Book pays tribute to Bradford man's front-line experience

It is said to be the first feature-length documentary of combat, filmed from the perspective of fighting soldiers; it includes scenes of British and German dead.

With front-line casualties running at the rate of one-in-four, the chances of a soldier getting through a battle let alone the entire war unscathed were remote.

Bradford-born George Oswald Mitchell, however, was one of the few British and Commonwealth soldiers who served through the 1914-18 war from beginning to end and walked away when it was over.

From the prosperous Bradford suburb of Jesmond Avenue (a young JB Priestley lived round the corner in Saltburn Place) and the safety of a job in the textile trade applying dyestuffs to fabric, George Mitchell, like JB Priestley, signed up for the ‘war to end wars’.

He saw front-line action at first as an infantry private with the 1st 6th battalion West Yorkshire Regiment in and around Neuve Chapelle and on the Ypres Salient, Belgium.

Then, as a corporal and one of the first members of the Royal Engineers Special Companies, he helped launch the gas attack on the first day of the Battle of Loos in September, 1915.

During the next three years he took part in many other gas attacks, according to his son Jeremy, who has compiled and written a first-class account of his father’s wartime experiences, taken from notes written in the trenches. Shrapnel And Whizzbangs is a combination of biography and historical chronicle, the latter concentrating particularly on the use of various forms of gas.

The use of chemical warfare is not a modern phenomenon started by Saddam Hussein in 1987 when, on the command of the Iraqi dictator, the military gassed to death more than 6,000 Kurds in the town of Halabja.

During the never-declared war in Vietnam, the US military used Agent Orange reportedly as a defoliant to clear areas of jungle used by North Vietnamese soldiers. The US Air Force also dropped canisters of napalm, adhesive petro-gel, to burn down the jungle and incinerate enemy troops hiding in it.

And, of course, the Nazis employed the chemical Zyklon B to asphyxiate millions of Jews and others considered unfit to live in the death camps located in Poland and other remote parts of Hitler’s Reich. The solid-form chemical reacted with body heat to dissolve and form a gas.

Before this sophisticated means of killing trapped and helpless people in fake shower units was devised, the Nazis crammed the captured from occupied countries into windowless trucks into which carbon monoxide fumes from the exhaust were pumped.

This method was first employed in Latvia in the Baltic region, as a cost-effective and psychologically less-stressful alternative to shooting and clubbing Jews to death; it is described by a Jewish survivor of the Riga concentration camp in Frederick Forsyth’s novel The Odessa File. But it was on the Western Front, during the early years of the First World War, that gas was tried, first by the French against the Germans in August, 1914.

That October, Germans fired fragmentation shells with chemical irritant against the British at Neuve Chappelle. They then used a form of tear gas against the Russians in January, 1915, and graduated to the killing agent chlorine against French colonial troops that April.

The French retaliated with the deadlier phosgene which, unlike chlorine, was colourless. But the deadliest chemical agent of all was Mustard gas, introduced by Germany in July, 1917.

The first use of gas by the British – 140 tons of chlorine at the Battle of Loos on September 25, 1915 – was a disaster. The gas blew back on the trenches occupied by the British.

Gas was either released from cylinders or delivered by artillery shells. The Germans reportedly coloured these shells: yellow for Mustard Gas, green for chlorine and phosgene – like Slavonic Easter eggs.

On Armistice Day, 11am, November 11, 1918, casualties from gas attacks numbered in the region of 1.5m – 88,498 of them fatalities.

Jeremy Mitchell writes in his book: “My father was not a professional soldier. He had joined the local Territorial Army battalion in Bradford as a part-time ‘Saturday night soldier’ in 1911 and had responded immediately to the call to arms on the day that war broke out on August 4, 1914.

“He had seen service in the front line throughout the conflict, notably on the first day of the Battle of Loos, but also in many other engagements, large and small. Without doubt war – even though he once said it was ‘90 per cent boredom’ – was the central, most significant experience of his whole life… “Yet though he treasured the medals…he did not talk much about the war…I can remember asking him once what he felt about the war. His reply seemed to me rather prosaic at the time – ‘it was a job that had to be done’. In retrospect, though, that was probably an approach he shared with many of his contemporaries, not least J B Priestley, who adopts a similar stance in his autobiographical Margin Released.”

George Mitchell’s army notes end on September 20 with the single word written in capital letters – ENGLAND. Within a week of his return to Blighty he had married Josephine Garner in St Marie’s RC Church, Halifax. The date was September 25 – exactly three years after the Battle of Loos and the deployment of gas.

Shrapnel And Whizzbangs: A Tommy In The Trenches 1914-18, by Jeremy Mitchell, published by The Memoir Club at £12.95.