Skip to main content

May 28, 1918 - Don Martin writes about Americans bombarded with gas shells


Don Martin diary entry for Tuesday, May 28, 1918: 
Stayed in Neufchateau and wrote letters and some mail stories. Spent the evening at the club.
           Don Martin on Tuesday, May 28, wrote about American forces being bombarded with gas shells. The dispatch was published in the New York Herald on Wednesday, May 29, 1918.
‘WEARY OF WAR,’ GERMANS’ PLEA TO AMERICANS
Prisoner Who Deserted Says Many of His Comrades Are Eager to Quit
TROOPS SHIFTED FROM EAST FRONT
Enemy Trying to Convince Pershing’s Men of the Presence of a Big Force
By DON MARTIN
[Special cable to the Herald]
WITH THE AMERICAN ARMY IN FRANCE, Tuesday
            German prisoners taken by the Americans say that most of the men opposed to the Americans returned from the Russian front. Their leaders want them to keep the Americans constantly harassed and to cause the suspicion that a great German force is near at hand. One German who deserted yesterday said many others want to desert, as they are weary of war.
            The net result of the powerful gas attack launched against the Americans yesterday in the Luneville sector and later when patrols attacked in this sector was five dead Germans and no deaths of Americans.
            The Lorraine sector gas attack lends strength to the belief that the war will develop even more frightfulness, due to the Germans’ fiendish determination to fight with the deadliest gases. Here the Germans set off five hundred large phosgene gas shells from projections recently implanted in the sector in order to give to the Americans a taste of what the Canadians got at Ypres.
            It is known the Germans are employing electrically connected batteries, connected so as to fire simultaneously large gas shells which contain each more than three gallons.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

‘New war with Israel at any moment’, ‘still digging through rubble’

The news about Iran has taken an ominous tone in the last couple days. Here is some reporting and commentary.  Newsweek on August 18, 2025, reported that Yahya Rahim Safavi, senior military adviser to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, said ‘ We are not in a ceasefire; we are in a stage of war. No protocol, regulation, or agreement has been written between us and the U.S. or Israel. A new war with Israel could break out at any moment .’  Yonah Jeremy Bob commented in The Jerusalem Post on August 19, 2025, that ‘ Khamenei can either “drink from the poisoned chalice” of diplomatic concessions … or face more airstrikes, possibly next time some targeting him directly ’.   Bob also noted that ‘ right now Iran is still digging through rubbl e’. The U.S. attacked Fordow, Natanz and Esfahan on June 22. Two months of digging. No surprise that there has been no public news about that.
Post a Comment
Read more

Assessing possible outcomes of the snapback mechanism

The initiation by the E3 of the 30-day snapback mechanism in the UN Security Council makes everything more difficult and there is great uncertainty about the outcome. Will it be peaceful with a new nuclear deal with Iran, negotiated by the U.S., endorsed by the UNSC and verified by IAEA, or will Iran withdraw from NPT with further military action by Israel and the U.S.?                 To perhaps shed a little light on what the outcome will be, here is my analysis of how the players - Iran, U.S. and E3 - may be assessing the acceptability of the range of outcomes. Four levels of acceptability were used: 1 Fully acceptable; 2 Less acceptable; 3 Just acceptable; and 4 Not acceptable. Four near term 30-day outcomes are listed, and two optimistic outcomes with an interim U.S.-Iran agreement reached within a 6-month extension.                 For the 30-day near term, the best outcome would b...
Post a Comment
Read more

‘Making nuclear fuel’ under the NPT

It is with some hesitation that I take issue with the latest publication of the renowned Henry Sokolski and Sharon Squassoni on August 15 in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, titled: “ Actually, the NPT doesn’t guarantee a right to make nuclear fuel .”  But someone should defend the IAEA and international safeguards! Here are points in question.            ‘ The [NPT] treaty was designed to prevent dangerous bombmaking activitie s.’  NPT is far more complex than that. It is common to state the three pillars of NPT: nuclear disarmament; nuclear nonproliferation; and peaceful uses of nuclear technology. Nonproliferation involves the commitment of non-nuclear states not to pursue nuclear weapons and to accept IAEA inspection to confirm that commitment is being followed. Perhaps Sokolsky intends to refer to INFCIRC/153, which lays out how IAEA and the state cooperate to carry out that confirmation. If so, INFCIRC/153 is not designed to ‘prevent’...
Post a Comment
Read more