Gas?

[JerseyJohn]

Bullwinkle

Always a pleasure!

Rambo

I think the answer is it wouldn't have been very effective in open air conditions. In the concentration camps they were used in sealed rooms with the ventilation closed off till after all the victims were dead -- a classic Gas Chamber. I didn't want to put it that way earlier because the subject really disgusts me.

During the First World War gas attacks were largely unpredictable unless the wind kept blowing in the same direction.

You may be right about Hitler being the Devil incarnate -- I'd put Stalin in there as well. Both had similar backgrounds involving the deaths of people close to them. But their deranged actions went way beyond any normal insanity.

[jon_j_rambo]

Sir Jersey --- Nice take, we don't want to insult any of the legit nuts & the nuthouse. We're not suppose to judge others or their final destination, but it's a good guess that Adolf is in a very warm place.

[ July 08, 2003, 10:59 PM: Message edited by: jon_j_rambo ]

[JerseyJohn]

General Rambo --

Agreed 100%.

There was a great cartoon in either Playboy or Penthouse in the late sixties that showed Hitler making a deranged speech in the fires, fist waving in the air while the other lost souls kept stoking the furnaces. Two demons with pitchforks are watching him, smiling, and one says, "I like this guy, he's nutsy!"

I've been trying to find it on the net but it's probably hopeless.

[ July 08, 2003, 11:02 PM: Message edited by: JerseyJohn ]

[kurt88]

jon_j_rambo ,good points.

It wouldn't have made sense to invest heavily in chemical warfare when one needed panzers and stuka's to conquer Europe.Also WWII was a war of manoeuvre so gas would have been unreliable and ineffective.

But surely the only few who could authorize the use of gas didn't consider the feelings of the German public.They sure didn't consider them when they decided the endlosung at that villa (Wannsee?).

[Liam]

The fact of gas is it's useful at first. I'm sure pre-war plans were made for the eventual use in a full scale conflict of the kind of WW1. Perhaps a lot of people thought in WW1 Gas would be the turn to get rid of trench warfare. In WW2 trenchwarfare was unusual. So using mass quantities of it against soldiers who could equip themselves against the worst kinds of gas and most profilic available at the time would be counterproductive if you in turn had to do the same for your own troops landing you right back into the square should you execute POWs or not... Well Hitler considered Jews less than human as well Gypsies and many Slavic races so Cyclon B wouldn't count in that case. It would be like using Rat Poison in his eyes likely. Whatever the thinking, the Japanese would likely use anything at their disposal to gain a victory. The Germans probably though that the rest of the World partly agreed with them about Slavic, Jewish, Gypsy races and didn't see that as being a huge WarCrime factor. Even the hellish war committed against the Russians who were Communists and would soon be facing a weapon far greater than Gas, Nukes... Which either side would've used...

As far as dropping it on the British Public towards the end as a payback for the firebombing. I think packaging in the rockets would've been a difficult job. Supposedly Germans had plans to dirty bomb NYC with a Gotha bomber filled with radiated junk. Would any or all of this ever been done? We could've done the same in retalation... So perhaps unbeknownst to us there were some in the German High Command that stamped out those projects from ever being pushed forward. They had family all over the country too, in the end they're just people and who knows exactly what they fought they'd face. I hear many of them felt they'd get away with much of it by pretending to Findilize to West towards War end.