I was reading this old book I have “Is Tommorrow Hitlers?”
Anyway, the author briefly posed this question and said Hitler had plently of gas to use against the Allies if he would have so chosen.
I will take a guess: he wanted to maximize his potential tax base.
Nuclear, biological and chemical weapons are not very useful ones. The purpose is to create terror, but in a war, most folks are already terrorized so the possession of these as battle field weapons does not have as much strategic value as it would seem. For example Hitler had a lot of gas weapons, but so did the Allies and once Hitler blasted a place with gas, it was open for everybody. That is why the USA did not worry about using the nuclear weapons on the Japanese. The Japanese had a limited capacity to retaliate. And they have tactical problems as well. Here are some for the use of chemical or biological weapons:
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You need to be very careful when managing these weapons. You do not want to do something like fire on your own soldiers and then have these same soldiers retreat into your lines contaminated with the chemical or bio agent.
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You need a lot of gas to make an area unlivible. The gas is extremely reactive and breaks down quickly especially in temperate or jungle areas where there is a high density of living systems. So you also need to continue to fire into the area to keep them out for extended periods of time.
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When you use chemical or biological weapons you eliminate the area for your use as well. So you limit your ability to maneuver and counterattack.
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When used the attacking force tends to speed up their attack as the closer they are to you the less chance of being gassed they have.
Nuclear, biological and chemical weapons are not very useful ones. The purpose is to create terror, but in a war, most folks are already terrorized so the possession of these as battle field weapons does not have as much strategic value as it would seem.
Exactly.
He had much better Gas and much more powerful, but he kept it only in case the British use it first.
Which Churchill almost did, to the point of already having planes and missiles fit and ordered by himself to gas the 6 most populous German Cities. At the last moment the British military managed to stop his craziness.
So, after the lesson you just received, maybe you should check your premises and ask who gave you such wrong axioms and wrong information and never speak to them again, being liers and deceivers.
Thanks for nothing.
Another reason why Hitler didn’t use the gas at least in direct combat would be that he saw it getting used already in WWI. There he saw how the gas fights turned into a lottery (wind…). You don’t play lottery if you are convinced of your superiority.
And in addition also his military overhead had the same experience, as well as the allies. So I guess nobody was really interested in a gas war.
I’m not saying this was the motivation, but…
Compare the rather pitiful effect Luftwaffe bombing had on the Allies with the massive devastation inflicted on Germany by Allied strategic bombing. Using gas implies retaliation, and given Allied air superiority, whatever temporary gains Germany could make by gassing Allied troops would likely imply the annihilation of the German nation (or much of it).
The reason is very simple. Poisonous gases were created for trench (ie stationary) warfare. While the terrifying effects were well described by Wilfred Owen in Dulce et decorum est their main intended scope was to force a defender into donning cumbersome gas protective equipment and to abandon the more exposed positions (for example the deepest trenches where the heavier gases would linger for days at an end). German tactical doctrine dictated shelling enemy artillery positions with long range guns using gas projectiles to force the gunners to evacuate their positions or to use gas masks, severely limiting their efficiency (remember one of the most feared Allied weapons of the Great War was the extremely fast firing French soizante-cinque field gun).
During the Thirties, when another world war seemed inevitable, there was a faction in military establishments that saw the next conflict as a rehearsal of the previous one, with trench systems stretching for hundred of miles, slow moving tanks and massive artillery concentrations. While the French were the most famous victims of this fallacity, it also afflicted the more conservative parts of the German military establishment. That’s the reason each German soldier were forced carrying a gas mask even when waging a fast moving warfare against the Poles who had no chemical weapons available. Established military rules die hard.
Another reason can be traced to Hitler’s personality. The Krupp family was quickly to discover that, like most other dictators, Hitler had a soft spot for grandiose engineering projects. When Alfred Krupp proposed to him building immense railroad artillery pieces to reduce the feared Belgian and French forts into rubble, the Fuehrer was ecstatic and gave the project the highest priority. Others were quick to discover that the bigger the numbers they put in front of Hitler the better their chances of getting work for their factories. The large and powerful German chemical industry realized that acquiring immense stocks of relatively easy to manufacture poison gases was a simple way of turning a profit. It didn’t matter that by this time the Wehrmacht had already ruled out trench warfare as a thing of the past and commanders like Heinz Guderian had become popular media figures by popularizing the Blitzkrieg concept in immensely popular books.
But, hey, it’s government we are talking about. They are not even good at killing people efficiently.
Had he used gas, the next day the Brits would have gased Berlin out of existence. The Luftwaffe was never a strategic air force, more of a tactical one (the last vestige of civilized warfare, the tactical air force), so as has already been said, it would have been self-defeating (the same would have been true if both Hitler and the yanks would have developed nukes).
The real question is: why didn’t the Brits use gas on the Germans? Why didn’t the French? Had they done so, perhaps the German war machine would have been stopped in its tracks (along with intelligent life on the border, I’m afraid) before France was overrun. Chemical weapons are indeed as powerful at nuclear ones. So, it’s a mystery to me. Perhaps the idea indeed was to let Germany live to take on the soviets.
Hitler was a victim of poison gas in the fist world war. He almost lost his sight & had to sit out the rest of the war(not a good thing in Hitlers view), it must of been traumatic. It is not entirely inconceivable that that experience gave him a psychological aversion to the prospect of large scale chemical warfare.
" The real question is: why didn’t the Brits use gas on the Germans? Why didn’t the French? Had they done so, perhaps the German war machine would have been stopped in its tracks"
Do you read?
I already explained above that Germany was the most powerful industrial/scientific nation on Earth and had the best Gas, and Hitler ordered it only for self-defense in case Churchill used it first.
Hitler save Europe from Gas Warfare, he made WW2 more humane and civilized, that is, without Gas, unlike WW1.
It was Churchill who, first, started terror fire-bombings of Civilician cities, and who ordered the 6 most populous German cities gassed, being stopped by his military in the last second.
My God, when are you going to free yourself from the Statist lies you were told?
Do you realize your comment had nothing at all to do with the sentence you quoted form me? WHY didn’t the brits gas , was the question, not vice-versa.
If the British military had used them, they would have sent their whole population to the grave with the retaliation.
But to begin with, the British didn’t want war.
Only Jewish bankers and Media wanted War, they bought Churchill (he had a lot of debts).
That is, the War profiteers wanted war, not the population, and they use their power to put Churchill in and declare War (remember who declare war on who).
Churchill never care about the British population, he killed them by starting terror-fire-bombing raids on German cities, thereby asking the Germans to kill his population.
The Germans didn’t want to wage total war, they wanted to win clean and fast, like how they took Paris, intact, and if you check the latest books the Parisians love the “invading Germans” and welcomed them. Unlike the Americans who bombed the hell out of their country. But they won, so they wrote the history you read, because you don’t have the courage to dig and fight for the truth if it’s politically incorrect.
With that said, Churchill wanted to annihilate Germany entirely, a genocide, as proven in Morgenthau Plan, and for him British population were a sacrifice in the retaliations that would come from his maniac gassing attacks.
Are you starting to realize now that the terrorist and warmonger who didn’t care about Geneva or about civilians was the greedy war-profiteer bought Churchill most of you worship?
If they wanted Germany could have taken England in the first year of the War, they never wanted to, they wanted to bring them against the Soviets to the last day.
And they were right all along, predicting the cold war while American and British bankers financed the Bolsheviks from the safety of their far-away homes, keeping the profits and interests while East Europe and Russia put the blood and dozens of millions of cadavers.
But they won, and even here;
Statism = bad, but American/British statism > German statism, American/British warmongers > German warmongers, the “all-lies” are always the good ones. You can’t even cite a single unethical conduct on American on France. Think about that.
But to begin with, the British didn’t want war.
That’s a probable answer, but I’m yet unconvinced. As for retaliation, Germany had no bombers with which to gas Britain.
One thing that is often understated is how quickly French resistance collapsed in 1940. Read Heinz Guderian’s memories Panzer General and you’ll have an idea not even the Wehrmacht expected them to be defeated so quickly. Guderian related how the the French military machine, considered the world’s finest, was taken completely by surprise by the German onslaught. During his drive to the Swiss border he was convinced the French army was actually trying to lure him into a trap as the sternest resistance to his Panzer Gruppe was offered by colonial infantry units from Madagascar and Indochina. He was puzzled when his scouts and the Luftwaffe reported there were no troop concentrations awaiting for him.
Finally do not overstate the military importance of poison gases. They have always been very tricky weapons to handle and are highly unsuited to a moving warfare. The fact they lingered so long in military arsenal (the US withdrew their last Weteye aircraft bombs at the end of the '90s) is a testament to the inertia of long established rules. The fully armored knight on his steed was the most powerful weapon of the Middle Ages, yet it proved to be useless against the Swiss pike, the English longbow and the Hussite handgun. This didn’t stop the French gendarmerie from going into war against Charles V’s arquebusiers armed just like their forefathers who were mowed down by the English at Creçy and Agincourt and suffering the same fate. As we all know fallacities die very hard.
Indeed, rapists don’t want rape, either. They’d prefer their sex clean and fast, too.
Z.
Sorry I don’t follow.
Which facts are you discussing?
-The millions of starved surrended Germans?
-The hundred of thousands of White Russians refugees illegaly sended to their torture by Stalin?
-The collaboration and welcome of the French to the supposedly evil Nazis?
-The fact the French hated the British and didn’t wanted to die for the British Queen’s Empire and welcome Nazis as liberators?
-The 1 million volunteers the Nazi had from all kind of countries, races and religions, while the Allies were all British Queen’s subjects?
-Or the 800.000 German women raped by the Allies?
It worries me when anti-semites/holocaust deniers show up on this forum. It makes the LvMi look bad.
I agree, it’s quite tedious. I’ve been following the board in some way for a few years and there always seems to be one poking around.
LvMi looks bad when intellectual discussion is sidetracked with anti-debate words tricks you just used.
LvMi looks bad when millions of independent men all around the world reach the same conclusion, but a powerful think tank with massive resources, staff and researches don’t.