A Secret Military History from the Greatest Generation
By most measures, my father qualifies as a member of America’s “Greatest Generation.” His assignment to a secret military operation kept him from feeling or being fully recognized as part of that group.
As a teenager in rural Indiana during the 1930s, my father sometimes walked the railroad tracks with a single-shot 22-caliber rifle, knowing that he and his grandparents would have nothing for supper unless he came back with a rabbit or squirrel. As a young adult in the year before Pearl Harbor, he responded to President Roosevelt’s call for America to be the “Arsenal of Democracy” and honed his skills as a plumber and pipefitter, helping build defense factories. Dad continued in this civilian role until the need for new factories declined and he was drafted, entering the US Army Air Forces as a private on January 18, 1943.
The Army kept my father in the US for over two years while he rose to the rank of sergeant, giving him specialized training and assigning him to train other soldiers. A portion of his training focused on providing ground support for B-29 Superfortress bombers, an important new weapon for which the development costs far exceeded the costs of the Manhattan Project. On June 1, 1945 he finally shipped out to India, arriving in Calcutta 28 days before the first atomic bomb destroyed the city of Hiroshima. He remained in India until the end of 1945, carrying out the secret duties for which he had been trained.
Dad was proud of serving overseas during those few weeks in July and August while the war still raged. He spoke often about loading C-47s, the workhorse aircraft that carried vital supplies “Over the Hump” from India to China. I still treasure souvenirs he brought back from India, especially a letter opener he carved from a piece of C-47 plexiglass. So far as I remember, he spoke only once about the secret work he did after the fighting ended.
The Army had assigned my father to the Chemical Warfare Service and trained him to handle toxic chemical bombs. Given his civilian experience installing pipes for water, natural gas and more, the assignment made sense. A training film from the period, You Are in the Chemical Warfare Service, Soldier Brown, is available on YouTube and provides insight to the world my father entered. The film emphasized the massive scale of US preparations for chemical warfare by noting that US plants in the Second World War were capable of producing more mustard agent in a single day than the US manufactured during all of the First World War. The film also predicted that soldiers in the Chemical Warfare Service would play a decisive and heroic role in winning the war.
“The big day … will be when Hitler, with his back to the wall, frantically uses gas as a last resort. That will be the climax of this war, and depending upon what happens then may rest the outcome. At that time, you will rush onto the field to take part in a main and deciding way. So, heads up, Soldier Brown. You have a big responsibility ahead of you. You belong to one of the finest technical services in the world. When the gas warfare phase comes, it will produce tremendous casualties on the enemy and at the same time prevent excessive casualties to our own troops. Good luck!”
My father was white and a high-school graduate with important technical skills. Many of the men assigned to the Chemical Warfare Service were African American and many were less well educated than my father. The training film promised that any new recruits who “have what it takes” could earn the opportunity to become a commissioned officer “regardless of race, color or any college degrees you may or may not have.” In the reality of a segregated US Army, most African Americans served in units where all the enlisted men were black and all the commissioned officers were white.
The atomic bombs which America dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were one reason that soldiers of the Chemical Warfare Service failed to make the cut as fully recognized members of the Greatest Generation. Those two bombs were and are controversial, but the scientists who developed them and the aircrews and others who delivered them are widely credited with having ended the war. The popular narrative that those two bombs ended the war, however, is at least as much an accident of timing and a product of publicity as it is a matter of objective truth.
Units such as the African American 769th Chemical Depot Company were generally divided into two sections, one responsible for incendiary bombs and the other for toxic bombs. The widely deployed M47A2 bombs could be filled with either toxic chemicals (usually mustard agent) or with the incendiary materials my father referred to as “jellied gasoline.” The bombs filled with toxic chemicals remained in depots throughout the war and were never used. The bombs filled with jellied gasoline were used very extensively and very effectively.
The atomic bombs caused massive damage to two cities and killed well over 100,000 people. By August 1945, the incendiary bombs America dropped on Japan had already caused extensive damage to 67 Japanese cities and killed far more people than did the atomic bombs. In announcing Japan’s acceptance of Allied terms for ending the war, the emperor recognized America’s “new and most cruel bomb,” but placed that as just one factor within the context of recognizing “the general trends of the world have all turned against [Japan’s] interest.”
Perhaps the Japanese knew the US had very few, if any, additional atomic bombs ready for delivery. Perhaps not. Either way, Japanese leaders surely recognized that surrender was the only way to stop the systematic destruction of Japanese cities and to deter further advance by the Russian forces moving eastward to attack Japanese occupied territories in China and the Japanese homeland. With or without the atomic bombs, if Japan had not surrendered in August 1945, the Russian advance and the firebombing would have continued. The B-29s and their bases, the enormous stockpiles of incendiary bombs, and ground crews like the incendiary section of the 769th Chemical Depot Company were ready and able to continue. The carefully planned and proven mix of high-explosive and incendiary bombs could have continued to inflict damage, death and injury on a truly massive scale.
It is likely the Japanese were also aware that before or during a land invasion, either the US or Russia or both might decide to employ the other horrifying weapon available in the Allied arsenal. Soldiers like my father knew how to load 1000-pound cyanogen-chloride bombs and similar weapons onto B-29s. The bombs, the planes and the soldiers were ready.
The atomic bombs’ efficiency of one plane, one bomb, one city had more impact on American popular opinion than on Japanese strategic thinking. I was born on August 8, 1945, two days after the bombing of Hiroshima and Truman’s quick announcement that the weapon had been an “atomic bomb.” My mother talked about her experience in the hospital and the fact that her sister had loaned her a radio. Almost all the doctors, nurses and other hospital workers had family or friends whose lives were at risk because of the ongoing war. My mother’s radio brought a steady stream of visitors to her room, all wanting to know if the bomb which Truman said harnessed “the basic power of the universe” might actually end the war. Japan’s announcement of surrender on August 15th—regardless of its actual causes—provided Americans with a quick, dramatic, satisfying and enduring answer to their question.
Even without atomic bombs, my father would have likely been excluded from claiming or receiving full credit for his role in the war. He was a “toxic gas handler,” not directly involved in handling incendiary bombs. His responsibilities were for handling those parts of the vast US arsenal of bombs which were filled with mustard agent, lewisite, phosgene and cyanogen chloride. Throughout the war, the Allies followed a strict no-first-use policy for the weapons my father handled. The policy resulted, in part, from horrible memories of how these weapons had been used during the First World War. The policy was also, in part, a result of an unofficial commitment to the 1925 Geneva Protocol which outlawed their use, although the US had never actually ratified that agreement. Earlier in the war, the no-first-use policy was also grounded in a practical calculation that Allied use of toxic chemical weapons would almost certainly lead to a response in kind by Germany or Japan.
By July 1945, retaliation by Germany was no longer a deterrent to Allied first use of toxic chemical weapons in the Pacific war. As Americans contemplated an invasion of the Japanese home islands, our war-weary public was almost evenly divided as to whether first use of toxic chemical weapons was justified as a way to end the war. Japan had, in fact, used similar weapons just a few years earlier against Chinese soldiers and civilians. Japan might even have initiated first use of toxic chemical weapons in a last-ditch defense of their homeland, much as the training film predicted. Japan’s chemical warfare stockpiles and their options for even short-range delivery were, however, dwarfed by America’s toxic warfare capabilities.
Regardless of what might have been, my father left military service in February of 1946 having been engaged almost exclusively in handling a type of weapon which many judged to be morally reprehensible and which almost everyone then thought was unnecessary. He clung to his few weeks loading C-47 cargo planes as something to brag about, but his dangerous work as a Toxic Gas Handler was a topic he avoided. Even his discharge papers changed his official job classification to the less offensive term, “Basic Gas Handler,” as if it referred to such tasks as installing kitchen stoves. Perhaps military authorities felt a degree of shame as well. Many of the archived documents which described the work of the Chemical Depot Companies remained secret until 2009 when they were finally declassified under a blanket executive order by President Obama.
The toxic chemical bombs never fell, and their degree of readiness has rarely been acknowledged. My father’s specialized training in handling toxic weapons did, however, become useful to the Army during the four months he remained in India after Japan’s surrender. He was transferred from the “Hump” base where he loaded C-47s to Ondal Advanced Chemical Park. Ondal ACP was America’s central toxic weapons depot for the China-Burma-India Theater, operated by the 771st Chemical Depot Company.
The final mission for the 771st before they could return to the US was to dispose of Ondal’s massive, unused toxic stockpile. My father helped load bombs and bulk containers of toxic chemicals onto trains for shipment to Calcutta and then onto ships from which they were dumped into the Bay of Bengal. Included among those bombs were eighteen rail-wagon loads of unused 1000-pound cyanogen-chloride bombs which had been returned to Ondal from Shamshernagar Airbase. From Shamshernagar, the bombs could have been transported Over the Hump in 1944 and used in Operation Matterhorn, the B-29 raids which were the first attacks on the Japanese home islands since the Doolittle raid.
My father worried two decades later about what happened to the weapons he helped dump into the Bay of Bengal. He initiated our only serious conversation about the real nature of his military service, asking me as a university physics student if the weapons he helped push overboard actually sank to the bottom of the ocean. He wondered if they might instead have drifted underwater for thousands of miles, perhaps even reaching the US coast.
In 2020, I discovered the Organizational History Reports from the 771st Chemical Depot Company, gaining context for the few pictures from India I had found among my mother’s things. The 771st operated in secret even from other units at Ondal Airbase. By the time my father arrived, many of company’s longer serving enlisted men were acquiring the necessary “points” and departing for home. New arrivals like my father may not have understood the full picture of what was happening. I doubt, in particular, that my father knew about the 15,000 mustard-filled bombs which were considered too prone to leakage for safe shipment to Calcutta and were instead buried onsite.
My father was never in combat. Unlike many soldiers in the Chemical Warfare Service, he never experienced serious exposure to the toxic agents he handled. He was never diagnosed with any war-related injury or illness. Nonetheless, he died at the relatively young age of 69 after a long struggle with alcoholism. His death came a day after the 39th anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing and the day before my 39th birthday. My dad’s experience of the Second World War does not fit easily into the standard American history of that war, but I believe his experience needs to be told, remembered and honored. With all his strengths and flaws and “might have done betters,” I honor him as part of a truly great generation.