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The most frequently used chemicals during World War I were tear-inducing irritants rather than fatal or disabling poison. During World War I, the French Army was the first to employ tear gas, using 26 mm grenades filled with ethyl bromoacetate in August 1914.
Lenin's Soviet government employed poison gas in 1921 during the Tambov Rebellion. An order signed by military commanders Tukhachevsky and Vladimir Antonov-Ovseyenko stipulated, "The forests where the bandits are hiding are to be cleared by the use of poison gas. This must be carefully calculated, so that the layer of gas penetrates the forests ...
The use of chemical weapons in warfare was a war crime as such use was in direct violation of the 1899 Hague Declaration Concerning Asphyxiating Gases and the 1907 Hague Convention on Land Warfare, which prohibited the use of "poison or poisoned weapons" in warfare.
Fritz Haber, a German chemist who proposed the use of the heavier-than-air chlorine gas as a weapon to break the trench deadlock. The German chemist Walther Nernst, who in 1914 was as a volunteer driver, proposed to Colonel Max Bauer, the German general staff officer responsible for liaison with scientists, that they could empty the opposing trenches by a surprise attack with tear gas.
Chlorine gas was first used on the battlefield in April 1915 at the Second Battle of Ypres in Belgium. The unknown gas appeared to be a simple smoke screen, used to hide attacking soldiers, and Allied troops were ordered to the front trenches to repel the expected attack. The gas had a devastating effect, killing many defenders or, when the ...
World War I saw large-scale use of poison gases. At the start of the war, the gas agents used were relatively weak and delivery unreliable, but by mid-war advances in this chemical warfare reached horrifying levels. The first methods of employing gas was by releasing it from a cylinder when the wind was favourable.
Chemical warfare (CW) involves using the toxic properties of chemical substances as weapons.This type of warfare is distinct from nuclear warfare, biological warfare and radiological warfare, which together make up CBRN, the military acronym for chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear (warfare or weapons), all of which are considered "weapons of mass destruction" (WMDs), a term that ...
First Battle of Ypres (19 October – 22 November 1914). During the Race to the Sea. more than 220,000 casualties. Second Battle of Ypres (22 April – 15 May 1915). First mass use of poison gas by the German army. Around 100,000 casualties. Battle of Passchendaele (31 July – 10 November 1917) also known as the Third Battle of Ypres. Between ...