A Higher Form of Killing: The Secret History of Gas and Germ Warfare - читать бесплатно онлайн полную версию книги автора Robert Harris (Picture Section) #14

Picture Section

^{Casualties of one of the first German chlorine attacks, April 1915. The victim could take anything up to two days to die, coughing up pint after pint of yellow liquid -hence the basin by the patient’s side.}

^{The first British respirators, May 1915. Each man carried a bottle of soda solution with which he was supposed to moisten the flannel. The masks were little protection: on 24 May, 3,500 men were gassed in a single four-hour attack.}

^{The British chemical weapon which the Germans feared most. Livens Projectors, fired in batteries of 25 at a time; each sent a drum of 30 lbs of liquid phosgene hurtling into the enemy’s lines.}

^{On impact a burster of TNT releases a dense cloud of gas. At the Battle of Arras in 1917, the British fired over 2,000 Livens bombs simultaneously in one mass attack.}

^{Ambulance men drilling in the standard British gas mask, the ‘P Helmet’, July 1916. The bag of flannel made the face sweat and the chemical which impregnated it then ran, stinging the eyes and trickling down the neck. In addition to the discomfort, the masks often leaked, the eyepieces cracked, and a lethal amount of carbon dioxide could build up inside the helmet.}

^{The Battle of the Somme, July 1916. Machine gunners were frequently issued with oxygen cylinders to enable them to withstand a long gas attack and mow down the first waves of the enemy’s assault troops.}

The men who pioneered the Allies’ wartime germ weapons programme:

^{A rare photograph taken near the Scottish isle of Gruinard in 1942, where the scientists first tested the anthrax bomb. L to R: David Henderson, Donald Woods, O.G. Sutton and W.R. Lane.}

^{Dr Paul Fildes, leader of the British biological warfare team.}

^{In a large shed at Porton Down in 1942, munitions workers using specially designed equipment were to fill five million small cattle cakes with anthrax – almost certainly the world’s first mass-manufactured germ weapon.}

^{These photographs are at odds with Britain’s 1980 claim never to have possessed ‘biological agents… in quantities which could be employed for weapon purposes’.}

Civilians prepare for gas warfare:

^{German High School students are given a lesson in gas precautions.}

^{A dance marathon in a bomb shelter in London’s East End provides useful publicity for civil defence.}

^{Windmill girls rehearse wearing gas masks, April 1941.}

^{A child’s gas mask. The British also developed ‘cot respirators’ for babies and hood-type gas masks for invalids.}

^{Heydrich’s bomb-damaged Mercedes a few hours after the attack. The Nazi leader suffered relatively minor splinter wounds, but mysteriously died a week later.}

^{The unprimed grenade recovered by the Nazis in May 1942 after the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich. The twin of this specially modified British anti-tank grenade was the weapon which killed Heydrich. Did it contain a filling of lethal germs?}

The justification for continuing biological and chemical warfare research after the Second World War:

^{A Soviet soldier on exercise in anti-gas suit and mask.}

^{Hungarian troops training against gas. Western intelligence believed the Warsaw Pact was prepared to use gas and germ warfare in any future confrontation.}

Four of the diseases chosen as weapons:

^{The effects of anthrax. Had the Second World War continued into 1946, the Allies expected to be capable of saturation anthrax bombing of six major German cities.}

^{Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, one of the most severe of infectious diseases, and extensively researched during the 1950s and 1960s.}

^{Facial paralysis caused by encephalomyelitis, several forms of which were refined as ‘humane’ weapons.}

^{An early symptom of plague. As the Black Death it had killed nearly one third of the population of Western Europe: during the 1960s it was still being developed as a weapon.}

The 1950s and 1960s saw a resurgence of gas and germ research:

^{In one of thousands of experiments at Edgewood Arsenal designed to discover a method of waging ‘war without death’, a dog is injected with an LSD-type chemical.}

^{The effect of only one drop of mustard gas administered to a volunteer at Porton Down.}

^{A 1960s test of suit and gas mask designed to resist nerve agents. In the UK and USA thousands of servicemen were used to test potential new weapons.}

^{Decontaminating a casualty during British exercises in Germany. Nerve agents developed during the 1940s and 1950s are capable of penetrating through the skin itself to attack the nervous system. Casualties – even of bullet wounds – must be ‘dusted’ all over before being admitted to field hospitals.}

Chemical warfare in Vietnam:

^{Part of Operation Ranch Hand, the huge defoliation campaign which was intended to strip the jungle bare.}

^{A ‘tunnel rat’ emerges from a Viet Cong bunker. US forces used CS gas to flush out the enemy, arguing that, like the defoliation campaign, this was not, despite appearances, chemical warfare.}

^{A CIA poison dart gun produced during 1975 Senate hearings into why the agency had disobeyed presidential orders to destroy stocks of biological weapons.}

^{British soldiers training against gas attack, 1980, The new gas training range at Porton Down was evidence of mounting alarm at the prospect of chemical warfare in Europe.}