Gas Warfare Research Paper
Jason Davis Professor Neeld HUM1020
15 November 2017
Gas Warfare Boils, burning, and blindness imagine sitting in a field hospital in agony wishing that the pain would just end. Many of these soldiers’ lives would be forever changed after heading to the battlefield and being confronted with this. We all know that warfare technology through the age’s changes and advances but even a general from five hundred years ago would say that this is just cold-blooded. That dreadful weapon is gas warfare or a specialized munition that uses chemicals formulated to inflict death or harm on humans. The first use of gas warfare was used on April 22, 1915 during the Battle of Ypres when the Germans attacked the French. These soldiers experienced a chlorine …show more content…
Weaponized chlorine gas was created by Fritz Haber. He was a talented Nobel prize winning chemist and mostly known for the Haber–Bosch process, a method used in industry to synthesize ammonia from nitrogen gas and hydrogen gas. However, he is also known as “the father of chemical warfare”, because of the contributes he made in developing gas for war. Chlorine gas itself was a yellowish- green color and was first deployed using open storage cylinders that allowed the wind to carry the gas to their enemies. That caused a major problem, if the wind started to blow back then it would affect the soldiers who deployed it in the first place. Chlorine gas isn’t that effective in causing death, out of the combined total of British and French causalities the estimate is that more than 5,000 of the 81,248 causalities, at the Battle of Ypres, were due to the gas. However, it did cause the allied troops to panic and run to their trenches. Also, since chlorine gas is heavier than air the gas settled down into the ailed powers trenches. When a solider first breathes in chlorine gas they begin to have a burning pain in their eyes and throat with a feeling of suffocation. Breathing gets harder, vomiting starts to occur and eventually one would fall unconscious. If the solider is taken of the battle field and taken to a hospital, the solider has a higher chance of living, but it doesn’t end there. Soldier’s faces turn a violet red and their finger nails blue, and many respiration problems, such as bronchitis and pneumonia, would follow while they are recovering from the
15 November 2017
Gas Warfare Boils, burning, and blindness imagine sitting in a field hospital in agony wishing that the pain would just end. Many of these soldiers’ lives would be forever changed after heading to the battlefield and being confronted with this. We all know that warfare technology through the age’s changes and advances but even a general from five hundred years ago would say that this is just cold-blooded. That dreadful weapon is gas warfare or a specialized munition that uses chemicals formulated to inflict death or harm on humans. The first use of gas warfare was used on April 22, 1915 during the Battle of Ypres when the Germans attacked the French. These soldiers experienced a chlorine …show more content…
Weaponized chlorine gas was created by Fritz Haber. He was a talented Nobel prize winning chemist and mostly known for the Haber–Bosch process, a method used in industry to synthesize ammonia from nitrogen gas and hydrogen gas. However, he is also known as “the father of chemical warfare”, because of the contributes he made in developing gas for war. Chlorine gas itself was a yellowish- green color and was first deployed using open storage cylinders that allowed the wind to carry the gas to their enemies. That caused a major problem, if the wind started to blow back then it would affect the soldiers who deployed it in the first place. Chlorine gas isn’t that effective in causing death, out of the combined total of British and French causalities the estimate is that more than 5,000 of the 81,248 causalities, at the Battle of Ypres, were due to the gas. However, it did cause the allied troops to panic and run to their trenches. Also, since chlorine gas is heavier than air the gas settled down into the ailed powers trenches. When a solider first breathes in chlorine gas they begin to have a burning pain in their eyes and throat with a feeling of suffocation. Breathing gets harder, vomiting starts to occur and eventually one would fall unconscious. If the solider is taken of the battle field and taken to a hospital, the solider has a higher chance of living, but it doesn’t end there. Soldier’s faces turn a violet red and their finger nails blue, and many respiration problems, such as bronchitis and pneumonia, would follow while they are recovering from the