by Theo Emery
After the speech, deflated war opponents gathered for a mass meeting at a downtown convention hall, their cause defeated, their ranks split. For Manning, the late supper for the naturalist Finley at Rauscher’s may have been a welcome social occasion, a pause in a rancorous day. If it provided a respite from the war, it was a brief one.
The morning after the president’s war speech, every paper in the country carried the news that Wilson had privately known when he took the rostrum: a German submarine had sunk another American ship. The steamship Aztec had gone down late Sunday night, with more than two dozen people feared dead. With this new atrocity, the surge of protest from pacifists and isolationists broke. At the Washington headquarters of one antiwar group, a prowar group painted over the windows with yellow paint. As war opponents scrubbed off the paint, a crowd taunted them on the sidewalk.
Inside the U.S. Senate chamber, shouting broke out when Robert “Fighting Bob” La Follette, the radical antiwar Senate leader from Wisconsin, temporarily blocked a vote on the war resolution. When one senator insisted that the chamber adjourn to end the antiwar speeches, gallery spectators broke out into cheers. Acrimony followed one antiwar senator dining at a hotel restaurant. After the band struck up “The Star-Spangled Banner,” other patrons hissed and heckled the senator when he stayed seated during the song.
The Bureau of Mines was only a few blocks down E Street NW from the offices of the National Research Council, where the military committee met at ten-thirty the morning after the president’s speech. Part of the committee’s business was to name the Committee on Noxious Gases and put Manning at its head. The members included army and navy ordnance officers, two men from the Army Medical Department, and two men from the council’s Chemistry Committee. It was a tiny group of men chosen to steer the research, almost laughably small given the magnitude of the problems they faced.
Manning’s immediate priority was a gas mask to protect the soldiers that would embark for Europe. The man in charge of raising that army was Brigadier General Kuhn, the head of the War College, who had previously asked the Bureau of Mines to regulate explosives. Now he asked Manning to meet him at the Washington Arsenal the next day, which was Wednesday, the midway point of Holy Week and two days after Wilson addressed Congress. Manning knew that creating a gas program to match that of the Germans would be a tremendous scientific challenge, and he needed a trusted lieutenant to lead the effort. Manning chose George A. Burrell. A chemical engineer, Burrell had been Manning’s former chief of gas investigations and one of the top technical men in Pittsburgh. He had a soft face, with questioning eyes behind his wire spectacles. His receding hairline made him appear older than his thirty-five years. More than twenty years separated Burrell and Manning, but the two men were close, with a deep mutual respect rooted in nearly a decade of work together.
Burrell had come from humble roots, the son of a Scottish immigrant who settled in Cleveland, Ohio, to work as a mill foreman. He had studied at Ohio State University then worked as a lab aide for a company in Cleveland. The U.S. Geological Survey hired him to investigate fuels in Saint Louis, then put him in charge of the survey’s fuel-testing plant in Colorado. After only a year, he came east to investigate gas and petroleum in the survey’s Pittsburgh labs. When Congress created the Bureau of Mines, the new agency absorbed the survey’s mine-accidents and fuel-testing divisions, and Burrell with it. He became an intellectual luminary, publishing more than fifty papers in top journals—an astonishing number for such a young man. Engineers across the country eagerly read his published studies on gas and petroleum extraction. A methane detector he patented in 1916 was a breakthrough for mining safety.
The previous October, Burrell had decided to leave the government to become a private consultant. Colleagues in Pittsburgh had toasted him at a farewell banquet and given him a gold watch to help him keep time in his new role. Now, with the country on the threshold of war, Manning summoned him back to the bureau. Not for just any job, but to head the entire war gas research operation for the U.S. government.
The road to the War College stretched alongside the Washington Arsenal and the barracks of the Engineer School, where the elite Army Corps of Engineers trained its future officers. Manning passed a parade ground lined with trees, with a baseball diamond in one corner. Wednesday of Holy Week was warm and mild. In a more peaceful time, it would have been a perfect day to stroll around the Tidal Basin, where engineers had been planting cherry trees, gifts from the Japanese government. There was no time for such luxury now. The War College was at the center of the coming mobilization, its officers shuttling back and forth to the State, War, and Navy Building for consultations over the war budget, the likelihood of a draft, and the requisitions needed to outfit a million men.
Theodore Roosevelt Hall rose from the flats of Greenleaf Point, where the Anacostia and the Potomac Rivers converged. An enormous Beaux-Arts building of red brick and marble trim, the hall spread east and west from the rounded roof of the central pavilion. The building projected military might, an imposing symbol of the country’s growing power. Atop the entrance, a sculpted eagle gazed east, poised for flight.
Along with Burrell, Manning brought George Rice and William Gibbs, as well as Arno Fieldner. A bright, likable man, Fieldner had risen quickly through the bureau after the U.S. Geological Survey hired him 1907 and later put him in charge of the chemistry lab at the bureau’s Pittsburgh Experiment Station. Rounding out the group was Yale University physiologist Yandell Henderson. His cardiorespiratory research had made him famous, while his pugnacious character had made him infamous. A contrarian prone to eyebrow-raising remarks, Henderson had written an inflammatory letter to the New York Times shortly after the Lusitania’s sinking in 1915. The letter scoffed at the allegations of atrocities by Austro-Hungarian troops and likened the actions of the Central powers to collegiate mischief at a school reunion. Accused of being an apologist for the Central powers, he earned a mocking editorial from the Times and had even been reported to the Department of Justice. He had learned to keep his opinions to himself and was now on board with the war effort.
Kuhn greeted Manning with Major Llewellyn Williamson, chief of the Medical Department of the U.S. Army and a member of Manning’s Committee on Noxious Gases. Lean and commanding, Kuhn had an imperious mustache, arched eyebrows, and silver temples. The military needed to be swiftly transformed into a fighting force, and Kuhn was particularly well suited to help with the task. He had been a brilliant student at West Point and a careful observer of battlefield tactics in the Russo-Japanese War. Most recently, he’d been the American military attaché in Berlin. He visited European battlefields regularly, and his diplomatic nature had made him a favorite among German military officers. When he returned to the United States, he brought with him valuable intelligence gleaned from the Germans who had unwisely taken him into their confidence.
Manning told Kuhn of the news that the National Research Council believed the Bureau of Mines should lead gas investigations. General Kuhn embraced the idea as well. Under different circumstances, this might have been an uncomfortable discussion— the decision put the civilian Bureau of Mines in charge of a military undertaking, making the War Department a backseat passenger to a nonmilitary agency. But under the circumstances, Kuhn felt that the bureau was best positioned to work on the gas investigations and offered to help in any way he could.
Manning and his men departed, retracing their route toward downtown. As they left the arsenal once again, the Capitol dome would have been visible in the distance, where the Senate was debating the president’s war resolution. When the War Department built its army, it would need more than infantry. It would call upon every profession to volunteer: blacksmiths, farriers, stenographers, wheelwrights, masons—anyone with a skill who could aid the massive mobilization that lay ahead. With Kuhn’s blessing, Manning was also gathering an army. But instead of calling upon carpenters and teamsters, he would summon chemists and technicians. He was organizing
an army of scientists.
That afternoon, the Senate voted to adopt the war resolution. Two days later, in the early hours of Good Friday, the House followed suit. The Senate convened briefly at noon, readying the resolution for delivery to the president. Throngs of men in boater hats pushed up onto the steps of the Capitol and clogged surrounding streets, waving flags and cheering the delegation that rushed the document up Pennsylvania Avenue. President Wilson was lunching with his wife and cousin when the delegation arrived. All three hurried to the Usher’s Room off the grand entrance. Rudolph Forster, the president’s clerk, waited beside a table with the document, and the first lady handed her husband a pen. President Wilson sat and scratched out his signature with its long swooping tail.
A burly navy officer named Lieutenant Commander Byron McCandless watched the strokes of the president’s pen. When it was done, the officer stepped to a window, raised his arms, and wagged them in semaphore code. Across the street, another officer watched from a window in the State, War, and Navy Building. At McCandless’s signal, he crossed the hallway to the wireless operators. Their fingers began to tap, sending the same coded message to every naval vessel, yard, and station: “The President has signed an act of Congress which declares that a state of war exists between the United States and Germany.”
Steam whistles blasted from the Navy Yard and from factories in Georgetown. Across Washington, the crowds churning through the streets erupted in cheers. At port cities across the country, sailors boarded interned German ships and detained their marooned crews, some of whom had smashed the cylinder heads of their vessels and crippled the engines in anticipation of the long-awaited seizure. Jewels of the German merchant fleet were now U.S. property, including the Kaiser Wilhelm II, the emperor’s favorite vessel.
Shortly after Wilson signed the declaration, the president of neutral Cuba sent a message to Congress asking permission to declare war as well. The Caribbean nation was no longer a safe haven for spies and smugglers.
For three years, scientists in the United States had watched the carnage unfold across the ocean, wondering if and when they would be pulled into the fray. In all that time, there had been virtually no preparation for the gas warfare that awaited American soldiers. Finally, the gears were turning. On the day that Congress passed the war resolution, Manning asked the secretary of the National Research Council to quickly sign off on his noxious gases steering committee, saying the men needed to convene immediately. The scientists who had dallied for so long threw their support to their colleagues in Europe. The neutrality of the U.S. government was finished, and so was the neutrality of the American scientific establishment, which had been on the sidelines of the war for so long. Hale, the chairman of the National Research Council, was also foreign secretary for the National Academy of Sciences, making him an ambassador to scientific organizations overseas. He dictated a telegram to the academy’s sister organizations across Europe—in London, Paris, Rome, and Petrograd. Hale wrote,
The entrance of the United States into the war unites our men of science with yours in a common cause. The National Academy of Sciences, acting through the National Research Council which has been designated by President Wilson and the Council of National Defense to mobilize the research facilities of the country, would gladly cooperate in any scientific researches still underlying the solution of military or industrial problems.
America had joined the chemists’ war.
Chapter Two
An American University
Darkness cloaked Washington, the city streets empty and still, when explosions rattled residents from their sleep in the capital’s Petworth neighborhood. It was before dawn on Saturday, April 7, 1917, not even a full day since the United States had declared war. Minutes after the explosions, police detectives swarmed Georgia Avenue to find splintered electrical poles along the trolley line. Saboteurs had drilled into the poles and stuffed the holes with dynamite. The damage was minor, and the trolleys began on schedule, but as the sun rose over the capital, the violence was an unsettling reminder of the wartime peril that was at hand.
As the city prepared for a somber Easter, guards scanned the streets outside federal buildings. When residents opened the morning newspapers, they learned that German merchant sailors interned in Guam had blown up their ship to keep it from falling into American hands, killing themselves in the process. Afternoon editions reported that spotters had glimpsed German ships prowling off Nantucket Shoals and the coast of Virginia. The president’s war proclamation banned German citizens within a half mile of any military or naval installation, and the attorney general ordered enemy aliens to “obey the law; keep your mouth shut.” Agents had seized radio transmitters across the city.
That afternoon, George Rice flashed his credentials to the guard on his way into the Bureau of Mines offices on E Street. There he met nine other men gathered in the director’s office for the first meeting of Manning’s Committee on Noxious Gases. A mix of military men, scientists, academicians, and technical men from the Bureau of Mines, all of them were well known in their various fields. They needed no reminder as to why they were there. While it wasn’t yet clear what the American role would be in the war, millions of U.S. soldiers could be sent. Reports from Europe laid bare that gas was an ever-growing factor on the battlefield, and it was the committee’s duty to protect them. Urgent questions needed to be addressed about how the research effort would proceed, who would control it and where.
A stenographer took notes as Duncan Gatewood, the dour-looking director of the Navy Medical Department, described the work in England. Britain had fifteen thousand men working in the Army Medical School laboratory in London and analyzing German gas brought from the front. The scope of the work there was enormous: ten factories making ten thousand masks a day, with 25 million more under contract. At the same time, the British had three factories making gas of their own to use against the Germans. “It is a tremendous thing we are considering,” Gatewood said.
“How extensive should the research work be? Should it be done here in Washington?” Manning chimed in with his Mississippi burr. The undertaking before them was vast—they would need millions of masks. They would need factories. They would need doctors to study the effects of war gases. They would need experienced chemists—the very best chemists in the country, and lots of them. And the research would not be simply for defensive measures. Like the British and the French, the Americans would need an offensive division to devise chemical weapons of their own. Every weapon the Germans had built—the drift gases released from tanks, the gas-filled shells launched across the lines, grenades, and flamethrowers—the Americans now needed to replicate as well.
They would need a laboratory. A place where experiments of all kinds could be carried out secretly, under guard. Manning’s longtime confidant, George Burrell, had gone back to Pittsburgh briefly but was returning to Washington in a few days to take charge of the research. The men agreed that the central research laboratory ought to be in Washington, or close to it, for security and convenience. As the men debated the location of the lab, Gatewood warned that the army would probably want to be in charge of the research, and probably should be, because only the army would be able to bring back gas samples from the front to study.
“There will be no objection on our part to having the army control the work,” Manning said. He suggested his bureau’s laboratory, while the chief of the Bureau of Chemistry argued that his would be best. The chief of ordnance agreed with Gatewood that they should use the army’s lab. The men went around and around, unable to agree on a location. When the meeting adjourned, there was still no consensus on how to proceed, but all the men recognized that a central government laboratory was crucial. It needed to be secure, it needed to be protected from spies and saboteurs, and it needed to be in Washington. The question was where.
As the committee members departed Manning’s office on April 7, they could hardly be faulted if they felt daunted by the enormity of the tas
k before them. They would be racing to catch up on a novel form of warfare they had neither seen nor experienced, which would test their scientific knowledge and their moral codes. It was also a field that was constantly changing, with new gases introduced with new types of weapons. The very week that the Americans entered the war, the British unveiled a new weapon that would reshape the battlefield for gas warfare again. The northern French city of Arras was a garrison city, a frontier outpost smashed into ruins when the Germans had seized the Artois coal-mining region almost three years before. Once famous for its tapestries, the city was a ghost of what it had been. In late 1914, shelling had reduced the sixteenth-century town hall to rubble, and the city bell tower soon after. Buildings ringing the city squares lay in piles of rock and timber. The cathedral walls still stood, the aisle columns protruding from heaps of stone, but the bombardment had smashed the vaulted roof open, leaving the nave open to whirling snowflakes. Most city residents had fled, but a few hardy souls remained, haunting the shattered homes and the cratered, vacant streets.
For months, the British had planned a major offensive at Arras to try to punch through the German lines and at the same time create a diversion from an impending French drive in the south. The immediate goal was to seize coveted high ground to the city’s north, Vimy Ridge, with the more ambitious hope of breaking the back of the German army and ending the war. It would be a massive attack, carried out both belowground and above. The British First Army had prepared all winter, slowly expanding caves, mines, and underground quarries around Arras into a warren of tunnels and subterranean rail lines to allow the Allies to creep up beneath the very feet of the Germans. At the same time, they’d been busy aboveground at night, digging in the darkness, sometimes shrouded in whirling snow.
The British were introducing a new weapon for the gas attack. The soldiers digging in the nighttime were burying a mortar called a Livens projector, an old weapon being put to new use. The mechanism was simple: the projector was little more than a metal tube buried in the ground with a heavy baseplate to keep it stable. Black powder ignited inside the tube could heave an eight-inch-diameter, thirty-pound shell nearly a mile, much farther than the smaller Stokes mortars that the British had been using to deliver gas shells since the previous year. Before Arras, projectors had been used to scatter burning oil over German troops, an age-old tactic to spread panic and chaos behind enemy lines. Now the British were using the projectors to launch shells filled with gases like chloropicrin and phosgene.