by Theo Emery
Farther back, Addison watched in awe as almost nine hundred projectors discharged phosgene shells in thunderous waves. Some projectors didn’t fire because time had been too short to prepare them all. Still, it was a spectacular display, explosions that shook the ground and turned the moonlit sky into daylight. The French artillery to the rear opened up next and continued for more than half an hour, raining shrapnel shells and high explosives over the German lines. There was little response from the Germans—nothing at all for a time and then a feeble volley of shells. Addison stayed in the entrance to the dugout for about an hour, waiting and listening and chatting, before walking back to camp. Not a single American soldier had been lost. He felt oddly calm and watched a few German shells land nearby, toward the French positions.
Back at the camp, the excited men rehashed the evening’s attack, congratulating one another on a successful operation. Addison fell into bed about 12:30 a.m., around the same time as Higginbottom in his billet.
In the middle of the night, explosions jarred both men awake. Company A’s show had begun about eight miles away, another 737 projectors heaving phosgene shells across the line. Addison and Higgie lay in the dark listening to the distant cannonade and the tremulous concussions that shook the ground beneath their beds. The firing resumed about thirty minutes later; this time the shelling had provoked an angry German response—continuous firing, the thunder of the ground-shaking explosions. It went on for hours. Higginbottom fell back to sleep and slept soundly until 9:00 a.m.
In the officers’ quarters, Addison drifted in and out of sleep. After he awoke in the morning, he took a truck and returned to camp, where he met up with the men from Company A. The phosgene attack, it turned out, had repelled a German raid of two storm battalions. Had Company A launched its attack even a half hour later, they might have been overrun by the Germans. Every member of the gas and flame regiment survived the night.
“A few days ago the Bosche got its first taste of American gas from my regiment and I hear he didn’t like it a bit,” Amos Fries wrote home to Bessie. Fries had missed the solo debut of the Hellfire Boys, laid up in the hospital for almost two weeks with a mysterious ailment that the doctors chalked up to an overactive liver. The colonel was thrilled by the operation report that the projectors shot by Companies A and B—sixteen hundred in all—and artillery shelling afterward. The show caused at least forty German casualties, including ten deaths, in the 150th Landwehr Regiment and stymied the raiding party preparing to go over the top. On one night, some twenty-three tons of phosgene had been unleashed against the German regiment. “We hope to give him lots of it from now on,” Fries went on.
Finding Fries fit, the medicos prescribed more exercise as the cure for his liver troubles. The hospital visit gave him a chance to rest, although he was hardly idle—he received briefings, read two novels cover to cover one day, and delivered a lecture on gas to forty doctors on another.
Fries was anxious to return to work. He was awaiting word of his proposal for a gas corps and had asked Pershing’s chief of staff to sign off on a huge order: more than two thousand tons of mustard each month and more than three thousand tons of phosgene, chloropicrin, and other gases, with an expectation that this volume would double by January 1, 1919.
The chief of staff felt that the United States simply didn’t have the capacity to manufacture such vast quantities, and so Fries withdrew the proposal. But the day he wrote home about the Thirtieth Engineers’ attack, he received good news from Washington: the War Department had finally acted on Fries’s and Sibert’s recommendations for consolidating everything related to chemical warfare into a single organization, with a domestic branch and a commensurate overseas branch in Fries’s corps. The name for the whole enterprise under the War Department would be the Chemical Warfare Service. “I am glad of that for it will simplify my work a whole lot,” a satisfied Fries told Bessie. He was also extremely pleased with Sibert. “You were right in thinking I would be happy at seeing General Sibert at the head of the Gas Service. Things are going vastly better there now and will continue as he gets hold of the game. He is getting the work of all the Gas coordinated there along the same lines in the States that we are here,” Fries wrote.
Fries was correct that the War Department was moving swiftly, but there was still a hitch. The Research Division under Manning’s Bureau of Mines remained an unresolved sticking point. On June 7, what had been a behind-the-scenes fight spilled into the headlines when the New York Times editorialized about the issue, transforming the dispute between the scientists and the army into a national debate. The paper lamented that it would be a “tragedy” if the army took over the chemists’ work. While coolly respectful to Sibert, the editorial nonetheless painted the general as a bully trying to bludgeon the country’s most esteemed scientists into line:
To militarize the body of chemists whose energies, whose genius, the Government cannot do without would be to introduce red tape and generate friction between army officers who know nothing of the properties of the new instrumentality of warfare and the scientific men who are seeking and finding means to defeat the enemy at his own game.
The ultimate decision lay with President Wilson, who had emergency powers from Congress to reorganize wartime agencies. The president claimed ignorance of the matter and asked the Interior Department for more information about the wartime activities of the Bureau of Mines. Manning’s allies rallied behind him, but there were louder voices on the other side, such as Assistant Secretary of War Benedict Crowell and Fries’s aide Raymond Bacon, the chief of the AEF’s lab who had been sent back to the States to push for Fries’s consolidation plan.
On June 25, President Wilson ended the debate with an executive order placing the Research Division and the American University Experiment Station under the control of the War Department. The army would absorb all the civilian scientists. All of the existing officers would stay on. Burrell—who would be made a colonel—would remain chief of the Research Division, and each of the division chiefs would keep his position. The only person without a role in this new military organization, it seemed, was Van Manning.
The next day, President Wilson wrote to Manning that he felt confident in his decision, but that he had hesitated out of a reluctance to take the Bureau of Mines off of the work it had so effectively performed. Secretary of War Newton Baker had taken pains to praise Manning and his bureau, and the president included Baker’s letter saying so. He wrote:
I want, however, to express to you my own appreciation of the fine and helpful piece of work which you have done, and to say that this sort of team work by the bureaus outside of the direct war-making agency is one of the cheering and gratifying evidences of the way our official forces are inspired by the presence of a great national task.
Privately, Manning was surprised and hurt by the decision. He confided in one of the officers at the National Research Council that up until the very last minute he believed that his bureau would remain in charge of the Research Division. He had no position or standing in this new organization, but he knew one thing: that he felt betrayed by scientists who had supported the army takeover and hoped that such men would have no role in this new enterprise.
Despite Manning’s bruised ego, he said nothing publicly. He wrote a gracious response to the president, thanking him for recognizing the bureau’s work. He extended no such niceties to Sibert. Instead, he sent the general an officious letter with an unmistakably curt tone stating that the transfer was only for the war’s duration and that afterward the research work would revert back to his dominion in the Bureau of Mines.
Telegrams and letters of condolence arrived for Manning from around the country, consoling the director as if a dear family member had died. “I am sorry to hear that you have lost your chemical section,” an editor of a mining journal wrote to Manning. “I can appreciate the keen regret you will have in parting with this work,” another supporter wrote.
The reorganization meant that che
mical warfare burst into the public consciousness again in congressional testimony, speeches, and articles. Americans learned not only that there were almost two thousand chemists working on chemical weapons but that the effort was big enough and important enough to warrant an entirely new branch of the military dedicated solely to this novel form of warfare. It was a front-page story in the Washington Herald, which declared “1,700 Chemists Employed for Gas Service,” and the wire-service story appeared in newspapers across the country. The New York Times followed up its previous editorial with another much gentler toward Sibert, calling him “an eminent engineer with a fine Panama Canal record,” saying that no more competent man could have been found. But the editorial also pointed out that Sibert had a heavy burden of responsibility. “The success of American gas warfare depends upon General Sibert; it is the man that counts in war, rarely the system, which can never be perfection.”
The War Department released Newton Baker’s letter about Van Manning to the press, saying “the whole subject of gas warfare has assumed a fresh pressure and intensity.” After Senate testimony about the transfer, Americans read in newspapers from coast to coast that the United States had exceeded Germany’s capacity for making war gases. That the introduction of chemicals to the battlefield was the most important innovation in warfare since gunpowder. And that scientists worked on these weapons in a secret laboratory in Washington that was so hush-hush that Department of War officials refused to discuss it. One article read:
This laboratory is now perhaps the most heavily guarded stronghold of the army. It is lined with a system of electrical and mechanical alarms as intricate as those that line the vaults of the United States treasury. Only persons with the most unimpeachable references may enter it. The reason for all this secrecy is that the element of surprise is essential to the success of gas warfare. Everything depends upon suddenly attacking the enemy with a new kind of gas against which he has no protection.
A spate of public addresses, testimonials, and speeches dedicated to chemical warfare followed, with accounts published in the newspapers. Given Wilson’s censorious ways and his administration’s strict limitations on wartime information, the blitz of news about chemical warfare suggests a public relations campaign, aimed at both the American people and adversaries abroad. On June 21, Colonel Raymond Bacon, Fries’s chemical laboratory chief, delivered a speech at a conference of mining engineers hinting darkly that a new gas more poisonous than anything that had come before would soon be used against the Germans.
“We are of the opinion that gas will win the war,” he said. “It is more and more becoming something of prime importance. We are finding greater protection against gas and better gases. In time we will be able to hand the Boche a little bit more hellish gas than he has ever handed us.”
Another speech noted in the Washington papers came on June 26. It was early evening as Northwestern University alumni took their seats in Cushman’s Restaurant, a few blocks from the White House. The university president, Thomas F. Holgate, spoke first, then the keynote speaker, a highly regarded judge. The judge introduced the next speaker on the program. It was the chemist Winford Lee Lewis. His voice was hoarse and strained, and he apologized for the state of his vocal cords. “I have been working in poison gases for six months and my voice is all gone,” Lewis croaked. “I used to be a splendid singer and a good speaker, but now I can never sing nor speak any more than the proverbial crow.”
Despite his rasping voice, Lewis delivered a short but typically wry address. It was a hard time for chemistry speeches, he said. “The military lid is clamped so tight on the chemists” that he had to talk to his wife in sign language, he joked. “Our hatches are closed so tightly that most of the time I feel like a submarine ready for a dive, and I am so full of the things that I can’t talk about that I simply can’t talk about the things I can talk about.”
But he could talk about one thing, he said: that despite Germany’s head start in gas warfare, the United States would surpass her. Though he could not speak of the details, he was in a position to know, he assured the alumni. “She started this poison gas game and we are going to finish it,” he rasped. “He who gasses last, gasses best.”
Two days later, President Wilson signed General Order 62, entitled “Creating Chemical Warfare Service.” The stroke of the president’s pen on July 1 created a new branch of the army, on a par with the Corps of Engineers. “Army Takes Over All War Gas Work,” the New York Times reported.
American soldiers had used gas for the first time only three months earlier and independently of their Allies less than three weeks earlier. Now the military would develop, manufacture, and deploy the weapons that its soldiers would wield. It demanded a new field of military study of how these new weapons should be used. Hundreds of civilian scientists and engineers abruptly became army officers. All of the research-and-development work, from California to Tennessee, was under the umbrella of the service. It was a sprawling empire stitched together beneath a single flag, and General Sibert was its standard-bearer.
One research facility, however, was absent from the reorganization plans. In Manning’s May 15 report to Interior Secretary Franklin Lane on the Bureau of Mine’s wartime research, he listed twenty-one different branch laboratories, from American University and Catholic University to the University of California. Jones Point was not listed. Nor did it appear in subsequent reports, and there was no description of the experiments under way there. Barely acknowledged, the secret laboratory overlooking the Hudson River was a phantom satellite in the chemical warfare universe that Major General Sibert had inherited. What Sibert learned of the secret laboratory in New York probably reached him in oral reports; the Research Division put almost nothing about it in writing.
Despite the turmoil over jurisdiction of chemical experiments and the nagging questions over Levering, the tests at Jones Point had begun. A storage building was refurbished into sleeping quarters for Scheele, so he wouldn’t have to ferry from Peekskill each day. Before he left, Grimes had assisted Scheele with unpacking and storing chemicals, and he had the windows painted over to mask the activities within. He arranged for a security firm to provide twenty-four-hour guards and added a layer of surveillance from the local sheriff, too. Governor Charles Whitman gave Levering permission to use land behind the plant for open-air detonations and explosions that would be part of Scheele’s experiments.
Five days after agents brought the doctor to Jones Point for the first time, an officer from the American University Experiment Station had arrived, a chemist from Arizona named Captain Paul H. M. P. Brinton. After he showed his identification and conferred with the doctor, he watched experiments and stayed only a day, returning to Washington in the morning. A few days later, he was back, and this time he stayed. During the tests, either Brinton or Edison’s chemist, Bruce Silver, was at Scheele’s side every day as his assistant and overseer. Brinton often authored the biweekly testing reports, which were forwarded to Bielaski, Lieutenant Commander Theodore S. Wilkinson in the Navy Bureau of Ordnance, and Lieutenant Colonel Earl J. W. Ragsdale of the Army Department of Ordnance.
Scheele began work on ten areas of experimentation. There were experiments with wing dope, the lacquers that protected airplane wings; dyes for military uniforms; designs for gas containers; shell linings impervious to corrosive chemical agents; and consultation over various war gases, including a phosgene variation. They also experimented with manufacturing mustard and other compounds for use as war gases, and when they created a particularly promising substance, they bundled up a sample and sent it to American University for further tests.
Those areas of research, however, were secondary to two main projects. The first was using liquefied oxygen as an explosive. When cooled into a liquid and detonated, oxygen proved to be a powerful explosive, perhaps even more so than TNT. Research into oxygen as an explosive had been conducted for years—including by the Bureau of Mines—but Germany had managed to iron out the techni
cal problems and turn it into a viable explosive. From the earliest moments of his capture, Scheele had told Levering that liquid oxygen was a part of the German arsenal, used in the enormous shells that destroyed the frontier fortresses in Liège, Belgium, in the war’s first days. Scheele claimed that the violence of the explosions was due to the expansion of the liquid oxygen reservoirs within the shells. Scheele also claimed that liquid oxygen accounted for the mystifying power of the so-called Paris guns that shelled the French capital from sixty miles away, a feat of firepower so stupefying that it seemed to defy physics. Scheele explained that they probably weren’t conventional shells but aerial torpedoes—rockets, in other words—propelled by the rapid expansion of liquid oxygen.
The other top priority at Jones Point was Scheele’s cigar-bomb compound, the mixture of hexamethylenetetramine and sodium peroxide. At first, the laboratory used the shorthand of “scheeleite” to describe the chemical combination. It didn’t take long for the chemists to realize that it was imprudent to identify the substance by the name of its inventor, a traitor and a German spy, so scheeleite gained a new name: “helline.”
Levering wrote frequent and enthusiastic reports about helline and its potential as a weapon. When mixed with petroleum, it burned more slowly but just as hot and with continual explosions, rather than exploding and flaring out quickly. Such a fire on a ship or in an ammunition factory “could never possibly be extinguished,” Levering wrote. He proposed that they start manufacturing the substance as soon as possible. He wrote to Bielaski:
I am quite willing and anxious to put any plant I have and quite an experienced staff of commercial manufacturers and engineers at your disposal, and would be very glad to come to some definite point where you could make some calculations as to the amount of the material which could be utilized so that a plan could be gotten up for whatever scale installation is necessary.