Page - 789 - in THE FIRST WORLD WAR - and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1914 – 1918

Operation ‘Loyalty to Arms’ 789 knowledge of the effect the weaponry and tactical procedures would have that the Ger- man 14th Army was planning to use. In particular, the Italians were least of all aware of the effect of the poison gas grenades that the German gas projector battalion was due to launch. How could they be ? Not even the Germans knew whether the grenades would be a success. Since poison gas had begun to be used in April 1915, and had gradually been intro- duced on all fronts, new chemical warfare agents, with new compositions, were being developed continuously. But it was not only gas warfare, but also protection against gas, that was making progress, and the gas masks with filter inserts made of activated car- bon and special materials such as urotropin provided increasingly effective protection against warfare agents containing chlorine, and even against phosgene. For this reason, from July 1917, the German Army decided to use a new generation of chemical warfare agents that were designed to act as ‘mask breakers’. Their most im- portant representatives became diphenylchloroarsine agents, known as ‘Clark’, which due to the coloured marking on the gas grenades were also referred to as ‘blue cross’. Unlike the poisonous gases that had been used before, and which were marked with a green cross, this toxic substance did not affect the lungs, but consisted of toxic crystals based on arsenic, which when detonated were so finely distributed that they penetrated the filters in the gas masks and led to severe asphyxiation attacks, coughing, sneezing and nau- sea.1839 This forced those affected to tear the masks from their faces, which left them fully exposed to the chemical payload affecting the lungs that was simultaneously activated. ‘Colour shooting’ (Buntschießen) had been discovered. And only days later, the Germans came up with another surprise development : mustard gas, or ‘Lost‘ [from the names of the two chemists, Lommel and Steinkopf, who first proposed its military use], which acted as a contact poison and which led to highly severe chemical burns. ‘Lost’ penetrates the clothing, shoes and skin of those affected, is undeterred by gas masks and leads to months of lingering illness, unbearable pain and often considerable long-term effects. For their part, the Allies had developed new ways of using poison gas missiles, the gas projectors, which were steel pipes of about one metre in length, from which high-vol- ume warfare agent missiles could be fired across short distances of approximately one or two kilometres. Their preferred use was for attacking the foremost front lines of the enemy, since these were more difficult to reach with artillery guns. The new gas projector method was quickly adopted by the Germans, and now they had the ‘ideal’ combination. On the Western Front, they had not yet managed to put the Buntschießen with gas projectors to the test. In Italy, they would avail themselves of the opportunity to do so. And the Italians had in fact nothing to protect themselves against it. On 9 October, the Italian reconnaissance and the military intelligence service had not only detected the preparations on the Austrian side, but had also correctly predicted that