The Little World

How did they spray poison gas from an airplane over troops? Or anthrax spores over cattle? How was it done?

This grisly thought occurred as I continued to paint the Bermuda. The idea of chemical and biological warfare was certainly on everyone’s agenda in the 1940’s as by then the military scientists had discovered how to to be terrifically efficient at it. They had mustard gas, lewisite, phosgene and the rudimentary forms of nerve gases as well. There were anthrax and probably smallpox weapons in hand. It only wanted the military order – impelled by a governmental one – to send them out.

Yet, apart from some Japanese army attacks, no-one else did. They had seen what had happened in WW1 and were all too terrified of it to wish to start the cycle of attack and counterattack.

But back to how, and not why. If you are going to lay down a trail of destruction from an airplane, you have to decide at what height you are going to be when you do it – the lower the better. You cannot do it too fast, either, lest the goo not settle where you want it to go. In both these scores, the Brewster Bermuda would have been a good bet – low and slow. It might also have been considered to have a useful capacity to hold a pressure tank in the bomb bay. Whether you then led the contents out through the bomb doors or into delivery pipes out on the wings would have been the next design decision.

If the nasty material was enclosed in a free-drop bomb then the release of it would have been simply the same as conventional explosives.

The one thing that worries me, and would have worried the crews – is the fact that chemicals and germs released would not all go straight away from the aircraft. There would have been air eddies that could have drawn some of the material back into the fuselage or wings – endangering the flight and maintenance crews. And it could have accumulated over time.

No wonder they don’t have a Bermuda preserved in any of the Canadian air museums. Perhaps there are a few buried out under bare dirt patches on the prairie…