What Became of the Last Mustard Gas Delivered to the RAF
 

In 1955 Major Ian Toler, a WWII glider pilot, was appointed Resident Section Manager at I.C.I Randle Works in Runcorn and tasked with destroying 6,000 tons of bulk poison gas, mainly mustard gas from the tunnels at Rhydymwyn. The apparatus to achieve this was designed and tested by Porton Down. It was called the Apparatus Oil Smoke (AOS).
Major Toler was delayed in starting his destruction by the need for Randle to fulfil an order for 10,000 one thousand pound mustard gas bombs and additional 2,000 inert bombs filled with Calcium Chloride.
4,500 tons of grade I bulk mustard gas was shipped by rail from the five Forward Filling Depots (FFD)s at Barnham, Lord’s Bridge, Escrick, Melchbourne and Norton Disney by rail to Randle. This was described as Operations Spring Onion and Pepperpot and emptied the tanks in the FFDs.
Two thousand of the mustard gas bombs were shipped to RAF Norton Disney and the remaining eight thousand bombs and the two thousand inert bombs were stacked in a building at Randle. All of these bombs which measured 65 inches long by 16½ inches diameter were packaged in individual cases.
It appears that of an initial order for 176 inert bombs 76 were shipped to West Freugh in April 1953 and in March 1955 100 were shipped to RAF Boscombe Down, presumably to air test the bombs which were of a new design and were designated Type E2.
Except for one shipment of 70 inert bombs to RAE Fareham in November 1955 there were no further reports of their use,
Does anyone have any further knowledge on this topic?
Did you work on them, ship them, store them or even drop them (the inert ones of course)?
It is difficult to comprehend why we built these bombs from WWII mustard gas at a factory which had not assembled any in the last ten years and at a time when we were destroying all of our Chemical Weapons.

It is of course quite possible that they were doing something "slightly different" to what it states on the documentation ! You say it's "mustard gas" to keep prying eyes away.

Regarding disposal of the gas after WW2, as is well known much of the stocks were sent to Cairnryan (near Stranraer) and loaded into surplus freighters, towed out to mid-Atlantic, and sunk. The railway handled this heavy freight with no more care than any other, and there are accounts in railway books of whole heavy trainloads, with no brakes other than on the locomotive (as was done on the railway in those days) getting out of control on the long hill down towards Stranraer. My goodness.

Interesting story.

The UK gained some 71,000 mustard gas bombs from Germany at the end of WW2 to add to its own substantial stocks so it difficult to understand why more were needed.

Perhaps the order was for research purposes though you would have thought the more modern nerve agents were more likely to be used by a potential enemy.

As an aside ICI discovered the V series of nerve agents including VX which UK goverment apparently sold in large quantities to the US!

Lost Mustard Gas Bombs
 

Thank you for the input. There is no doubt that in "this" case that Y3 and Y25 was shipped and head-filled into 1,000lb bombs at Randle.
The 10.000 mustard gas bombs and 2,000 inert ones is such a precise amount that I wonder if perhaps they were for an overseas order.
In the mid-1950s I can think of many potential customers but a total of 12,000 bombs would by standards have had to have been moved initially by rail.
We can trace most of the mustard ever made in the UK and its eventual destruction but to lose 12,000 bombs is a big hole in our calculations. Someone out there must have knowledge of them.

I know there was an "Incident" at Bari (Italy) towards the end - or maybe just after the end - of WW2 involving Mustard Gas.

I don't know the details but apparently a consignment of Mustard Gas Bombs were being either loaded or unloaded from a ship and there was a fire (or some such catastrophe).

Gas escaped and contaminated a large area of the town.

My uncle was in the guard cordon and this was one of his favourite war-stories. He often had difficulty convincing others that we actually had nasty gas-warfare weapons - most thought they had been outlawed after WWI.

Once_an_Erk: It was more than an incident, though probably treated as such at the time.

It is thoroughly explained in the book Poisonous Inferno : World War II Tragedy at Bari Harbour by George Southern.

It is also detailed in "Disaster at Bari" by Glenn B. Infield, 1971, Robert Hale & Co., ISBN 07091 4312 5.

The basics are that the Luftwaffe struck the Allied shipping lying off Bari on December 2nd, 1943 including the "John Harvey" that was carrying 100 tons of mustard gas. She exploded and over 1,000 military plus "an even higher number of civilians" lost their lives.

The Bari Disaster
 

The definitive version may be in After the Battle issue 79 page 34.
There is an article by Ian Toler on the destruction of the British poison gases in the same issue. He was an admirable man but his account has unfortunately proved to be flawed.

I was out in the Solomon islands a few years ago and a cache of mustard gas bombs were uncovered on one of the islands. I do not know whether they originated from Japan or the USA but the Americans sent out a bomb diposal team to neutralize them.

There were about fifteen personnel and they arrived in a C5 Galaxy. It got stuck on the small international apron and they had to send a Starlifter out with a tow truck so that it could be moved off.

And just to think that when I was a kid in 1950s Wirral there was a small barbed wire enclosure against the wall of an old building in an area in which we used we used to play. On it was a sign saying "Danger Mustard Gas". What it was doing there, I have no idea, possibly Home Guard but what would they be doing with the stuff? So much for Health and Safety!

ISTR reading that a large quantity of Mustard Gas bombs spent a considerable amount of time in open storage at RAF Bowes Moor near Barnard Castle.

I think the Bowes Moor shells were long gone. Most of them were decanted and shipped to Rhydymwyn if Grade I or destroyed on site if Grade II/III.
The manufacture of these bombs at Randle was totally out context. The UK policy was to destroy all mustard gas stocks and Major Toler was tasked with that job. Mustard was irrelevant in a nuclear age and insignificant in a nerve gas age.
Then all plans for destruction were shelved and Randle recovered 4,500 tons of mustard gas manufactured in WWII by rail from five widely dispersed sites and made it up into 12,170 new style 1,000 lb bombs. 170 were used for testing and the remaining 12,000 were stored at Randle or Norton Disney. There is no doubt they were filled with Y25 or Y3 mustard gas.
I can think of no contingency for their use. Suez was later, Malaya, possible I suppose but Runcol did not like the tropics.
Did we make them for export? Israel, dangerous for them really but possible
Who would be the potential customers in the Commonwealth? Canada, no, Australia, no, South Africa, mm they manufactured there in the war.
I suppose that the best possibility is that it was an export order but I have no idea who to

Response on your PMs

Fight Them on the Beaches!
 

In 1989 I was chatting to a Home Guard veteran from Kent. He said that during the summer of 1940, when it was feared the Germans were about to invade, his unit was issued with World War One vintage gas projectors (mortars) and boxes of gas shells. I believe he said they were Mustard Gas. Even though this was 50 years after the event, he lowered his voice when he spoke to me and looked around the room nervously. He explained that they'd been told at the time never to tell anyone that they were issued with gas weapons. However, if the Germans had landed, his job would have been to fire the gas shells onto the beaches.

The Way We were
 

There were in 1940 onwards about 200 converted tar sprayers held at Randle. These were to spray the roads inland of any invasion beaches with mustard gas.
There were also a number of glass ampoules of mustard gas which were intended to be buried shallowly on roads. When German vehicles drove over them the persistent gas would have been released.
The major anti-invasion chemical warfare effort would have been the bombing our own beaches by the RAF. The attached link is to the planning document dated 1941.
We were very serious about resisting invasion.

http://i472.photobucket.com/albums/r...g?t=1242597173

Wasn't that Operation Banquet? When I was researching one of the Glidet Training Schools I found the "Banquet Plan" detailing which pilots were involved.

Mr Barber,
ISTR reading that Op SANDCASTLE didn't just involve scuttling ships, but also airdrops into the oggin, from aircraft operating out of Llandwrog. I can't find a reference at the moment, but will post when it comes to light.
Must get around to the visitor centre at Valley Works next time I'm in Treffynnon, nai.:ok:

Operation Sandcastle
 

If you tell us before you come we have the official movie of the above operation and will have pleasure in showing it to you.
I was in Chippenham last weekend and visited the National Monuments in Swindon to copy old aerial photographs of Randle. Small world.
We have an Open Day on Sunday 21st June and expect visitors from all over the country. Please try and come.

Further Developments-Project Red Admiral
 

In 1946 Air Staff Requirement OR/1006 was issued for an anti-personnel, biological bomb comparable in strategic effect to the atomic bomb (which neither we nor the Russians possessed). This became Project Red Admiral
The early target date of 1951 was for strategic use against civilian targets, botulism toxins and Bubonic Plague were favoured for development.
According to AIR 20/8727 the bombs would be capable of being aimed from heights up to 50,000 feet and at speeds of up to 500 knots and be of such a design as to permit stowage in the space required by one of the series of ballistically stable bombs now under design.
The bomb should be capable for carriage in the B3/45 (Canberra) and the long-range and medium range bombers now being schemed. Development should be completed in 5 years (1951)
It was later proposed that the optimum configuration would be in the form of a 1000 lb cluster bomb which would contain many 4 lb bomblets. The parent bomb would break up at a pre-determined height and eject the bomblets to maximum effect. The plan was to have a reserve of 10,000 bombs by 1955.
There followed over the years many labyrinthine developments, the possession of the atomic bomb, the definition of the role of Porton Down, would we research or manufacture any BW, the efficiencies and risks of such a weapon but finally the realisation that we could not come up with an effective biological agent killed the project
So there we were in 1955 with 10,000 one thousand pound bombs and no filling for them.
It is, perhaps, more than a coincidence that we collected all of that mustard gas and put it into 10,000 one thousand pound new style bombs in 1955.
We do not know if they are the same bomb casings or what became of the mustard gas bombs but it is credible that we would utilise the manufactured bomb casings from another project.

Colin,

interesting. I see that there was a 1,000-lb "N" cluster scheduled for bomb ballistic trials at Woomera in 1955. Contained 52 x 10-lb bomblets. Apparently an alternative to the 1,000-lb "N" bomb. I'm sure I've also seen this weapon referred to as the "Toxic bomb" - I suspected an Anthrax bomb. But maybe the same weapon you refer to ?

Do you know whether they actually produced the 10,000 bomb casings ? I've seen huge orders for other bombs in same period and most ended up being cancelled before production.

rs