Review: Six-Legged Soldiers

Six-Legged Soldiers: Using Insects as Weapons of War by Jeffrey A. Lockwood. Oxford University Press. 2009.

Warning: the following passage contains disturbing mental images and should not be read by squeamish individuals.

The victim was initially force-fed milk and honey to induce severe diarrhea. Then the poor soul was stripped, lashed to a skiff (or hollowed out tree trunk so that his head, hands, and feet protruded over the sides, smeared with honey, and set adrift on a stagnant pond or simply left in the sun. Wasps attracted to the honey delivered excruciating stings, but the coup de grace came with the insects drawn to the feces accumulating in the boat. Flies would breed in the filth and then begin laying eggs in the victim's anus and increasingly gangrenous flesh. Although the misery could be prolonged by providing the victim with continuing allotments of milk and honey, the condemned would eventually succumb to septic shock associated with being infested with maggots.

Yup, the title and passage above give you a good idea of what you'll find in the book. I got the book as a Christmas gift (thanks Santa, but you're scaring me a little - we're a long way from toy train sets and tricycles :).

Despite the disturbing passages, Lockwood has written a good read. Writing from a scientific perspective, he traces the unintentional and intentional use of insects in warfare throughout history. 

Although Lockwood does examine the use of insects in warfare by past civilizations, the majority of his analysis focuses on the 20th Century. He discusses the Japanese manufacture and use of insect vectors to spread disease among the Chinese populace during the Second World War.

Biological warfare continued to be a a priority research area during the Cold War. Both Western and Communist-bloc countries poured a lot of resources into the development of biological weapons and the spread of disease through insects. Some countries even accused others of using these weapons despite the restrictions on the use of biological weapons in the Geneva Convention. What is not surprising during this time is that the accusers and the accused in the biological warfare debate always followed ideological lines.

Lockwood ends his analysis by looking at America's state of readiness against a biological attack, focusing on the country's agricultural sector. According to the author, American agricultural production is very susceptible to biological attack. As we saw with FEMA's response to Hurricane Katrina, government agencies are not prepared to deal with widespread emergencies.

As I said, Lockwood has a good book here. I know that it is not his background, but I think his analysis would have been made a little stronger and could have answered the "why" questions if he had put the events he discussed into a larger historical context.