During World War I, the French Army was the first to employ tear gas, using 26 mm grenades filled with ethyl bromoacetate in August 1914. The most frequently used chemicals during World War I were tear-inducing irritants rather than fatal or disabling poison. See also: Weapons of World War I 1914: Tear gas Widespread horror and public revulsion at the use of gas and its consequences led to far less use of chemical weapons by combatants during World War II. The use of poison gas by all major belligerents throughout World War I constituted war crimes as its use violated the 1899 Hague Declaration Concerning Asphyxiating Gases and the 1907 Hague Convention on Land Warfare, which prohibited the use of 'poison or poisoned weapons' in warfare. The widespread use of these agents of chemical warfare, and wartime advances in the composition of high explosives, gave rise to an occasionally expressed view of World War I as 'the chemist's war' and also the era where weapons of mass destruction were created. In the later stages of the war, as the use of gas increased, its overall effectiveness diminished. Gas was unlike most other weapons of the period because it was possible to develop countermeasures, such as gas masks. The killing capacity of gas was limited, with about 90,000 fatalities from a total of 1.3 million casualties caused by gas attacks. This chemical warfare was a major component of the first global war and first total war of the 20th century. The types of weapons employed ranged from disabling chemicals, such as tear gas, to lethal agents like phosgene, chlorine, and mustard gas. They were primarily used to demoralize, injure, and kill entrenched defenders, against whom the indiscriminate and generally very slow-moving or static nature of gas clouds would be most effective. The use of toxic chemicals as weapons dates back thousands of years, but the first large-scale use of chemical weapons was during World War I. Contains Chlorine, phosgene (a choking agent) and mustard gasĪ French gas attack on German trenches in Flanders, Belgium (1917).

German cavalry ww1 gas mask