WMDs on the Ostfront?

Discussions on WW2 in Eastern Europe.
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iangreenhalgh
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WMDs on the Ostfront?

#1

Post by iangreenhalgh » 27 Nov 2015, 14:14

Hi guys

I've read many books on the Ostfront and never read anything about use of WMDs by either side.

However, after reading several works about the German atomic waffen programmes I came across a claim that the enormous Soviet casualty figures could only have been so high if the Germans had used some kind of wunderwaffe that was capable of widescale fatality - a WMD in modern parlance.

The claim is made by author Joseph P Farrell in at least three of his books. In 'Reich of the Black Sun' he talks about a fuel-air bomb; in 'SS Brotherhood of The Bell' he expands a little on this and mentions a Japanese communique and the writings of Otto Skorzeny as evidence of the use of WMDs by the Germans on the Ostfront:

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Z9w ... nt&f=false

Skorzeny mentions 'rockets filled with Liquid Air' and Farrell postulates that the work of Zippermayr on fuel-air explosives using coal dust was behind these stories; including an excerpt of a British intelligence report on German fuel-air explosives. He speculates that the Nebelwerfers would have been to deliver these fuel-air warheads.

The Japanese communique gives an instance of the use of a WMD in 1943, near Kursk:
A third report dated December 14, 1944, but only declassified by the National Security Agency in 1978, is titled “Reports on the Atom-splitting Bomb.” This purports to be a decoded intercept of a message from the Japanese embassy in Stockholm to headquarters in Tokyo.

It reads:

This bomb is revolutionary in its results, and will completely upset all ordinary precepts of warfare hitherto established. I am sending you, in one group, all those reports on what is called the atom- splitting bomb. It is a fact that in June of 1943, the German Army tried out an utterly new type of weapon against the Russians at a location 150 kilometers southeast of Kursk.

Although it was the entire 19th Infantry Regiment of the Russians which was thus attacked, only a few bombs (each round up to 5 kilograms) sufficed to utterly wipe them out to the last man.

The following is according to a statement by Lieutenant Colonel... Kenji, adviser to the attaché in Hungary and formerly... in this country, who by chance saw the actual scene immediately after the above took place:

“All the men and the horses [within radius of] the explosion of the shells were charred black and even their ammunition had all been detonated. Moreover, it is a fact that the same type of war material was tried out in the Crimea too. At that time the Russians claimed that this was poison gas, and protested that if Germany were ever again to use it, Russia, too, would use poison gas.”
I looked for other claims of specific instances of WMD use and found this speculation about Sevastopol in a Jim Marrs article:
Fully one-half of the 50 million casualties of the war occurred in Russia, and several massive explosions, such as the one that destroyed a section of Sevastopol, have never been fully explained. It was announced that a hundred-foot below-ground ammunition bunker was destroyed after being struck by a lucky shot from Dora, a 311/2- inch German railway gun considered the largest in the world.

Such attacks were never reported by Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, due to the fear of losing control over a panicked and war-weary Russian population. The use of a super-weapon on the Eastern Front also might explain why more is not known about this issue. Accurate war news from Russia was extremely hard to come by during the war and grew more so during the Cold War.
http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/cienc ... ects77.htm

Obviously, the claims and 'evidence' are rather paltry and don't prove anything, but I find it a fascinating hypothesis that some unknown wunderwaffe was in use on the Ostfront and was responsible for part of the enormous Soviet losses.

Let the debate begin!

Jan-Hendrik
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Re: WMDs on the Ostfront?

#2

Post by Jan-Hendrik » 29 Nov 2015, 09:48

I think they refer to

32cm Wurfkörper Flamm

Jan-Hendrik


iangreenhalgh
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Re: WMDs on the Ostfront?

#3

Post by iangreenhalgh » 29 Nov 2015, 23:49

Hi Jan

That's interesting. My German is very poor and Google Translate doesn't help much:
The flame-throwing body was filled with 45 liters of oil flame that had a gefählriche Wikrung, especially against villages. The first features a heavy division 28/32 cm 28 cm included 450 WK.Spr. 150 and 32 cm WK.Fl., D.S. each launcher around 33 shot, that approximately 5 1/2 volleys.
This equipment weighed 69 t, of which each battery 13.8 t and t transported the le.Kolonne 27.6.
The WK.Spr. led to the basement a pink center that WKFl. a green-yellow line on the usual gray-green floor paint.
In general, the flame oil use was associated with an explosive shells-ships-.
The launchers were of six engineering firms:
Hartmann, Frama, Sack, Eberhardt, Schwarzkopf and Donauwörther Maschinenfabrik in Berlin-Lichtenberg, Hainichen and Chemnitz / Sa., Ie manufactured at four locations of the Reich territory.
1944 Skoda / Pilsen was a leader in the manufacturing and struck a compressed air launcher before.
I haven't heard of this version of the Nebel/Racketen werfer before. 45 litres of 'oil flame' (I take it as meaning a liquid incendiary filling) certainly sounds destructive.

The other details of the weapon are a bit unclear, 69t is very heavy, as much as a King Tiger! Or do they mean each battery had a weight of 13.8t and 5 battery therefore weighed 69t? 13.8 x 5 = 69.

33 shots per launcher is a lot, especially compared to the 5 or 6 shots of the more well known werfers.

I'm interested to know more about this weapon, particularly photos.

Some estimate of the destructive capability would be good. The damage radius of each of the 45 litre warheads and the dispersion of those warheads would tell us a lot.

iangreenhalgh
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Re: WMDs on the Ostfront?

#4

Post by iangreenhalgh » 29 Nov 2015, 23:56

I wasn't able to find much on this weapon. Here is a photo posted on this forum of one of the projectiles:

http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic. ... 5#p1775530

A few photos found elsewhere on the web:

Image

Image

Image

iangreenhalgh
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Re: WMDs on the Ostfront?

#5

Post by iangreenhalgh » 29 Nov 2015, 23:57

A couple more questions spring to mind:

1, Is this the weapon used 150km from Kursk that wiped out a rifle division?

2. Why would using this weapon provoke the Russians to threaten to use poison gas? After all, the Russians deployed huge numbers of rocket launchers of their own.

iangreenhalgh
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Re: WMDs on the Ostfront?

#6

Post by iangreenhalgh » 30 Nov 2015, 03:42

According to Wikipedia, the oil from the 32cm Wurfkörper Flamm could cover an area of 200 square metres, which sounds pretty destructive to me.

The dispersion of the rockets from a 6 barrelled launcher is stated as an area of 500m length and 130m width, due to uneven burning of the rocket motors.

So a single volley from a single launcher could blanket a pretty big area with incendiary oil. A battery of launchers could feasibly cover an even bigger area.

But this hardly sounds like a WMD that could be responsible for mass casualties.

Alixanther
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Re: WMDs on the Ostfront?

#7

Post by Alixanther » 02 Jan 2016, 23:24

Leaving the usual definition aside, I'm going to tell a story about something I read in the memoirs of Antonescu's adjutant. He wrote that during '41 he visited some places after a successful German offensive and he witnessed a strange landscape, littered with thousands of bodies of men and horses, hardly any scratches left. After expressing his surprise of seeing this mass of bodies who seemed almost as being asleep, he was told by the Germans that it was a special kind of ammo for their heavy guns, which was able to instantly burn the oxygen from the air and - if saturating a special zone with this kind of ammo - practically suffocate the defenders because they'd have carbon monoxide and burnt gasses for breathing instead of oxygen (plus the damage done to the lungs, of course - similarly to what happens when you face a volcanic ash cloud).
He saw this type of ammo as a war-winner recipe and asked why didn't they use it extensively, but he was told that the far-reaching consequences might put the attacking army at risk, too. He mentioned he was told this kind of ordnance was merely used 3 times at all, only in the controlled environment of dogged pocket defences of the Eastern Front.
I never heard anything similar from different sources, so it might only be a myth. Or he got rickrolled by the German counterpart.

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