U.S. At War: Should the U.S. Use Gas?

The horror and repugnance aroused by the use of gas in World War I is still alive. Sensitive U.S. citizens shuddered at an editorial last week in the New York Daily News and the Washington Times-Herald entitled "We Should Have Used Gas At Tarawa."

The debate touched off by the editorial shocker pointed up one of the great areas of American ignorance about war. Americans are rightly opposed to the use of poison gas by U.S. troops — but for the wrong reasons. The U.S. imagination has been fed by lurid writings of super-scientists...