Hellfire Boys

by Theo Emery

  Dewey and Lewis’s lives became a haze of train stations and hotels and laboratories and factory floors as they raced between suppliers and labs, seeking the best materials and parts. All told, 320,000 separate pieces would have to be produced for the twenty-five thousand test masks alone. The charcoal for the filter had to come from red cedar at a coking plant in Pennsylvania. The soda lime that absorbed carbon dioxide came from the General Chemical Company in Easton, Pennsylvania. The Simmons Hardware Company in Saint Louis would make the knapsacks that held them. The Goodrich and Goodyear Rubber Companies in Akron would manufacture the face pieces. The American Can Company in New York City would make the canisters, and one of its plants in Long Island City would assemble the 320,000 parts.

  For the two men, day blurred into night and back into day. At every turn, problems arose. Little in the way of directions or drawings were committed to paper; instead, verbal instructions kept the process moving. Inevitably, that led to new confusions and problems. With every complication or mishap, work had to stop while the chemists called Burrell or Fieldner or Dewey to consult over the problem before work could proceed. Mistake after mistake swallowed more time, the delays multiplying and adding up. Telegrams with test results flew back and forth between Washington and each of the satellite locations.

  On June 10, a small batch of a half-dozen masks was ready for testing. On a baseball diamond across the street from the American Can Company factory in Brooklyn, Dewey, Henderson, and Burrell gathered with the new masks in hand and slipped them over their heads. The masks fit, and the men could breathe in them, but that wasn’t enough of a trial. The real audition for the mask would be in the man-test chambers in the Pittsburgh Experiment Station, where the masks could be donned in a gas cloud—only then would the chemists know whether their creation actually worked.

  Dewey and Henderson traveled to Pittsburgh that night. One of the men needed to be the guinea pig for the test. The newspapers had been so filled with the terrors of gas warfare that all of the men felt trepidation about testing the mask. Henderson said he would do it; he decided he had a duty to put himself at risk in service to the war effort. Perspiring and nervous, he pulled a mask over his face and entered the chamber with two large bottles of chlorine gas. The door closed behind him. He set the bottles down and uncapped them. He felt a warm sensation as the heavier-than-air chlorine gas moiled from the bottles down around his feet. The minutes ticked by.

  The mask worked. Henderson, his heart racing, stayed in the chamber for a quarter of an hour, and the mask allowed him to breathe in the cloud of chlorine surrounding him. When he emerged from the man-test room, the chlorine had bleached his hair and his socks white, and when he pulled off his sweat-soaked shirt, it fell to pieces in his hands.

  On July 13, the Americans shipped 19,960 gas masks to Europe for testing, promising that the other 5,000 would arrive soon. Dewey, Lewis, Gibbs, and Fieldner awaited the response. It came in an overseas telegram from General John J. Pershing, the commander in chief of the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF). The general reported that masks had been tested in French labs, and while the canister was adequate, the rubberized facepiece was “very poor.” “The tissue allows chloropicrin, superpalite, and bromactone to pass through in one minute,” the cablegram read. British scientists then did their own tests. Their results were even more withering, finding that the canister was also badly flawed. “Construction of entire apparatus faulty in almost every detail,” another cablegram read. The masks were useless.

  The Americans were crushed. The chemists had failed their first real test. But it also made them determined to improve their performance and prove their mettle in chemical warfare, even if they were the newcomers to the battlefield. Time was running out. American soldiers had already marched onto troop transports in Hoboken under cover of night and embarked for Europe in a massive convoy of twelve ships. The chemists redoubled their work, frantically retracing their steps to determine how to improve the masks.

  The gas mask debacle was a learning experience in more ways than one. For Yandell Henderson, the Yale physiologist, his terrifying experience in the Pittsburgh man-test chamber in his gas mask proved to be a revelation for him. Despite his trepidation about stepping into the gas chamber, he did so because there was simply no way to determine the integrity or quality of equipment without using soldiers in the experiments. It was essential that tests on men should be run, he concluded.

  As the research work expanded, the American University campus was undergoing a radical transformation. Manning had asked for $175,000 from the army and navy to pay for the necessary research facilities. The bureau’s architect quickly drew up plans to convert McKinley Hall into a chemical lab. There were lab benches to install, chemical hoods where gases could be mixed, gas lines and burners, sinks and counters. The sound of hammers and saws filled the campus as construction began on barracks and mess halls for the Corps of Engineers. A YMCA building for the soldiers went up in short order, and within two weeks, there were thirteen hundred engineers stationed at the campus. A week later, that number had ballooned to twelve thousand. As the number of soldiers grew, the college trustees insisted on rules to prevent damage to the campus and the buildings, including protections for the young trees that had been planted that spring.

  On the last day of May, a crowd had gathered under a gray sky at American University’s tree-ringed outdoor amphitheater. For the school’s third convocation, a special patriotic ceremony was planned. The Daughters of the American Revolution presented an American flag to the school chancellor, and an officer with the Sixth Engineers slowly raised the flag as the soldiers saluted. After a short musical interlude from the orchestra, the audience bowed their heads for a prayer, then joined in singing “America,” before U.S. senator Hiram Johnson of California spoke.

  “Now it is for you and me and all who call themselves Americans to make it plain to all our people all these things for which America stands and for which America fights,” he said.

  The flag raising was a patriotic gesture in wartime, but it had another symbolic meaning: the Methodist school was now government territory. On the same day as the outdoor convocation, the American University board of trustees met to approve the government’s use of the campus that they had offered in April. Behind the amphitheater, hundreds of tents belonging to the Sixth Engineers Regiment radiated outward in rows.

  The engineers would have only part of the campus, which would be partitioned into two jurisdictions. The eastern side would be for the Corps of Engineers, while McKinley Hall and the western end of the campus would be the domain of the chemists from the Bureau of Mines. In June, the bureau’s architect carried the blueprints and schematics to Riggs Bank to present to Leighton and the rest of the university’s board of trustees. The board of trustees approved the bureau’s plans with minor changes, such as substituting fireproof concrete for wood floors throughout the building. When the university’s board of trustees met once again, university secretary Albert Osborn down jotted the results.

  “At a very important and interesting meeting of the executive committee at Riggs Bank the plans for the government occupation of McKinley Building for chemical work were approved,” he wrote.

  Every Tuesday, the chemists from all of the research sections gathered in Washington to update one another on progress in each of their areas and to brief army and navy officials on the work to date. By mid-July, sixty chemists were working on the investigations, many of them paid out of the Bureau of Mines budget, and forty more unpaid ones. The work on gas masks had rapidly dispersed the gas warfare work to more than twenty universities that Warren K. Lewis and other chemists traveled to, as well as the private companies that aided in the effort.

  For now, the Pittsburgh Experiment Station was the center of the research, with Johns Hopkins and Henderson’s lab at Yale as important secondary hubs. But when McKinley Hall was done, American University would become the central workshop for the war gas investigations. It
would have another crucial function, too: ensuring the secrecy of the work. With so many scientists participating in so many locations, the need for oversight and management of the research was paramount. Security was a constant and omnipresent fear. At the top of Hulett’s report from May, he scrawled “Secret,” underlining the word twice. When Hale sent the reports on to the Bureau of Mines, he cautioned Manning about keeping the reports under lock and key:

  It is quite unnecessary for me to warn you regarding the extreme importance of keeping these reports on gas warfare STRICTLY CONFIDENTIAL. Every possible precaution should be taken to prevent them from falling into the hands of spies, who are undoubtedly numerous in Washington. I should like to know that you will keep them in the safe in your own office, and that you will not allow them to be seen by any one regarding whose loyalty there is even a remote possibility of suspicion.

  The need for secrecy required looking no farther than corner newsstands, where the newspapers provided constant reminders of the espionage that had riddled the country before the war. The German spymaster Captain Franz von Rintelen had been caught trying to flee back to Europe. On trial in New York along with six codefendants, he had been convicted on May 20. Over the summer, an espionage bill making its way through Congress permitted censorship of newspapers, provoking the first split in the war coalition, with Republicans and some Democrats vociferously opposing censorship. Facing defeat in the House, the bill eventually passed in June stripped of the censorship provision but with harsh penalties for those convicted of conspiring against the United States.

  Manning reassured Hale that he fully appreciated the sensitive nature of the reports and that everything would be kept under lock and key. Nothing was put in writing that didn’t need to be, he wrote. Hale made sure Hulett’s reports went to Secretary of War Newton Baker as well, with the same warnings about keeping them locked away from prying eyes. It was urgent, he noted, that the work be concentrated at the earliest possible date at American University and urged Baker to order the Secret Service to investigate all those people engaged with the work “in a case where our relations with the Allies and the safety of our Army are so clearly involved.”

  By July, the organization of the research was taking shape. To keep the National Research Council apprised of progress, Manning drafted a chart for Hale that folded, accordion-style, into four panels. In a box at the top, seated above the army and navy and all others, was the only name on the chart: Van H. Manning. Below his name, the chart displayed all the organization’s sections and subsections, laid out in a pattern resembling piano keys. There were now seven major divisions of work: chemical investigations, physiological investigations, large-scale investigations of gas shells, gas mask design, gas mask examination, submarine gases, and gases for balloons and dirigibles.

  The focus of the final category—gases for balloons and dirigibles— was far more specific than the vague description suggested. Over the summer of 1917, the British Board of Invention and Research asked the Bureau of Mines for assistance with a very specific technical problem, one which had bearing on Britain domestic security and military power. The Americans had access to a resource that the British did not, a prize locked deep in the earth beneath Texas and the American Midwest. It was a gas—not a war gas per se, but a gas that Britain hoped would give them superiority in the air. The gas was a stable, nonflammable, lighter-than-air noble gas: helium.

  How exactly helium came to be part of the war gas investigations is something of a mystery; Burrell recalled that it was he who hypothesized that it might have value in the war, despite the fact that the army and navy seemed to have little interest. One of Burrell’s friends, a captain in the Signal Corps, was going overseas and brought a letter from Burrell to the British about helium. The British responded like a shot, sending two officers to the United States.

  The reason for Britain’s interest in helium was airpower. England had long enjoyed the strategic advantage of geographic isolation from Europe, making invasion from the Continent difficult. But the advent of aviation was altering that calculus. The British feared that if Germany’s airpower prevailed, England would become vulnerable to attack from the skies. Airplanes were buzzing over France, and so were lighter-than-air zeppelins, buoyed into the sky with hydrogen. The problem with hydrogen was its flammability—a single bullet that found its mark could ignite a fire and bring down a zeppelin in seconds. Out of fear of fire, the British had grounded $125 million worth of dirigibles.

  Britain hoped that helium, which was noncombustible, could replace hydrogen and, if kept out of the hands of the Germans, give the British an edge in aviation. But extracting and isolating the gas was both extremely expensive and technically difficult. In the summer of 1917, a British rear admiral wrote to the National Research Council with a plea for Anglo-American cooperation on helium. “It is regarded by the British authorities as absolutely essential that every endeavor should be made to discover and produce Helium in quantities with the least possible delay, the matter being of vital importance to the future military use of lighter-than-air craft,” he wrote. It was no small task—the British Admiralty hoped to buy 100 million cubic feet of helium immediately and a million cubic feet weekly after that. He ended with the caution that it is “scarcely necessary to inform you that this matter has throughout been dealt with in the strictest secrecy.”

  The National Research Council responded that there was a great deal of interest in helium and that the Bureau of Mines was beginning investigations under Manning. The British already had a code name for it—they called it “C gas.” It was probably MIT chemist William Walker who came up with the American code name for helium. “Argon,” they would call it.

  On a hot day in late August, Osborn stopped by McKinley Hall. More and more tents for the engineers had sprouted in neat rows. Thousands of men in uniform drilled and paraded throughout the campus. As Osborn mounted the steps of McKinley Hall and strolled through the building with the campus superintendent, the clamor of construction met their ears. The building that had been largely empty and quiet for so many years had suddenly come alive. The two men walked past workmen finishing the floors, hammering partitions into place, and installing lab equipment for the chemists. It had taken a war, but after more than a quarter of a century, the campus was finally occupied.

  Chapter Five

  Amos and Goliath

  I n the weak half-light of early morning, the soldiers of the First Division lined up in a drenching rain along the French roadside. The perpetually overcast skies and muddy countryside were a far cry from the “sunny France” that the AEF volunteers had expected. It was July 19, 1917. The men had arrived from Hoboken in June, cheering as their transports passed through the submarine blockade to dock at Saint-Nazaire. The cantonments at the American training camp near Chaumont, about 170 miles east of Paris, weren’t yet ready, and the only accommodations available were the white-walled villages and farmhouses dotting the French countryside. Divided into squads, the soldiers moved into makeshift billets in stables and barn lofts draped in cobwebs, sleeping under decaying roofs with wind and rain spitting through the rafters. Fires were forbidden except for cooking, and the soldiers grumbled as they tried to heat their meals with the twigs they scavenged from nearby woods. A bombing school was down the road; sometimes, the men could hear the boom of hand grenades detonating in the distance, as if the front lay at their doorstep.

  At sunup in the villages around the American training camp, the soldiers strapped on their sidearms, buttoned up their coats, and cinched their belts tight before falling into rank along the roadside for inspection. The mutter of an engine announced their commander’s arrival. His machine trundled up the road and stopped in front of his soldiers. Curious French residents cheered as Major General William Luther Sibert stepped from the vehicle and planted his boots in the mud.

  Sibert was commander of the First Division and General Pershing’s second-in-command. A fifty-six-year-old engineer from Alabama,
he was famously contemplative and meticulous, with little tolerance for inefficiency. He was tall and powerfully built, earning him the nickname “Goliath”; but graying at his temples, with kindly eyes, round spectacles, and a moon-shaped face, he resembled a doting grand- father more than the biblical giant.

  Sibert returned the regiment officers’ salutes and then turned to his assembled squads of Sammies, as the French called the American soldiers. He scrutinized the soldiers from head to foot, taking in every detail, from the length of their hair to the condition of their boots. He clambered up rickety ladders to the haylofts where the soldiers were billeted, looked over their sleeping quarters, and walked through the barns, checking to make sure that their accommodations were orderly and sanitary. He ordered his aides to jot down notes for improvements, and they scribbled frantically as they tried to keep up with his pace. Striding down the ranks, he peered closely at the collars of the men’s uniforms. Something was missing. Many of the soldiers lacked service pins, the two brass letters U.S. that indicated they were American. What happened to your pins? Sibert demanded. Some of the men admitted that they lost them. Others had given them away like cheap keepsakes. Sibert turned to the regimental officers and made his disapproval clear. Then as the rain continued its dreary drumbeat, he strode to the car, aides scurrying behind him, and set off down the road to the next stop, leaving his officers to dress down their soldiers.

  In July of 1917, the creaking machinery of the U.S. military had begun to shed its rust, along with any doubt that involvement in the war would cost American lives. Some Americans and even members of Congress believed the nation’s role in Europe would be limited to moral and logistical support and were shocked to learn that U.S. soldiers would set foot on European soil at all. The question of a draft and compulsory military duty was politically fraught and went to the very heart of the Republic. Under the existing volunteer structure of the military, state-based National Guard units fed into the relatively small Regular Army. Proponents of a draft argued that conscription into a new National Army would assimilate immigrants, level class differences, and instill military discipline in the populace. But to others—mainly Democrats in the South and West—conscription was a threat to democracy, a symptom of a coercive federal government that, unable to raise a volunteer force, must instead dragoon an army through force of law. The details of a potential draft were also deeply contentious. How many soldiers should be called up? Which ones should be exempted? How young and how old?