Second Battle of Ypres and First Poison Gas Attack
The Germans released 168 tonnes of chlorine gas from cylinders at Ypres on 22 April 1915, the first large-scale use of a chemical weapon in war. The wind carried a yellow-green cloud some six kilometres wide across the French and Algerian positions on the northern face of the salient, and the troops there — with no protection of any kind — fled or died, leaving a gap of about seven kilometres in the line. The Germans had not expected it to work that well and had no reserves ready to exploit it, which is the only reason Ypres did not fall that evening. Canadian troops on the flank extended their line across the gap and held through the night, urinating on cloths to hold over their faces, ammonia being the improvised counter to chlorine. The gas was used repeatedly over the following month, and both sides had respirators of increasing sophistication within a year; by 1918 all the major armies used gas as a matter of routine, and phosgene and mustard were far worse than chlorine. Fritz Haber, who directed the German programme, had synthesised ammonia from the air and won a Nobel Prize for it, feeding a large part of the world since. His wife Clara, also a chemist, shot herself days after the Ypres attack. The battle continued to late May and cost some 70,000 casualties for a shortening of the salient. Gas killed perhaps 90,000 people in the war and injured a million. The Hague declarations of 1899 had prohibited projectiles whose sole purpose was to deliver asphyxiating gas, and the German legal argument was that cylinders are not projectiles. The 1925 Geneva Protocol closed the argument and left production and stockpiling untouched.
- Year: 1915 CE
- Category: Military
