Hellfire Boys

by Theo Emery

  Some of the reports of the sentencing noted that Scheele had fled and was still at large. But he was not forgotten. Even as the trial reached its conclusion, federal agents continued to investigate his whereabouts, chasing down tips and false leads. On the day before the sentencing, a man in New Mexico wrote a letter to the Department of Justice, reporting that there was a man named Scheele in his town who he believed was the fugitive chemist. The young chief of the Bureau of Investigation, A. Bruce Bielaski, wrote back to the man with a description of Scheele. “If the man in your city answers this description, please wire me government rate collect,” Bielaski wrote. A dead end. In Washington, D.C., another report of a Scheele sighting sent agents knocking on a door on N Street NW to question the man. He was definitely not the chemist. Another tip that went nowhere.

  And then, a break. On April 14, a Bureau of Investigation agent went into a bank in New York City. He needed to talk to a cashier about a hundred-dollar check that had recently been remitted to the bank. Made out to Marie Magdalene Scheele, the check was from the National Bank of Cuba in Havana. It wasn’t the only one. Checks from Cuban banks rolled in to Marie Scheele’s bank every few weeks. At last, the German chemist had been found.

  Chapter Four

  Technical Men

  The thunder of artillery grew closer as George Hulett’s car sped east across northern France. The Princeton chemist and the rest of his scientific delegation had left Paris on May 11, driving more than one hundred miles north to Abbeville, close to where the British had their gas headquarters in France. So close to the front, civilians had fled, and in their place hundreds of thousands of British, Canadian, and Australian soldiers had amassed. Hulett watched soldiers learning to use their masks and training in fight in poisonous gas. To experience for himself what the instruction entailed, he went through the officer training course, donning a gas mask and wearing it into a gas cloud.

  A few days later, the British brought Hulett and the other scientists to within six miles of the front. As they approached Arras, the city where the British had used Livens projectors, he could hear artillery rattling in the distance before they arrived in the city. Nothing he had seen of the war so far, no photo or news report, prepared him for the destruction he saw in Arras. The once glorious city had been crushed into rubble, the houses still standing too battered for habitation. Few civilians remained, and soldiers had turned the ruined city into a camp, which the Germans still periodically shelled.

  Then they went south, near a British base used during the Battle of the Somme. Here, too, the destruction stunned Hulett. Ten months after the titanic battle, shell craters of all sizes pocked the landscape, trenches cleaved the fields, and barbed wire sutured the earth. Detritus of the battle lay all around—shards of hand grenades, dropped rifles, pierced helmets, and carcasses of downed airplanes. Splintered stubs of tree trunks thrust up at odd angles. Hulett walked over the fields for hours, past shattered villages, around shell holes that served as shallow graves for the dead. A member of the delegation searched for a village he knew, but the entire town had vanished, obliterated by high explosives and pounded back into the soil. Metallic husks of tanks lay where they had been stranded and abandoned. “Ever yet horrible scenes are everywhere. One cannot describe it,” Hulett wrote home. “I would not have missed it for anything but it is too terrible and no one can give a real idea of the battlefield in words.”

  From there, it was back to Paris and then to England. Throughout his travels, Hulett absorbed an encyclopedic knowledge of war gases, their composition, and their attributes, as well as the massive enterprise required to produce them. He also gained a practical understanding of gas warfare and what it meant to use it or avoid it on the battlefield—something that most scientists in the United States would never get. With his own eyes, he saw the fearsome toll it took, as well as its limitations and strategic disadvantages.

  He was also becoming acquainted with British and French officers with the greatest clout in gas warfare. Figures like Brigadier General Henry Thuillier, the director of the British gas service, deeply impressed Hulett, as did his top lieutenants, such as Major General Charles Howard Foulkes, commander of the British gas troops known as the Special Brigade, and Major Samuel J. M. Auld, a chemical adviser who, like Hulett, had been a teacher before the war.

  Hulett sent back an update on May 21 that went first to George Hale at the National Research Council, then to Manning. Hulett said he planned to hurry to England to collect information about the manufacture of British gas masks for the benefit of Manning’s technical men. Gathering details of the British mask was important, Hulett wrote, because “it would take a year or two to develop a satisfactory mask, and it would seem best that we select either the French or British mask, since the chemical and manufacturing details have been thoroughly worked out and would put us in a position to supply our troops in a few months.”

  Hulett also sent a sheaf of reports on gas warfare. One was on the organization of the gas services in France, another on offensive gas warfare. There were others on the use of charcoal for absorbing poisonous gases and on the manufacture of chemicals. Copies of all the reports should go to Manning and the Bureau of Mines, he said, to be studied and used at the laboratory set up to handle problems connected with the use of poisonous gases in warfare. He also included an urgent warning: that gas warfare was more widespread than the Americans knew, and the need for preparation far greater than what the Americans had anticipated.

  “The use of poisonous and lachrymal gases, not only by the Germans but particularly by the allies, is far more extensive than we have supposed,” Hulett wrote.

  Hulett sent his dire missive across the Atlantic as plans for the laboratory at American University were beginning to fall into place. McKinley Hall’s unfinished shell meant there was no need to rip out and replace existing features—the rough interior was ready for the lab benches and gas hoods, racks and sinks, required for chemistry research. The vacant building wasn’t the sole reason that American University was ideal for the chemists. Swaths of pastures and rolling farmland swaddled the campus, land that the chemists would need as well, but not for bayonet drills or marksmanship practice. The war gas investigations would need open space where the chemists could dig test trenches, detonate incendiary bombs, ignite smoke candles, and lob shells without danger to buildings or nearby residents.

  The lab could not be completed soon enough. It would be months before the laboratories at American University would be ready for the bureau’s scientists, but the research was already well under way. Manning’s census of engineers and chemists had set off a kind of chain reaction that activated the fraternity of chemists across the country. Offers of help poured in to the Bureau of Mines. Every colleague that he asked to commit to the war effort in turn asked the same of his colleagues and brightest students. But the flood of enthusiasm needed organization and coordination to prevent the talent from going to waste or, worse yet, being lost for good if scientists opted to go to the front instead of into military research.

  In the weeks after the United States entered the war, Manning, Burrell, and the Committee on Noxious Gases organized the research into a few principal directions: one was developing war gases, and another was designing a gas mask for the millions of American soldiers who would soon be sent overseas. Without a central lab, George Burrell decided on the next-best thing: finding chemists willing to corral the volunteer scientists across the country, identify their potential contributions, and travel to their far-flung labs if necessary.

  Casting about for help with developing war gases, Burrell looked to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, which was among the country’s most prestigious research institutions. One of its chemistry professors, Joseph C. W. Frazer, had been chief of chemistry at the Bureau of Mine’s Pittsburgh station. Burrell asked Frazer for names of the most promising chemists in his department. Frazer recommended E. Emmet Reid.

  Reid was forty-four and an organic chemist in
Frazer’s lab. The son of an itinerant Baptist preacher, he had grown up in a pinprick Virginia town called Skinquarter, which boasted a post office, one store, a blacksmith, a buggy shop, and two churches. Despite a modest upbringing and only sporadic formal schooling, Reid went to Richmond College, then earned a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins. He went on to teach at a small college in Shreveport, Louisiana, before Johns Hopkins lured him back to Baltimore. When Frazer asked Reid to help with the gas investigations, Reid didn’t hesitate.

  Frazer brought Reid to Washington to introduce him to Burrell, Henderson, and the other scientists at work on the gas research. Reid received his assignment: to canvass organic chemists for new chemical compounds that could be used as weapons on the battlefield. He was given no money, just a book of Bureau of Mines travel orders allowing him to roam anywhere in the country to meet with chemists. He also had a stack of postage-paid envelopes which he could use to correspond with them, and chemists could use to mail him chemical samples. Working out of the Johns Hopkins chemistry building, Reid wrote letter after letter to organic chemists across the country, asking them for chemical samples of potential war gases, in the process expanding the network of scientists that were part of this new wartime endeavor.

  Reid’s letter-writing campaign was haphazard, relying heavily on trial and error. And though he was corresponding with some of the country’s most distinguished and experienced chemists, the chemicals they were dealing with could be dangerous if mishandled. One of Reid’s letters went to Elmer Kohler at Harvard, asking him to make a batch of a chemical called chlormercaptan. A rumor later reached Reid that some of the gas had been released from the chemistry lab at Harvard and wafted into Harvard Square, causing a commotion. Another letter went to Professor William N. Dehn at the University of Washington in Seattle; Reid asked him to prepare cacodyl chloride, an extremely toxic and flammable arsenic compound. Dehn promised to make the cacodyl, along with several other chemicals. Not long after, a reeking cardboard box from Seattle arrived at the Johns Hopkins lab. When Reid opened it, he found the glass tube inside had cracked and the cacodyl had leaked out, soaking the cotton batting around it. Reid joked about the incident, but it was lucky that no harm came to him or those who handled the package on its way from Washington. In late 1914, a chemist in Fritz Haber’s lab in Germany had been experimenting with cacodyl chloride when the substance exploded. The violent detonation had blown off the man’s head.

  These were dangerous chemicals—in fact, the more dangerous they were, the more desirable they were as war gases—and the need to study their effects on human physiology soon became an early priority of the Research Division as well. Manning felt that research could not be delegated to scientists outside the bureau and put those efforts under the oversight of Yandell Henderson and a team of physiologists, pharmacologists, and pathologists at Yale, which had offered labs and approved the use of an athletic field for temporary laboratories. Animals would be the test subjects, “in order to avoid risking human lives in this matter.”

  Henderson’s research quickly expanded into three sections, with a dozen scientists researching different effects of gas, from the short-term damage to tissue to the long-term health impacts. The experiments required a new pathology lab for the tests on the unlucky dogs and other animals that ended up as test subjects. Each creature that was gassed was carved open and autopsied, its tissue and organs studied under a microscope. As the tests got under way, stray dogs and cats began to vanish from the streets of cities and towns in Connecticut.

  The other prong of the early research was gas masks. Burrell selected two men to spearhead the gas mask effort. One was Bradley Dewey, a Burlington, Vermont, native who had attended Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dewey had been with the bureau since the first days of the war, lured away from his job as research chief of the American Sheet and Tin Plate Company in Pittsburgh. The other was Warren K. Lewis, a brilliant thirty-five-year-old chemical engineer who taught at MIT. Known as Doc, Lewis had an unruly lick of hair sprouting from his head and glasses perched atop his large nose. Famously pugnacious and dramatic in MIT’s classrooms, he barked withering comments at students who failed to meet his expectations. He was also deeply religious and saw his calling as a scientist in almost evangelical terms, as a public service to better humanity. Arno C. Fieldner, the chief chemist at the Pittsburgh station, was given the task of finding the best material for the mask’s filter canister.

  Lewis and Dewey were among the brightest chemists in the country and believed that enterprise and ingenuity would make their assignment easy. In reality, a gas mask is a deceptively complicated piece of equipment. Designs differed, but most modern gas masks had a common feature: the wearer inhales through a filter that removes the gas and particles from the inhaled air. The main absorbent in the filter canisters is activated carbon, charcoal baked at high temperatures to expel gases trapped in its pores. Layered between cotton batting treated with soda lime, a substance that neutralizes acid, the charcoal absorbs gas as it is inhaled through the respirator. The real complexity of gas masks was in how their design needed to vary in order to protect against different chemicals. Each new war gas had different chemical characteristics, and a new gas could make existing masks obsolete, requiring weeks or months of study to determine its composition and how to reconstitute a filter for it. Chloropicrin, for example, went right through the filters of British and French masks.

  The other part of the task that the men gravely underestimated was that making gas masks wasn’t merely a theoretical or an academic undertaking—this was an industrial job, a manufacturing process to produce millions of perfect and identical masks. The charcoal for the filters had to be just right. So did the cotton batting that filled the canister and the soda lime that absorbed carbon dioxide. The can had to hold all three together just so. Everything needed to be assembled flawlessly, from the buckles on the straps, to the rubber hoses connecting the canister to the faceplate, to the eyepieces. Every grommet, every stitch, every flange, needed exact placement. Once the mask was designed, factories would need to quickly supply every piece to order—each one exactly matching specifications. They would then have to be shipped to a factory and assembled without flaws before they were finally provided to the soldiers. Not only did they need to work, but they needed to be comfortable and to stay in place as the soldiers fought, loaded artillery, or charged through gas.

  Undaunted, Dewey and Lewis split up, with Dewey boarding a westbound train and Lewis remaining in the East, dashing between campuses and companies soliciting equipment, laboratories, and manpower. On April 28, Lewis stepped off a train in Cleveland, then went on to Nela Park, the campus of two General Electric Company subsidiaries, the National Lamp Works and the National Carbon Company. Nela Park was a logical destination for Lewis: the campus had gained a reputation as an incubator of industrial ingenuity, an engine of invention and innovation on a par with Edison’s famed laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey. There was a man at Nela Park whom Lewis wanted to meet, a thirty-eight-year-old chemical engineer named Frank M. Dorsey who had responded to Manning’s scientific census.

  Dorsey had a bulldog jaw, beady, narrow eyes, and a face like a barroom tough. Outwardly, he didn’t appear to have much in common with most of Manning’s tweedy technical men, with their Ivy League pedigrees and burnished academic credentials. He glowered with his legs apart and his head down, with the swaggering stance of a boxer. He looked like a fighter, and he proved to be one, with a reputation as a fixer, a manufacturing genius who could quickly hammer out solutions to difficult engineering problems. Dorsey’s supervisor agreed to allow Dorsey to work exclusively for the Bureau of Mines, along with four investigators turned over to Dorsey. By the end of April, an entire research laboratory at the National Carbon Company was dedicated to making charcoal for masks.

  On May 1, the Army Medical Corps chief, Major Llewellyn Williamson, asked Manning and his chemists to produce twenty-five thousand gas masks—
a trial run for the millions that would be needed for the soldiers sent to the front. The draft was still months away, but soldiers had been lining up at recruitment stations to enlist. Every soldier who went to Europe would need protection from gas as surely as he needed bullets and bayonets.

  Punctuating the urgency of the matter, Brigadier General Kuhn issued a supply order to his chief of staff soon after Williamson’s request: Standard-issue gear for every soldier sent abroad would include two gas masks, along with their uniforms, boots, and steel helmets. Every company would have two chemical sprayers for clearing trenches of gas. Every regimental aid station would have oxygen-breathing apparatus for resuscitating the wounded. In a year, the first five hundred thousand troops expected to ship out to Europe would require one million gas masks and another one hundred thousand masks in reserve, eighty-five hundred chemical sprayers, and one thousand oxygen-breathing apparatuses. It was a colossal order to outfit an inexperienced army for what they would face in Europe.

  The Bureau of Mines chemists soon realized what a difficult task they had undertaken. Lewis and Dewey’s efforts had begun long before receiving Hulett’s reports warning that a new mask could take a year or more to design and urging the chemists to choose either the British or the French mask in the meantime. Even though the British and the French had been working on their masks for years, Manning and Burrell naïvely believed that they could construct a mask that was superior to both the British small-box respirators and France’s M2 masks in a matter of a few weeks.