[SoFloFreeper]

Robert Citino, the author is a leading authority on the German warfare.

Do his peers respect him? Let's see:

Winner of the 2004 Paul M. Birdsall Prize for Best Book in Strategic Studies, American Historical Association for Blitzkrieg to Desert Storm: The Evolution of Operational Warfare

Winner of the 2005 Distinguished Book Award, Society for Military History for Blitzkrieg to Desert Storm: The Evolution of Operational Warfare

Winner of the 2012 Arthur Goodzeit Award New York Military Affairs Symposium for The Wehrmacht Retreats: Fighting a Lost War, 1943

Winner of the 2013 Distinguished Book Award, Society for Military History for The Wehrmacht Retreats: Fighting a Lost War, 1943

all the above awards are cited on Wikipedia with footnotes/sources.

[blueunicorn6]

The history of the use of chemical weapons is not a good topic for this country.

[bk1000]

Greatest mass murderer? Worst genocide ever? Hitler was bad, but compared to Mao he was an alter boy.

[\/\/ayne]

The Japanese used plenty and they were allied with Nazis.

[alternatives?]

We were ready to do so. Search “Bari bombing”.

[Chainmail]

However impressive his resume, he doesn't know much about chemical warfare. Nerve agents disconnect nerves from muscle control and victims lose any ability to move and then to breathe. Only a very small amount on your skin will cause rapid death. Gas masks provide some protection but if any part of your skin is in contact, you die. Allegedly, the Germans were testing a new rat poison vapor for use in ships and the test personnel all died when they went down into the test ship holds to see how things went.

Nasty stuff.

[DNME]

I heard somewhere during my Air Force days (sorry, no references at all) that a certain chemical, crucial to the production of nerve gasses, had disappeared from industrial catalogs just before the war. German intelligence figured that the missing chemical must mean that America was making nerve gas.

In fact, the chemical was simply obsolete. We didn’t know about Germany’s discovery of organophosphates (first developed as an insecticide) until after the war.

That’s what we were told, back in the day.