Gas

The ugliest charge that can be lodged against a nation at arms is that it has used poison gas. Last week Tass, official Soviet news agency, said that Nazi gas had been fired from Hitler's trench mortars in western Crimea.

The implications in this blunt charge were horrible. All belligerents' chemical-warfare services were ready and waiting. Military objectives on both sides include factories surrounded by crowded residential districts.

This was not the first censure of the Axis for using gas. Gas felled barefoot warriors in Ethiopia when Mussolini's braggadocio legions thrust at Haile Selassie's primitive empire. And last October Hirohito's artful hosts threw blistering gas at attacking Chinese outside Ichang, forced them to withdraw.

There was no question what the Allied response would be to Nazi gas in Russia. Said Winston Churchill: "I wish now to make it plain that we shall treat the unprovoked use of poison gas against our Russian ally exactly as if it were used against ourselves, and, if we are satisfied that this new outrage has been committed by Hitler, we will use our great and growing air superiority in the west to carry gas warfare on the largest possible scale far & wide against military objectives in Germany."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.