👻Really Spooky Smith👻
@reallyseansmith.bsky.social
2.9K followers 644 following 15K posts
Author of Even a Dog Enlists, Why Not You? and Rank Absurdity: An Irreverent Military Memoir. Formerly a US Army, MI, UN, NATO, etc. guy. Currently a Regular Human Person goofing off on Bluesky. www.amazon.com/stores/Sean-Smith/au…
![World War I is infamous for being the fi rst war to feature the serious
use of battlefi eld chemical weapons, but this didn’t come entirely
out of the blue. The potential of poison gas being used in warfare
was already a mainstream concern by 1899, when 29 countries
including France, Germany and the United Kingdom all ratifi ed the
Hague Declaration to “agree to abstain from the use of projectiles
the sole object of which is the diff usion of asphyxiating or deleteri-
ous gases.”1
Notable by its absence from the list of signatories was
the United States, whose rationale seemed to be that the whole idea
of the treaty was unnecessary. Quoting the U.S. representative to the
conference, Alfred Thayer Mahan, already world famous as a naval
historian and proponent of the importance of sea power: EVEN A DOG ENLISTS, WHY NOT YOU?
188
It was illogical and not demonstrably humane to be tender
about asphyxiating men with gas, when all were prepared to
admit that it was allowable to blow the bottom out of an iron-
clad [warship] at midnight, throwing four or five hundred men
into the sea, to be choked by water, with scarcely the remotest
chance of escape.2
The more cynical reader might assume the United States wouldn’t
stake out a position like that unless it was already working on chem-
ical weapons, or at least was seriously planning to. However, there
doesn’t seem to be any evidence that it was, and it seems clear the
Army was no more ready to engage in chemical warfare in 1917
than it was ready to properly employ machine guns, artillery, tanks,
or aircraft. Actual signatories to the declaration France and Great
Britain both dabbled in chemical agents starting in 1914, but these
efforts focused on developing various forms of tear gas, which all
seem to have been ineffective as battlefield weapons.3](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:nre3gaohxhiissdpfkqu5a3d/bafkreihrvbbpa4sjo4qnrp32owgupzle35nzyaspyqeh7zyjx3kpadzl3q)
