SEEKING VICTORY ON THE WESTERN FRONT: The British Army and Chemical Warfare in World War I.

By Albert Palazzo. Univ. of Nebraska Press. 245 pp. $50

Though World War I has been written about exhaustively, Palazzo offers a genuinely fresh dimension by focusing on the British army’s extensive and imaginative use of gas. The Germans may have pioneered its use in 1915, but the British developed it, devised and put into mass production the most lethal chemicals, and provided their troops with by far the better gas masks. Above all, the British incorporated gas into their operational doctrine and training in a methodical way, a key consideration in the defense of Field Marshal Douglas Hague and his much maligned staff against the usual charge that they were unimaginative butchers.

In 1915, Major Charles Foulkes of the Royal Engineers took command of the Special Brigade, as the chemical warfare unit was formally known. An inventive bunch, many of them drawn from universities and chemistry labs, the Special Brigade experimented with pepper sprays, itching powder, nicotine, and other poisons before concentrating on phosgene and mustard gas. (They also developed flamethrowers.) Their work was reasonably well known in the 1920s and 1930s, partly through Foulkes’s memoir, Gas! (1934). But the dominance of tanks in World War II, along with the decision on both sides to avoid gas, has blurred the focus of modern military historians. Palazzo, a research associate at the Australian Defense Force Academy, does a service in restoring awareness of the prominent role of gas and demonstrating that it was part of a new British military doctrine of combined arms.

The Allied victories of 1918 are usually said to start with the Battle of Amiens on August 8, which the German commander Erich Ludendorff described in his diaries as "the black day of the German army." Palazzo, after describing the earlier British efforts with gas at the battles of Loos and the Somme, focuses instead on the small Battle of Hamel on July 4. It was here that the Fourth Australian Division, supported by four companies of American troops, fought one of the most successful and most significant actions of the war. Through the combined use of gas, tanks, and artillery, along with tactical surprise, they showed that the stalemate on the Western front could be broken.

It was not gas alone but the incorporation of gas into a wider offensive strategy that brought success. The British calibrated each individual gun barrel and calculated the effects of wind and temperature to ensure that guns could hit targets the first time, without the traditional ranging shots that would have alerted the Germans to their presence. They also used gas in the days before the attack as a morale weapon, drenching the approaches through which German ration parties brought food and drink and ammunition by night to the front lines. The British had so much of the stuff that they would routinely continue gas bombardments for days at a time, knowing that at some point the German gas masks would be overwhelmed. And they would mix their fire, using shrapnel to force the German troops to take cover in trenches and dugouts, where the follow-up rounds of gas would be most lethal. From research in the archives of artillery units and the Ministry of Munitions, Palazzo demonstrates that by 1918 British barrages were routinely half gas and half high explosive.

At the Ministry of Munitions, Winston Churchill was so enthusiastic that he promised to triple the number of gas shells in 1919 if the war continued. By the time of the Armistice in November 1918, the British, French, and American armies were all enthusiastic converts to the new potential of chemical warfare. The heartening surprise is that, in the 1920s and 1930s, memories of the horrors and a strong pacifist sensibility produced such public outrage that statesmen sought to ban gas warfare and generals agreed to abjure it.

—Martin Walker