Tularemia.

This is coolbert:

An extract with some comment from the Isegoria Internet web site:

 "War in the East"

"The books generally say that biological warfare is ineffective"

"There is reason to think it has worked, and it may have made a difference."

That one [?] instance during that German advance in 1942 from Kharkov to Stalingrad. German troops suffering from poor health as may be attributed to tularemia.

. . . .

". . . Ken Alibek was a bioweapons scientist back in the USSR. In his book, Biohazard, he tells how, as a student, he was given the assignment of explaining a mysterious pattern of tularemia epidemics back in the war. To him, it looked artificial . . . Antony Beevor mentions the mysteriously poor health of German troops at Stalingrad — well before being surrounded. Third, the fact that there were large tularemia epidemics in the Soviet Union during the war — particularly in the ‘oblasts temporarily occupied by the Fascist invaders’, described in History and Incidence of Tularemia in the Soviet Union"

* Ken Alibek previously going by the name of Ken Alibekov. Ken a defector and scientist who worked in the Soviet/Russian military bioweapons program.

* Tularemia from a bio-warfare standpoint advantageous. NOT so absolutely lethal but rather incapacitating, also the diagnosis not so easy: "it has comparatively low lethality, which is useful where enemy soldiers are in proximity to noncombatants, e.g. civilians".

* The Japanese during the Second World War without question [?] having dropped plague on the Chinese population. Perhaps even not a mere single usage but repeated attempts to infect the Chinese citizenry. THE SOVIET TOO DID THE SAME WITH TULAREMIA? THAT VICTORY AT STALINGRAD NOT MERELY DUE TO SOVIET COURAGE AND STEADFASTNESS?

coolbert.