The Germans and French used the full panoply of chemical weapons in WW1, but you only single out Churchill because he used tear gas!! So if the RAF had used bombs on recalcitrant Iraqis you'd have no objection or is it only the Brits you have a problem with?
It is sheer affectation to lacerate a man with the poisonous fragment of a bursting shell and to boggle at making his eyes water by means of lachrymatory gas. I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes. The moral effect should be so good that the loss of life should be reduced to a minimum. It is not necessary to use only the most deadly gasses: gasses can be used which cause great inconvenience and would spread a lively terror and yet would leave no serious permanent effects on most of those affected.2
Ten days later, Churchill addressed the India Office’s reluctance to use tear gas against rebel tribesmen on the Northwest Frontier:
Gas is a more merciful weapon than high explosive shell, and compels an enemy to accept a decision with less loss of life than any other agency of war. The moral effect is also very great. There can be no conceivable reason why it should not be resorted to. We have definitely taken the position of maintaining gas as a weapon in future warfare, and it is only ignorance on the part of the Indian military authorities which interposes any obstacle.3
Churchill went on to cite what he saw as a greater good, which in his view made the use of “lachrymatory gas” acceptable: the welfare of soldiers. In all the accounts of his supposed enthusiasm for gas warfare, I have never seen this key minute cited in full:
Having regard to the fact that [the India Office] are retaining all our men, even those who are most entitled to demobilisation, we cannot in any circumstances acquiesce in the non-utilisation of any weapons which are available to procure a speedy termination of the disorder which prevails on the frontier. If it is fair war for an Afghan to shoot down a British soldier behind a rock and cut him in pieces as he lies wounded on the ground, why is it not fair for a British artilleryman to fire a shell which makes the said native sneeze? It is really too silly.4
Almost always absent from quotations alleging Churchill’s penchant for the use of gas is the above paragraph, and certainly the first part of it. It testifies that Churchill was thinking more broadly, and more humanely, than most: He was thinking of sparing serving soldiers, most of them not volunteers, from ugly deaths by the most grisly and barbarous methods.
The issue of gas came up again after Britain had occupied Mesopotamia, part of the old Ottoman Empire, and was trying to restore order and establish a state, later Iraq— “nation building,” we would call it today. Britain was not securing her oil supply, which had already been achieved elsewhere. Churchill actually considered “Messpot,” as he called it, a huge waste of money. (See David Freeman, “Churchill and the Making of Iraq,” FH 132.)
https://winstonchurchill.org/publica...of-lethal-gas/
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