3 National Programs Prior to and During World War II
Many of the WWII belligerents developed BW programs, either in the interwar period, or in the case of probably the most significant program of all, that of the United States, during WWII itself.[1] Japan, Germany, France, Italy, Canada, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Russia all developed BW programs. Italy, France and Germany did not advance to the stage of fielding military biological warfare units, or of initiating a BW warfare training program.
Geissler provides the following dates at which various nations began “BW activities” (an ambiguous phrase which doesn’t differentiate between offensive and defensive programs, but which I take to imply offensive programs, with possible exceptions).
France: 1922-28, and 1934-1940 UK: 1936
USSR: 1926 Canada: 1938
Japan: 1932 Germany: 1940
Italy: 1934 USA: 1943[2]
Hungary: 1936
Information on the degree to which Soviet activities had progressed during WWII is minimal. It appears to have been focused on typhus as a BW agent, but also included an aircraft-mounted dispenser for Yersinia pestis (Plague) which reportedly sprayed “an emulsion” of the agent.[3] German BW research operated under very restrictive orders, formally forbidding all offensive research.[4] (The Wickham Steed charges alleging German BW testing in the Paris Metro in the mid-1930s still appear not to be resolved satisfactorily.[5]) The Japanese program fielded not just one operational BW unit, but several, each with facilities in cities all over China, as well as in several other Asian countries. Only Japan used BW, in China, beginning in the mid-1930s.[6] Delivery mechanisms varied, but included aerial bombs and vectors. Agents included plague, typhoid, cholera, anthrax and other traditional pathogens. The instances of use were apparently widespread. The number of deaths resulting from individual attacks is disputed, but appears to have been low. (Estimates vary drastically: from a thousand to over 222,000, but there appears to be no available documentation. The Japanese also used captives for experimental purposes, and estimates of the number of people killed in this fashion range between 5,000 and 10,000.) What is most important is that the effort again had absolutely no identifiable military consequences.
In an extremely unfortunate postwar development, US military officials bartered the cancellation of all charges of war crimes against the administrators of the Japanese WWII BW program in exchange for the tissue pathology data from Japanese experiments with BW agents on human subjects. Ironically, the data was of virtually no use to the postwar US program. The USSR was able to capture other data from the WWII Japanese program, including architectural plans for building facilities, and it apparently adapted these in building newer facilities in the USSR in 1946. The USSR also obtained industrial fermentation technology in Germany in 1945-46 as its forces searched the zone that it occupied in Germany for usable military and industrial equipment to be evacuated to the USSR.
The Canadian and British BW programs began in the mid- to late-1930s, before the onset of the war, and well before any BW work was begun in the US. Both programs concentrated heavily on anti-animal and anti-crop diseases. As early as March 1937, Britain’s Microbiology Warfare Committee had produced its first report dealing with foot-and-mouth disease.[7] In 1940 the British government wanted to have an offensive BW weapon to be able to use for retaliatory purposes ready within six months. By December 1941 Lord Hankey reported to the Prime Minister that "field work" had began at Porton, and that "most of the work was related to diseases of animals," and that it was already understood that "-- the only method technically feasible at the moment is the use of anthrax against cattle by means of infected cakes dropped from aircraft."[8]
Work in Canada began in September 1940, and among the topics on which research was begun -- strongly motivated by Sir Frederich Banting -- was the chemical destruction of field crops, the distribution of pathogens from the air, and animal disease, particularly work on rinderpest.[9] The rinderpest work was from the very beginning undertaken with offensive use in mind, but as the war progressed, and rinderpest came to be considered the most dangerous threat to North America itself, the work became more and more concerned with defensive aspects and efforts to develop a rinderpest vaccine. Bryden’s book contains an excellent brief description of the early interaction between the Canadian and British programs and the first interest by US military intelligence and scientific advisory bodies in the years before a US program actually came into being in 1942-1943.
Quite extensive information is available on the US BW R & D program during WWII.[10] Very substantial research was also carried out on a variety of chemical plant growth regulators and chemical herbicides (Agents RR, LN). A pilot plant at Fort Detrick for the production of plant pathogens was not completed until February 1945. Consideration of the use of a chemical herbicide, Ammonium Thyocyanate against Japanese rice crops was made in May and June 1945, and rejected on technical grounds of priority allocation of aircraft for bombing missions. A decision on the possible use of a second chemical herbicide 2, 4-D (LN-8) against Japanese rice crops was to be considered in January 1946, and it appears that initial approval to recommend this had been given in the case that a land invasion of the Japanese mainland was to take place in November 1945.[11] In 1950, Hanson Baldwin wrote that “in July and August 1945, a shipload of US biological agents for use in destruction of the Japanese rice crop was en route to the Marianas.”[12] However, the statement in the official US governments, post-WWII Merck Report that “Only the rapid ending of the war prevented field trials in an active theater of synthetic agents which would, without injury to human or animal life, affect the growing crops and make them useless”[13] apparently referred to Ammonium Thiocyanate.[14]
The Allied WWII BW program did, however, produce and stockpile an anti-animal agent. Although the WWII US-UK-Canadian BW program included plans for a potential use of anthrax as an anti-personnel weapon – the US to produce the agent fill and the UK the bomb – neither the agent nor the bombs were ever produced in 1944-1945, and the project was cancelled before the war’s end. Instead, Britain produced 5 million cattle cakes impregnated with anthrax, intended for use over Germany. These too were never used.
It is possible to piece together estimates – some very approximate and some reasonably precise – of the number of individuals involved in WWII BW R&D programs:
Germany: perhaps 100 to 200
Canada: ?
USSR: ?, presumably several hundred
USA: 1,500 in 1944
3,000+ in 1945
There are several important points to note in ending a brief overview of the WWII programs.
¨ Britain assumed that Germany had an advanced BW program.
¨ On several occasions German intelligence received “information” on non-existent preparations by the US and the UK to use BW against Germany, believed that the USSR was preparing for BW, and received reports of USSR use of BW against German forces.
¨ A Japanese document reports that there was a Soviet BW experimental facility “in the vicinity of Vladivostok…which holds some tens of thousands of scientists,” a facility which apparently did not exist.
¨ In their Cornell conference paper, Millet and Whitby also state that the "British anti-animal programme … conducted during the Second World War … was instigated to counter the threat of German Foot and Mouth research." As in the case of German "intelligence" regarding the BW programs of the US and UK in WWII, the information received from agents was frequently inaccurate, and at times so mistaken that its derivation is difficult to understand. That appears to be the case for "German Foot and Mouth research" as well, nor is there any indication that the British actually knew about what little German F. & M.D. work there actually was.
¨ Japan accused the US of using BW in Europe by dropping contaminated material from aircraft (which was exactly one of the activities Japan was itself undertaking in China.)
¨ In the US, the movement to turn over the BW R&D program to US Army control in December 1943 was due to the receipt of intelligence reports by the OSS, the WRS and by G-2 that implied Germany might initiate BW using anthrax or Botulinum toxin in their cross-channel rockets (the V-1 and V-2). Prior to the invasion of Europe in June 1944, it was generally considered by most of the intelligence agencies that Germany had made considerable preparations for BW.
It is plausible that the kind of pre-war expectations quoted in the introduction to this study, that BW was an effective weapon likely to be used during WWII, not only produced apprehension, but resulted in the predisposition to accept dubious intelligence.
Back to Contents Forward to Section 4
[1] See the chapters on individual national programs in Geissler and Moon, Biological and Toxin Weapons.
[2] Geissler provides the year 1941 for the
USA. That is two years too early, and the
1943 date is derived from US declassified documents. Erhard Geissler,
„Biologische und Toxin-Kampfstoffe und ihre Volkerrechtlichle Kontroll,“ p. 85,
in Ernst Buder, ed., Möglichkeiten und
Grenzen der Konversion von B-Waffen-Einrichtungen, Munster: LIT Verlag,
2000.
[3] Walter Hirsch, Soviet Chemical Warfare and Biological Warfare Preparations and Capabilities, US Army Chemical Intelligence Branch German Intelligence Report 786604, Washington, DC, 1951.
[4] Major J.M. Barnes et al., “A Review of German Activities in the Field of Biological Warfare” (ALSOS Mission), Intelligence Report, War Department, Washington, DC, September 12, 1945, Declassified; Erhard Geissler, Biologische Waffen – Nicht in Hilters Arsenalen, Munster: LIT Verlag, 1998.
[5] Martin Hugh Jones, “Wickham Steed and German Biological Warfare Research,” Intelligence and National Security 7:4 (1992), pp. 379-402.
[6] Sheldon H. Harris, Factories of Death: Japanese Biological Warfare, 1932-45, and the American Cover-Up, London: Routledge, 1994; Peter Williams and David Wallace, Unit 731: The Japanese Army’s Secret of Secrets, London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1989.
[7] David Millward, “Allies Drew Up Plans to Poison German Crops,” The Electronic Telegraph [Daily Telegraph, UK], January 8, 1996.
[8] "Prime Minister: Bacteriological Warfare;" Most Secret; Hankey, December 6, 1941. See also G.B. Carter, Chemical and Biological Defence at Porton Down, London, The Stationary Office, 2000, pages 62 to 65.
[9] John Bryden, Deadly Allies, McClelland and Stewart Inc., 1989, pages 46-49, 86-87, 94-103, 218 to 219, 240-241.
[10] Above all, Rexmond C. Cochrane, Biological Warfare Research in the United States. Volume II of History of the Chemical Warfare Service in World War II (1 July 1940 – 15 August 1945), Historical Section, Office of Chief, Chemical Corps, November 1947, Declassified.
I am omitting reference to the several version of the post-WWII Merck report (reference #3 above): the two books by Theodor Rosebury, and the lengthy 1947 monograph in Journal of Immunology by Theodor Rosebury and Elvin Kabat and several papers by the historian Barton Bernstein.
[11] Barton J. Bernstein, “America’s Biological Warfare Program in the Second World War,” Journal of Strategic Studies, vol. 11 (September 1988), pp. 292-317. See especially pp. 304, 308-310.
[12] Hanson W. Baldwin, Great Mistakes of the War, (New York: Collins, 1950).
[13] George W. Merck et. al, “Implications of Biological Warfare,” Chapter 7 in The International Control of Atomic Energy: Scientific Information Transmitted to the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission, June 14, 1946 – October 14, 1946, US Department of State, p. 7.
[14] Personal communication to the author in 1969 or 1971, by Dr. Arthur Galston.