(Targets, purpose, return on investment). Churchill was 1918 Minister of Munitions. In his The Great War (my copy: Ch.LXX, P.1108: ) he reproduces his Survey to War Cabinet on the 1919 Munitions Programme: “how are we going to win the war in 1919?” “there are 4 new arms…Aeroplanes…Gas…if either side possessed the power to drop not 5 tons but 500 tons of bombs each night on the cities and manufacturing establishments…the results would be decisive. If the Germans had used poison gas on a sufficiently large scale…they could undoubtedly have broken up our whole front in the West….(for 1919)we should create an army essentially different in its composition and methods of warfare from any that have yet been employed by either side…we may contemplate drawing upon the artillery and the material which supplies it…to raise chemical warfare to its proper proportionate position in our organisation. It is unnecessary to speak of the air, for this is already accepted. We have..the power…of making such decisions fully effective…if we act…upon a…ruthlessly pursued plan…and revolutionary changes in…the methods of warfare are unhesitatingly faced…”

Tom Mangold, Plague Wars, may have more on this. WSC saw CBW as legitimate (in April,1944 he broadcast en clair that if our landings met gas, we would drench Berlin). He also dispatched captured German tabun bombs in June,1945 to Tiger Force: Mangold says MacArthur would have used CBW for Coronet. In 1918 WSC was not the decision maker, but he is unlikely to have printed these quotes if the notion had been rejected by his colleagues.

Interesting Ken. However I have to say that the ability of Bomber command to kill 100,000 people in one night did not prove decisive in round two so I find it unlikely that CBW would have been much more effective in 1919. I tend to agree with the Germans, aircraft are better used in support of the Army (via Plan-1919) than being wasted on very costly and largely pointless strategic bombing efforts.