In September of 1976, four thousand U.S. troops flew together from Fort Carson, CO, to form a new combat unit that would reinforce NATO forces in West Germany. In what has been called the only warlike thing President Jimmy Carter ever did, this armored brigade reinforced the Fulda Gap on the East-West border in then-divided Germany. For most of us, this three-year assignment seemed like just another training exercise. For this new tank commander and the rest of the armor crewmen in our 54-tank battalion, the sure signs that this deployment was "real" were the Soviet tanks on the other side of the border fence and phosphorus. More specifically, white phosphorus (WP) cannon rounds standing in the ready racks on the turret floor of our M60A1 tanks.
We all knew that WP rounds were dangerous both to the enemy and to us. Also called smoke, these rounds burn brilliantly spreading elemental phosphorus that we all knew burned even in water. Armor crewmen fear few things more than fire, and those seven light-blue painted rounds of 105-mm cannon ammo said more eloquently than any speech by the unit commander that we were loaded for war on a moment's notice. We had no particular fear of the other 56 rounds filling the ammo racks of our tanks, but those seven always got careful handling.
While we waited for the Cold War to turn hot, none of us knew that phosphorus was discovered three hundred years earlier just a few hundred kilometers north of our base in the German pott city of Hamburg. In 1669, a German alchemist looking for the secret of the Philosopher's Stone turned to the "golden stream" of urine as a possible source. Hennig Brandt was a former soldier and apprentice glassmaker who knew how to make hot fires. He boiled the urine down to a dry solid then heated the residue to a high enough temperature to form glowing fumes. The vapors he collected were white phosphorus, glowing as it reacted with atmospheric oxygen. Brandt kept the secret of the glowing element to himself at first; likely conducting failed experiments in turning base metals into gold.
As noted in the previous article on alchemy (CEP, Aug. 2005, p. 64), from the 17th century onward, alchemists had the reputation of being dreamers who wasted their family's substance. Most were secretive, and one can only imagine what the neighbors thought of a man boiling urine, an activity that cannot remain secret for long. Brandt was able to conduct his experiments because he married a woman with money. She died young and Brandt remarried, again to a woman with some means: a widow with children by her previous marriage. So Brandt got a lab assistant in his stepson and more money to fund his research. Six years after his discovering phosphorus, Brand! sold the secret for the modern equivalent of several thousand dollars, but his second wife's income was reported to be much higher than the sale price for the secret of phosphorus - a strong indication that Brandt had wasted the fortunes of both wives within just a few years after his great discovery. In the following decade, Brandt's recipe became widely known, causing a great demand for urine: liters of urine are necessary to make just grams of phosphorus.
Hamburg, the city that gave the world Felix Mendelssohn, Johannes Brahms, Heinrich Hertz, Otto Diels, and Gerhard Herzberg, could not count Brandt among its leading citizens. Yet Brandt's discovery came back to haunt Germany's second largest city in a week of horror numbered with the conflagrations in Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Tokyo, and Dresden. At 1 a.m. on July 25, 1943, Royal Air Force (RAF) bombers dropped 1,400 tons of high explosive and 1,000 tons of incendiary weapons on the first night of Operation Gomorrah. The objective: destroy the city and its shipbuilding and other war-related industries. The incendiary weapons used on the first night included 27,000 thirty-pound phosphorus bombs.
Fires burned across the city, and more raids followed, both daylight raids by the U.S. Army Air Corps and attacks in the night by the RAF. Then on July 27, at 1 a.m. 738 RAF bombers dropped more than 3,000 tons of bombs and created what is now known as die Katastrophe, a firestorm that killed an estimated 30,000 residents of Hamburg in one night and made refugees of hundreds of thousands of others. In fact the fire was so bad that the raid the following night was called off - smoke completely obscured the city, and the bombers flew to secondary targets. The bombing campaign went on until Friday, but, after Tuesday, the subsequent raids just made the rubble bounce. Despite the death and devastation left in its wake, Operation Gomorrah achieved only infamy. Hamburg was crippled, but recovered to produce more U-boats on other weapons.
Of course there is much more to say about an element that is in our DNA and is necessary for every living thing to grow. To get more of the story of phosphorus, read, "The Shocking History of Phosphorus: A Biography of the Devil's Element by John Emsley."
[Author Affiliation]
"We're History" was prepared by Neil Gussman, communications manager for the Chemical Heritage Foundation (CHF; www.chemheritage.org).
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