Hellfire Boys

by Theo Emery

  A month of waiting had frayed Jabine’s enthusiasm for his regiment. Not long after Thanksgiving, commanding officers had stopped issuing passes to leave camp. Rumors had snaked through the ranks that their departure for France was imminent. Every time they were ordered to assemble their mess kits and rolls, Jabine wondered if it was time. Then they were ordered to unpack again, and the routine resumed. Every day, they were told they would leave as soon as transport was available to take them across, but that day never seemed to come.

  As the weeks crawled by, Jabine received a promotion to corporal. When he had his picture taken with his new stripes, he didn’t like how it turned out—he thought he looked too cross and tough—but he promised to send the photos to his family. When he wrote home on December 18, the word “disgusted” salted his letter. Two sergeants he liked had been demoted for not being tough enough, while officers that Jabine thought were rotten received promotions. He asked his family to write Christmas letters early, because he didn’t know where he would be that day. To his surprise, he was promoted again, to sergeant.

  Early on the morning of December 21, the regiment was ordered to pack again and then march out of camp. Jabine took his position at the rear of Company B, a solitary figure marching alone. It turned out to be another departure drill that sent the men down the hill, in a circle, and right back to camp. “This sudden activity may mean everything or it may mean nothing,” Jabine wrote home. “But don’t be surprised if you don’t hear from me soon.”

  On Christmas Eve, the soldiers packed into the YMCA to watch vaudeville acts, and Red Cross workers handed out cigarettes and writing materials, comfort kits, and miniature stockings stuffed with candy. Secretary of War Newton Baker got up in front of the men, calling them “sons of the entire nation.” Mrs. Baker sang for them, and the men roared their approval.

  Dawn was still an hour away on Christmas morning when the order came to burn their mattresses and prepare to depart. Jabine joined the procession of engineers dragging straw stuffing from their barracks to the pyre. The flames leaped as they consumed the bedding the men had been sleeping on moments earlier. It was a sight to behold: hundreds of soldiers gathered in the dark around the inferno, the flames throwing a spectral glow over their ranks, a baptismal light of fire.

  Everything Jabine needed for Europe had to fit in his pack. His woolen underwear, his cigarettes, his mess kit, the brushes and comfort kit from his church—all of it went into his pack. The temperature dropped, and the rain turned to snow. The men formed ranks on Massachusetts Avenue at 3:30 p.m. Daylight was slipping away. Lieutenant Colonel Atkisson took his place at the head of the column with the color guard, while Jabine fell into place behind the Third Platoon. The snow whirled in the deepening gloom as the men began to march.

  With the city’s pulse slowed to a holiday standstill, Washington seemed deserted. They marched down Massachusetts Avenue, past the gates of Westover, Charles Glover’s mansion, and the half-finished apse of the National Cathedral atop Mount Saint Alban. The snowfall grew heavier, and soon the men marched in a blizzard. They turned south past the White House and the State, War, and Navy Building. As the men peered through the whirling flakes, they saw shapes moving on the White House lawn—the presidential flock of sheep, their white coats blending into the new-fallen snow.

  The column crossed the mall and then turned east toward the train yard. At 6:00 p.m., they boarded a waiting train, which reached Jersey City at 3:30 in the morning. Just before daybreak, they boarded a ferry for the Hoboken piers where they pounded up the gangplank of the SS President Grant, a former German packet ship seized when the United States entered the war. Other regiments boarded as well, the 21st Engineers, the 303rd Stevedores, and an ordnance detachment. Colonel Atkisson said goodbye to his men—he was crossing later, on account of illness—and retreated back to the pier.

  At 4:00 p.m., the President Grant set sail in a convoy with two other ships, the Rochester and the Pastores, their hulls painted with gray-and-black camouflage. The Statue of Liberty and Governor’s Island fell away. The convoy turned past Staten Island, alongside Breezy Point, and out into the dark open ocean.

  The Hellfire Regiment was on the fourth deck, down in the gut of the ship, with barely any room to move. Abandon-ship drills bookended each day, one first thing in the morning and another after lights-out at four-thirty in the afternoon, when the ship went dark to reduce visibility to submarines. After that, the men could remain on the decks or fumble their way into the dark interior, feebly illuminated with blue lights. Deep in the ship’s thundering belly, Jabine’s friend Ellis Frink, along with Arthur Archer and four other boys from the regiment, volunteered in the boiler room, their faces streaming with sweat as they shoveled coal into the furnace.

  Shortly after noon on January 5, the President Grant’s torpedo bells clanged to life. Two soldiers on deck in the squalling wind and rain had spotted an object in the water off the port side of the ship. Everyone scrambled for their drill positions. Belowdecks, the ammunition hoists began to grind as shells and powder bags were winched up to the gunners. The ship shuddered as the engine powered up, and it began to zigzag in a submarine-evasion plan, then one of the guns opened fire with a booming concussion. The sea quieted, and the ship resumed its typical course. The soldiers had mistaken a porpoise for a submarine.

  Four days later, the ship was under full steam when the bells clanged again—a periscope had been spotted to starboard. The ship shuddered as the guns boomed again and again, sending geysers of water into the air eight times as the ship fired at the object. Jabine rushed from the fourth deck for his drill station, but he was among the last to arrive at his post. By the time he had reached his station on the deck, the guns had fallen silent and the water was calm. He was too late to see anything. It was probably an unlucky fish, he mused, but afterward, word spread among the soldiers that it had been a true submarine attack, and that the ship’s guns had sunk a U-boat. Both were wrong—the ship’s captain recorded the object as a ship’s mast floating on the waves, the detritus of another, less fortunate ship sunk at sea.

  On the morning of January 10, the President Grant docked at Brest, France. For eight days, Companies A and B prowled the decks waiting to disembark. Finally, on January 18, they were allowed off the boat and onto trains. After two days of travel, they disembarked at Wizernes and marched to Helfaut, close to Saint-Omer, where the British trained their troops in gas warfare. Jabine was pleased to discover that winter in France was far warmer than back home, though very damp and foggy. “We are billeted still in the little village where we first stopped and I guess will be training here for some time to come so you have no cause for worrying over me for quite a while yet,” Jabine wrote home. For now, Jabine was comfortable and warm—the weather was so balmy that he didn’t even need a jacket at night—and he assured his mother he was as safe as if he were back in Yonkers.

  The arrival of the gas and flame regiment marked a new phase for the gas service, both at home and overseas. The first American soldiers trained to use chemicals in war were just a few miles from the front. Under the tutelage of their British counterparts, Jabine and Higginbottom would learn how to bury Livens projectors, anchor Stokes mortars, and haul heavy gas tanks for drift-gas attacks. They would learn how to take wind readings before attacks, handle bombs, and dig projector emplacements both in daylight and at night.

  Amos Fries had been working feverishly for months to prepare for gas warfare in France, and when Companies A and B marched into Helfaut, a crucial part of Fries’s plans fell into place. The arrival of the Hellfire Regiment represented a bridge between the domestic gas service and the AEF’s service under Fries. Before long, the chemists’ work would burst from the laboratories, turning from technical puzzles defined by beakers and Bunsen burners into an explosive fusion of steel and flesh and gas on the battlefield.

  Amos Fries’s confidence in the gas service grew by the day. He kept at his work with relentless determination; he had
even spent Christmas Day working in his office, except for an hour or so around lunch, when he traded stories around a fireplace with one of his majors. Three or four inches of snow blanketed the ground when he made his way to the mess to join the other officers for turkey with chestnut dressing, peas, salad, plum pudding, coffee, and champagne. A small decorated tree sat on a side table. Holly, ivy, and mistletoe draped the chandelier overhead, and the officers swapped knickknacks. They were all married, many with children, and they tried to enjoy themselves despite the distance that lay between them and their families.

  Despite Fries’s efforts to stay healthy in the dank, cold French winter, he took to bed with the flu, which began with a mild fever, a cold, and painful tonsils. He stayed in bed for several days, wrapped in a dressing gown that Bessie had sent him for Christmas. As he rested, he felt like Robinson Crusoe, with nothing to do but sit and think. As 1917 wound down, Fries fell into a contemplative state about the war and what lay ahead. There was a feeling among the officers that Germany was going to do something major soon, something desperate, probably by mid-1918, “before the days and nights reach an equality again,” as Fries poetically put it.

  New Year’s Eve was a squalling, windy night, cold with a driving rain. General Pershing was throwing a party to usher in 1918. Fries felt better, but he continued to ruminate over how long the war would go on. There was talk among the officers that peace might be coming soon. Despite the hopeful talk, an end to the war seemed distant to Fries—the Germans seemed endlessly resilient despite heavy setbacks. “On the other hand the Germans are certainly sick of the war and those who know anything know they are beaten just as the South knew it was beaten in the fall of ’63,” he wrote home to Bessie.

  His stubborn flu returned, turning into a painful sinus infection and splitting headaches that sent him to the hospital for several more days of recovery. Stuck in an officers’ ward warmed with a feeble coal stove, he answered Bessie’s letters from November and earlier December that were only now reaching him. In one of them, she asked about the prospects for peace. He responded:

  Frankly, I don’t see anything clearly on the subject. Somebody and perhaps everybody is doing a lot of dying. Whose bluff will show threadbare first is yet to be seen. I know a great many things naturally from my position and yet I really know nothing definite. However, if peace comes before Christmas 1918, I will be most agreeably surprised.

  In that first week of January, he also learned some news: General Pershing had finally acted on his long-standing reservations about William Sibert and sent the general home. “I guess he was canned. This is no place for a man nearly old enough to retire anyway,” Fries wrote home.

  Fries’s nonchalance about Sibert’s dismissal wasn’t surprising. The friction between Pershing and his second-in-command was hardly a secret, particularly after the dressing-down that Sibert had received in September. On December 12, a telegram had landed on Sibert’s desk at Gondrecourt saying the War Department was relieving him of his command and ordering him to return to the United States. The next day, a lengthy letter from Pershing himself arrived, marked CONFIDENTIAL. The subject of the memo: “Pessimism.”

  Americans visiting training areas sensed deep apprehension, leaving an impression “that the war is already well along toward defeat for our arms,” Pershing wrote. Without accusing Sibert of creating a negative mood in the ranks, Pershing’s rebuke was clear. An officer who isn’t hopeful, inspired, and uplifted, he wrote, “should yield his position to others with more of our national courage.”

  Sibert fired back a blunt challenge to his commander in chief to drop the oblique accusation and make an official charge against him, which Sibert could then refute in a military court of inquiry. In the end, Sibert headed home. It was a humiliating fall for the engineer who had built and sailed through the Gatun Locks of the Panama Canal and was charged with training the largest American army ever mustered for a foreign war. Sibert didn’t even land a face-saving job at the War Department; instead, his new assignment was an unglamorous post in charge of distant camps that were little more than staging areas for soldiers before they debarked for France.

  Fries didn’t linger much over what had happened to Sibert or reflect on the fate of his old friend; in his letter, he moved quickly to news of other officers and sartorial matters, like his torn fur coat. “About time for me to stop and do some sewing on my bearskin coat where it has ripped under the right arm.”

  After he got out of the hospital, Fries threw himself back into his work with a ferocious energy. The summer before, everything the American Expeditionary Forces knew about gas warfare fit inside the manila file folder handed off to Fries. That meager beginning had ballooned into a robust organization that grew daily, and his single-minded attention to his new service had begun to pay off. Because of his agitation for staff, he now had more officers than he knew what to do with, and the experienced men he requested were arriving from the States. Other technologies were also being grouped under the banner of chemical warfare—smoke bombs, incendiaries, and phosphorus were all rapidly being subsumed into his department.

  In January, the French had ordered up 240,000 gas shells from the Americans, and the two countries struck a deal under which the Americans would provide the French with three hundred tons of chlorine each month, and the French would provide the Americans with one hundred tons of phosgene monthly. The French phosgene added up to only a fraction of the amount the U.S. Gas Service calculated it would require; Fries and the AEF’s chief ordnance officer had already set in motion plans for a factory in France to produce more than eighty-three tons of phosgene per day—or twenty-five hundred tons per month—as well as a shell-filling factory. Both would be near Gièvres, France, a location close to ports and a departure point for sending finished shells to the front.

  By late January, his lieutenants had recommended the best chemicals for aerial gas bombs. The primary filling would be mustard or another war gas, dichloropropyl sulfide, in fifty-pound bombs. A second filling would be cyanogen bromide or cyanogen chloride in larger bombs. Phosgene or a similar substance, thiophosgene, was a third option, and bromobenzyl cyanide or bromoacetone was a fourth. One of Fries’s lieutenants recommended that aerial gas bombs should not be used on a small scale, except for experimental purposes. “When available for use on a large scale, every possible bombing plane should be concentrated for the employment of these bombs on the same night so that the greatest number of rest billets, concentration camps, etc., may be taken by surprise,” he wrote.

  Fries described the rapid growth of the gas service as a “seven day’s wonder”—an explosive expansion on a biblical scale. “We have gradually enlarged our vision until we have everything in the chemical line whether for artillery, shell, aviation bombs or anything else in that line,” he wrote to Bessie.

  In a sign of the growing prestige of his service, he had been promised his own limousine, an eight-cylinder Cadillac with electric lights, upholstered seats, hand-cranked windows, and an intercom to talk with the driver—“a daisy” of a car, he called it. Department heads were assigned limousines, and receiving one imparted the same prestige to Fries’s service as other, more established army sections.

  In letters home, Fries described the endless complications he faced. Fries’s job wasn’t solely to build the army’s capacity for chemical warfare, get gas troops into fighting form, and send them to the front; he also had to shoehorn the new service into the army’s existing structure, melding old and new seamlessly. For every problem he needed to solve, a dozen more cropped up, each of them interlocked in the slow-moving machinery of the War Department. One of the biggest challenges was determining the relationship between the gas service and the Ordnance Department, which was responsible for supplying the army with arms, ammunition, and everything else pertaining to the fighting, as well as establishing ordnance arsenals and depots. Which department would be responsible for filling shells and rebuilding stockpiles? Which department would st
ore them, mark the tanks and projectors, and transport the new weapons up to the lines? Over the winter, Fries and the Army Ordnance Department had wrestled with that question, ultimately deciding that the Ordnance Department would make the gas shells and the gas service would fill them.

  Fries faced a similar problem with respect to training. Readying recruits for gas warfare required education and drilling. For now, the American gas troops would train with the British Special Brigade, but that wasn’t a long-term solution. Would artillery and gas service companies—both of which would use gas shells—train together or separately, and which department would be in charge? As he had since the beginning of his tenure, Fries followed the example of the British gas service. The British had their Porton experimental field in England and a training ground at Saint-Omer. With an ocean separating him from Washington and American University, Fries began searching for an experimental field of his own.

  On Sunday, January 20, he chose a location about eight miles southeast of Chaumont, on twenty square miles of farmland outside the village of Biesles. Aligned east to west, the range was oriented in the same direction as prevailing winds on much of the front to mimic battlefield conditions. He envisioned a training field as grand as Britain’s, a center of both research and teaching.

  Fries had supreme confidence in the fiefdom he was building in France. He was less confident in what was happening on the other side of the Atlantic. He seemed puzzled about Colonel Charles Potter, the chief of the domestic gas service, and what exactly he did, scoffing that Potter was “more or less just a kid.” From his perspective across the Atlantic, Fries believed he was in charge of the entire enterprise on both sides of the ocean, maintaining order and keeping the whole machinery running smoothly. “The arrangement now in Washington is simply a loosely jointed federation of parts of four or more other departments and except for our steering would break down in no time.”