Homing pigeons carried out a crucial mission in the conflict. In a less formal way, dogs improved morale within the trenches by hunting rats and acting as companions to troops in miserable conditions. Their small size helped them slip over and between trenches to deliver messages, shuttle medical supplies or lay down communication wires. Some dogs pulled heavy machine guns on trolleys, others used their keen sense of smell and hearing for sentry and scout work. The Germans used some 30,000 dogs on the Western Front, and the Entente kept around 20,000. (The Germany army would remain majority horse-drawn through World War II.)īetween 19, gas hospitalized 2,200 horses and killed 211, mostly because logistical uses limiting their exposure to the more dangerous areas at the front. The railways that carried the millions of tons of food and ammunition to the rear were frequently several miles away, so horses, mules and donkeys bridged the gap even after engineers set up light railway and automobile supply lines. Pack animals carried supplies and weapons on the front and rear lines. Animals were important companions and workers to the soldiers at the front, and like their human compatriots they needed protection from the perils of chemical warfare. Everyone knows the enormous human cost of the conflict, but it is easy to forget the fates of the million of animals that supported the war on all sides. More than eight million horses, mules and donkeys and a million dogs died in World War I. What’s more, thanks to their natural abilities, slugs would actually survive the attacks unscathed - which is more than could be said for every other animal on the Western Front. They would compress their bodies and temporarily stop breathing, alerting soldiers to the danger and giving them enough time to pull on their gas masks. Three times more sensitive than humans, slugs reacted to mustard gas at one particle per 10-12 million. Army was the first to discover the slug’s life-saving secret. Slugs were far more effective than dogs at detecting incoming mustard gas attacks. My understanding is that natural rubber (of which Germany had little in WW2 also) makes a much better flexible, airtight material.However, there was one other tiny gas-detecting hero on the Western Front - the slug. I leave my post as-is, because for all I know it might have some bearing on WW2, as well. Masks for large numbers of horses probably just weren't in the cards.Įdit: I misread the OP, and thought we were discussing WW1. With sharply-limited supplies, I suspect this had to be reserved for the soldiers' masks.

Now, normal masks required at least a little rubber. LeFebure claimed that the Germans only barely managed to squeak by using masks with enlarged canisters of various filtration materials, but had the war continued much longer, with the British introducing new agents or increasing the typical tactical concentrations of existing agents, the Germans would've found this insufficient.Īnd without enough rubber for hoses, thus being unable to use chest respirators, they'd have been up shite creek. Germany could not duplicate this method - they lacked enough rubber!

The British solved these issues by migrating the respirator to the soldier's chest, connected to the mask by a rubber hose. But thick filters meant impracticably heavy masks, and increased the difficulty of breathing (unless the surface area could be increased). In LeFebure's book Riddle of the Rhine: Chemical Stategy in Peace and War, the author explains one reason why this might be so.īy the end of the war, the chemical environment had become so difficult that the mask filter canisters had to be pretty thick.

Horse gas mask