In fact, chemical weapons, including mustard gas, blister gas, and tear gas were used on the soldiers, as young as 16, without their knowledge or consent. Nearly all of them suffered extreme pain and lifelong health problems. Mustard gas destroys human tissue on contact, causing painful blistering of the skin and lungs.

"We weren't told anything about gas. We were only told that Suffield needed volunteers. We thought it was just another army camp," said Jim Dickson, a retired Alberta farmer. "The Canadian government should have been charged with war crimes. These men suffered terribly and died prematurely." Dickson was not invited to attend the defense minister's ceremony.

In 1945 Dickson was a 19-year-old recruit to the Canadian Army when he was transferred to the base, called an "experimental station." In 1939 Ottawa set aside 129 square kilometers at Suffield for scientists to conduct experiments on 2,500 soldiers, which would continue until the end of the Second World War.

Dickson was one of six men ordered into a windowless bunkhouse--he calls it "a gas chamber"--at 11:00 one morning. "They filled the chamber with mustard gas, and by noon two of us were unconscious. When a box of food was put into the chamber, we threw it out right away. They only took us out when everyone lost consciousness. We later learned that if you consume food during a mustard gas attack, it's certain death."

Having been scarred by blister gas and burned by mustard gas, Dickson was taken to the station hospital, which was normally off-limits to him. He found it housed more than 70 badly burned soldiers. Some of them had been sprayed by planes that dropped either a mustard gas spray or an exploding mustard gas canister. There was also a group of six soldiers who had been ordered into a van with seats contaminated with the gas.

"They were in extreme pain and their testicles had swelled to football size," explained Dickson. "Nothing was done to help the severely burned because the experiments continued in the hospital for another five or six weeks. They wanted us to suffer greatly--the more pain the better."

Many of the Suffield veterans who suffered permanent mental and physical damage from the experiments have renamed the military base "Sufferville." Dickson has been blind in one eye for the past six years as a result of a splash of blister gas that damaged his eye during the army's chemical warfare experiments.  
 
A 'type of torture'
"We got into this mess" he insisted, "because we did everything they said. We thought we were fighting for the country, but it was a useless scam. I don't know how human beings could do that and take a new bunch of men every two months and put them through that type of torture."

Leonard Berard of Red Deer, Alberta, died in 1986 of a rare blood cancer his widow is convinced was caused by the mustard gas experiments. She recalled her husband's agony at Suffield as she dressed the blisters and oozing sores on his skin. "As soon as one blister broke and ran, underneath was another blister," she said. In the end, "Leonard was blind and in so much pain. They'd turn him over in bed and his bones would break."

Neither he nor his widow have received compensation for his ordeal.

The human guinea pigs were ordered to keep their mouths shut. Those who fought for pensions were denied them on the basis that there was no proof of the army's secret chemical tests. The use of human guinea pigs for chemical weapons testing was kept secret until aspects of it were first documented in the book Deadly Allies: Canada's Secret War 1937-1947 by John Bryden, which was published in 1989. As a result, some soldiers were able to establish their right to limited pensions in the late 1990s, more than half a century after being injured by the secret tests. Bryden obtained much of his material under the Freedom of Information Act.  
 
Requested by Washington and London
According to Bryden, Washington and London asked the Canadian and Australian armies to find volunteers for mustard gas experiments. The Canadian and Australian governments then "volunteered" soldiers who had no idea that they were going to be used as guinea pigs for chemical weapons testing.

Bryden adds, "Canada was ahead of everybody in the development of chemical and biological war weapons," pointing out that Agent Orange, a highly toxic defoliant widely used in the Vietnam War, was developed at an Ottawa experimental farm. Tens of thousands of Vietnamese, as well as U.S. and other soldiers, are still suffering from its effects.

Norman Amundson, a retired government worker from Regina, was another of the Suffield "volunteers." There was a "bluish rain" that landed on him and other soldiers as a plane dropping mustard gas flew overhead at Suffield Station in 1942. "They didn't tell us what it was or to put on respirators. They said they were just testing our uniforms," he reported. Amundson's lungs and lower body were burned by the gas. Following that experiment, he and others were ordered into a shack and tear-gassed while not wearing any protective equipment.

Amundson said he is insulted by the government's unveiling of the plaque in Suffield thanking the 2,500 soldiers, claiming they "voluntarily suffered injury and hurt." He insisted, "It should be an apology actually. They shouldn't have ever done what they did."  
 
 
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