by Theo Emery
Bielaski wrote back praising Levering for the reports, which “should prove of great benefit to the government.” But he cautioned that he wasn’t in a position to respond to Levering’s overture about manufacturing Scheele’s compound. He suggested that Levering discuss the matter instead with the navy and other military agencies that contracted with government suppliers. Levering did just that; he soon had a deal with the War Department to produce helline and manufacture five thousand incendiary bombs for testing.
The experiments with helline initially took two forms: determining how to manufacture it on a large scale and how to weaponize it in bombs or incendiary devices, such as flares that would remain lit underwater. The manufacturing research went smoothly, and by late May, plans were under way to build a helline plant to make five hundred pounds every day. Figuring out a use for the compound started with only a few experiments. The chemists tried turning it into incendiary bombs, building a scaffolding rigged with a crane to drop three buckets filled with ninety pounds of helline through the roof of a wooden shanty below. The bottom bucket contained a glass vial of sulfuric acid that smashed on impact, igniting the helline around it, which in turn ignited the two buckets above. When the buckets were dropped, they erupted with a satisfying whoosh, creating a fifty-foot pillar of fire. But the flame was so intense and hot that it quickly flared out with little damage to the shanty. When repeated using a mixture of helline and oil, the oil ignited, too, and turned the shed into a roaring inferno.
The scientists also tested helline for use in small firebombs—incendiary “darts,” Levering called them—dropped from airplanes to set crops afire behind enemy lines, or for signal flares. The Palisades Interstate Park Commission gave permission to use a nearby abandoned quarry, where explosives could be dropped from a height. A request to use other areas of the park was refused, but the commission agreed to let the chemists use condemned buildings for tests. They were not standing for long. In one experiment, three pails of helline—like the device dropped from the scaffolding—were placed inside a log cabin and ignited with a fuse. When the first bucket of helline exploded, it ignited the other two buckets, spattering flaming gobs of oil throughout the cabin. Within minutes, a raging inferno had burned the cabin to the ground.
Peekskill residents surely wondered about the mysterious activities afoot on the nub of land across the Hudson River. Just to the north of Jones Point, the U.S. Navy maintained the Iona Island Arsenal on an archipelago that jutted out into the river, so men in uniform weren’t an uncommon sight in the area. Iona provided its own share of pyrotechnics; fifteen years earlier, in 1903, an explosion of defective ammunition killed six men and injured ten at the arsenal, shattering windows miles away. Still, the experiments at Jones Point were much more mysterious. Explosions threw showers of debris and fountains of flame into the air. Projectiles and rockets sizzled overhead and exploded on contact with the earth. Sometimes men gathered in boats and threw things into the river that mysteriously caught fire beneath the surface, emitting an infernal yellow and pink underwater glow. There were explosions on the river, too, underwater detonations that heaved geysers into the air. Sometimes, phosphorescence danced on the river’s surface after dark, a glowing curtain that swirled and shifted in the current.
The chemists had high hopes for helline as an explosive, but comparative tests quickly found that TNT was more powerful, so Scheele’s compound would have to be useful in other ways. Scheele was soon experimenting with using it as a depth charge, for signal lights, flares, and grenades. The chemists shot at it with rifles to test its stability. Though less powerful than TNT, its use for incendiary darts remained promising, and development of different variations picked up steam, eclipsing other, less promising experiments, Brinton wrote to Levering. They also began investigating it for use as a rocket propellant.
The ongoing involvement of the chemist Bruce Silver from Thomas Edison’s laboratory eventually prompted Edison’s assistant to write a puzzled note to Silver asking exactly what he was doing and when Edison could expect him back. Silver apologized for his absence, but said that he had been “just about as busy as possible” with his responsibilities for the chemical warfare work. The work had reached a stage that none of them would have imagined.
“The people in Washington have become so enthusiastic that the actual manufacture of the incendiary bombs is underway for rushed shipment to Europe,” he wrote.
Levering, too, wrote to Edison to explain Silver’s absence. “The work at Jones Point has progressed and extended beyond any possible expectations that any of us held in regard to the experiments of Dr. Scheele’s various propositions,” he wrote, adding that the length of time they needed Silver for was “absolutely indefinite.” Levering began sending the reports to Edison as well.
Levering and the chemists at Jones Point were thrilled with the progress, but trouble was brewing. As the weeks went on, the doctor chafed more and more at his confinement. He began to agitate to spend more time with his wife under less restrictive circumstances. Marie Scheele was living alone in Hackensack, New Jersey. She occasionally traveled to Haverstraw, New York, where she stayed at a hotel about seven miles south of Jones Point and was allowed to have brief visits with her husband. But the visits were rare and always under close supervision. At the end of May, Charles DeWoody, the division superintendent, brought Marie Scheele to Peekskill for a visit. For about two hours, he allowed the doctor and his wife to sit on the outdoor veranda at the Eagle Hotel. Marie Scheele wanted to come up to Peekskill for the entire summer and asked permission as well to stay over weekends with the doctor at his quarters at Jones Point. DeWoody warned the couple that he couldn’t promise that but said he would ask the bureau.
In his account of the trip to deliver Marie, DeWoody also described something that troubled him more than conjugal visits between the doctor and his wife: his agent Francis X. O’Donnell had reported that Scheele planned to go into business with Levering to manufacture his explosive compound. O’Donnell had overheard snippets of conversation between Scheele and Bruce Silver about the deal and learned that Silver met with Levering about once a week to discuss forming some kind of a holding company which would take over any patents for helline. Though the details were scant, O’Donnell had a very clear impression that Scheele would profit financially from this arrangement.
DeWoody asked the chief, Bielaski, if he knew anything about such a partnership between Levering and Scheele:
Personally, I am surprised at it, and believe that if there were public knowledge of the fact that Dr. Scheele’s offenses having been condoned for the sake of utilizing his technical knowledge, the Government had then gone further and given him the right to participate in the profits from a Government contract, it would invoke a great deal of criticism.
He added that it was not up to him to decide.
Bielaski couldn’t take it up with Levering immediately, as the oilman was busy with aerial bombing tests in Montauk, Long Island. His country house was there, part of the Devon Colony that he had helped to finance and construct. Since the previous year, the U.S. Navy had maintained an air station there, where seaplanes and airships patrolled the coast all the way up to Nantucket Shoal. On Saturday, June 1, Levering accompanied the commanding officer at the Montauk station up in one of the station planes to test Mark IV aerial bombs loaded with helline. As the plane roared over Long Island Sound, there were some tense moments. One of the released bombs got jammed in the chute, and the pilot had to let go of the controls and shove the bombs out of the plane by hand. The bomb exploded prematurely about two or three hundred feet under the plane, “giving him a good kick,” Levering wrote in his report to Wilkinson.
In the report, Levering discussed the mechanisms for detonating the bombs and the possibility of constructing depth charges with liquid oxygen as the explosive. He also proposed that the incendiary darts—the lightweight bombs filled with helline—could be tested on his property at Montauk, with Wilkinson’s assist
ance. “There are about 15 miles of wasteland, some of the property belongs to me and the rest to owners whose permission I can always secure,” he wrote.
The following day, Bielaski wrote to Levering to inquire about the rumored profit-sharing plan. In the earlier investigations into his background and integrity, Levering remained measured when he answered questions. But the insinuation of war profiteering was different. Levering erupted in furious indignation, writing on Department of Justice letterhead that he was “disgusted” with the accusation and insisting that there was no contract with Scheele. The accusation, he wrote, “is a very bitter pill which I deeply resent.” Colonel Ragsdale, the chief of the Trench Warfare Section of the Army Ordnance Department, who was constantly kept up to date about progress at Jones Point, defended Levering, writing that his attitude “has always been most splendid and he and his staff have been placing valuable data in the hands of this Department.”
Levering demanded to know who had raised the accusation of war profiteering. DeWoody doubled down, further interrogating Agent O’Donnell, who had passed on the tidbit of intelligence. The agent reiterated what he knew to Bielaski but conceded that perhaps it was just idle talk and not a fully fledged plan. Bielaski apologized to Levering, saying that he was obligated to ask about the allegation but that he couldn’t reveal who had made the report.
Amid all the squabbling and snooping, helline had a setback. When scientists at American University attempted to replicate one of the Jones Point experiments, the helline exploded, an accident that almost certainly injured the men carrying out the test. Edison’s chemist Bruce Silver described the incident as “discouraging” and a result that “seems to cast some doubt upon the mixture as being safe for ordinary handling and transportation.”
When Colonel Ragsdale of the Ordnance Department wrote to Levering of the incident, the oilman expressed regret for the accident but placed the blame on the chemists at American University. “The first essential in handling this incendiary material is to keep organic matter away from it,” he wrote. “This essential was reported when Doctor Scheele first described the formula.” Hundreds of experiments had been carried out at Jones Point without any such accidents, and Levering suggested that perhaps the scientists at American University were not familiar with the work already done. It was hardly surprising that Levering would want to wave away concerns, as a thousand of the incendiary darts packed with helline were almost ready for testing on his land, and another four thousand would soon be coming.
Levering’s relations with the Bureau of Investigation had resumed a more polite tenor, but in the aftermath of the caustic accusations, he began to look for some other role in the war effort. Levering didn’t specify why he began to back away from the work at Jones Point; perhaps it was to disengage from the Bureau of Investigation and its probe of his business interests or to put himself at arm’s length from the potential business prospects around helline. Perhaps he wanted a commission in the army and the prestige that military rank bestowed.
Whatever the reason, Levering approached the U.S. Navy seeking a commission in the American Patrol Detachment, the squadron assigned to police the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico against marauding German U-boats. The commander of the detachment gently rejected Levering’s request, saying that his current role was of “inestimable value” and it was his patriotic duty to continue his existing work.
Undeterred, Levering turned next to the Chemical Warfare Service. He had gotten to know many military higher-ups during his involvement with Scheele, and now, as of July 1, Jones Point was part of the wide, all-encompassing umbrella of the service. Perhaps this new agency would have a place for him.
The war turned Independence Day of 1918 into an eruption of patriotic fervor. Secretary of State Lansing pronounced July 4 “an international holy day,” and called the war a global campaign to destroy Prussian militarism. Washington had banned fireworks on the wartime Independence Day, allowing only sparklers, but the festivities didn’t lack for enthusiasm. A ceremony raised the Stars and Stripes outside Union Station, children paraded in Petworth, and President Wilson delivered a stirring speech at George Washington’s tomb at Mount Vernon, railing that “the blinded rulers of Prussia have roused forces they know little of—forces which, once roused, can never be crushed to earth again.” Thousands of spectators cheered Wilson as he declared that there could be no compromise in the war, “no half-way decisions.”
Afterward, he boarded the Mayflower, the presidential yacht, to sail back to Washington for a parade down Pennsylvania Avenue. Tens of thousands of people lined the street to watch the procession of delegations from the Allies around the world. Led by the Serbians, they paraded in order of joining the war. Maria Leontievna Bochkareva, the fierce Russian warrior who organized the all-female Battalion of Death, marched with a huge sword. A woman in the blue-and-silver armor of Joan of Arc sat astride a white stallion at the head of the French contingent. A kilted Scottish Highland unit stepped to the drone of bagpipes. The procession ended at the Capitol, where spotlights bathed the dome and an elaborate, nighttime costume pageant unfolded on the steps. Children whirled in colorful robes, resembling enormous moths under the searchlights, and gowned figures representing Humanity, Justice, and finally the United States floated up and down the steps in a melodramatic allegory for the war. Several hundred volunteers ended the spectacle with the “Hallelujah Chorus” before the crowds headed home.
Sibert’s office at Seventh and B Streets NW was just a block from the Pennsylvania Avenue parade route. One side of his building overlooked the National Mall, where revelers had milled on the grassy expanse all day.
When Goliath took the job in May, he had been in charge of a handful of officers whose duties constituted little more than shuttling messages between different bureaus and agencies. Now he commanded a constellation of science, engineering, and war concerns that demanded ingenuity as well as improvisation to respond to emergencies. He marshaled thousands of men—not just the seventeen hundred chemists at American University and on campuses across the country, but also the soldiers of the gas regiment, engineers, and doctors. He was in charge of factories, gas masks, shell-filling plants, experimental laboratories, and proving grounds.
In the days after the consolidation of the Chemical Warfare Service, Goliath had moved swiftly to take charge of his new organization. One of his first tasks was to smooth over the conflicts on Mustard Hill between the chemists and the engineers at Camp American University, which was renamed Camp Leach at the end of May. On July 2, he had asked George Burrell, the head of the Research Division and newly commissioned as a colonel, for a report on all construction at the American University Experiment Station. He wanted to know whether new buildings were permanent or temporary and what they would be used for. He also asked for an accounting of costs for the new laboratory that was under construction on the American University quad. That same day, Sibert strolled the American University grounds with Brigadier General Frederic Abbot of the Corps of Engineers, discussing the construction debris around the new chemistry building, the chemists’ car park on the parade ground, a fence line, the layout of roads, and other sources of friction. One by one, they worked out solutions.
Within days, Burrell had furnished a report on construction and sent Sibert his own plan for sharing the campus in a way that put to rest the festering antagonisms between the experiment station and the Corps of Engineers. The one unresolved issue—a coal pile that Abbot felt was encroaching on the engineers’ turf—turned out to have nothing to do with the Research Division, and Abbot withdrew his complaint. “I wish that all controversies could be settled as satisfactorily and as quickly as this one,” Abbot wrote.
Sibert took over the chemical warfare work right at the moment when work on the gas-manufacturing infrastructure had begun to bear fruit. Edgewood Arsenal had started production of chloropicrin in June. Ten days later, Edgewood’s mustard plant went into operation as well, as did the phosgene plant. By
the end of June, the first shipments of American gas had gone over to Europe: 15 tons of mustard gas, 705 tons of chloropicrin, and 48 tons of phosgene loaded onto ships and sent to France. The Ordnance Department was not yet producing gas shells, so the American gas that had begun going overseas would fill French shells after it reached European shores.
Not long after Sibert took over, the AEF cabled to temporarily halt chemical shipments. The French had run out of shells, and gas sent to Europe would be useless until more could be manufactured. It was a major hiccup that increased pressure on the service to quickly make it possible for American shells to be filled and shipped.
After the initial publicity about the Chemical Warfare Service’s creation died down, the press still continued to push information about gas warfare into the public domain. On July 7, the New York Times Magazine cover story was “Mustard Gas Warfare.” The article gave Sibert almost exclusive credit for the manufacture of mustard, despite the fact that many months of research and development had preceded his rise to the top of the service. But the article also sketched out little-known aspects of gas warfare, such as the merits of persistent gases like mustard over more toxic but quickly dispersing gases such as phosgene. It carried photographs of Fritz Haber and Walther Hermann Nernst, and it predicted that the American gas program would soon eclipse the Germans’. “Those who are in a position to know what they are doing are confident that, when the full story is told, the myth that the Germans are supermen in this realm of science will be exploded,” the article read.
The article reported nothing of lewisite, which was still a closely guarded secret of the Research Division. One of Van Manning’s last tasks connected to the war work was to send out the monthly research summary to government agencies and officers connected to the gas investigations. As always, the July 1 report had gone out stamped CONFIDENTIAL with dozens of research reports in it, including experiments on neutralization of mustard gas, effects of mask filters against sneeze gas, and “Experiments with Tiger Slugs as Detectors of Toxic Gases.”