by Theo Emery
The advantage of Livens projectors was both their mobility and the sheer amount of gas they could deliver. Until gas shells came into use, cloud or wave attacks like that at Ypres had been the only means of delivering gas. Cloud attacks were unpredictable, often ineffective, vulnerable to sudden changes in weather or wind, and incredibly difficult and time-consuming to carry out. Stokes mortars delivered in a more precise fashion. Now Livens projectors, which were arranged in batteries of twenty and fired simultaneously by the hundreds, sent gas farther and in much higher volume than regular mortars. Though not very accurate, they rivaled the saturation of cloud attacks and could be dropped behind enemy lines at strategic locations to maximize mayhem.
Over Holy Week, the British had used the projectors to throw the Germans into turmoil before the Easter Monday attack. The first projectors fired in a deafening cannonade in the early morning of April 4: first the tremendous blast and flash with belching smoke, then the rustle of the bombs tumbling toward their targets. With each concussion, a gas cloud burst from the shells, three thousand projectors in all, firing some fifty tons of phosgene. The dense clouds of gas that the new weapons delivered behind the lines took the Germans completely by surprise. Even if they had time to get their masks on, the chloropicrin seeped through the respirators. If the retching soldiers tore off their masks to vomit, the odor of corn or apples—the telltale smell of phosgene—reached their noses. Inhaling meant death a few hours later, drowning in the fluid that filled their lungs. The impenetrable volleys of gas threw the Germans into chaos. Overhead, the Royal Flying Corps darted in the clouds, strafing camps and bombing ammunition dumps while snapping photographs of the German positions.
The projector shelling lasted for days, keeping the Germans off guard and disorganized. On the night of Saturday, April 7, the roar of the projectors stopped. Arras fell quiet. At daybreak, Easter stole over the city, gray and rainy. Residents crept down into cellars to mark the holy day. The sound of singing seeped from basements where they huddled. Celebrants sang a Benediction hymn reflecting the bleak reality enshrouding the city: “O Saving Host, guardian of Heaven’s Gate, armed foes oppress us; give us strength, bring us aid.”
The lull was short-lived. When dawn broke on Easter Monday, a fifteen-mile wave of fire erupted anew from the British line, a fusillade of spitting howitzers and Livens projectors that blew apart German trenches, shredding barbed wire and coughing out clouds of gas. As the bullets whined across the heath and shells soared overhead, a flock of rooks rose from a copse of trees and wheeled in a spiral, silhouetted by the flames rising from the German positions. Behind them, to the west, Sopwith biplanes appeared, flying low over no-man’s-land toward the German lines. A light drizzle turned to rain, then snow, and waves of British and Canadian soldiers rose from the underground earthworks like specters in the mist and smoke. Amid the swirling snow, the infantry advanced behind a wall of shellfire and smoke bombs—called a creeping barrage—that moved in a scorching, slow-moving curtain of fire in front of them. Tanks growled across the plain alongside the infantry, advancing yard by yard through a gale of gas and smoke and snow.
By early afternoon, Canadian troops had taken Vimy Ridge, giving the Allies the high ground. That early success, partly enabled by the projectors and the confusion they wrought, was the only clear-cut victory of the battle. The British momentum stalled, and fighting ground to another standstill, raging on for weeks with the Allies unable to advance. The potent power of the Livens projector and its far-ranging shells had not been enough to smash the German front. By mid-May, with some 150,000 dead among the British Expeditionary Force (BEF), the Battle of Arras ended, and the stalemate on the western front resumed.
The articles about Arras that appeared in the Washington papers made oblique mentions of the role of gas in the battle, but the words “Livens projectors” never appeared, with little to no technical information about the advance in gas warfare that had taken place there. Few of the scientists joining Manning’s effort had any practical notion of what chemical warfare actually entailed, as they had few channels of information with their British and French counterparts, and detailed information took weeks to reach Washington on slow-moving steamships.
Manning and his cadre of scientists needed someone in Europe as soon as possible to observe, consult with allies, and report back to the nascent research organization. The day before Congress passed the war declaration, the National Research Council had begun assembling a scientific delegation to embark for Europe. One of the seven invitations to serve on the delegation went to George A. Hulett, a Princeton professor and former chief chemist at the Bureau of Mines Pittsburgh Experiment Station. Manning told Interior Secretary Franklin Lane that he wanted Hulett to represent the Bureau of Mines on the delegation to investigate gas warfare and that the bureau should subsidize his expenses. Lane agreed.
Hulett was a natural choice to be the bureau’s eyes and ears overseas. Joseph Holmes, Manning’s mentor at the Bureau of Mines, had recruited Hulett in 1910 as chief chemist at the Pittsburgh station. He brought new vigor to the station’s work, introducing weekly seminars and guiding the younger, less experienced chemists. He had a brilliant, searching mind, and his students adored him. His skills included glassblowing, making him the only chemist at Princeton who could make his own laboratory equipment. He was also an avid golfer who scoffed at pious objections to hitting the links on the Sabbath.
The professor in charge of the scientific commission, Joseph S. Ames of Johns Hopkins, was eager to have Hulett on the delegation. He welcomed Hulett and told him of the arrangements for his passage to Europe. He would be appointed an attaché with the American embassy in London and given a diplomatic passport. Hulett would leave from New York on April 14. In the meantime, he should write to the National Research Council’s top chemist, Marston Bogert, for a list of questions about gas warfare to ask the British and French. Ames scribbled “absolute silence” at the top of his note.
After hastily getting his passport and ticket, Hulett boarded the steamship Chicago on April 14. He scanned the wharf for his family, but he couldn’t spot them in the crowds to say goodbye before the ship cast off. As he sailed east, Hulett huddled over a typewriter and compared notes with the other delegation members on the ship, formulating questions to pose once their work began. In the afternoons, Hulett exercised with laps around and around the promenade deck. When the weather turned foul and storms tossed the ship, Hulett avoided the seasickness that befell many of his fellow passengers. The Chicago joined a convoy partway across, and the ships soon crossed the submarine zone in formation. The choppy weather reduced the threat from submarines, but nonetheless, many nervous passengers stayed up through the last night of the voyage. Subs had recently sunk two small ships near their destination, the Bay of Biscay in southern France. For his part, Hulett retired to his stateroom and slept soundly.
At 5:00 a.m. on April 25, the Chicago steamed into the mouth of the Gironde River, about sixty miles downriver from Bordeaux. The delegation arrived in Paris the following evening. Springtime had exploded in the city, with peach, cherry, and pear trees in bloom. The beauty meant little to Hulett with the horrific battle to the north. The indelible stain of the war was everywhere. Grief swaddled the city, and wounded soldiers hobbled through the streets.
The delegation went to work immediately. The morning after they arrived, the scientists motored south to a training camp near Fontainebleau, where Hulett watched gas mask training for protection against chemicals. Afterward, he saw artillery practice with gas shells, then toured a gas-manufacturing plant. He had plenty to ponder as he motored back to Paris through the dense, wild forest around Fontainebleau. He wrote home that night:
So you see my work for the Bureau of Mines studying gases to prevent the explosions in coal mines is being put to a very different use, and knowledge acquired to save life must be utilized to kill if possible whole regiments of boys for the most part. This would appall one if he didn’t see that
at this time the only thing that will help is to “carry on” and hope when it is over—it will be over for good.
Hulett spent his first few days studying the gases that the Germans used and promised detailed reports for Manning on how to manufacture them. “Everything is open to us and we are getting first class information,” he wrote in a report back to headquarters. He also referred to a gas that the French were testing that was “distinctly better (or worse) than anything the Germans have”—probably a reference to hydrocyanic acid, which the French called vincennite.
He spent time studying gas masks: their stitches, the rubber pieces, the glass eyepieces, and the canisters containing charcoal and neutralizing agents through which soldiers drew their breath. He also carefully examined the differences between the British mask known as the small-box respirator and the French M2 mask. It was absolutely vital, Hulett wrote to Manning, that the Americans quickly settle on a gas mask. The U.S. military attachés and French military authorities insisted that every American soldier must have preliminary training in protection against gases before arriving on European shores. For that to be possible, the Americans needed to decide which mask to adopt, whether it was the British or the French model.
Hulett’s trip had only just begun, but already he had a rudimentary grasp of the enormity of the task ahead for the Americans. Beyond the difficulty of mastering gas warfare from a purely technical viewpoint, he understood there would also be moral and ethical challenges. Like many scientists thrust into the middle of chemical warfare, he was simultaneously thrilled by the intellectual challenge and repelled by the concept of using his scientific skills for the purpose of mass killing. Seeing the maimed and scarred men in Paris, while taking in the vast apparatus of the French and British for inflicting the same grievous suffering upon Germans, he was open about his ambivalence.
“The use of these gases is a most terrible and terrifying thing, but it seems that it was absolutely necessary to fight fire with fire,” he wrote to Manning.
Each morning, the front page of the Washington Post featured the day’s war news in a special inset section, headed with the number of days since the United States entered the fray. “Twelfth Day of the War,” the box read on Wednesday, April 18, with news of a submarine attack off the coast of Sandy Hook, a 7-billion-dollar war bond bill that the Senate passed, and President Wilson’s push for Congress to pass a conscription bill. “Fifteenth Day of the War,” for Saturday, April 21, outlined the espionage bill making its way through Congress, proposals for price controls on food, and raising new war taxes. A front-page brief reported that the British embassy had flown the Stars and Stripes for the first time to hail the U.S. entry into the war.
Burrell and Manning probably took little note of the headlines that Saturday. Burrell had sketched a tentative outline of the new gas service, and Manning had convened the gas committee to meet again to grapple with the research enterprise they had undertaken. In preparation for the next meeting of the scientists, Manning distributed a seven-page memorandum summarizing everything known so far about chemical warfare research. Two weeks into the war, the scope of the scientists’ undertaking was still unknown—only that it would start small and would grow quickly. “The tremendous scale and elaborate system of the gas service abroad may never be required here; however there is enough uncertainty to necessitate our making provision in our plans for a large amount of experimental work,” Burrell’s memo read.
George Hulett’s promised reports had yet to reach the States—transatlantic travel still took several weeks—but the War College had received other reports from abroad that Burrell planned to distribute as soon as they were compiled and reproduced. Burrell proposed that the American gas program be modeled after the British and French, both of which investigated defensive technologies and offensive capabilities in separate but coordinated efforts. Advanced laboratories had hundreds of chemists at work on gas problems, including physiologists, physicians, and engineers. Factories produced masks by the millions.
The scientists were learning some of the most elementary lessons about gas warfare that their allies had known for years. One was that even the term “gas” was often a misnomer. Most chemical weapons were liquids that required an explosion to be volatized or dispersed in misty clouds, while others were solids blown into clouds of toxic particles. The researchers needed to quickly learn how to make the chemicals already in use in Europe. When the United States entered the war, there were three basic types of chemical weapons agents. The first type was lachrymators, or tear gases, like benzyl bromide and xylyl bromide, which caused temporary blindness and made fighting impossible in the absence of masks. The second was called sternutator gases, or sneezing gases, which were mostly nonlethal but irritated the nose, throat, and eyes, causing headaches and nausea. It was the third category, though, that reaped a lethal harvest of chaos and death on the battlefield. These were asphyxiants, or suffocating gases, which included chlorine and phosgene, irritants that caused the alveoli of the lungs to slowly fill with liquid. At the same time, they also needed to investigate and develop their own gases, ones that the Germans had not yet discovered.
The scientists didn’t have to start from scratch with some chemical production. In the spring, the bureau had dispatched a chemist to Midland, Michigan, to discuss gas production with the Dow Chemical Company. “They are prepared and willing to cooperate to their fullest extent,” Burrell had written in his memo to the gas committee. Dow already made chlorine and bromine—both useful as war gases—as well as many other chemicals on an industrial scale. The company recommended sulfur chloride as a drift gas, had already begun experiments, and was anxious to demonstrate its findings. “This work will be transferred later to some selected and more convenient point near Washington,” Burrell reported.
When Manning next reconvened the Committee on Noxious Gases—now numbering eighteen men—the Bureau of Mines had moved to the Department of the Interior Building. The men gathered around Manning’s gleaming desk to discuss their next steps, particularly the problem of gas masks, which was the most immediate and urgent issue facing the bureau. The navy had already asked for fifteen thousand test models, but Burrell and Henderson said more investigation was needed before a requisition of that size was made.
Henderson told the committee that, in his opinion, mask makers always made the same mistakes. Breathing holes were too small. There was too much dead space for trapped air inside the mask, so carbon dioxide built up. Some British respirators were so hard to breathe in that soldiers tore them off and threw them aside. He argued that commercial companies couldn’t be trusted to design military-grade masks; the masks would have to be designed by the government and then manufactured by private companies. He argued that researchers should take “a week or two” to go over currently available masks and remedy the defects.
A week or two was, to put it mildly, an optimistic estimate for such major research. But without Hulett’s observations, the men in the room knew very little about the actual use of gas in Europe and how America’s allies were researching it. The only man present with firsthand knowledge of gas was Dr. Henry Drysdale Dakin, a chemist and military surgeon who had developed an effective antiseptic to prevent infection of wounds. He had last been at the front six months earlier and explained that, though the gas situation changed rapidly, when he was there chloropicrin was the gas getting the most attention. He described the manufacturing process—British companies were paid to make gas in what were called “controlled factories” overseen by the military—and the process used to test masks: sealed chambers where test subjects could sit in a cloud of gas to determine if the mask worked properly.
There was no shortage of talent or manpower to help with these problems: because of Manning’s census of chemists, private laboratories, universities, and research institutions around the country were offering to help with the gas work. The problem was still finding a secure location for the research. For Manning and his technical men, s
ecrecy was paramount, and the threat of German spies was very real. The lead-up to war revealed Germany’s espionage apparatus: labor unions, diplomatic circles, and immigrant communities were riddled with German sympathizers and collaborators. In Washington, members of the city’s exclusive social clubs checked over their shoulders and eavesdropped on suspicious conversations, and the papers regularly included breathless stories about conspiracies and unsavory alliances. Over the weekend that followed the war declaration, a Department of Justice dragnet swept the country, netting hundreds of Germans suspected of being spies and jailing them without warrants or charges. Absolutely secrecy was needed for development and testing without fear of spies or leaks.
The men had discussed potential sites at the committee’s first meeting without reaching a consensus. The responses to Manning’s census included many offers of space and facilities; all of them should be considered, Manning said. In the meantime, they would use the laboratory in the building where they were meeting. “We will equip the office in the Bureau of Mines, and use our laboratory facilities, and Mr. Burrell will be designated as gas director, with offices and laboratories in the Bureau, without any further consideration as to expense,” Manning said.