On D-Day, June 6, 1944, the 87^th Chemical Mortar Battalion went ashore during the first hour of the landing on Utah Beach and quickly began to fire rounds over the cliffs above. The 87^th paid a heavy price, with a total of 84 men killed in action during the unit's 16 months overseas. Like the CWS as a whole, the 87^th and the other three chemical mortar battalions who fought in Normandy fired only high-explosive, smoke, and phosphorus shells, never the toxic chemicals for which their mortars were initially designed.

Eighty years ago, in May 1945, the dangers and the responsibilities faced by soldiers in the U.S. Chemical Warfare Service became frighteningly clear. The 760^th Chemical Depot Company was stationed near Oro Bay in what is now Papua New Guinea, maintaining the central American stockpile of toxic chemical bombs for the South West Pacific. The 760^th was ready to supply many thousands of toxic munitions for what President Roosevelt had promised would be a massive “retaliation in kind” if Japan resumed using its own toxic chemical weapons, as it had done earlier in China.

Eighty years ago, on March 5, 1945, Lt. Col. Wyss from U.S. Chemical Warfare Headquarters in Calcutta visited Ondal Advanced Chemical Park in West Bengal, India. The purpose of his visit was to reassess the stockpile of toxic chemical bombs then being maintained at Ondal by the 771st Chemical Depot Company (Aviation). Immediately after Wyss’s visit, the soldiers of the 771st began a major project to dispose of tens of thousands of chemical bombs that were judged to be either unneeded or unusable.

By May 1944, the US had equipped four airbases near Kharagpur, India with 130 of America’s newest and largest bombers, the B-29 Superfortress….