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The Not-So-Nice Canadians of World War I

Khalid Elhassan December 9, 2024 15 min

Canadian - A WWI Canadian recruitment poster — A WWI Canadian recruitment poster. Library and Archives, Canada

18. WWI’s Most Enthusiastic Users of Poison Gas

Masked German soldiers run through gas. American Chemical Association

Another theory has it that Canadian soldiers were particularly peeved about, and never forgave the Germans for, their first use of poison gas in 1915. Canadian forces had been especially hard hit when that new horror was introduced to warfare. In due course, the Canadian Corps became the Western Front’s most enthusiastic user of poison gas. As one Canadian historian put it about the war’s last months, “[w]e like to think of Canada as pure, but Canadians gassed everything that moved whenever they could“. Another Canadian historian put it more succinctly: “if we could have killed the whole German Army by gas, we would gladly have done so“.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.