Thread: Australian Chemical Weapons Unit(s)

Deadly chemicals hidden in war cache - National - smh.com.au

FOR more than 60 years RAAF veterans Geoff Burn and Arthur Lewis kept silent about the terrible secret hidden in a disused railway tunnel at the foot of the Blue Mountains.

Thousands of barrels filled with chemical weapons, including mustard gas, were stored in the tunnel at Glenbrook and other sites around Australia during the Second World War.

The men were part of a secret unit formed to look after the deadly stockpile, kept for use against Japanese troops - a fact the Defence Department refused to admit until the late 1980s. And for decades successive governments refused to disclose that the Australian wartime command had conducted chemical warfare experiments on its own soldiers.

Army volunteers were sprayed with and exposed to the gases, suffering horrifying burns and boils as well as lifelong health problems.

Messrs Burn and Lewis, former RAAF armourers, refused to join Anzac Day marches and wouldn't talk about their time in the Glenbrook tunnel.

Now, after decades of denials, the military is about to recognise the unit's contribution to the war effort.

Next month the Defence Department will publish a book - Chemical Warfare In Australia - detailing the unit's story, including how they and army volunteers were used as guinea pigs by their own commanders. Author Geoff Plunkett said the unit had the most dangerous and underrated job in the military - maintaining, storing and shifting the chemicals and bombs daily.

Last week Mr Burn, 83, of Penrith, and Mr Lewis, 83, of Gerringong, made an emotional return to the tunnel for the first time in 63 years. It is now used for growing mushrooms.

"We were just fodder," Mr Burn said. "When the war was over they didn't want to know about us. They just wiped our war records. Mine said I had been attached to headquarters but I was never there." He, like many others in the unit, suffered health problems but he can't prove they were caused by contact with the gas - his records were destroyed at the end of the war.

Both men joined at 18 hoping to be air gunners but were ordered to the RAAF chemical warfare unit.

"We'd rather have been doing something more useful like fighting Japs," Mr Burn said.

Mr Lewis was horrified to see what the gas did to the soldiers. "They volunteered because they were paid an extra shilling a day. I don't think they knew what they were in for as they came out of the gas chambers with blisters the size of tennis balls on their bodies."

Thank you, Chemical Nasty

Thanks for bringing an obscure yet important topic to light. After all, it is only through understanding that propr course of action can be reasoned out.

The topic is timely in that the USA is currently involved in a nasty occupation in Iraq brought about because of the misinformation regarding "Weapons of Mass Destruction" (WMDs) that were alleged to exist in Iraq. Now you inform us of the former existence of WMDs in Australia.