Toxic Exposures: Mustard Gas and the Health Consequences of World War II in the United States by Susan L. Smith (review)

Susan Smith, on hearing cbc radio reports about secret chemical warfare exercises during World War II in her adopted home of Alberta, had her interest sparked about this topic. This led her to locate and analyze formerly classified Canadian and American government documents, the testimonies of soldier guinea pigs, and military and biomedical scientific reports. The resulting book, Toxic Exposures: Mustard Gas and the Health Consequences of World War II in the United States, is fascinating, frightening, and often one with unexpected revelations. It is also, through no fault of its author, incomplete, as many official documents still remain classified and off-limits even to scholars. As Toxic Exposures deals primarily with men, chemicals, and war, it marks a departure from Smith's two earlier monographs on the health care issues of American women of visible minorities during the first half of the twentieth century, although her attention to American soldiers of various racial and ethnic backgrounds connects this current work to her previous studies.

Part I of the book describes well-orchestrated medical experiments and training exercises (often the line between these was blurred) during the 1940s in which men (but also some women) were routinely exposed to mustard gas to study its deleterious effects. Participants in these events were soldiers who unwittingly but dutifully volunteered, along with other soldiers who were "volunteered" for such duties. Such human guinea pigs were doused en masse by mustard gas sprayed from aircraft; were exposed to it in close quarters by being held in sealed gas chambers; or had patches of skin subjected to various concentrations of this vesicant (blistering agent). During tests, volunteers might or might not be equipped with protective clothing and gas masks; regardless, all would end up in hospital to be examined and treated for painful burns, often for extensive periods. Other more specific experiments were race-based and conducted on white, African American, Japanese American, and Puerto Rican men to determine if reactions to mustard gas might vary due to skin colour. The results of this research were inconclusive. While many of these experiments were undertaken at the Canadian army base in Suffield, Alberta, American military installations elsewhere in the continental US were involved, as were British forces' establishments in the United Kingdom and the Empire. Exact numbers of American personnel involved are difficult to calculate, but Smith estimates that at least 60,000 were exposed to mustard gas, and maybe as many as 150,000. Moreover, with the US allocating $1 billion dollars (equivalent to almost $20 billion today) toward chemical warfare research during WWII, it was as much a part of big science as the development of the atomic bomb. To underscore the novelty and significance of Smith's study it is useful to cite Medical Aspects of Chemical and Biological Warfare published in 1997, which is a current volume in the Textbook of Military Medicine series produced under the auspices of the Office of the Surgeon General, Department of the Army, Washington, DC. It states, officially, that medical research on human volunteers before the 1950s was "on a somewhat ad hoc basis, with little documentation surviving" (52).

Part II of Toxic Exposures is concerned with the negative and positive legacies of mustard gas. Mustard gas and related chemical warfare agents were never deployed during WWII, yet tens of thousands of tons of them were produced that were stockpiled or loaded into bombs. The fate of this military materiel was to have it dumped at sea: both east and west coasts of North America are dotted with gas graveyards, which are potential submerged ecological time bombs due to corrosion of metal containers (bombs and drums) leading to continual leakage into the surrounding environment. Human time bombs also figure into the ledger of negative consequences as those exposed to mustard gas would later develop various chronic...