Did some chemical weapons from the military end up in private hands after WWI?
score:3
From a conceptual viewpoint it's one thing to speculate.
Simple chlorine's usefulness in canisters is entirely different from yellow cross in grenades; or other types. Some could be used as pesticides, others would just pollute 'the barn' so much to be utterly impractical. And disarming the cap means there was practically zero knowledge for that 'idea' in say agriculture or urban pest management. But start to think less 'souvenir' but 'political activist' and even the craziest chemical might attract a crazy crackpot?
That said, some of the chemical weapons were after the war not overseen destructed by allied military but from 1918–1920 partially 'set aside' by German military and private companies, officially to be 'delaborated'.
Apart from these clandestine operations it does indeed happen to this day that dumped into the sea chemicals leak and get washed up on the shores in the form of toxic lumps. Unidentifiable for the casual tourist.
But sometimes the souvenir aspect takes over in people visiting the battlefields. Taking a grenade from an abandoned trench storage maybe somewhart 'safe'. But people still take fired but unexploded shells home today:
A farmer had called to say he had left a shell on the roadside, beside a metal pole with a yellow tip, but it is not there. ‘It seems that someone has taken it for a souvenir. There’s no other explanation. It happens,’ he says. ‘People take these things away without knowing what they are. The explosive danger is little, but the toxic danger is great.’ His colleague Geert Denolf adds that unscrupulous locals sometimes take shells from the roadside, clean them up and sell them to unsuspecting tourists in the markets of Ypres. ‘It will be a booming business during the centenary years,’ he predicts. ‘Booming’ in more senses than one, perhaps.
–– Martin Fletcher: "Lethal relics from WW1 are still emerging", Telegraph, 12 Jul 2013
And not only in France and Belgium were some hidden treasures lurking below ground. On the grounds of American University in Maryland's Spring Valley a private company dug up
a sewer line in front of a recently constructed house in a luxury development uncovered a cache of rusting munitions, including four unexploded mortar rounds and three 75-millimeter artillery shells. […] determined that the mortar rounds still had fuses in them-that they were "live" and extremely dangerous. Some of the munitions were also believed to contain mustard agent…
–– Jonathan B. Tucker (2001) Chemical Weapons: Buried in the Backyard, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 57:5, 51-56, DOI: 10.1080/00963402.2001.11460494
And of course there was more where that came from. Much more. During the war they simulated Verdun battleground, killed a lot of goats with poison gas shells and explosives and after the war just filled up the simulated trenches without proper cleanup. When suspicions about this site formerly called Death Valley resurfaced in 1986 the army simply declared the area safe – just to the University, not the public – as there had been orders to remove the poison…
Now transfer this outcome from a very orderly environment in the US and apply that to the trenches system from Switzerland to the North Sea. It is still such an issue that Eurostar train line issued warnings to passengers that collecting grenades is forbidden and especially prohibited is taking them onboard the trains.
According to 2010 numbers 60 metric tons of duds are cleared annually from the Verdun battlefield by demineurs now.
Q Were there any instances where a military grade chemical weapons ended up in private hands after the WWI?
Quite a lot. One instance would be this:
–– Tom Parry: "The First World War bombs that are still killing people in France", Mirror, 14 Jul 2014.
Upvote:2
Former battlefields in North-Eastern France and Belgium still turn up live ammunition today, including some with chemical ordnance. And as hinted at in the comments, thousands of tons of unexploded ordnance got dumped in the North Sea. So in a sense, yes, such shells do end up in private hands on occasion - if only momentarily.
That said, I've never heard of a story of someone crazy enough to bring a live mustard gas shell home.
More post
- 📝 Has a sniper ever disabled a tank?
- 📝 Were any of the early settlements in America attacked from the sea?
- 📝 How large were the East India Company armed forces?
- 📝 How much did a telephone call cost in the USA around 1920?
- 📝 Was it common practice for men to kiss on the lips in 1920s USA?
- 📝 Did any Nazi TV news broadcasts survive?
- 📝 Did quantum theory originate as pure research?
- 📝 What's the origin of the legend that this rock formation in America had a 12th century Welsh Origin?
- 📝 What language was the Charter of Liberties written in?
- 📝 How can I understand the effect of the Sonderweg on the Revolution of 1848?
- 📝 How many ships did the fleet of the Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC) possess at its peak (around 1670)?
- 📝 During internment, how effective was the US at identifying and detaining Japanese-Americans?
- 📝 Were the officers assigned to Kamchatka being punished?
- 📝 What sort of signage did ballrooms require?
- 📝 How did the Allies deliver the Moscow Declaration to the Nazis?
- 📝 Are there any archeological finds or primary source drawings of the Chinese "blade shaped" bamboo-copter or rotary fans?
- 📝 How to collate the available contemporary press coverage of the 1936 US olympic hockey team?
- 📝 How did corn become the most produced crop in the world?
- 📝 Were certain soldiers considered to be neutral by both sides?
- 📝 Did early northern Europeans drink alcohol?
- 📝 Was it common to carry a concealed dagger in Spanish California?
- 📝 Relative merits of oligarchy and democracy
- 📝 How did Poland avoid partition in the 17th century, but not the 18th century?
- 📝 What was the first regular airline service to pass low over urban areas?
- 📝 Did British measures cause starvation in Norway during WWI?
- 📝 What actually happened in Greek and Roman temples of healing?
- 📝 When did it become customary to address the King/Queen of England as Majesty?
- 📝 What degree of relations did the different Hawaiian islands have between themselves before Kamehameha's unification?
- 📝 Did Jefferson and Washington smoke weed?
- 📝 Where did tree spiking prevent the most logging?
Source: stackoverflow.com
Search Posts
Related post
- 📝 Did some chemical weapons from the military end up in private hands after WWI?
- 📝 How long did it take to get news of the sighting of the Spanish Armada from Land’s End to London?
- 📝 Which state capital did the Apollo 11 command module NOT visit after it returned from the moon?
- 📝 How did the British Army unit size and structure in WWI change from 1915 to 1918?
- 📝 Did Nazi Germany use chemical weapons on the battlefield?
- 📝 Why did Black and Asian immigrants from the Empire not come to Britain in substantial numbers until after WW2?
- 📝 Why did the Umayyads spare some of the male members of the Family (Ahl-al-Bait) after Karbala?
- 📝 Why does the UK buy some of its major military hardware from the USA while France is self-reliant?
- 📝 How did soldiers in WWI who wore jackboots keep the boots from being sucked off in the mud?
- 📝 After the Mongol Empire fell, did China really turn away from math and physics?
- 📝 In a feudal system the king would give land to the knights in exchange for military services. Where did he get his money from then?
- 📝 Did French troops use chemical weapons during the Siege of Laghouat in 1852?
- 📝 How did the countries devolved from USSR turn from communism to democracy or other ideology peacefully after the collapse?
- 📝 How did changes in the balance of land versus naval balance of power prevent England from being successfully invaded by foreign powers after 1066?
- 📝 Did people from the cities of Uruk, Ur and Sumer have knowledge/recollection of how old their cities were (say, recollection after 2000 BCE)?
- 📝 Why did Native Americans die from European diseases while Europeans didn't catch serious diseases from the New World?
- 📝 Did Bill Gates steal the GUI concept from Steve Jobs?
- 📝 Why did the British scuttle the u-boats surrendered after WWII?
- 📝 Why did stock brokers go bankrupt after the crash of 1929?
- 📝 Why did Columbus cross the mid-Atlantic instead of exploring from Greenland?
- 📝 Why did the Roman military start to favour swords over the spear phalanx?
- 📝 Did Albert Einstein really receive this rejection letter from the University of Bern?
- 📝 Did the leaflets from the US to Hiroshima/Nagasaki civilians on bombing cities reduce the civilian casualties of the two nuclear bombs in August 1945?
- 📝 Why did the United States not resort to nuclear weapons in Vietnam?
- 📝 Why didn't Britain's nuclear weapons deter Argentina from invading the Falklands?
- 📝 Why would silk underwear disqualify you from the United States military draft?
- 📝 Did the end of the British Raj in India create an economic loss for Britain?
- 📝 How did the American Civil War help the U.S economy recover from the Panic of 1857 given that civil wars are extremely destructive?
- 📝 Did Heisenberg undermine the German atomic bomb by deliberately hiding his expertise from the Nazis?
- 📝 Where did the “vikings wear helmets with horn” stereotype come from and why?