climb from the canvalk into the forward engine car ... Then our blood
ran cold. A long thin tongue of flame leapt from the forward gondola and
ran along the canvalk. There was a terrific explosion, the whole earth
seemed to echo and re-echo with it. In the hvinkling of an eye the airship
... was a mass of flames." There were no survivors and the Naval
Airship Didsion's very future seemed uncertain until its new head, naval
captain Peter Strasser, a neat, dapper man with a goatee, convinced his
superiors of the airship's militalY potential.'
Airplanes also achieved success. On October 16, 1908, Samuel Cody,
an American who had come to Britain with a Wild West show before being
employed by the British army, flew fourteen hundred feet in a biplane over
Famborough Common in Blitain's first successful heavier-than-air flight.
The plane crashed on landing but Cody survived to become such an iconic
public figure that when he died in another Hying accident in 1913, one
hundred thousand people lined the route of his funeral procession.
On July 25, 1909, a Frenchman, Louis Bleriot, nursed his monoplane
o Meanwhile, Count von Zeppelin had set up a company-the Deutsche Lnftschiffahrt
Aktiensgesellschaft, known as DELAG-to operate what was effectively the world's first
cOlllmercial airline. By July 19]4 DELAG zeppelins had carded more than ten thonsand
passengers and flown some one hnndrecl thousand miles between Germany's largest cities.
"ENGLA 0 WILL BURN"
in a thirty-seven-minute dawn Aight across the English Channel to land
behind Dover Castle. The following day the author H. G. Wells wamed
the Daily Mail's readers that "within a year we shall have-or rather they
will have-aeroplanes capable of starting hom Calais ... circling over
London, dropping a hundredweight or so of explosive upon the printing
ma(;hines of The Daily Mail and retuming securely to Calais." The previous
year his The War in the Air had conjured a nightmare vision of "the little
island set in the silver sea ... at the end of its immunity" as planes and giant
airships battled in the skies above.
One hundred twenty thousand people queued for a glimpse of BIeriot's
plane when it went on display in Selfridges department store in London.
Yet despite such popular enthusiasm on the one hand and Wells's apocalyptic
wamings on the other, the British govemment remained cautious
about airplanes. Sir William Nicholson, chief of the general staff, dismissed
them as "a useless and expensive fad." A govemment committee concluded
that planes posed no serious threat but endorsed the Royal Navy's proposal
to acquire an airship to explore its military potential. The craft-named
Mayfly-had a short life. As she was being readied for her maiden flight,
crosswinds ripped her apart and British interest in airships waned.
However, on November 1, 1911, an Italian pilot demonstrated the
airplane's potential. In the world's first bombing raid Lieutenant Giulio
Gavotti dropped four five-pound bombs over Turkish lines near Tlipoli in
Libya uming an Italo- Turkish conflict. The next day, patriotic Italian papers
rejoiced in exaggerated headlines such as AVIATOR LIEUTENANT
GAVOTTI THROWS BOMB ON ENEMY CAMP. TERRORISED TURKS
SCATTER UPON UNEXPECTED CELESTIAL ASSAULT. The Turks
claimed wrongly that the bomb hit a hospital. Italian pilots went on to
conduct the world's first night bombing. In Morocco in 1912 the French
dropped bombs from airplanes as did pilots during the 1912-13 Balkan
conAicts. Aware of the limited eHects of such bombings and planes' obvious
vulnerability to ground fire, Britain concentrated on building large, slowflying,
stable craft suited to the reconnaissance role that they and most
other govemments, including Germany's, saw as their most promising
application. In 1914, General Douglas Haig, who at the end of 1915 would
become commander in chief of British forces in France, was still
A H' GHER FOR \1 0 F K' L L , N G
unconvinced airplanes were even useful for reconnaissance: "There is only
one wav/ for a commander to Meret information ... and that is bv_ the use of
cavalry. "
Churchill worried about Britain's vulnerability to air attack and supported
the Aerial League of the British Empire set up by those who
believed that, just as Britannia ruled the waves, so it must rule the skies.
League members, who included H. G. Wells, highlighted the potential risk
to London from enemy aircraft, identifying the Houses of Parliament as a
likely target. Lurid German publications depicting airships laden with
explosives crossing the orth Sea to hover menacingly above the capital
fed public fears. In June 1914, an author claiming to be a former member
of "the German Secret Service" described a fleet of zeppelins waiting to
attack England: "huge cigar-shaped engines of death ... ready to drop
explosives to the ground." "Picture the havoc a dozen such vultures could
create attacking ... London. They don't have to aim. They are not like
aviators trying to drop a bomb on the deck of a warship. They simply dump
overboard some of the new eXlJlosives of the German government, these
new chemicals having the property of setting on fire anything that they
hit ... They do not have to worry about hitting the mark ... If they do not
hit Buckingham Palace they are apt to hit Knightsbridge."
As Chnrchilliater wrote, at the time he did not rate airships highly: "I
believed this enormous bladder of combustible and explosive gas would
prove to be easily destructible. I was sure the fighting airplane ... would
hany, rout and burn these gaseous monsters." He did his best "to restrict
expenditure upon airships and to concentrate [Britain's] narrow and stinted
resources upon airplanes." Nevertheless, recognizing that even if Britain
was wise not to invest in airships it needed to guard against the zeppelin
threat, he encouraged experiments with devices like the "Fiery Grapnel"-a
four-pronged grappling hook loaded with explosives to he swung by airplane
pilots against the sides of airships-and "flaming bullets." Test flights
were made with a semiautomatic cannon mounted on a plane. However,
the gun's powerful recoil when fired caused the plane to stall and plunge
five hundred feet. Dropping small explosive or incendiary bombs on airships
seemed more promising.
As the war began, B,itain's meager air power was divided between the
"E GLAND WILL BUR" 65
Royal Naval Air Selvlce (RNAS) for which Churchill and Fisher were
responsible, and the army's Royal Flying Corps (RFC). (The two air anTIS
would not combine into the Royal Air Force until April 1918.) The RNAS
had more than 90 planes, 53 of them seaplanes, and 7 small airships. The
RFC possessed 190 planes. However, many of the planes of both seIvices
were unairworthy.
With all the RFC's seIviceable airplanes dispatched to France, on
September 3, 1914, Churchill and the Admiralty accepted responsibility
for the air defense of Britain from the army. l\vo days later Churchill
announced his strategy. The R AS would establish a forward line of
defense in France and a second line somewhere between Dover and
London. Other measures included ordeling and siting antiaircraft guns and
searchlights and laying out floodlit landing strips in London's parks for
British fighters. By the end of 1914, Churchill's plans had crystallized into
a two-tier system; aircraft stationed inland should receive sufficient warning
of zeppelins approaching London to get airborne to intercept them while
planes nearer the coast would be waiting to attack returning zeppelins. In
practice, however, he knew that all planes then available would struggle to
reach the height at which zeppelins flew.
From October 1 the government imposed a blackout-limited at first
but soon extended. The tops and sides of streetlamps were painted black
to mask their radiance from above and people were asked to draw their
cUltains tight. In these early weeks anxious Londoners scanned the night
skies but no zeppelins came. During the first days of the war the German
army lost three zeppelins on the western front. French shell fire brought
down the first hvo while the third was fired on initially by German soldiers
in error, then by Allied troops who shot off its rudder leaving it to drift
helplessly before plummeting into a forest. However, any hopes that airships
might not be as menacing or effective as feared were extinguished
when zeppelin attacks in August and early September on Liege and
Anhverp in support of the German advance killed a number of civilians.
Believing the best place to attack a zeppelin was on the ground,
Churchill ordered an RNAS raid on zeppelin sheds in Cologne and
Diisseldorf. On October 8, 1914, hvo British pilots took off from Anhvelp
just as Blitish troops were about to pull out of the city in the face of a
66 A HIGIIER FORM OF KILLING
German advance. One headed for Cologne where he was unable to find
the sheds. However, Flight Lieutenant Reggie Marix in a Sopwith Tabloid
reached DUsseldorf and finally located a shed further outside the city than
his map indicated. Swooping low, he released his hvo bombs: "As I pulled
out of my dive, Ilooked over my shoulder and was rewarded with the sight
of enormous sheets of Aame pouring out of the shee1." After landing his
bullet-riddled plane north of Anhverp because his fuel was running out
and finally catching up with the retreating British forces by means of train
and bicycle, he learned that he had destroyeo a brand-new airship.
Encouraged by what was Britain's first successful bombing raid on
Germany and learning from intelligence reports that hvo zeppelins had
almost been completed at the zeppelin plant in Friedrichshafen, Churchill
ordered a fmiher RNAS raid. On November 21 four new Avro 504 biplanes,
each armed with four twenty-pound bombs, took off from Belfort in eastern
France. Three reached Flieorichshafen and dropped nine bombs but failed
to destroy the zeppelins. Two of the pilots returned to base but the third
was forced to land near the burning zeppelin sheds where local people
attacked him. German soldiers intervened and took him to a hospital. The
German government at once accused the British of barbarously dropping
bombs on the "innocent civilians" of Friedrichshafen despite knowing the
only casualties had been mechanics and crewmen.
In December the RNAS targeted zeppelin sheds at Nordholz on the
German North Sea coast. Since Nordholz was beyond the range of any
British plane Aying fi'om Britain, France, or unoccupied Belgium, the navy
converted three Channel passenger steamers into carriers from which seaplanes
could be lowered into the water for takeoff. On Christmas Day 1914,
seven RNAS seaplanes launched the raid which in foggy conditions failecl
to locate and oestroy any zeppelins but provoked the word's first air-sea
battle as zeppelins and German seaplanes attacked the British seaplane
carriers and their naval escort.
The German army and navy both hoped for the glOIYof being the first
to bomb the British mainland. Von Tirpitz wrote in mid- ovember 1914
of his conviction that "the English are now in terror of Zeppelins, perhaps
not without reason." Though "not in favour of 'frightfulness' "and considering
indiscriminate bombing "repulsive" when it "killed an old woman,"
., E N G LAN D W J L L BUR N "
he saw the potential that "if one could set fire to London in thirty places
then the repulsiveness would be lost sight of," later adding that "all that
flies ... should be concentrated on that city." Admiral Gustav Bachmann,
shortly to become chief of the naval staff, agreed, arguing that Germany
"should leave no means untried to crush England, and that successful raids
on London, in view of the already existing nervousness of the people, would
prove a valuable means to this end." However, the army and navy high
commands had to contend with the kaiser, who hesitated over what the
zeppelin targets should be and in pmticular whether zeppelins should be
allowed to bomb London, where his royal relations lived and of which he
had sentimental memories. Chancellor von Bethmann Hollweg, a habitual
opponent of von Tirpitz's aggressive policies, whom the admiral would
accuse of "lukewarm flabbiness," was also reluctant.
While the kaiser pondered, German planes conducted three small air
raids on England. On December 21, 1914, an Albatross seaplane dropped
two twenty-pound bombs that fell into the sea near Dover pier. In the days
that followed, a second plane dropped the first bomb to f~lllon British soil.
It landed near Dover Castle, shattering several windows. A third dropped
two bombs on the village of Cliffe on the Thames estumy.
Churchill believed from intelligence sources that raids on London
itself could not be far away. On New Year's Day 1915 he told the British
cabinet that Germany had approximately twenty airships capable of
reaching London "carrying each a ton of high explosives. They could
traverse the English paJt of the journey, coming and going, in the dark
hours ... There is no known means of preventing the airships coming,
and not much chance of punishing them on their return. The un-avenged
destruction of non-combatant life may therefore be very considerable."
So perturbed was Admiral Jad.)' Fisher that he suggested Britain inform
Germany that any captured zeppelin men would be shot as pirates. When
Churchill disagreed with him he threatened to resign but Churchill deftly
dissuaded him.
Early in January 1915, the kaiser agreed that zeppelins could attack
England but insisted their targets be limited to naval shipyards, arsenals,
docks, and other military establishments in the Thames estuary and on the
east coast, and that "London itself was not to be bombed." On Janmuy 19
68 A HIGHER FORM OF KILLING
three naval zeppelins took ofl, aiming to inAict the damage so ardently
demanded in a popular German song:
Zeppelin,ftieg,
Hilf /IllS ill Krieg,
FLiege nach EngLand,
EngLa/ld u;ird abgehran/lt,
Zeppelin, .flieg!
Fly Zeppelin
Help itS in W(II~
Fly to Engla lid,
England will b/lrn,
Fly Zeppelin!
L6 was only half-vay across the North Sea when engine trouble forced
it back but L3 and L4 continued and despite rain, fog, and sleet reached
the Norfolk coast. A young man on the ground spotted "two bright stars
moving, apparently thirty yards apart"-the navigation lights of the L3 and
L4. Once over land, the two zeppelins separated. At eight thirty P. M. that
evening L3 dropped nine high-explosive bombs onto Great Yarmouth-the
first zeppelin raid on British soil-killing a fifty-three-year-old cobbler and
a seventy-two-year-old woman, injuring three people, and wrecking several
houses. The L4 meanwhile headed for King's Lynn, dropping bombs as it
went, killing nvo and wounding thirteen. A woman who watched it drift
overhead caJled it "the biggest sausage I ever saw in my life" and another
\ovitnessthought it resembled "a church steeple sideways."
King's Lynn was close to the royal estate at Sandlingham, which King
George V and Queen Mary had left earlier the very day of the attack. The
British press speculated whether the L4 had been sent specificaJly to attack
them and raged against German ·'frightfulness." The raid left many Britons
fearful and angry about why no advance warning had been given or efforts
made to down the airship. Though the L4'S commander reported having
been heavily shelled and pinpointed by searchlights, the guns existed only
in his imagination and the "searchlights" had been the lights of King's Lynn
penetrating the misty skies.
Neutrals like the United States, Holland, Switzerland, and the
Scandinavian countries condemned the attacks as a clear violation of the
Hague prohibition on the bombardment of undefended places. The New
York Herald wondered whether "the madness of despair or just plain
everyday madness" had prompted Germany to attack quiet English coastal
"ENGLAND WILL BURN 69
resorts and asked "What can Germany hope to gain by these wanton attacks
on undefended places and this slaughter of innocents?" adding that such
behavior was no way to win the good opinion of neutrals.
In Germany the raids were greeted with exultation as confirmation
that Britain could no longer look to the sea to keep out the enemy. In their
wake, the kaiser agreed, albeit reluctantly, that the London docks be
included on the list of targets. While the German army and navy awaited
the imminent delivery of a new generation of airships capable of reliably
reaching the city, naval zeppelins again attacked England's east coast,
raiding from Tyneside to East Anglia.
In mid-March 1915, Ernst Lehmann, the commander of the army
airship Sachsen, diverted from an attack on Britain's east coast by fog,
turned toward Calais where he decided to test his invention of a tiny observation
car that could be lowered on steel cables. Its purpose to enable
airships to survey their targets while remaining hidden in the clouds-in
other words to provide airships with the aerial equivalent of a submarine's
periscope. As the Sachsen hovered in clouds above Calais, Lehmann
ordered a crewman to descend into clear air in his prototype obsenration
car whence he telephoned precise guidance for bombing Calais. Lehmann
described the "shattering" effect: "The anti-aircraft batteries could hear us,
but they couldn't see us. They fired blindly into the air •v•.ith no effect whatever.
We planted our bombs nicely, but the bombs seemed to cause less
panic than the fact that we were invisible." Learning of Lehmann's experiment,
a week later Peter Strasser tested the observation car for himself
and was so impressed he ordered new naval airships to be equipped with
them.
CHAPTER SEVEN
"A Most Effective Weapon"
By JANUARY 1915, only four months into the war, both the British and
German governments were developing strategies to break the stalemate
that had already ensued. The British War Cabinet, with Winston Chnrchill
playing a prominent role, saw the solution in a naval expedition to the
eastern Mediterranean. Their plan was to control the Dardanelles, the
heavily guarded strait leading from the Aegean through the Sea of Marmara
to the Black Sea, so that, at a minimum, they could get supplies through
to Russia and, at best, force Ottoman Turkey, which had joined the Austro-
German alliance at the end of October 1914, quickly out of the war. Success
might draw Greece and perhaps Bulgmia and Rumania into the Allied
camp. Churchill believed that "at the summit true politics and strategy are
one. The manoeuvre which b,ings an ally into the field is as serviceable as
that which wins a great battle." To that end he was also taking a leading
role in the wooing of Italy to join the Allies. Conscious of the need for new
weapons to break the deadlock in the trenches, in February he gave the
Admiralty's SUPPOltand ftmding to the development of "land ships." Under
their code name of "tanks" they would make their first appearance on the
battlefield in September 1916 and first be used en masse at the Battle of
Cambrai in 1917 and become one of the lasting major advances in weaponry
of the First World War.
Perhaps surplisingly for a nation whose power was historically land
based, one of the principal areas to which Germany was looking to break
the deadlock was the sea and the suhmatine. At the beginning of the war,
Germany's U-boats had been used to attack enemy warships like the Cressy
7°
A MOST EFFECTIVE WEAPON 71
and troop transports, leaving surface vessels to do the commerce raiding.
However, on October 20, 1914,a V-boat captain demonstrated the V-boat's
potential as a commerce raider. Captain Johannes Feldkirchner in U-17
forced the British merchant ship Glitm to stop in waters off Norway. He
briefly searched her cargo of whisky and sewing machines and ordered her
crew into their boats. The U-17 then sank the Glitra but obligingly towed
her laden lifeboats for a qualter of an hour toward the shore. The Glitra
was the first British merchant ship to be sunk by a V -boat and, as he sailed
home to Germany, Feldkirchner worried how his superiors would react.
According to a fellow V-boatman his action was "entirely unexpected.
Attacks on commercial steamers had not been foreseen. The possibilities
... had not been anticipated." Feldkirchner need not have been
concerned. He was commended for his attack.
Lack of a single head of the navy bedeviled German naval policy.
Although the inspiration of Germany's naval buildup and preeminent in
naval matters before 1914- instantly recognizable by his great domed bald
head and forked white beard-Secretary of the Navy von Tirpitz was formally
only head of the Imperial Naval Office, responsible for finance and
political affairs, including new construction and budgets. Admiral Fliedrich
von Ingenohl commanded the High Seas Fleet. Separate from both was
the Admiralty Staff headed in January 1915by Hugo von Pohl, responsible
for planning and directing operations in war in a way analogous to a land
army's general staff. Finally, there was the kaiser's naval cabinet under
Georg von MLiller. All reported direct to the kaiser and policy decisions
rested with him alone.
In October Hermann Bauer, commander of one of Germany's submaline
Aotillas, had, unknown to his crews, already suggested to his superior
von Ingenohl using submarines as commerce raiders. Feldkirchner's success
confirmed the practicability of the idea. Von Ingenohl circulated the
proposal to von Pohl and others, writing, "From a purely military point of
view a campaign of submarines against commercial traffic on the British
coasts will strike the enemy at his weakest point and will make it evident ...
that his power at sea is insufficient to protect his imports." Von Pohl worried
about the restrictions of international law since submarines would find it
extremely difficult to follow the Cruiser Rules-V-boat commanders were
72 A HIGHER FORM OF KILLING
already complaining how hard it was to distinguish enemy shipping from
neutral vessels. He knew too that surfacing to stop and search would expose
fragile submarines to enemy attack.
However, von Pohl changed his mind after what he saw as Britain's
attempt to stan;e Germany when Britain in November 1914 declared the
"militalY area" and made all food contraband-the latter on the grounds
that one could not be sure whether food was for militaIY or civilian use and
that in case of shortage militmy requirements would take priority over
civilian. \\Then he saw the proposal Chancellor von Bethmann Hollweg was
concerned about the effect on neutrals such as the United States. The
kaiser too worried about neutrals but also about killing and 'vvounding
women and children, and would not endorse the action. Von Pohl persisted.
Von Tirpitz, often opposed to von Pohl in the maneuvering for support in
the German naval hierarchy, then threw his authority behind the use of the
submarine, convinced it was Germany's "most effective weapon." A young
naval officer admired how von Tirpitz "fought, with a doggedness which
can hardly be described ... for the inauguration of intensified U-boat
warfare."
At the end of November von Tirpitz gave an interview to a Germanborn
American journalist in which he criticized the United States for not
protesting against the British military zone and asked," ow what will
America say if Germany institutes a submarine blockade of England to stop
all traffic?" When the journalist asked whether Germany was going to do
so, von Tirpitz responded, "Why not? ... England is endeavoming to starve
us. We can do the same, cu t off England and sin k every vessel that attempts
to break the blockade." The article when published in Germany received
great support from naval officers, and von Pohl and von Tirpitz pressed
hard for a submmine campaign. In mid-January von Tirpitz told the kaiser
that if Germany did not use the submarine "to get our knife into the
English ... we should accomplish nothing."
On February 4, his last day as chief of the naval staff before he succeeded
von Ingenohl as commander of the High Seas Fleet and was himself
succeeded by Admiral Gustav Bachmann, von Pohl accompanied the kaiser
to some naval exercises at vVilhelmshaven. \Vhile the emperor was preoccupied
with the maneuvers, von Pohl secured his signature on a declaration
A MOST EFFECTIVE WEAPON" 73
agreeing the launch of a campaign of unrestricted submarine warfare
whereby enemy merchant vessels would be sunk without search or even
warning and citing as justification Britain's blockade of Germany. From
February 18, the waters around Great Britain, except for a designated route
north of Scotland from the Atlantic to Scandinavia, would be a war zone in
which all enemy ships "would be destroyed even if it is not possible to avoid
thereby the dangers which threaten the crews and passengers ... It may
not always be possible to prevent the attacks meant for hostile ships from
being directed against neutral ships." In a telegram to its Washington
embassy, Berlin was even more specific, advising that "neutral vessels will
not in most cases be recognizable as such in the war zone and will therefore
be destroyed without more ado." The embassy was instructed to use the
press to warn American vessels to keep clear of the war zone "to avoid
dangerous complications."
Not long afterward, Berlin dispatched another telegram to Washington
containing the draft of a notice to be inserted by Ambassador Count Johann
von Bernstorff in the American press, warning Americans against traveling
through the war zone on British ships or those of its allies. "Thinking it a
great mistake," von Bernstorft" threw it into his desk drawer and "hoped
Berlin would forget about it."
U-boats were now equipped with machine guns, grenades, and formal
instructions about contraband. Shipping schedules were distributed and
scarce copies of the British-produced Lloyd:~ Register listing evelY ship in
the world became a highly plized aid to identifying targets for German
submariners.
Despite the German declaration of unrestricted U-boat warfare, the
British navy continued throughout the war to follow Cruiser Rules in any
attacks their submarines made against merchant vessels-a decision made
easier not only by the need to retain the good will of neutral governments
like the United States, but also by the limited num ber of German merchant
vessels still operating- almost exclusively in the Baltic or coastal waters.
When the war began the British and German governments requisitioned
passenger liners and converted them for war duties as armed
merchant cruisers. The British Admiralty reminded Cunard of its agreement
to hand over the Lusitania and the Mauretania but then decided
74 A HIGHER FORM OF KILLING
neither was suitable as an auxiliary cruiser-they simply consumed too
much coal. The Mauretania was dazzle-painted to camouflage her for duty
as a troop transport and hospital ship. Although having had four six-inch
gun rings fitted in 1913 to her deck to allow guns to be mounted quickly
in wartime, the Lusitania was left unarmed with Cunard to continue the
commen.:ial transatlantic run, but under strict conditions. The Admiralty
would inform her master of the course she was to follow; any contact
between Cunard and the ship, while at sea, must be through the Admiralty;
her cargo space must be at the Admiralty's disposal.
By the beginning of 1915 the Lusitania was the only one of the great
prewar liners of any nation still plying the Atlantic although some smaller
British, U.S., and other neutral vessels were also making the crossing. The
British Admiralty's Room 40-using improved instruments developed by
Guglielmo Marconi-was able to pick up German transmissions to and
from U-boats for the day or two after they left port before they were out
of range of radio contact with their base. Among some of the early targeting
information they intercepted and decoded was: FAST STEAMER LUSITANIA
COMING FROM NEW YORK EXPECTED AT LIVERPOOL 4TH
OR 5TH MARCH. The purpose of the communication was clear especially
compared with another sent to U-boats: AMERICAN SS PHILADELPHIA
AND WEST HAVERFORD WILL PROBABLY ARRIVE IN THE IRISH
SEA BOUND FOR LIVERPOOL. BOTH STEAMERS ARE TO BE
SPARED. Obviously the Lusitania was not.
On March 2 U-27 lay submerged on the approaches to Liverpool. In
his war uiary, her captain recorded letting several tempting targets pass
close by because "the Lusitania was expected to arrive in English waters
on 4 March and in my present position I believed I had a good chance of
attacking her." On March 5, he turned reluctantly homeward. The Lusitania
arrived a few hours later. On this occasion the British Admiralty had tried
to provide her with a naval escort but it failed to rendezvous with the liner
due to a comic opera series of communication failures.
WOODROW WILSON HAD recognized early in 1915 that the stalemate
in the war offered a good opportunity for America to lead arbitration to
A MOST EFFECTIVE WEAPON" 75
secure a peace settlement before casualties rose too high and both military
and political positions became too entrenched to allow concessions. He
sent Colonel House on a secret mission to investigate the prospects for a
broke red peace. The small, softly spoken, slightly frail House, whose rank
was an honorary one, was throughout the war Wilson's most trusted adviser.
Wilson wrote of him "Mr. House is my second personality. He is my independent
self. His thoughts and mine are one." Surprisingly, given his
neutral status, House sailed to Britain not on an American ship but on the
Lusitania.
Nearing the Irish coast in early February the Lusitania raised the U.S.
flag. The press pursued House about the incident as soon as he landed. He
wrote in his diary: "Every newspaper in London has asked me about it, but
fortunately, I was not an eye witness to it and have been able to say that I
only knew it from hearsay." The incident caused fury in Germany, which
insisted that it was illegal for British shipping to hide behind neutral flags.
In the United States fears were roused that U-boats would attack AmeJican
vessels suspecting they were disguised as enemy ships. President Wilson
protested to London that using neutral flags would create intolerable risks
for neutral countJies, while failing to protect British vessels. The British
government responded blandly that the Rag had been Rown at the request
of the Lusitania's American passengers to indicate that there were neutral
Americans on board. Germany's declaration that it would sink British merchant
ships on sight made such actions necessary and legitimate.
The U.S. government's reaction to the German promulgation of unrestricted
submarine warfare was much harsher than exchanges with Britain
about the blockade or the use of neutral Rags. On Februmy 10 President
Wilson declared that Germany's action violated the rights of neutral countries
and that it would be held "to a strict accountability" for any consequent
loss of'American life and any deprivation of American citizens' "full enjoyment
of their acknowledged rights on the high seas." The two words "strict
accountability" would achieve great significance in the months ahead.
However, von Pohl expected Britain to be brought to its knees by the submarine
campaign within a few weeks and von Tirpitz was soon rejoicing in
the "magnificent" work of the German submarines, thinking their war diaries
"as exciting as novels."
A HIGHEH FOHM OF KILLING
The U.S. threat to hold Germany to account \-vasquickly tested when,
on March 28, 1915, the V-28 sank the SS Falaba, an unarmed British
passenger-cargo ship of five thousand tons, in the recently declared war
zone off the southern Irish coast. More than one hundred people died
including one American, mining engineer Leon Thresher, bound for \Vest
Africa from Liverpool. The Falaba was given some warning by the V-28's
commander, who had surf~lced. However, he did not allow many minutestwenty-
three according to the V-boat war clialY,seven according to Blitish
accounts-for evacuation before firing a single torpedo. The American
press called the sinking "a massacre" and "piracy" but President Wilson
avoided invoking the doctrine of "strict accountability" or reacting formally
in any way.
Churchill thought the U-boat campaign was in fact having little impact.
By the end of its first week, out of 1,381 vessels arriving or departing hom
British ports only eleven had been attacked and seven sunk. During the
second week, only three ships were attacked and all escaped. By April the
British press was rejoicing that inward and outward sailings were now running
above fifteen hundred a week. Churchill even believed celtain political
advantages could be found in the new situation. On Februmy 12, he had
written to the president of the Board of Trade, \Valter Runciman, that it
was "most important to attract neutral shipping to our shores, in the hope
especially of embroiling the United States \-vith Germany ... For our part
we want the traffic-the more the better; and if some of it gets into trouble,
better still."
Churchill had, however, on FcbruaJY 10 issued instructions to merchant
captains to avoid headlands, steer a mid-channel course, operate at
full speed off harbors, and post extra lookouts. If attacked by a su bmarine
they should do their "utmost to escape" but if they could not they should
steer for tile submarine "at utmost speed" to force it to dive. The word
"ram" was not used but ramming was clearly what was meant. When the
Germans discovered these instructions they protested, saying any merchant
captain who attempted to ram would, if captured, be treated as a climinal.
On July 27, 1916, the German authorities would execute Captain Charles
Fryatt, a BIitish merchant captain who in March 1915 had saved his ship
from a V -boat by attempting to ram it but had been captured on a
A MOST EFFECTIVE WEAPON" 77
subsequent occasion. Prime Minister Asquith would describe their action
as "terrorism," continuing: "It is impossible to guess to what further atrocities
[the Germans] may proceed. His Majesty's Govemment therefore
desire to repeat emphatically that they are resolved that such crimes shall
not ... go unpunished ... They are determined to bring to justice the
criminals, whoever they may be and whatever their station ... The man
who authorises the system under which such crimes are committed may
well be the most guilty of all."
Although he had not accepted Fisher's intemperate proposal to promulgate
that captured zeppelin crews would be shot, Churchill ordered that
in the future any captured V-boat crewmen should not be treated as ordinary
prisoners of war but segregated for possible trial as pirates at the
conclusion of hostilities. In retaliation, the German authorities placed in
solitary confinement thirty-nine captured British officers, picking those
whom they supposed related to the most prominent families in Great
B,itain. Among them was one of Sir Edward Grey's relations. An outraged
British press demanded that any special privileges given to von Tirpitz's
son, a naval officer captured earlier in the war, should be removed.
CHAPTER EIGHT
"Something That Makes People
Permanently Incapable
of Fighting"
As WELL AS considering new strategies to secure a quick victOlY, the
German high command had begun to consider new weapons to achieve
the same end. As early as September 1914, General Erich von Falkenhayn,
minister of war at the war's start but since mid-September chief of the
general staff succeeding General Helmuth von Moltke, whom the kaiser
had ordered to report sick following what he thought of as his mistakes at
the Battle of the Marne, concluded that "the ordinary weapons of attack
had often failed completely ... A weapon bad, therefore, to be found which
was superior to them but would not excessively tax the limited capacity of
the German war industry ... Sucb a weapon existed in gas." He turned to
Germany's industlialists and scientists to provide it.
Among those who responded was a bespectacled, shaven-headed,
forty-six-year-old Prussian chemist and future Nobel Prize winner, Fritz
Haber, the director of the newly established Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for
Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry in the Berlin suburb of Dahlem.
Haber's path to prominence had not been straightforward. Born in 1868
into a wealthy Jewish famil~' in Breslau (now Polish \Vroclaw), his mother
had died three weeks later, a loss from which his father, Siegfried, took
many years to recover. Siegfried Haber was a businessman trading primarily
in dyes. Since he bad started his business the nature of dyes had
"s 0 MET H I N C T HAT M A K ESP E 0 P L E 79
been changing-formerly they were made from mainly organic substances
but now most were synthetic dyes of which Germany had become the
world's leading producer, as with so many other chemicals.
The nineteenth century is often said to be the century of chemistry,
just as the twentieth is that of physics. To the young Haber, as to many,
chemistry seemed the key to Germany's economic advance. In 1886, restless
and with little interest in the hlmily business, he convinced his father
to allow him to study chemistry at Berlin University. Finding the work less
than stimulating he moved to Heidelberg to study under Robert Bunseninventor
of the eponymous burner--only to find him a dull teacher and
return to Berlin. When he reached twenty, the one year's military selvice
that was the minimum obligation for all German males intervened and he
was posted to an artillery regiment in his hometown of Breslau-his first
contact with the military. He enjoyed the army, became a noncommissioned
officer, and aspired unsuccessfully to be an officer.
Military service over, Haber returned to Berlin again where in 1891
he completed his doctorate. By now interested in physical chemistry, a new
subject combining the two sciences, he applied to join the Leipzig laboratory
of the leading exponent but was rejected. Using his business contacts
and still hoping his son would join the family firm, Siegfried Haber then
arranged three short apprenticeships in chemical companies for him to gain
industrial expelience. Perhaps despite himself the young Haber found
industrial processes stimulating, supplementing as they did his academic
knowledge. At a Budapest distillery he saw how potash was extracted from
residues left over from distilling molasses. At a chemical plant northwest
of Kracow he first became acquainted with the new Solvay process using
ammonia to produce sodium carbonate, a key component in the production
of glass and soap. Although he dismissed the neighboring countryside as a
monotonous "wasteland of sand, swamp, and fever"-(it would become the
site of Auschwitz)-he thought the plant was dominated by "a splendid and
energetic intelligence" and was grateful to visit. His third apprenticeship
was at a cellulose factory.
Shortly afterward at his father's urging he reluctantly joined the family
business. Six months of tension and argument followed, culminating in a
major dispute over a business venture in which the young Haber purchased
80 A HIGHER FORM OF KILLING
a large amount of chloride of lime for use as a disinfectant during a cholera
outbreak in Hamburg, only to be left with it when the outbreak subsided
unexpectedly quickly. As a result of the argument, he left Breslau and his
father's business to work as an unpaid laboratOl)' assistant in lena while
studying chemistry again. He also converted to Christianity-a gesture that
friends and family interpreted as underlining his rift with his father but
behind which other factors may also have lain. Although there was no oveli
or legal religious discrimination in the newly unified Germany, the position
ofJews within German society-especially their commitment to the newly
formed nation-remained an issue, debated in the press and by right-wing
political parties and in the military. Conversion symbolized his loyalty and
commitment to Germany and might have made it easier for him to obtain
an academic post.
In 1894 Haber did get a junior position in the chemical institute of
Karlsruhe's Technical University. There he specialized in the physical
chemistry that had roused his interest in Berlin. Publishing papers on electrochemistry
and working ferociously hard and successfully-though
frequently bemoaning the state of his "nerves"-within four years he was
close to becoming a full professor. His rapid thinking and f~lst talking as
well as his energy impressed many. However, he (;ould also appear combative,
aggressive even. Viennese physicist Lise Meitner, later the discoverer
with Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann of nuclear fission, admired his intellect
but observed that "his immediate reactions could be very violent and
therefore not always objective." She also said that sometimes Haber wanted
to be "both your best friend and God at the same time." When in 1900
Haber applied for the newly created chair in physical chemistry at the
Karlsruhe chemical institute and it went to a lival, he vented his disappointment
in even harder work, robustly challenging the su(;cessful candidate's
theOlies. In doing so he drove himself to near nervous breakdown as he
had done on earlier occasions in his life-from 1898 he had been a regular
visitor to sanatoriums. In 1906 when the holder of the chair of physical
chemistry moved on, Haber was at last appointed to it.
To supplement his academic income, Haber was already acting as a
consultant to the chemkal industJ)'- Germany's rapidly expanding population
meant that one of the great challenges was producing enough food and
"s 0 MET II I N G T I-I AT M A K ESP E 0 P L E .. 81
that required more feltilizers. The German chemical industry was therefore
focusing on producing artificial fertilizers containing potassium,
phosphorous, and vitally nitrogen. A major source of nitrogen was saltpeter
imported from Chile. However, estimates that Chile's saltpeter deposits
would be exhausted by 1930 led to pressure to discover a way of extracting
gaseous nitrogen from the air and bonding or "fixing" it in another form.
Haber became one of several scientists investigating whether nitrogen
could be combined with hydrogen before being "fixed" in the form of
ammonia and then used for conversion into fertilizer. While other scientists
abandoned the idea as unfeasible on an industrial scale, Haber persisted.
In 1908 the industrial giant Badische Anilin-& Soda-Fabrik (BASF)
became his sponsor and the following year he succeeded in synthesizing
ammonia, excitedly shouting to a colleague, "You have to see how the liquid
ammonia is pouring out." He reported to BASF the success of his process
which involved heating nitrogen and hydrogen with an osmium catalyst
under pressure of around 175 atmospheres to between 500 degrees Celsius
and 550 degrees Celsius. The company was doubtful whether such a technology
could safely be applied on an industrial scale but a member of the
staff, the future Nobel Prize winner and industrialist Carl Bosch, convinced
his colleagues that the technical obstacles to large scale production could
be overcome and that "we should risk it." On the eve of war, BASF was
profitably producing thirty thousand tons of sulfate of ammonia fertilizer
a year.
In the summer of 1911, Haber took up his new directorship at the
Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry.
Among the scientists who accepted his invitation to join him there was
Albert Einstein, nine years his junior, who in 1905 had published his theory
of special relativity and the ideas expressed in the world's most famous
equation: E = me. Einstein thought Haber a "splendid man" but one suffering
from "personal vanity." Other colleagues would recall his "hunger
for power" though also his generosity, loyalty, and personal courage.
When the war began, Walther Rathenau, a prominent industrialist and
head of the major German electrical company AEG and an adviser to van
Bethmann Hollweg among others, was already concerned that if the ShOlt
war implicit in all German planning had to be prolonged, Germany would
82 A HICHER FOB 'vi OF KILLING
run short of imported raw materials. The inevitable British naval blockade
would, for example, deprive the countJy of both Chilean copper and saltpeter,
the latter essential for explosives production as well as fertilizer. On
August 9, 1914, Rathenau approached von Falkenhayn, then minister of
war, and finding his concerns chimed \,vith those of some of the military,
persuaded von Falkenhayn to found the Kriegsrohstoffsamt (KRA)-the
Wartime Raw Matelials Office-within the Ministry of War with himself
as its head. KRA's PU1l)ose was to put German indushy on a war footing
and find substitutes for scarce strategically important materials.
Soon afterward, Rathenau approached Haber to lead the KRA's chemistJy
department. A proud patriot, Haber accepted with alacrity. As early
as 1909 Haber had spoken of "the relationship of chemistry to \ovar"and in
1912 unsuccessfully sought to link his institute with the Prussian Ministry
of \Var. Haber would soon, like Rontgen and Planck, be one of the
ninety-three "representatives of German science and arts" to sign the
"Proclamation to the Civilised \,yorld" denying that Germany was responsible
for the war and had committed atrocities at Louvain and refuting the
accusation "that our warhlre pays no respect to international laws." Einstein,
now a professor at Berlill University, saw matters differently, shortly afterward
heing one of the few to sign a counter-manifesto arguing for an end
to the war and calling on Europe to unite, In 1917 Einstein would liken
Germany's "much-praised technological progress and civilization" to "an
axe in the hand of a pathological criminaL"
The KRA chemistJy department soon became known as the "Bureau
Haber" and Haber himself became involved in the debate about the best
way to sYllthesize nitrates to replace saltpeter. Haher and Carl Bosch
argued for a massive expansion of the ammonia synthesis program to produce
the essential ammonia feedstuff. After much debate, not only \ovith
other scientists proposing competing technologies but also with other
industrialists keen to promote and protect their financial and commercial
interests, the KRA agreed to expand the Haber-Bosch process plant at the
BASF f~lctOlY,eventually increasing its capacity thirtyfold.
Meanwhile, in September 1914 Haber had been one of several chemists
invited by von Falkenhayn to consider the viability of "developing shells
that contained solid, gaseous, or liquid chemicals that would damage the
"s 0 MET H I N G T HAT M A K ESP E 0 P L E
enemy or render him unable to fight." The idea had originated with Major
Max Bauer, an artillery expelt who was acquainted with Haber as well as
with some of Germany's leading industrialists. Von Falkenhayn was attracted
to the idea of the new weapon, both as a way to gain the desired quick
victory and also to provide an altel11ative to the high explosive-shells of
which Germany was running short. At one stage in mid-November, von
Falkenhayn would calculate he had only enough for four more days of
fighting in Flanders.
In addition to Haber, the chemical weapons group included chemists
Walther Nernst and Carl Duisberg, the latter an "imperious Prussian who
would not tolerate dissent in either his personal or his business life" and
an enthusiastic advocate of chemical warhue-a fact some thought not
unrelated to his position as head of the Bayer chemical company.' As
Duisberg knew, Germany's chemical industry "vas exceptionally well placed
to conduct chemical weapons research. The techniques and equipment
developed by companies like his own to gain their prewar dominance in
world trade could be readily tUl11ed to the bulk production of toxic gases
just as that of BASF could be to the production of fixed ammonia for
nitrates.
Tests of such gases began quickly. Duisberg and Nel11st experimented
with dianisidine chlorosulphate-a compound used in the synthetic dyes
familiar to Haber-which caused sneezing fits. The German army fired
shrapnel shells filled with this powder at the Battle of Neuve Chapelle in
France in late 1914 but to no noticeable effect. German scientists also
expeJimented with xylyl bromide-a liquid that vaporized on contact with
air to form a variety of tear gas. Shells specially designed to hold Iiquidknown
as "T-shells" after their creator Dr. Hans von Tappen-were filled
with the xylyl bromide and used against the Russians on the eastem front
at the end of January 1915, again with little effect. The scientists pondered
why, then realized that the extreme cold might have inhibited the chemical's
vaporization. Hoping T-shells would perform better in the wanner
o After the war Duisberg showed an Allied officer a giant I11mal in Baver's offices. celebrating
the companv's contribution to the war effOlt and depicting the manufacture of gas
and shells heing filled with it.
A HIGIIEH FOHM OF KILLING
climate of the western front, scientists oversaw the manufacture of a further
batch of shells, this time mixing xylyl bromide with bromacetone. However,
these new shells, fired at Nieuwpoort in Flanders, in March 1915 again had
no obvious effect on the enemy. German scientists concluded for such
irritant gases to succeed in temporarily incapacitating the enemy, they
would need to be deployed in greater concentration and quantity.
In the interim, however, General von Falkenhayn's views on the use
of gas had hardened. He no longer wanted weapons that would merely
incapacitate but "something that makes people permanently incapable of
fighting"-a step that, even more than the deployment of irritant gases,
was entirely illegal under the provisions of the Hague Conventions prohibiting
the use of poison, poison weapons, and asphyxiating gases. Duisberg
thought the production of such a weapon would require an immense effort
by "all suitable forces in the German Empire" and might indeed be beyond
their capability. However, Emil Fischer, a leading organic chemist, suggested
the possibility of using phosgene, which could kill "even in
extraordinarily great dilution" and Duisberg began experimenting with it.
Haber too explored toxic gases at his institute where, an employee
recalled, "the work was pushed day and night." Every morning members
of the military arrived in "steel-grey cars" to inquire about progress. The
exhausting pace was not conducive to safety. On December 17, Haber was
called away just as two colleagues were about to combine two chemicalsdichloromethylamine
and cacodyl chloride-in a test tube. Moments later
he heard a tremendous explosion and ran hack to find one of the scientists
dying and the other \vith his hand blown off. Within two weeks of learning
of von Falkenhayn's changed and lethal requirement, Haber suggested
deploying liquid chlorine which, on coming into contact with the air, would
immediately gasifY and form a low, heavy cloud that would roll over the
enemy trenches, suffocating or driving out the enemy and cleating the way
for German troops to advance. Chlorine gas had first been characterized
in 1774, then in 1810 established as a pure element by scientist Sir Humphry
Davy who, because of its distinctive color, named it from the ancient Greek
khloros meaning "pale green."
Having witnessed some of the early T-shells tJials, Haber was convinced
that "owing to the small area affected by each shell it would be necessary
"s 0 MET If IN G T If AT M A K ESP EO P L E 85
to fire a large number simultaneously to produce any technical effect." The
remedy, he suggested, was "the use of a large number of mortars." Told
that such a quantity could never be provided in time, he proposed storing
the chlorine in liquid form in pressurized steel canisters, each large enough
to hold twenty kilograms. The canisters would be buried in the ground a
meter apart in a long line. Inserted in the top of each would be a lead pipe
which could be raised above the trench and directed toward the enemy.
When the wind was in the right direction, they would be opened simultaneously
to release the vaporizing chlorine. He asked for some of Germany's
existing stock of twelve thousand gas canisters in which liquid chlorine used
as an industrial bleaching agent was stored to be put at his disposal.
In mid-January 1915, von Falkenhayn endorsed Haber's proposals.
Although it seems inconceivable that the use of gas would not have been
discussed with the kaiser, no record of this appears to have survived either
in the official sources or elsewhere. Haber began his preparations. Unlike
Duisberg whose progress was being hindered by the scarcity of phosgene,
Haber had no shortage of chlorine-another by-product of the dye industry.
Even before war broke out the group of chemical companies including
Bayer and BASF (who in 1916 would combine their relevant activities to
form the Interessengemeinschaft: [IG]) had been producing forty tons a
day. However, he had quickly to assemble a suitable scientific team, as well
as recruit and train five hundred soldiers in the delicate task of handling
the gas canisters.
The scientists whom Haber-who retained his rank of noncommissioned
officer (NCO) in the army reserve dating from his military service
in Breslau-assembled into what became Pioneer Regiments 35 and :36
included future Nobel laureates James Franck, Gnstav Hertz, and Otto
Hahn as well as Hans Geiger, inventor of the Geiger counter for radiation
monitoring. Hahn was summoned by Haber to a meeting at a hotel in
Brussels in January 1915 to find him "lying in bed." Haber told him "how
the war had now become frozen" so that "the fronts were immobile."
Because of this "the war now had to be fought by other means ... He then
gave me a lecture on chlorine gas clouds which had to blow over the enemy
trenches in order to force the enemy to come out of them." When Hahn
objected that this surely violated the Hague Convention, Haber responded
86 A II I G HER FOR l\J 0 F K ILL I N C
that the French had already started it "by using rifle ammunition filled
with gas." (In fact, the French had not done so at this time but there is
some evidence that they would in March experiment in battle with nonlethal
tear gas cartridges and grenades.) Haber also argued that "it was a
way of saving countless lives, if it meant that the war could be brought to
an end sooner."
Hahn and the other chosen scientists received special training in
Berlin in the handling of poisonous gases and also in observing wind and
weather conditions. Some, like Hahn, were then deployed to regiments on
the western front as "gas pioneers"-soon to be nicknamed ·'Stinkpioneere"
by other German troops- tasked with selecting positions from which gas
might be deployed and instructing officers "in the nature of the new
weapon" as well as actually releasing the gas.
The problem for von Falkenhayn was where to launch the chlorine
attack. Most of his commanders refused outright to have anything to do
with the indisputably illegal poison gas, ignoring his arguments that its use
was essentially humane because by shortening the war it would save lives.
Colonel-General Karl von Einem denounced gas as dishonorable and
claimed its use would provoke a worldwide reaction that could only damage
Germany's reputation. Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria agreed that
poison gas was unchivalrous and also pointed out that except for a brief
period in the spring, the prevailing winds along the western front blew
toward the German lines not away from them. He also predicted that if gas
proved a success, the Allies would swiftly follow suit and deploy it against
German troops.
Von Falkenhayn found a more receptive ear in fifty-year-old Albrecht,
Grand Duke ofWiilttemberg, commander of the Fourth Army in Flanders.
In October 1914, the Grand Duke had almost succeeded in taking the
moated fOUlteenth-century city ofYpres, a quiet backwater in the western
corner of Belgium-the only significant pOltion of the country the Germans
had failed to occupy and one that blocked the route to the strategically
important Channel POIts whose capture was a key German war aim. Ypres
and its outlying villages and farms lay in a feltile basin intersected by canahi,
including the Yser Canal, and surrounded to the north, northeast, ,md.south
by wooded hills.
"s 0 MET H I N G T HAT MA KESP E 0 PL E
However, by mid-November 1914 in the First Battle of Ypres the
British Expeditionary Force had halted the German army's advance in
three weeks of fighting that had almost exhausted stocks of shells in both
armies and produced casualties of eighty thousand killed and wounded on
the German side and fifty-four thousand on the British. Consequently,
German troops were now occupying a network of trenches they had dug
for themselves east of Ypres. Facing them were Blitish, Canadian, and
French divisions, similarly dug into the Ypres Salient, an elongated tongue
of land projecting eastward into German-held territory from the village of
Steenstraat, five miles north of Ypres, to St. Eloi some three miles to the
south.
The Grand Duke hoped poison gas might deliver the breakthrough
that had so far eluded him. Satisfied that he had finally identified a suitable
place to deploy chlorine, von Falkenhayn ordered Haber to make the necessary
preparations. Haber decided the gas should be transported in liquid
form to a railhead in German-occupied territory, then poured into the
metal canisters ready to be brought up to the front. By February 1915 he
was ready to travel to the German front lines near Ypres to oversee the
arrangements in person. His wife Clara-herself a scientist, the first woman
to obtain a doctorate from Breslau University and according to James
Franck a gifted woman "with outspoken views that often contradicted her
husband's"-was fundamentally opposed to chemical weapons and tried to
dissuade him. Haber ignored her pleas and by March had settled into
lodgings in the small German-held town of Geluveld east of Ypres.
The senior German officer who would actually superintend the attack
was Major General Berthold von Deimling. By his own account, "when von
Falkenhayn informed us that a new weapon, poison gas, was to be deployed
for the first time in my sector" he was shocked. "I must admit that the task
of poisoning the enemy as if they were rats went against the grain with me
as it would with any decent sentient soldier." What convinced him to continue
was the thought that "using poison gas might perhaps lead to the fall
l. )f Ypres, perhaps even make the entire campaign victorious. With such an
im[J:ortant goal, all inner doubts had to be silenced. vVehad to go on, corne
",hat may. War is self-defence and knows no law. That will always be so as
long as war exists."
88 A HIGHER FORM OF KILLING
Haber decided to position his gas cylinders on Hill 60, a German-held
sixty-meter-high heap of spoil dug out during construction of a new railway
cutting in the nineteenth century, which faced the southeast sector of the
Ypres Salient. Before the war locals called the hill "Lover's Knoll." Working
at night to avoid being spotted, his soldiers dug some SLX thousand of the
heavy, unwieldy steel canisters requisitioned from civilian use into the
earth. Otto Hahn, who was assisting, found himself so close to the British
lines that "at times we could only talk in whispers. We were not velY well
entrenched and we were constantly under enemy fire so the installation of
the gas cylinders for the proposed attack was velY difficult indeed. [To
protect] against enemy hand grenades we used wire netting that catapulted
the grenades back into the enemy lines."
In early March, British shells by chance ruptured two chlorine cylinders,
gassing several German soldiers including one who died coughing up
blood. Not long after, similarly random Allied rifle fire damaged further
cylinders, releasing chlorine gas which injured fifty German soldiers and
killed three. Deimling, who visited the wounded, wrote, "They suffered
terribly. These incidents severely shook the troops' confidence in the horlible
devices." By March 10, all six thousand cylinders were in place but
the required wind from the east refused to blow steadily and consistently
enough. Deimling rode over to Haber's command post to yell at the "pale
and exhausted" scientist. An officer who was present recounted how
Deimling called him "a charlatan and a lot else besides for making false
claims to the high command about the utility of poison gas." Deimling's
accusations left Haber "extremely unhappy."
On March 25 the Grand Duke-under relentless pressure from von
Falkenhayn to launch the attack "at the first possible favourable opportunity"-
ordered Haber to set up an "alternate gas front" facing the northern
curve of the Ypres Salient. On April 5, shortly after Haber himself suffered
the effects of gas after riding too close to some fumes during a test, the
work began. Six days later 5,730 chlorine canisters-some new, some
dragged laboriously from the earlier position on Hill 60 and containing }r 08
tons of chlorine gas-were in place.
As timescales continued to extend, the German commanders \··,\VDrn.0d
that their plans would be discovered. They might have been if the Allies
"s 0 MET H I N G T HAT M A KESP E 0 P L E 89
had taken a slew of warnings more seliously. Toward midnight on ApJiI 13,
1915, twenty-four-year-old German private August Jaeger deserted,
crossing the several hundred yards of scarred ground that separated the
German and French lines to surrender to soldiers of the Fourth Battalion
of Chasseurs. Taken to the headquarters of the French Eleventh Division,
he startled his interrogators by reporting that "an attack is planned for the
near future against the French trenches ... Four batteries have been
placed in position in the first line trenches; these batteJies each have 20
bottles of asphyxiating gas ... At a given signal-3 red rockets fired by the
artillery-the bottles are uncorked, and the gas on escaping, is carried by
a favourable ,vind towards the French trenches. This gas is intended to
asphyxiate the men who occupy the trenches and to allow the Germans to
occupy them without losses." He added that German troops would use
wads of chemically treated cotton to protect themseh-es from the fumes.
The Eleventh Division's commander, General Edmond Ferry, sensibly
pulled some of his men back from the front lines to lessen casualties in the
event of a gas attack and ordered his artillery to concentrate its fire on the
area where, according to Jaeger, the gas cylinders were buried. He passed
the deserter's information to the British Twenty-eighth Division positioned
to the right of his own troops, urging them "to exercise the greatest vigilance
and to seek suitable means to prevent inhalation of gas." Having also
warned the Canadian troops who were about to relieve his own men, Feny
believed he had done all in his power "to avoid surprise, the effect of terror,
and the heavy losses the Germans counted on inflicting with this new and
abominable weapon of war." However, Ferry received no thanks for his
timely actions from his seniors at French headgmuters, who sent a liaison
officer to reprimand him for breaking protocol by communicating directly
with the BJitish and the Canadians and to tell him that "all this gas business
cannot be taken too seriously." This was despite the fact that French spy
Charles Lucieto had also been warning for some time that BASF was manufacturing
poison gas at its factories in Mannheim in the Ruhr.
When Ferry's report reached the headquarters of Liel1tenant General
Sir Herbert Plumer, commander of the three British divisions defending
the Salient, it was greeted with similar skepticism and the suspicion that
Private Jaeger's confession was in fact part of some dastardly German plot
go A HIGHER FORM OF KILLINC
to mislead and confuse the Allies. However, like the French commanders,
the British had also received earlier warnings that the Germans were planning
a chemical attack. In late March a captured German officer had told
a British sergeant of the Leicestershire Regiment that gas cylinders were
being buried ready for an attack "at the first favourable wind." The sergeant
had gone out with a small patrol and found "cylinders in dozens" but
although his report "was passed to headquarters" no action was taken. On
April 9, the Times carried a statement from a war correspondent that "it
has been reported that in the Argonne [nOliheastern France], where the
trenches are very close, the Germans have on several occasions pumped
blazing oil or pitch on to the French, but, according to the statements of
our prisoners, they are preparing a more novel reception for us in front of
parts of our line. They propose to asphyxiate our men if they advance by
means of poisonous gas. The gas is contained under pressure in steel cylinders,
and, being of a heavy nature, will spread along the ground without
being dissipated quickly.'·
Further evidence that something was being planned continued to
reach the British and French lines. A more detailed report from Jaeger
describing exactly how the gas cylinders worked and enclosing a wad of
cotton from his o.vn gas mask reached Plumer on April 15. The same day,
explicit intelligence Plumer received from the headquarters of his senior,
General Sir Horace Smith-Donien. Based on information from a Belgian
agent it warned of an imminent gas attack: "Passages have been prepared
across old trenches to facilitate bringing up of artillery. Germans intend
making use of tubes with asphyxiating gas. They are placed in batteries of
20 tubes per 4 metres ... A favourable wind necessary." However, more
attention was paid to the statement of a second German deselier, NCO
Julius Rapsahl of the Fifty-second Reserve Division, that there were no gas
cylinders in the German front lines and that the cotton mask found in his
own kit was for protection should the Allies use chemical grenades.
Senior British officers met at Plumer's headquarters to discuss how te
cope with any casualties from an attack \\lith asphyxiating gas. However,
the war cliary of one of those present which refers merely to "a rumour" of
a gas attack shows that, though such an attack was not ruled out, it was
considered a fairly remote possibility-a view confirmed when aerial
"s 0 MET H I N G T HAT M A K ESP E 0 P L E
reconnaissance by Hoyal Flying Corps aircraft flying slowly over the German
lines hliled to spot anything untoward. The night of April IS duly came and
went. A young Canadian officer wrote, "Last night [AprillsJ we got ready
to receive a German attack ... with tubes of poisonous gas; but it didn't
materialise ... Today is quite norma!." A British report stated: "We were
aware of the fact that the Germans were making preparations for the discharge
of gas for several days previously ... Nobody seems to have realised
the great danger that was threatening, it being considered that the enemy's
attempt would certainly fail and that whatever gas reached our line could
be easily fanned away. No one felt in the slightest degree uneasy."
The date set by Grand Duke Albrecht for the first gas attack had
indeed been April IS but the conditions noted by the young Canadian had
again frustrated it. Without a wind-and one blowing steadily from the
right direction-a gas attack was impossible. On April 17 on orders from
von Falkenhayn, German reserve troops began to pull back from the Salient
and elsewhere to begin their long journey to Galicia to strike against the
Hussian armies on the eastern front to which von Falkenhayn was now
shifting his focus-so much so that he refused the Grand Duke's request
for a division to remain in reserve to exploit a German breakthrough should
the gas attack succeed. Von Falkenhayn was, however, still committed to
the use of poison gas around Ypres to test its effectiveness on the
battlefield.
That same day, Germany issued a communique accusing the British
of using "shells and bombs with asphyxiating gas" near Ypres. Again that
might have given the Allies some pause for thought. The British Official
History later described the communique as typical of "the German mentality"-
intending to do something themselves they "were putting the
blame on their opponents in advance." (In fact, the British authOlities had
looked very briefly at the possible use of tear gas but dropped work on it
as they considered even the use of such a nonlethal gas breached the Hague
Conven tion.)
Another action that began that day, April 17, should also have provided
clues. British tunnelers detonated five mines beneath Hill 60 and as the
mines exploded they observed that the enemy seemed more panic-stricken
than usual, even seeming to turn their bayonets against their comrades in
92 A HIGHER FORM OF KILLING
their desperation to scramble out of the trenches. The British moved in to
occupy the hill before the Germans launched a counterattack in which
James Franck joined with several of the other gas pioneers, winning a
medal for bravery. Eventually after attack and counterattack BIitish troops
finally took and held the hill. They did not, however, find any of Haber's
gas cylinders that remained. Though some among the first wave of attackers
reported a smell of gas, and that their eyes suddenly started streaming and
they felt nauseous and weak, their commanders assumed they must have
encountered some sort of tear gas.
Meanwhile, worIied that the British might indeed have discovered the
gas cylinders remaining on Hill 60, Grand Duke Albrecht set Tuesday, April
20 as the new day for a gas attack on the northern sector of the Salient. Its
code name was "Disinfection" and its objectives were twofold. Two divisions
of General Otto von Hugel's XXVI Reserve Corps were to overwhelm
French troops and seize Pilckem Ridge, high ground just two and a half
miles north of Ypres which-according to the official German historycommanders
assumed would render the Allied position in the remainder
of the Salient untenable, allowing German troops to take the city.
Meanwhile, soldiers of General Hugo von Kathen's XXIII Reserve Corps,
advancing on von Hugel's right, were to dash westward to seize crossings
over the Yser Canal. The day before-Aprillg-the Grand Duke ordered
one of his giant seventeen-inch guns-a so-called Big Bertha-to start
pounding Ypres with its one-ton shells to distract the Allies from observing
his final preparations, which included bringing up one of his FOUIih Army's
own reserve divisions to the front lines to await the attack. Their officers
told the infantrymen who would lead the attack simply to await the order
to follow the gas cloud that would knock out the opposition. There was no
need to load rifles-steel bayonets were all that would be needed to dispose
of the choking survivors.
Through the early hours of April 20, the men crouched in their
trenches. However, at four A. M. the wind suddenly died. The next day a
frustrated von Falkenhayn called on the Grand Duke at his headquarters
at Thielt to insist on an attack as soon as even a "halfway favourable opportunity"
offered. With predictions of strong winds gusting from the northeast
on the following day, German troops were again put on aleIi. Infantry
"5 0 MET H I N G T HAT M A K E 5 P E 0 P L E 93
officer Leutnant Becker recalled how they "spent the night in the front line
brimming with confidence. The pioneers came and checked the locking
valves on the steel cylinders. The gas was trapped inside the cylinders under
high pressure. Harmlessly the cylinders sat there in the Flanders mud. The
pipes through which it would be released nestled in amongst the breastworks,
hidden from view."
However, April 22 dawned without a breath of wind. Tot until late
afternoon did a light breeze finally begin gusting toward the southwest.
German commanders passed down the line the code words that would
launch the attack "Gott strafe England!" (May God Punish England!). The
German altil1ery opened up against the nOlthern edge of the Salient held
by French and Canadian troops. An hour later at five P. M. , as the three red
Hares Private Jaeger had warned of shot into the sky from an observation
balloon, Haber was told to order his "Stinkpioneere" to open the valves on
the canisters.
CHAPTER NINE
"Operation Disinfection"
THE TWO FRENCH divisions dug in along the Ypres Salient's northern
front line around the village of Langemarck were about to experience the
world's first chlorine gas attack. The men of the Eighty-seventh Tenitorial
Division were veterans recalled to military service at the outbreak of the
war. Stationed to their right was the Forty-fifth InfantJy Division-known
informally as the Forty-fifth "Algerian" Division-which had served in
France's North African colonies. It included three Zouave regiments.
Originally recruited from North African Berbers, the Zouaves by 1914 were
conscripted Frenchmen who at this early stage in the war still wore the
traditional Zouave uniform of baggy red pantaloons, braided blue jackets,
and red fezzes.
The Forty-fifth also included a regiment of Tirailleurs or "sharpshooters"-
native North Africans with French officers also wearing
Zouave-style uniforms. In addition, two battalions of the Infanterie Legere
d'Afrique (African Light Infantry) had recently joined it. The latter were
composed of French convicts whose offenses ranged from vagrancy and
pimping to theft and assault, and soldiers transferred from other regiments
as punishment for ueserting or disobeying orders. The members of the
African Light Infantry had long ironically dubbed themselves "Les Joyeux"
(The Happy Ones).
The Forty-fifth had only taken over their positions eight days earlier
on the night of April 14. Captain Louis Botti of the Seventh Zouaves
despaired at the problems of digging trenches in ground more resembling
a cemetery than a defensive position: "In certain places shod feet stick out
94
·.0 PER AT ION D I SI FEe T I 0 95
of the soil and at a place we pass a hundred times a day, red trousers appear.
Everywhere, however little we seek them, the eye falls on out-stretched
corpses ... anonymous, not meaning anything to anyone." Living conditions
for all Allied soldiers around Ypres were indeed atrocious. The high
water table and low elevation-barely above sea level-meant trenches
Hooded easily. Newcomers thought those already there "looked like tramps,
all plastered with filth and dirt, and unshaven."
One of the few consolations was smoking-sometimes, despite their
"vile taste," the tobacco leaves they found hanging in the lofts of farmhouses.
But smoking required caution since as one soldier recalled, "ifJerry
saw any smoke he would send a grenade over because he knew there was
someone there." The belief in the trenches that to light three cigarettes
from one match was unlucky was not superstition but well foundedlighting
up the first revealed your presence to the enemy, lighting the
second allowed him to take aim, lighting the third gave him time to fire"
Then there were the rats. Some thought there was no point in killing them
since "they would putrefy and it would be worse than if you left them alive.
I think they lived in corpses, because they were ... big as cats ... horrible
great things."
It was not much better for the German troops although occupying as
they did more of the higher ground their trenches were somewhat dl;er. A
commander of a cavalry troop, Rudolf Binding, thought
the battlefield ... fearful. One is overcome by a peculiar sour, heavy
and penetrating smell of corpses. Hising over a plank bridge you find
that its middle is supported only by the body of a long-dead horse. Men
that were killed last October lie half in swamp and half in the
yellow-sprouting beet-fields. The legs of an Englishman, still encased
in puttees, stick out into a trench, the corpse being built into the parapet;
a soldier hangs his liRe on them. A little brook runs through the
trench and everyone uses the water for drinking and washing; it is the
• The writer J l. J l. Munro, better known as "Sak-i,"was shot dead by a German sniper in
France in November 1916 while as a lance sergeant sheltering with his men in a shell crater.
J lis last words reputedly were "PlIt that bloody cigarette out."
96 A HIGHER FORM OF KILLING
only water they have. Nohody minds the pale Englishman who is rotting
away a few steps hutlwr lip ... At one point T saw twenty-two dead
horses still harnessed, accompanied hy a few dead drivers. Cattle and
pigs lie about half-rotten: hroken trees ... crater upon crater in the
roads and in the fields. Such is a six month ~sold battlefield.
To the right of the Forty-fifth and Eighty-seventh French divisions
and holding a forty-five-hundred-yard front were four battalions of the
Second and Third Canadian Inh111tryBrigades that had recently replaced
French general Ferry's Eleventh Division. During the handover some
Canadians had gotten lost in the cratered terrain. Sergeant Raymond
MacIlree described to his parents in Victoria, British Columbia, how "a
Frenchman found us, for it was a French Regt. we were relieving and he
steered us over all kinds of obstacles, shell holes polka dot the whole place,
some so big that a Frenchy drowned in one, also there were dykes and
ditches galore." A flllther eight Canadian hattalions were in reserve behind
the lines and some of the men were playing football in the sunshine on the
afternoon of the attack.
The Canadian troops belonged to the First Canadian Division. Since
Canada was a British dominion, the division was part of the British army.
Its British commander, Lieutenant General Echvin Alderson, reported to
General Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien, commander of the British Second
Army. When Britain entered the war, many Canadians and especially the
dominion's numerous British immigrants had greeted the news with patriotic
enthusiasm. The Toronto Globe related how people came out onto the
streets, stood for a few moments in silence, then broke into a cheer. "It was
not for the war, but for the King, Britain, and-please God-victory ...
Heads were bowed and the crowd began to sing 'God Save the King.''' In
towns and cities including Vancouver and Regina mobs attacked property
thought to belong to Germans. In Berlin, Ontario, a meta] statue of the
first kaiser was thrown in a lake, then fished out and melted down.
As soon as recruiting offices opened, men converged on them in such
ovel\vhelming numbers it was clear there was no need yet for conscription.
At one office in Toronto, guards with fixed bayonets had to restrain eager
volunteers. By early September 1914 nearly thirty-three thousand men
"OPERATION DISINFECTION" 97
were in training at a specially constructed camp in Quebec and a month
later the first Canadian troops were disembarking in England. Churchill,
never concerned about straying outside his naval brief, sent them a rousing
cable: CANADA SENDS HER AID AT A TIMELY MOMENT. THE CONFLICT
MOVES FORWARD AND FIERCER STRUGGLES LIE BEFORE
US THAN ANY WHICH HAVE YET BEEN FOUGHT. The London Times
remarked that "nothing like the Canadian contingent has been landed in
this country since the time of William the Conqueror."
In February 1915, after rigorous training on Salisbury Plain, the
Canadian Division embarked in stormy weather for Saint-Nazaire at the
mouth of the Loire where they boarded trains for the five-hundred-mile
journey to the front in Flanders. Once arrived they accustomed themselves
to their muddy, dangerous environment, suffering the constant itching and
scratching caused by lice. One soldier recalled it as "enough to make a saint
swear ... We did not notice the lice so much when stancling, pelished with
cold on look-out. But when we got in our tiny dug-outs, and our bodies
began to get warm, then out would come the lice from their hiding places
in our clothing, forming up in columns of fours, [they] would start route
marching over our flesh ... There have been times when utterly worn out,
both mentally and physically, yet unable to sleep because of the lice, I have
known men to actually cry." Meals were of bully beef so solid that the soldiers
sometimes used the unopened tins as bricks to line their trenches.
The Canadians also quickly developed respect for the German snipers who,
an officer commented, "are the very deuce. They pick off our men whenever
they get a chance."
The brigade commanders of the Canadian troops settling into their
new positions at Ypres were tall, heavyset, thirty-nine-year-old Brigadier
General Arthur Currie, whose prewar career had included teaching, selling
insurance, and speculating on property on Vancouver Island, in charge of
the Second Brigade; and forty-three-year-old Brigaclier General Richard
Turner, a Quebec wholesale merchant who had won Britain's highest military
decoration, the Victoria Cross, during the Boer War, in charge of the
Third Brigade. Many of their soldiers were of Scottish stock or recent
emigrants from Scotland. Turner's Third Brigade included the Canadian
Scottish, Royal Highlander, and Forty-eighth Highlanders of Canada
98 A HIGHER FORM OF KILLI IG
regiments who fought in kilts. Other Canadians were in the khaki uniforms
adopted by their British counterparts in the Boer War when in their red
coats they proved all too easy for Boers to pick out and pick off.
Since relieving the French, the Canadians had worked under cover of
darkness, "vhen the risk of being sniped was less, to improve the trenches
the French had bequeathed them. To their dismay, they found that these
trenches were shallow, badly connected, am} inadequately protected by
barbed \vire. To give proper cover, entrenchments needed to run in long,
continuous lines that zigzagged to prevent an in/lltrating enemy firing down
the length of them. They also had to be protected by high bulletproof
parapets to the front and further parapets behind to provide some shelter
from shell bursts. Instead Sergeant MacIlree found his position had only
"a mere breastwork, bullet proof for about n\!o feet up, no cover behind."
The Canadians also discovered, as another sergeant complained, that "the
French have used the trenches as latlines'" Even worse, bits of body protruded
through the earthworks like the hand dangling through a parapet
that some men "used to shake hands with."
To the Canadians' right the British Twenty-seventh and Twenty-eighth
Divisions held the rest of the British army's ten-mile pOItion of the Salient's
front line, including its easternmost point. Major Cuthbert Lawson
described in a letter to a fi-iend how the British were situated: ''The position
round Ypres has always been like a horseshoe-Ypres is in the centre of
the heels and we are light in the toe."
For all these Allied troops, April 22 had passed much as usual except
for exceptionally beautiful weather. A Canadian offlcer recalled how "we
spent the time basking in the sun and writing letters" before enjoying "a
glorious tea of Scotch shOltbread and chocolate biscuits." To another officer
it seemed "the very essence of spring ... when the spring feeling suddenly
gets into the blood, when one throws work to the winds and takes to the
woods in search of the first violets." For most of the day German artillery
had continued pounding Ypres with its masterpieces of Gothic architecture-
the Guild Hall of the Cloth Merchants and Saint Martin's
Cathedral-so that, as a soldier noted, "a dark red pall of dust and smoke"
hung over it. Many of its once seventeen-thousand strong population were
streaming out of the city, "in scattered groups ... in Sunday black or rags;
<. 0 PER AT ION D I S I FEe T I 0 " 99
old men sweating between the shafts of handcarts piled high with household
treasures; deep-chested dogs harnessed underneath and straining at
the axle with lolling tongue; aged women on wagons stacked with bedding
or in wheel-barrows trundled by the family in turn, bewildered children
and anxious mothers, all hastening in stricken flight before the breaking
storm."
Allied troops observed little untoward except that British aerial reconnaissance
reported an unusual amount of activity to the rear of the enemy
lines, including the forming up of long lines of troops. However, at four
P. M., as the revised time set by the German command for the gas attack
approached, the German artillery shortened its range and began bombarding
not Ypres but the French and Canadian lines. Then shortly before
five P. M. their guns fell silent.
Soon aftelward, French sentries saw the three red rockets shoot across
the sk)' followed by puffs of white smoke rising from the German trenches.
The smoke was the chlorine that began to condense as it absorbed moisture
from the atmosphere. As its volume increased it changed color; the pale
wisps were soon a grubby-looking yellow-green cloud rolling across no
man's land toward the French trenches. Haber's "Stinkpioneere" had taken
only five minutes to release the 150 tons of compressed chlorine gas billowing
forward along a front nearly four miles wide to engulf the soldiers
of the Forty-fifth "Algerian" Division. A German airman observing the
advancing gas from above was struck by "how extraordinary it looked when
the clouds came up to the enemy trenches, then rose, and after as it were
peering curiously for a moment over the edge of the trenches, sank down
into them like some living thing."
The war diary of the First Battalion of the African Light Infantry
relates how "the north wind that blew that cloud towards our lines ...
brought on our companies asphyxiating vapours of chlorine and nitrolls
products." A French medical officer saw troops suddenly scrambling from
the trenches on all sides. Wondering what had caused "this panic" he looked
around to find "the sky totally obscured by a yellow-green cloud." Moments
later the vapor enveloped him so that he felt he was peering "through green
glasses." At once he experienced effects on his respiratory system: "throat
burning, chest pains, choking and spitting of blood, dizziness. We believed
100 A l-lIGI-IEB FOB f OF KILLI G
we were all lost." An officer beside him turned purple and no longer had
the strength to walk.
Canadian troops stationed to the right saw "a heavy greenish cloud
hanging over the French lines" and "the French running back." However,
at five ten P.M. German field guns, ordered to hold fire while the gas had
been released for fear that shells might disperse the chlorine before it could
form a clond, opened up once more. As the barrage descendecl again, for
the moment the Canadians "could find out nothing more." By no,v German
inhmtry in their uniforms offeld grm( (field gray) were advancing cautiously
in the wake of the cloud, many wealing crude face masks of dampened
cotton and gauze. Skeptical whether the gas would indeed immediately
knock out the enemy as their officers had promised, many had ignored the
order not to load their riRes, only to fix bayonets. As cautiously they
approached the shallow trenches of the Forty-fifth Division; some
defenders, coughing and choking though they were, managed for a short
while to return fire before being quickly overrun or Reeing. On entering
the French trenches the German troops found them crammed with the
dead and the clying, some of the latter vomiting green phlegm. The official
German acconnt of the attack records how "even before [the gas] reached
them the enemy could be seen to waver."
Capitaine Tremsal of the African Light Infantry had been resting in a
cellar when the sounds of heavy machine gun fire brought him rushing
toward his front line. Running the opposite way was one of his men shouting
that he and his fellows hacl been poisoned. Looking beyond the soldier, the
captain saw "an enormous cloud several meters high, yellow in the centre
and green on the edge masking ancl discolouring the landscape." As more
of his men staggerecl choking toward him from the now gas-enshrouded
trenches he tried to rally them, shouting, "The Joyeux have never lost a
trench!" However, within moments "the asphyxiating cloud" ovelwhelmed
both him and them. He experienced "a horrible sensation of burning" in
his throat as his lungs "refused to receive that poisoned air" while bloodtinged
mucous ran from his nose and mouth. Some men of the Forty-fifth
rushed toward the Eighty-seventh TerritOlials on their left to collapse in
their trenches. Soon the Eighty-seventh too were Aeeing, clogging the
roads as they made for the bridges over the Yser Canal hoping to cross to
"'OPERATION DISINFECTION 101
the west bank, or heading for the Canadian lines. A Canadian Royal
Highlander watched French troops "pouring into our trench, coughing,
bleeding and dying all over the place."
At around six P.M. French gunners of the Eighty-seventh Division
east of the canal spotted the gas cloud and the advancing Germans. Spared
the worst effects of the gas by a shift in the wind, they trained their sixteen
modern seventy-five-millimeter "quick-firers" and twenty-nine older
ninety-millimeter guns, brought out of "retirement" for the war, on the
enemy, claiming heavy casualties. However, they quickly exhausted their
limited ammunition. Soon, as an artillery officer related, "we distinctly
heard the cries of their officers, 'Vorwaerts!' 'Vorwaerts!' and the rolling
artillery barrage which preceded them intensified more and more. Finally
groups of the enemy surged to the right and to the left. We had to extricate
the guns as quickly as possible or abandon them. A great many of the gunners
were unable to escape in time and were taken prisoner." By seven P.M.
most of the forty-five guns were also in enemy hands.
The first that Colonel Jean Mordacq, commander of the Forty-fifth
Division's Ninetieth Brigade, knew of the attack was when, some h.venty
minutes after the arrival of the gas cloud, Major Villevaleix of the First
Tirailleurs telephoned him and '"in a gasping voice, punctuated, barely
distinct ... announced to me that he was being violently attacked, that
immense columns of yellow smoke issuing from the German trenches were
now extending across his entire front," that the Tirailleurs were starting to
evacuate their trenches and beating a retreat-"many falling asphyxiated."
Mordacq's first reaction was to ask himself whether the major "had not lost
his head a little or suffered one of those shocks to the brain I'd seen so
often since the start of the campaign ... In any case a gas attack was far
from my thoughts, having never enteliained the possibility or heard it being
discussed since my arrival in Belgium." However, a subsequent call from a
hoarse-voiced other officer, of the First Tirailleurs, told a similar story and
reported that "he was being forced to abandon his command position"' since
he could not breathe and the situation was untenable. 'Whole groups of
Tirailleurs were collapsing all around him due to the gas and German
shelling. Moments later Villevaleix rang again: "Everyone around me is
falling, I am leaving my position." Then the line went dead.
102 A H r G JT E R F 0 H r-I 0 F K ILL I N C
No longer doubting some catastrophe had happened, Mordacq hurried
outside, mounted his horse, and made for the Yser Canal, which he
could no longer see because of drifts of ~'ellow smoke. Approaching the
village of Boesinghe on the canal's west bank, his nose and throat began to
tingle violently, his ears buzzed, and his breathing was becoming labored.
An "unbearable stench of chlorine" hung over everything. \Vith his horse
refusing to go on, Mordacq dismounted and walked into Boesinghe to a
sight "worse than lamentable, it was tragic. Men who had fled their positions
were everywhere: territorials, 'Joyeux,' zouaves, artillerymen without
their guns, haggard, greatcoats thrown away or hanging open ... running
hither and thither like madmen, crying loudly for water, spitting blood,
some even rolling on the ground in a desperate struggle to breathe." One
"Joyeux" called out to Mordacq, "Those [bastards] have poisoned us."
Meanwhile, "a mass of crazcd unfortunates" crowded the canal banks
hoping water would relieve "their horrible sufferings." Mordacq-one of
several to liken the sights uf that day to scenes from Dante's l/~femodecided
there was no point tr~ring to prevent those who could still walk
from fleeing since they were "no longer soldiers ... but poor beings who
had suddenly turned mad."
By six forty-five P. 1\1. -less than two hou rs after the start of the gas
attack-German advance troops were approaching the east bank of the
Yser Canal and would soon establish a bridgehead over it at Het Sas, north
of Boesinghe. So far, the gas had done its work. Haber had chosen to
release a mixture of one thousand pcuts chlmine to one million parts air-a
level that burned the throat, distended the chest, and destroyed the lining
of the lungs which, engorged v,rithliquid, swelled to tvvricetheir normal size.
An Allied soldier described how the vrictim drowned in his own body Auids:
"It produces a Aooding in the lungs ... the coughing-up of a greenish froth
off the stomach and lungs, ending flnally in insensibility and death. The
colour of the skin turns a greenish-black and yellow, the tongue protrudes
and the eyes assume a glassy stare."
Another soldier saw several hundred men in an orchard "wriggling
and writhing ... their faces black ... tearing at their throats" watched by
a medical officer who lamented, "Look at the poor bastards and we can't
do anything for them." Lieutenant Colonel Edward Morrison, a Canadian
"OPERATION DISINFECTION"
officer who had been a journalist in Ottawa before the war, described
demoralized French troops "absolutely in rout" and "ambulances loaded
with unwounded men, ammunition wagons, transport vehicles crowded
with infantry galloping across country through hedges, ditches, and
barbed wire After this rabble came men on foot, without arms [weapons],
singly and in groups, alternately running and walking, and only intent on
getting away" and men "tearing madly through the crush of fugitives with
staring eyes and their faces Reeked with blood and froth. Frequently these
men would fall down under the feet of the mob, and roll ahout like mad
dogs in their death agonies." Another Canadian officer commanding a battery
one thousand yards south of Saint-J ulien, a village northeast of Ypres,
saw Algerians "running back as if the devil was after them, their eyeballs
showing white, and coughing their lungs out-they literally were coughing
their lungs out: glue was coming out of their mouths. It was ... very disturbing,
very distressing."
In the initial chaos and \vith many field telephone lines-the principal
means of communication-severed by shell fire, Allied commanders found
it hard to gauge what had happened, beyond that the Germans appeared
to have used some type of poison gas and that French troops had Red their
position along the northern edge of the Ypres Salient. In fact, the French
Right had created a breach to the left of the Canadians of four to five miles
between the Poelcapelle to Ypres road and Steenstraat on the Yser Canal.
No organized French units remained east of the canal. Therefore, the
Canadian front line, despite still holding finn, was in imminent and grave
danger of being outflanked. Until reserves could be called up, only five
hundred Canadian troops in Saint-Julien, a Canadian battery of four
eighteen-pounder field guns protecting the approach to the village, a
British battery in Kitcheners Wood west of Saint- Julien, and some scattered
French troops stood in the way of the German advance.
The most imminent danger was to the Canadian Royal Highlanders
in the trenches immediately adjoining the ahandoned French lines. Major
D. Rykert McCuaig at once pulled men out of the front line to establish a
protective Rank while Major Edward Norsworthy, together with two platoons
and some French troops he had gathered up, for a while succeeded
in holding up the German infantry as they tried to cross the
A HICHEH FOHM OF KILLll\'C
Ypres-Poelcapelle road to outflank the Canadian front line. Norsworthy's
entire {()fee was either captured or, like him, killed.
Advancing German troops attempted to capture the guns of the
Canadian battelY blocking their path to Saint-Julien but machine gunner
Lance Corporal Frederick Fisher of the Royal Highlanders, who had
come out from Saint-Julien with his crew, held them off, winning time
for the guns to be loaded on their limbers and dragged off to safety. Like
orsworthy and his men, Fisher and his team paid with their lives. Fisher
was awarded a posthumous Victoria Cross-the first to a Canadian soldier
in the war. Meanwhile, the two Canadian frontline brigades were doing
what they could to plug the gaps the French had left in the trenches
adjoining theirs while Canadian reserves were rushed up. As night fell,
the German troops had met enough resistance to convince them to halt
for the night and dig in.
At eight o'clock that evening, a French liaison officer told Lieutenant
General Edwin Alderson, commander of the First Canadian Division, that
the French Forty-fifth Division was about to counterattack toward Pilckem
and asked for help in clearing the Germans from Kitcheners Wood.
Unaware that as a fighting force the Forty-fifth no longer really existed and
had an~"vay lost most of its artillelY, Alderson agreed. At eleven forty-eight
P. M. the order to advance was issued (by whisper rather than by whistle to
avoid alerting the enemy) and fifteen hundred soldiers {i"01n two battalions
(the kilted Sixteenth Canadian Scottish and the Tenth Calgary-Winnipeg)
went forward, bayonets fixed, toward the south side of the woods, five
hundred yards away. In the bright moonshine a subaltern reflected "what
a picture the flashing bayonets made."
When they were still two hundred yards from the wood, the leading
men found their way obstructed by a high hedge of twigs, branches, and
barbed wire. As they forced their way through, the noise alerted the
German troops ahead of them in the woods. A German flare lit the sky and
the Canadians dropped to the ground. Then urged on by a company commander
they stood and charged forward to be met by small-arms fire so
intense it sounded "like hailstones on a zinc roof." Many fell but those who
could crossed a shallow trench the German defenders had dug to engage
in what a survivor called "dreadful hand-to-hand conflict." "W'e fought in
"OPERATION DISINFECTION 105
clumps and batches, and the living struggled over the bodies of the dead
and dying ... All who resisted were bayoneted; those who yielded were
sent to the rear."
As the Canadian troops pushed deeper into the trees, German machine
gunners fired at them from the protection of banks of sandbags.
evertheless, by two A. M. the Canadians had flushed the Germans from
most of Kitcheners Wood, driving one thousand yards north into enemy
lines. However, in doing so they exposed themselves to fire from all sides.
After attempts to reinforce them failed, they were ordered to pull back to
the wood's southern edge. Of the original Canadian force, less than one
third was still standing.
That same morning of April 23-Saint George's Day-commander in
chief of the British forces, Sir John French, visited General Ferdinand
Foch at his headquarters in the hilltop town of Cassel twenty miles west of
Ypres. Commander of the northern "ving of the French armies, Foch was
also responsible to the French commander in chief, Marshal Joseph Joffre,
for liaising with the British and Belgian forces. Sir John French intended
to inform Foch that the defense of the current positions within the Salient
was unsustainable and that he was going to pull back his troops. Foch,
however, told French that he had called up fresh divisions. Once they were
in position, his troops would connterattack and regain their lost ground.
He asked for British support. Persuaded by Foch's passion, French agreed
to maintain his present line within the Salient and even to cooperate in a
counterattack later that day. Returning to his headquarters at Hazebrouck,
he duly ordered troops he had already placed on standby to move up to the
front.
The counterattack was to begin at three P.M. and German positions
on Mauser Ridge, directly north ofYpres, were the initial target. However,
congestion on the roads delayed the arrival of British reserve troops so that
the assault did not start until an hour and a half later. Even so there had
been little time to reconnoiter. Worse still, because of poor communications
the British and Canadian batteries ordered to launch a preliminary bombardment
of the ridge were not informed that the attack had been
postponed. They therefore wasted ammunition by firing their guns too
early. \Vhen eight British and two Canadian battalions finally did advance
106 A HIGHER FOR\1 OF KILLING
on the Jidge, first German cutillery, then rifle and machine gun fire cut them
down. The only significant assistance from the French troops promised by
Foch came from a few hundred men of the Forty-fifth on the east bank of
the Yser Canal, and even this was only brief as they soon fell back. By seven
P. M. the counterattack was over with the loss of more than half the BJitish
and Canadian troops and the majority of their officers. The British Official
HistOlY records: "No ground was gained that could not have been
secured ... by a simple advance after dark. to which the openness of the
country lent itself."
As darkness fell on April 23, the Allies' consolation was that most of
the German troops had remained in the positions they had dug the previous
night and shown no sign of launching an all-out infantry assault. The only
significant German push was in the north of the Salient where troops were
extending their bridgehead over the Yser Canal at Het Sas and advancing
toward the village of Lizerne, on the canal's west bank.
The German behavior puzzled the Allies. However, just as confused
intelligence had hindered their decision taking, so it had clouded the judgment
of the German high command. Their troops had met greater resistance
than anticipated and suffered higher casualties. Therefore, German commanders
were convinced they had insufficient reserves to advance further
at present. The result was orders to one division (the Fifty-second Reserve)
"not to go beyond the southern slope of Pilckem Ridge" and lukewarm
instructions to another (the Fifty-fi rst) to take Saint-Julien "if possible." An
official German war dimy attributed the German failure to capitalize on
their advantage to low morale, declaring that "the infantry ... had lost its
daring and indifference to heavy losses." vVhatever the case, the result was
that instead of pushing on, the Germans concentrated on bringing up field
guns and trench mortars to their new front line while waiting for supplies.
They did, however, have more than enough stocks of their new weaponchlorine
gas-and of containers from which to release it.