The Other Paris

Fort Bragg usually gets most of the fame in Western Tennessee and it is the name we associate with the entire theater but, the name was associated with a network of prewar fortifications and improved defensive points. Many of these places were not officially under the administration of Fort Bragg which was, after all, not exactly a traditional fortress to begin with since it sprawled across a hundred mile sector of the Department of Western Tennessee. There were actually three official ‘forts’ that administered the sector that spanned between the Mississippi and Tennessee river’s. Bragg was the one in the center of it all and the other two Forts, Polk and Cheatham, were mostly concerned with the defense of the two primary waterways they were headquartered on.

Paris, Tennessee fell inside the zone of Fort Cheatham, which covered the Tennessee River Valley, even if this fact has long since been forgotten in pop culture. In this zone was a town that was named after an enemy capital, Paris, even if this fact did not spare it any wrath from the United States Army. In 1901 the actual town was still in Confederate hands but, this was a hollow victory since the civilian population was largely gone and the city had stopped functioning as such for over a year.

Confederate defenses sat just north of Paris, along what had been a creek bed. In 1901 it was barely recognizable as such since the ground had been fought over for nearly a year and a half. We have one picture of the area, taken just after the war, and it showed the shallow valley devoid of any plant life except for fallen trees that had turned the creek bed into a pile of splintered logs. The damage shown in the area looks to largely be the result of conventional artillery but, this is not what Paris would be remembered for in the history books. That is understandable since the US Army had made no serious attempts to storm the city since 1899 and the CS Army was perfectly happy with that situation. That meant the fighting around Paris was static and had consisted largely of raids on the other sides trenches.

There are those who wonder why it was that General Shafter chose this particular area to try out his new weapon. It did not appear to be of any real importance to either side and, I propose, that might very well be the reason he picked it. One has to remember that Shafter was not the most enthusiastic fan of the chemical artillery shells and never showed any sign that he had much confidence in their effectiveness. His detractors point out that he did take the time to travel to the front lines to personally oversee the first operation using the weapon. They also point out that any failures were largely the responsibility of those who planned the missions, and this list also includes the commanding general of the entire US Army, since he approved those plans.

Looking back on the situation, the reverse seems to be the case in so much as it was the not the plans that Shafter approved but, the ones that he denied that were at the core of the matter. Shafter’s staff, back at Fort Lincoln, shared their commanders sentiment about chemical weapons, and their recommendations seem to show this. They were in direct contradiction to Third Army’s new commander, General MacArthur, who had a staff that saw the situation very differently. By this time, MacArthur’s people were probably the most experienced command staff in the US Army. They had been the ones that directed the defense of Washington in the early days of the war. As a result they had both the intimate knowledge of the problems at the front and a good reason to find practical solutions to those problems. Tragically, like so many other instances in this war, their superiors were not listening to them and this was yet another instance.

MacArthur supported the recommendations of his people who suggested that the new weapons be used in high concentrations on specific points that were to be exploited by specially trained infantry that went in almost immediately after the artillery. Fort Lincoln completely denied these plans and pointed out that MacArthur had no time to train any troops in new tactics. Shafter also, personally, noted that these plans were too radical and that the other units involved in the operation would be unable to support such an attack. This kind of attitude from above was not entirely unrealistic but, it also demonstrates another problem of general officers during the war.

There seemed to be two classes of Generals that developed as the war went on and hind sight affords us the opportunity to see that both schools of thought were just plain wrong. We met the first kind of General in the Balkan campaign. The Russian General Fok made the mistake of expecting his conscripted army to act as if they were pre war regulars. As the war went on Shafter very much became the mirror image of this in that he was seriously underestimating the abilities of his own troops. He understood that they were mostly civilians in uniform and, as a result, lacked any serious confidence in their abilities. His plans at Paris, plans he forced on a theater commander that he had personally appointed to the position, show this basic lack of confidence. When combined with his pessimism about the new weapon, one can see that this ‘test’ was half hearted at best.

The entire assault on Confederate lines were carried out as if it were any other attack. The chemical artillery shells were used as if they were just another high explosive round. They were given no specific targets for the new weapon, their rate of fire was one chemical round per every five salvo’s, and the preliminary barrage was no different than the countless others that came before. One has to wonder if Shafter, who was most definitely personally appalled by this weapon, wanted it to fail. If he did, he did not seem to have considered the ramifications of using chemical weapons in the first place.

The single biggest factor that Shafter’s staff seemed to completely ignore, if indeed they even understood it at all, was the type of chemical being used. This is essential to any such operation of this type. They also did not make any allowances for the weather, most important of which was wind. These two crucial factors were not lost on MacArthur and his people. Their reports to Fort Lincoln stressed these variables, multiple times, and were not even addressed by Shafter’s people. This goes a long way towards explaining what happened.

The artillery shells fired by the US Army, on that day, were a concentrated mixture of chloroacetone with a combination of herbicides, the latter of which was completely useless in this area since they were south of the major Kudzu belts. In layman’s terms the weapon was a primitive form of tear gas, and while it could be lethal in heavy doses, no such concentrations were fired on that day. Then the weather took it’s toll. It was spring time but, the air did not feel like it and, in the early morning, when the barrage began, the temperature was still well below freezing. Most of the initial gas attacks did not vaporize once the shell exploded. It froze in chunks and much of it was buried in the mud as it fell back to earth.

Despite all of the problems and misdirection, US Artillery still managed to create a cloud that was more than just dust. Many Confederate soldiers fled their bomb shelters and, shortly after that, the front lines completely. Not all of them ran though. At some point, the Confederates figured out what was happening and a make shift solution appeared along the lines. Soldiers were dousing rags and bandana’s with a combination of liquids. They even went so far as urinating on the cloth. These make shift gas masks were far from perfect but, given the haphazard manner in which the enemy was gassing them, it allowed more than a few pockets of resistance to make a stand along the trench lines.

When the US Infantry attack went in, they found the enemy resistance sporadic and varied all down the line. That might have been enough had the US soldiers not been told that there would be no resistance at all. The sudden return fire, much of it coming from locations that were thought secured, had as adverse affect on the US soldiers as did the gas on their CS counterparts. Even in locations where the US overran the enemy trenches, they faced yet another problem. Many of the chunks of frozen chemicals began warming up as the day progressed. As the US soldiers fought off counterattacks by Johnny Kudzu, their own gas began to form around them out of what appeared to be nowhere.

By the end of the day, the trenches were mostly back in Confederate hands. In three more days the lines would be right back where they had started. Again, it is highly debatable if this was the conclusion that Shafter was looking for. There is, also, every possibility that it was a case of Shafter’s staff simply not knowing what they were doing. Since Shafter never mentioned this in his book or various writings on the subject, it is likely that we will never know for sure. What we do know for certain is that Shafter had just unwittingly kicked over a hornets nest. To the horror of his people at Fort Lincoln, the CS had not been completely unaware of what was coming.

Confederate Naval Intelligence had long since detected the activity going on in Delaware. They were never able to discover exactly what it was that the enemy was up too but, they never really had too. Once the hard data was assembled many of the analysts realized that the sudden surge of outgoing railcars, from Wilmington, could only be so many things. They assumed it to be worst case and that meant some sort of chemical weapon. As a result, the Confederacy was ready to retaliate.

They had not made any artillery shells as the US had done but, what the Confederacy did have was a huge textile industry and that included factories that both made and used many kinds of dye. The bi-product of many of these processes was chlorine gas which had limited uses for other things but, was largely discarded. The CSA also had a surplus of air tight containers that were now in use for their new Zeppelin industry. It was trivial for them to turn out a small train yard full of bottled gas. None of it was as lethal as the next generation of gas, it’s direct descendant, that was specifically made for the job of war, and earning the nickname Mustard Gas. It was lethal enough for what the CS had in mind even if, when they were stockpiling it, no one had ever seriously thought it would be used.

The biggest problem that the Confederates had with their gas weapons, which was brought to the front line and released from hoses in a concentrated area, was the lack of good places to use it. Geography and wind patterns were mostly against them in this exercise but, on a front of nearly 1500 miles, it was inevitable that they would find one place. This spot was near Winchester, West Virginia, and had long since been scouted out as a possible location for this exercise. On the very day that the CS army was retaking the last of the trenches around Paris, their first gas cloud rolled over US lines in West Virginia.

On the surface it would seem as if the Confederate attack was far more successful than the one made by the US Army. We have no reliable figures on the casualties generated by the Paris attack, largely due to the haphazard manner in which it was done. The gassing at Winchester was an entirely different matter and even the conservative estimates put casualties at around four thousand men in a single day. Note that I said casualties and not fatalities since the largest portion of those men were wounded, many of whom would return to the front before that particular operation was even over with. Yet, still, that was not why these weapons were complete failures.

Contrary to popular opinion, war is not about killing the enemy. Casualties are a bi-product of war and not it’s goal which is the imposition of will. In this conflict, that goal could only be realized by breaking the enemy front line and, here we see, that chemical warfare was a total failure. Even the Confederate attack at Winchester failed to break the enemy front. They did manage to open a small hole in the line but, infantry marching on feet were simply not capable of fully exploiting the breech. The US would plug the hole in their lines and eventually beat the Confederates right back to where they started from, even if it took longer than it did at Paris. Ultimately the end results were identical.

Of course, chemical weapons did have an effect, it was simply not what anyone had expected. It did not take long for everyone to figure out that they would not produce victory but, now that the genie was out of the bottle, to not use them could most certainly produce defeat. It did not take long before the Germans used them on the Russians, the French on the Germans, the Russians on the British, and so forth and so on. Within months everyone would be using them and the types of chemical mixtures only kept getting more lethal, even if none of them were producing the desired result.

A lot of this failure could be explained by the inexperience of the armies, namely their leadership, in the prosecution of the kind of war they were truly fighting. Indeed, much of the leadership of the world still did not even realize what kind of war it was, let alone fight it in an effective manner. That was only a small problem compared to others and the most notable of these were the simple fact that chemical weapons are inefficient to begin with. They lack the one quality that is most desirable for any military weapon, that being the ability to be properly aimed. Chemical weapons simply can’t be and that means that in order for them to be used at the right place and time, on a battlefield, to produce a decisive result is always a matter of chance. In a profession that does it’s utmost to reduce random luck, chemical weapons become almost useless.

Countermeasures to defeat the worst effects of chemical weapons were fairly trivial to devise by most industrialized nations. The gas mask was simple to produce and did not even make a noticeable dent in the rapidly shrinking rubber supplies. These masks varied widely in design, from one nation to the next, despite the fact that they all essentially worked the exact same way. When paired with gloves and hoods, they rendered most concentrations, and types, of gas essentially harmless. This was so much the case that the countermeasures themselves became the worst effects of the gas. Infantry commanders would do their best to get their men close to the enemy before he could unmask since fighting in the protective clothing was prohibitive and exhausting. Of course, this was usually balanced out by the fact that both sides were masked. It served only to reduce the offensive capabilities of all the armies and deepen the quagmire.

There was also one effect that no one saw coming or even thought possible and it was the fact that chemical weapons were actually aiding the very enemies that it was made to kill. A little fact that is almost never discussed about warfare, and certainly not unique to this war, is the little creatures that have followed every army since time began. Pestilence was an age old problem for armies and, in this war, with it’s miles of trench lines that were half flooded in water, polluted with feces, and a host of decaying bodies lying in close proximity, disease was a serious problem. For every soldier that was incapacitated by the direct result of the enemy action, three were brought down by disease. A great deal of this was due to insects and this is not even counting the less lethal but, annoying kind, which had thoroughly infested the trenches such as lice. These creatures were far more effective killing machines than any chemical weapon and, ironically, they were also completely vulnerable to the new weapons. Within months of the first wide scale use of gas attacks, on all fronts, the mortality rates from disease dropped by almost half.

The beneficial, and surprising, side effect of this particular aspect of chemical warfare would not even be realized until long after the war. In 1901, just after it’s first use at Paris, it suddenly became a major concern for world leaders. Even after Winchester they were not so much afraid of it’s effects on their armies. If anything, the North American attacks seem to indicate that these weapons would not do much to change the battlefield equation. The national leaders had other concerns however. By this time they all had powered balloons flying high above cities and dropping bombs on each others civilian populations. All of them gasped in horror and realized that if those high explosives changed to chemical weapons, the devastation could be more than they ever imagined. Here is where the chemical munitions’ had their most profound impact.