“A requirement was outlined, in the event of the Germans setting up a bridgehead in Ireland, of spraying their landing sites and axes of advance with poison gases including mustard gas, which would have caused incapacitating blistering of the lungs and respiratory tract. There was also phosgene gas which would kill by choking. It would not separate Irish from German, and no thought seems to have been given to the possible effects on the Irish civilian population, north or south. This could hardly have been termed assistance to repel German invasion. A bomber squadron at Feltwell in Suffolk was equipped with gas spray containers for this contingency.”
From “NEUTRAL IRELAND AND THE THIRD REICH” By Lt Col John P. Duggan (1985)
A British War Cabinet Memo dated 8 October 1940 recorded that Winston Churchill agreed with an RAF plan to drench Ireland with poison gas in the event of any German troops landing there. In the previous 13 months German troops had overrun much of Europe from Poland to the English Channel. The British, who had habitually used poison gas on Iraq and other “mandated territories” they had awarded themselves in 1919, did not use poison gas on the Germans, nor did the German use gas on the British since the Armistice in 1918.
Lt Col Duggan, after service in the Irish Army was Registrar with the Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies. He returned to the story above in his “A HISTORY OF THE IRISH ARMY” in 1991 and Proinsias MacAonghusa, a distinguished journalist, in his “GULLIVER” column in THE SUNDAY PRESS, devoted a piece to it. But I never saw any comeback, TERRY de VALERA youngest son of the 1940 Taoiseach, referred to it in his Memoir, an indispensable source for serious students of the period.
However THE IRISH POLITICAL REVIEW of August 2004 had a long article by Manus O’Riordan which dealt with the matter and the refusal of other media in Ireland to confront it.
The title of the article is ON THE SWALLOWING AND POISONING OF NATIONS.
Manus has an encyclopaedic brain and a generous heart and sent me an email copy of the whole issue of the issue of the IPR for August 2004 which I shall pass to Jude to mount on the BLOG
See http://free-magazines.atholbooks.org/ipr/2004/IPR_August_2004.pdf – page 11 – “On the Swallowing and
Poisoning of Nations”.
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