A short run through Chemical Weapons
In the pre-war years we thought the Germans would use Mustard Gas as they had so successfully in WWI. In 1939 we began production at Sutton Oak, Randle, and began the erection of factories at Valley and Springfields.
The AASF in France was armed with CW and it was removed at Dunkirk but we left behind our armour and tanks.
In 1940 the only means we had to “fight them on the beaches” was by using mustard gas to contaminate the Kent beaches. We had only three days supply.
By 1941 increased production allowed us to plan saturating the beaches by the use of hundreds of aircraft and dozens of squadrons. We would have breached the Geneva Convention by doing this, but we were determined German would not gain a foothold here.
Although many varied CW munitions were manufactured they were not used for various reasons.
In the preamble to D-Day we manufactured and shipped 4,500 tons of mustard to five Forward Filling Depots which were located in the heart of the bomber groups to allow us to respond in a timely fashion if the Germans decided to use CW on the invasion beaches.
In 1945 we ceased production of mustard and decanted the lesser grades from weapons and tanks and shipped it by rail to Valley. The sub-standard product was loaded into 25,000 52 gallon drums and shipped to Barry docks before dumping in the Hurd Deep North of the Channel Isles.
This left in 1946 9,500 tons of bulk mustard, 4,500 tons from the FFDS was made up into other weapons in 1952/3 in Operations Spring Onion and Pepperpot. The remaining 5,000 tons stayed in the Valley tunnels until 1958-1960 when the debonair Major Toler burnt the lot in the AOS system at Randle.
In 1945 we found that the Germans had over 71,000 Sarin (nerve gas)250Kg bombs at Raubkammer near Munsterlager. These were all individually packaged in bespoke wooden boxes. We shipped these to RAF Llandwrog where we stored them until 1955-1957 when we shipped them to Cairnryan, loaded them in hulks and scuttled the hulks in the Beaufort Deep.
The only CW we held at this time was a 20 ton “museum sample” of mustard gas.