Jan Medemma looks at another centennial - mustard agent


A century of mustard attacks O


n 10 July 1917 the first shell marked with a yellow cross was fired across the Flanders fields.


Within a day soldiers in the trenches had serious difficulties - some with breathing, some with their eyesight, and many had itchy skin while some started to develop serious blisters. This attack was followed two days later with a major attack using the yellow cross shells in the Ypres area. It was a turning point in the chemical war. British and Canadian troops with gas masks had not suffered many chemical weapon (CW) casualties in the previous year, but the new gas produced more casualties in the three weeks to come than happened in the whole of 1916.


Google has the whole story The yellow cross agent became known under several names and Google shows thousands of hits when the most common of them - mustard - is entered and most details the use and effects of mustard. To commemorate its first use as a CW exactly 100 years ago, it is best not to copy all these facts and sometimes fictions, but to tell some of the stories that are harder to find.


Odour or taste? Generally the odour of mustard is described as garlic or mustard-like. But the first description (Frederic Guthrie 1860) of the effect of mustard on the senses was a tickling sensation on the tongue, very similar to the taste of French mustard. When you come into contact with minute quantities of mustard this is the first thing you will note, the tickling sensation on the tongue, you will taste it before you smell it. So the agent is named after the taste not the odour.


Was it effective? In historical overviews mustard gas is described as the ’King of CW agents,’ the most deadly CW agent of the world war one era, and the most humane weapon in WW1 (Calinicus, In Defence of Chemical Warfare). It was used in


two ways, as an anti-personnel weapon and for terrain denial. Around 12,000tonnes of mustard were produced, but an unknown percentage of the 12,000 tons never made it to the battlefield. Another percentage was not fired, and when hostilities ceased was dropped into the North Sea in front of Ostend where there’s a sandbank known as the Paardemarkt. Late in the war the German ammunition became unreliable so many shells failed to detonate and disappeared into the mud. In the 1990s Belgium was still retrieving about 200tonnes of unexploded ammunition each year. Some of this was CW. Based on much guesswork the quantity used in anti personnel mode, which was the most casualty-producing, was between 1,500 and 3,000tonnes or 5-10kg to produce one casualty. This is much lower than the amount of phosgene and other gasses used, which was about 100kg per casualty, and in turn that was lower than the 250kg of high explosive needed to cause one casualty in trench warfare. (Hanslian, Der Chemische Krieg). There was also a significant


difference in lethality. For mustard gas it was 1-2%, for the other CW agents it was around 7% and for the high explosives it was one in three. So mustard was not the most deadly weapon but the least, and because of low lethality it was said to be the most humane! However, the suffering after the war, the blindness that developed in time and the skin and other forms of cancer that were generated because of mustard exposure were not considered. In recent times Iran has experienced several mustard attacks and medical personnel in Iran will most certainly disagree with the idea that mustard is a humane weapon. On average the mustard casualties


had to be treated in a hospital for two months, day and night. To care for and transport each casualty, two men were needed, so almost 1 million man-years were lost on the allied side in the final year of WW1. It is rather cynical but


dealing with the 10 million lethal casualties of that conflict required far less manpower. This made mustard the king of CW agents.


Was using mustard advantageous? German scientists expected two advantages from the use of mustard. Firstly, it would circumvent the protection offered by the gas mask and secondly, it would be extremely difficult for the allied forces to analyse the agent. The benefit would be that the German forces did not have to expect retaliation in kind and protective measures were not considered. The first point was assessed correctly,


in that although the mask succeeded in protecting the lungs from mustard thereby reducing lethality, the skin effects were devastating. The second advantage, however, was assessed completely wrongly. Within a week the British knew exactly which agent was used, as it had been synthesised by a British postdoc in Berlin in 1913. Workers at the Chemical Defence Establishment in Porton Down had produced the agent in 1916 and suggested its use. British military rejected the agent because it did not kill. Angry Porton Down researchers wanted to prove the efficacy of mustard and placed a drop on the director’s chair. As the story goes, he had to eat his meals at the mantelpiece for a month. The British were able to produce mustard in autumn 2017. But the first allied mustard attack took place in September of that year as French forces had captured a German stockpile of yellow cross shells somewhat earlier. Within a few months any advantage the Germans had hoped for was gone.


Are the alternatives worse? The US developed an alternative blister agent named Lewisite and later a form of mustard using nitrogen instead of sulphur. After world war two, a discussion started about the hazards of a form developed by Italians in Libya, which was later named dusty mustard. In contrast with mustard, Lewisite


CBRNe Convergence, Indianapolis Motor Speedway, Indiana, USA, 6 - 8 Nov 2017 www.cbrneworld.com/convergence2017 16 CBRNe WORLD June 2017 www.cbrneworld.com


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