On 21 February 1916, German artillery fired 100,000 shells in the first hour of its attack on French defences at Verdun. During the 303-day battle, the two armies bombarded each other with an estimated 23 million shells. Many of the shells, both French and German, contained phosgene. On 11 July alone, the Germans fired 75,000 phosgene shells containing some 137 tons of the lethal chemical.

Sulfur mustard appeared on the western front the following year. One night in July, the Germans bombarded British frontlines east of the Belgian town of Ypres, with 50,000 shells containing around 125 tons of the blister agent.

In September 1917, the Germans began firing shells filled with the vomiting agent diphenylchlorar sine. It was designed to force Allied troops to wrench off their gas masks so they could be sick and expose themselves to lethal gases fired in shells at the same time.

Approximately 30% of those fired between 1914 and 1918 did not detonate. Retreating German soldiers also left dumps of unused chemical munitions. Most of the old gas shells recovered from battlefields contain phosgene, mustard gas or organoarsenic compounds, according to Manley. An estimated 10 million or more lost or abandoned chemical munitions have yet to be retrieved or destroyed. Only in France, a specialist munitions-clear ing agency collects around 900 tons each year. The Belgian Explosive Ordnance Disposal Company, known as DOVO, collects up to 200 tons of unexploded munitions every year.

Munitions that have been buried for many years are usually heavily corroded on the outside, without legible markings, their origins as well as their contents unknown. It was also common practice to use the same type of munition body for both chemical and high explosive munitions. Chemical warfare agents have also been found in partially exploded shells and shell fragments.

Environmental pollution resulting from damaged or corroded munitions is a major hazard. Organoarsenic warfare agents and other toxic compounds have seeped out in many areas, contaminating the soil and surface water. Bullets in shrapnel shells and rifle and machine gun cartridges were mostly made of lead. Percussion caps employed mercury fulminate or lead azide to detonate the propellant in the cartridge. During the war, the British alone manufactured billions of rifle and machine gun cartridges containing these heavy metal pollutants.

Soon after the armistice, men, women and children began collecting scrap metal from spent or unexploded munitions that lay on the western front battlefields. Before selling the metal, they emptied explosives and other chemicals from the shells.

By the early 1920s, it became common practice for authorities to blow up unexploded weapons. The volume was so great, however, that many were loaded onto ships that were simply sunk into the sea.

Dumping munitions into the sea was seen to be safe and environmentally benign. It was thought that any toxic chemicals that leaked out would be rapidly diluted. In the mid-1950s the British dumped over 120,000 tons of chemical munitions off their coast. Overall, more than 300,000 tons of chemical weapons were dumped in the sea after the second world war. After Germany’s defeat in WWII, the Soviet Union dumped the captured chemical weapons in the Baltic Sea. The British and Americans did the same in the Skagerrak strait, between Norway and Sweden to the north and Denmark to the south. At the time, this disposal method was deemed less hazardous than burning the materials.

the Soviets jettisoned at least 50,000 metric tons (t) of German weapons into the Baltic Sea, some 15,000 t of which contained chemical agents. Previous reports concluded that most of these munitions probably had sunk into mud on the seafloor and were largely harmless.
Bełdowski and his colleagues developed new methods to analyze for chemical agents in seabed sediment, as well as in fish and mussel tissue. They used underwater drones and towed sonar scanners around three dump sites (in the Baltic Sea, the Northern Sea and the Atlantic Ocean) and collected sediment samples and fish in the areas.
The most abundant chemical agent they found was sulfur mustard, used in aircraft bombs and artillery shells. They also detected arsenic-contain ing agents like clark 1 (diphenylchloro arsine) and adamsite (diphenylaminec hlorarsine), as well as hydrogen cyanide and chemicals used in tear gas. Subsequent investigations revealed that bioaccumulation of arsenic in seafood is associated with sea-dumped munitions.

1 I hope I don't sound flippant when I say that "war is hell." Even non-combatants emerge wounded. Still, those who say that "war never solved anything" are idiotic, because how to solve a problem like Hitler otherwise?

2 "It is good that war is so terrible lest we grow too fond of it" Robert E. Lee

War IS hell, but it does in fact solve problems. Slavery ended for one. Pax Romana was because Rome defeated Carthage in war is another example.

You're point is well taken Dana.

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