Hellfire Boys

by Theo Emery

  The American Protective League was a civilian intelligence organization, the creation of a wealthy Chicago advertising executive named Albert M. Briggs. There was little in the papers about the league; it was a quiet organization, operating in the shadows and oiled with private money. Briggs had proposed the organization to Bielaski as a way to harness the talents and zeal of hundreds of thousands of older men ineligible to serve in the army or navy but eager nonetheless to aid in the war effort.

  The Bureau of Investigation was stretched thin. Prewar revelations about German espionage showed the limited abilities of existing law-enforcement organizations to root out spies, saboteurs, and seditionists. Nationwide, the Bureau of Investigation had only a few hundred agents, the Treasury Department had a similarly tiny number, as did the Office of Naval Intelligence and the Military Intelligence Division of the army. Yet men from coast to coast were eager to play a role in the war, even if they couldn’t enlist. Briggs posited that if they were organized into an unpaid auxiliary corps—a patriotic civilian police force—the Department of Justice would instantly have eyes on every street corner in America, agents eager to peer into the shadows of German clubs and labor union halls. They could gather valuable intelligence about propagandists and agitators and direct badge-carrying agents to their homes. Not just anyone would be allowed to join—they would seek out well-connected men of means, with authority and resources at their disposal.

  Levering seemed like a perfect candidate to head the league in New York, and his overseas businesses could extend the government’s counterespionage operations far beyond U.S. borders. Agents could travel to all of these countries under the guise of working for Richmond Levering & Company, posing as engineers or oilmen. Wireless radio towers built on his territory could aid the bureau in intercepting German transmissions.

  Levering was also tight with the pro-American government in Cuba. “He states that the present government in Cuba is very friendly with the United States, and that he, Levering, is in a position to secure the active aid of the secret service of the Republic, as is also our military attaché,” Offley wrote. Germans considered Mexico and Cuba to be hospitable safe havens, and both countries seethed with smugglers and spies operating just outside the U.S. jurisdiction. Having a patriotic counterweight such as Levering in those places, someone who knew the terrain and could pierce the local political intrigue, would be a tremendous asset for the Americans.

  Four days later, Bielaski had approved Briggs’s plan for the league, on March 22, 1917, two weeks before Congress declared war. Briggs appointed Levering as head of the New York league on May 4. He undertook an ambitious organization of the New York league, proposing twelve different bureaus, each in charge of a different aspect of security against espionage. Levering offered his own company offices as the bureau headquarters, located on the twenty-ninth floor of the Equitable Building in Lower Manhattan.

  The early cases he handled were not of the highest caliber. He investigated a dog club whose owner was suspected of being pro-German. He nosed around the Plaza Hotel, where the chief waiter in the café had been overheard denouncing the Allies in Europe. He dropped in on an Upper East Side art gallery because the dealer was known to be “rabidly pro-German.” Still, Levering’s gusto impressed his champion, Offley. “Mr. Levering is displaying some considerable enthusiasm,” Offley wrote to Bielaski soon after Levering was installed in the position.

  But his appointment was not greeted with the same enthusiasm in business circles. Bielaski and Offley soon learned about Levering’s less-than-shining reputation. Some businessmen had been astonished by Levering’s elevation to the important post and quietly told his superiors at the Justice Department that his spotty credentials threatened to tarnish the bureau and the Secret Service. And in July, stockholders of two companies had sued Levering in federal court in Virginia, accusing him of a $50 million stock swindle. After the department received yet another negative report about Levering, Bielaski passed it on to Offley with a worried note about their agent. “I enclose herewith a copy of a confidential report concerning Richmond Levering, which if it is true in any large part, indicates that we have had something put over on us,” he had written. More and more, that seemed to be the case.

  The dustup with the Department of Justice plate on Levering’s car and flouncing around town with a notorious showgirl was now the latest headache. Even more infuriating, it wasn’t the first time it had happened. His chauffeur had been arrested for speeding in Hampstead, Long Island, in the same car with the same metal sign and summoned to court to answer charges before a judge.

  Levering agreed to return the plate but pleaded ignorance of wrongdoing. The letter’s tone was less than contrite, even a little combative. “I desire to call your attention to the fact that all other state and city departments have the privilege of special signs, except the United States Department of Justice,” he wrote. “Would it not seem fair that our people received the same courtesy as others engaged in similar volunteer war work?”

  Levering had been affiliated with the league and the bureau for less than four months and had already proved to be a disaster. His reputation was so dubious that potential patrons of the league considered Levering a blight on the organization and were considering withholding their support. Briggs—the founder of the American Protective League—informed Levering that he wanted to reorganize the New York branch and asked for the resignation of Levering and his twelve deputies. Miffed, Levering stepped down. His letter to Briggs had a distinctly sour tone. “I wish to state once more that I do not approve either of your plan or methods in this reorganization,” he wrote. He also managed to get into a testy squabble with a bureau agent on his way out the door. The agent, a man named Underhill, warned Bielaski that “any further connection between Mr. Richmond Levering and the department is likely to prove highly dangerous to the Department’s interests.”

  But even before Levering had departed, he was already looking for a new angle: to use his overseas connections to leverage an ongoing relationship with the bureau. Soon he was sending letters to Bielaski about his political connections in Latin America, including in Cuba. His company had an office in Havana, and he boasted about his close ties to Cuban military officials and politicians, including the president, who he claimed was a one-third owner of his oil venture there. “Any information we wanted from Cuba, all we had to do was go to President Menocal,” he wrote. Perhaps the inveterate showman, the oilman with the transatlantic connections, might prove useful after all.

  On the evening of August 30, Fries took a long walk through the heart of Paris and circled the Eiffel Tower, which the French army had turned into an enormous radio antenna. In a few days, he would leave Paris for the AEF headquarters at Chaumont. He welcomed the move—he had been in Paris for several days and had tired of bouncing back and forth between government office buildings and wasting time waiting for meetings. He didn’t have the staff that he needed, and he was hamstrung by the silence from the chemists in Washington, who seemed deaf to the urgency of the gas situation. Fries was at work organizing the AEF Gas Service, fortified with knowledge from his trip to the front. Earlier that day, Pershing had sent a cable labeled CONFIDENTIAL to the War Department. It was a warning about mustard. “Since July 18 the British have suffered 20,000 casualties from this gas alone. Five percent have been fatal; 14 percent have been serious, while the balance have been mild,” he wrote. It was a primer on the gas, describing its properties and its symptoms—the burns and blisters, the blindness, the insidious ability to seep through clothes. “The only defense is prompt use of the gas mask, and even this only guarantees a reduction in losses,” the cable read.

  On the first of September, Fries set out for Chaumont. Cold had set in as his powerful Cadillac raced east across the countryside. The car sped past gleaners bringing in the harvest, and young children waved at the passing car, crying, “Vive l’America!” Fries’s quarters in Chaumont were in a grand mansion filled with a “va
st and elegant silence.” There were both army offices and living quarters, but Fries rarely saw anyone else in the building except for the housekeeper and the reclusive gatekeeper’s wife who admitted him every time he arrived. He was assigned an enormous high-ceilinged room with a marble fireplace, tall mirrors with gilded frames, a rolltop desk, a huge four-poster mahogany bed, and an ornate gilt-and-glass chandelier to light the room. He had to pass through five doors to reach the nearest bathroom, and he puzzled over the house’s lack of bathtubs. At night, Fries would gather for an hour or so with the other resident officers for dinner before retiring to his room to write letters or study French. During one dinner, an engineer joked about how the people at home were worrying they were suffering hard times in the trenches, and Fries wrote home to Bessie that it was far from a hovel.

  Two days after Fries arrived in Chaumont, Pershing approved his plan for the new gas service and sent out General Order 31. Just five sentences and an accompanying organizational chart, the order relating to the service began: “There is established a department of the American Expeditionary Forces to be known as the Gas Service.” The order was broad, giving Fries latitude in building up this new service.

  The day after the AEF issued the order forming the gas service, Fries received a promotion to colonel and the silver eagle pins to go with it the next day. He also became the commander of the future regiment that would be trained to use chemicals, the Thirtieth Engineers (Gas and Flame).

  Fries needed men and supplies. He needed gas and factories to make it. He needed the regiment that would have the skills to use gas. He needed offensive and defensive instruction. He needed a laboratory of his own. And he needed to convince the army that gas was a vital part of the war effort. Frustrated by inertia in Washington and the shortage of staff, he cabled the War Department constantly. The War Department insisted it could spare no officers for Fries. “Well, if swearing would do any good I sure would break this silence with a roar that would shake the walls,” he wrote in a letter to Bessie.

  Within a few days, he had put in a massive order for offensive gas equipment: fifty thousand gas cylinders. Fifty thousand Livens drums. Twenty thousand projectors. Stokes mortars and bombs. The general staff must have been flabbergasted to receive the request for items that no one in the army knew anything about or, perhaps, had even heard of.

  During his time at Chaumont, Fries went to see General William Sibert and one of his sons. Fries hoped to get Sibert’s son as an aide in the new gas service. When he met the father and son for lunch, Fries noted to Bessie that the elder Sibert “looks to have aged a great deal since last January though it may be only my imagination.”

  It was not his imagination. Unlike Fries, who had Pershing’s blessing, Sibert was having a difficult time with his commander in chief. On the same day that Fries had driven out for lunch, Pershing had inspected Sibert’s First Division. It was a disaster. Sibert and his officers had only learned of Pershing’s review the night before; and to make matters worse, the general announced he was going to bring the president of France with him. The location Sibert’s aide hurriedly chose for the inspection was a muddy, miserable spot, and since word of the inspection had come so late, far-flung squads in billets twenty and thirty miles away had to march all night to get there in the morning. The men appeared exhausted and glum as they slithered in the mud in front of President Poincaré and the mortified Pershing. It was a ragged, amateurish display. The soldiers were still barely more than recruits, and what training they had received from the French had largely been in practical combat skills, not marching in formation.

  The whole spectacle was so embarrassing for Pershing that he dressed down Sibert afterward. What was wrong? Pershing demanded. Why was progress so slow? Sibert kept a tactful silence, and Pershing angrily stalked away. As if that weren’t bad enough, Sibert left later that day on a three-day trip to Montreux without informing Pershing or seeking his permission. Pershing, already irate at his second-in-command, wrote a reprimand letter for Sibert’s personnel file.

  Goliath was well liked among his fellow officers—he was amiable and collegial, always willing to take advice—but to Pershing he was weak and inexperienced, with little of the fortitude necessary to be a commander. He didn’t even look the part of a general. To Pershing’s critical eye, the men of the First Division had progressed little in their training, and he feared that they would not get the discipline that they needed from Sibert. Summer was turning into fall, and the Americans at the training fields in Gondrecourt were not ready for war. Sibert was the man charged with making them so, and he was failing. In a confidential memo to Secretary Baker, he complained that Sibert was too old, slow, and set in his ways and lacked the instincts of a soldier. “I think that I shall be compelled to replace him before his division goes into the trenches, as the responsibility is too great to take the risk of leaving him in command,” Pershing wrote.

  It was clear to everyone that Sibert was not among Pershing’s favored and that his position was tenuous. His loyal aides, deeply sympathetic, felt he was being unfairly blamed, but who was going to risk his career to tell that to Black Jack Pershing? And so Sibert suffered in silence. Over lunch, Sibert most likely said nothing to Fries of his difficulties, but his appearance gave Fries pause.

  Fries succeeded in persuading Sibert’s son to come over to his fledgling organization, and within a few days, he had requested the younger Sibert for his staff. Getting officers was a universal headache; every part of the AEF was desperate for talented officers. That went double for Fries, who only had two aides. Fries soon lured over to his staff a particularly capable lieutenant named Richard Crawford, who had graduated from West Point in 1914 and was stationed with the engineers on a hillside farm near Gondrecourt. The day after Crawford started, Fries assigned him a car and sent him on a six-hundred-mile trip to find storage areas and dumps for the new gas service. He was gone for a week and found fifteen sites.

  “Capt. Crawford appears to be a hustler and very desirous of doing everything in his power to make things a success, so apparently I drew a good man,” Fries wrote to Bessie with satisfaction. A second officer—a lieutenant who had been stringing electrical lights for the engineers—was soon added, bringing Fries’s staff to four. His fledgling organization had begun to grow, and he was waiting on four other requests, one of them Sibert’s son.

  Fries boasted to Bessie that he was gaining a reputation as a go- getter who was able to wrangle what he needed out of the creaking army bureaucracy. Even getting something as simple as desks for his offices was a challenge, but Fries always managed. Fellow officers were amazed that he was able to finagle supplies and staff from the army.

  On September 16, Fries and his staff met in Paris for what would be the first of several conferences among the Allies about chemical warfare. The event was hosted by the French, and in addition to Fries, there were delegates from Britain, Belgium, and Italy. The conference focused largely on the medical treatment of mustard and defense against gas.

  The conference invigorated the indefatigable Fries. After he returned to Chaumont, he began working on a cablegram that would go to the chief of engineers on September 25. It was a sweeping directive that, perhaps more than any previous order, illuminated the future scope of the growing overseas service. First, Fries wanted his own research lab in France. The cablegram read:

  Send at once chemical laboratory complete with equipment and personnel, including physiological and pathological sections, for extensive chemical investigations of gases and powders. Arrangements made for physiological chief from medical personnel now in Europe. The laboratory is to be auxiliary to the one in the United States and is for local emergency investigations to meet the constant changes in gases and powders used by the enemy and by ourselves.

  Then he inquired about the capacity to manufacture war gases and the availability of precursor chemicals, including those for making mustard. “This material urgently needed in manufacturing a new gas for all
ies; also needed for our own troops. French desire about 75 tons of glycerine and 75 tons sodium cyanide each month.” He went on to propose a system for manufacturing gas and packing it into shells and wrote that American troops would need the same offensive equipment as the British. “The principal material used are 4-inch Stokes mortars, 8-inch Livens projectors, and gas cylinders. Chief ordnance officer will be directed to send samples of above apparatus, including bombs,” he wrote. He ended by proposing that the invaluable George Hulett be assigned to the gas service in Washington “to handle all orders and correspondence concerning gas matters and avoid duplication and possible confusion and delay.”

  He was, as he put it later, “selling gas warfare to the army,” building a case for making it an integral part of the army’s strategy. His work was also creating what would become a new and troublesome dimension in the evolution of the gas service. There were now essentially two services: the domestic service and his overseas service in the AEF. Fries was well aware that his constant demands probably angered his counterparts in the United States, but it didn’t bother him. “Perhaps they don’t appreciate it but I’m too far away to hear them swear so I won’t worry,” he wrote to Bessie.

  As September turned to October, the weather was beautiful—too beautiful for war, Fries mused. He was ebullient in his letters home, with rosy predictions about the future of his service. “I have a man-sized job to run the game as it involves furnishing every officer and man with gas masks and respirators,” he wrote home. He slept soundly at night and sometimes dreamed of Bessie and the children. Soon, a new family member began to appear in his dreams. On September 29, a cablegram arrived from home. Bessie had given birth to a seven-pound baby girl. In his letters home, he called her “Silky.”