by Theo Emery
Deep in the report, the section on pharmacological research referred to tests of lewisite’s toxicity relative to other compounds. The toxic concentration of chloromethyl ethyl sulfide for mice was 20 milligrams per liter and 6.5 milligrams per liter for thionyl fluoride. Lewisite was clearly more toxic, killing mice at a concentration of just 0.6 milligram per liter. Other experiments found that lewisite had surprising qualities. One test found that lewisite passed through most rubber or rubberized protective material, which meant that rubber boots and suits didn’t provide an adequate defense. Another test reached the startling conclusion that when lewisite came in contact with German gas masks, it degraded the eyepieces, making them opaque and impossible to see through, which would be a powerful strategic advantage.
For the first time, the Allies would have a lethal chemical weapon that the Germans did not have. There was a difference with lewisite, however. Every war gas, whether defensive or offensive, had been put through exhaustive testing over many months, in every conceivable fashion. But although lewisite had shown promising qualities, it had gone through testing far less rigorous than mustard, phosgene, and other chemical weapons agents had. The Research Division appears to have generated only about a half-dozen reports about lewisite by mid-July. Crucially, the technical men also appear to have done little investigation into one of the most important characteristics of a war gas—its persistence. A defining feature of mustard was its stability: the so-called king of the war gases lingered on the battlefield for days, even in rain and damp conditions, remaining dangerous long after the shells had burst. When the chemists finally got around to studying the persistence of lewisite, they found it hydrolyzed easily. In other words, water caused it to break down—hardly a desirable attribute of a war gas.
Nonetheless, Sibert decided in early July to rush lewisite into mass production along with mustard, phosgene, chloropicrin, and the other war gases. The work at Catholic and American Universities showed that lewisite could be produced at least in small quantities, but the improvised apparatus on the roof of Maloney Laboratory at Catholic University was a far cry from the industrial-sized factory needed to manufacture it by the ton. The chemists needed to design and engineer full-scale equipment, which demanded more laboratory work. Speed was crucial, and building a new factory would be time-consuming, so it would be better to find an existing building somewhere and modify it for lewisite production. There was the additional logistical problem that the precursor chemicals for lewisite, arsenic trichloride and acetylene, were not readily available commercially, and so the government would have to build plants to produce those as well.
Though lewisite was still top secret, some researchers carelessly used the name in meetings and reports, such as in a report on lewisite that had been discussed during a June meeting of the bureau’s Medical Advisory Board. After Sibert took over, he ordered the chemists to stop using the name immediately. “It is directed that the word Lewisite shall not be written on paper again, neither shall it be printed. This should be communicated to the various department Chiefs, and by them to others who are familiar with the term,” an aide to Sibert wrote to Burrell. From that point forward, it would only be referred to using code.
On July 12, Sibert sent new orders for Frank Dorsey—now a colonel—at Nela Park in Cleveland. His Development Division would be in charge of manufacturing lewisite. The division in Cleveland was the logical section to undertake this problem because Dorsey had already played crucial roles in production of gas mask charcoal and mustard gas. But because his existing staff was already deeply consumed in those tasks, lewisite would require an entirely new organization with its own staff. Dorsey wouldn’t be alone in setting up the lewisite production: James Bryant Conant was sent to Ohio to assist. Conant received a commission as major in the new Chemical Warfare Service, and within a few days, he had his own orders to report to a town about twenty miles northeast of Cleveland called Willoughby, where he would be working for the rest of the war.
Willoughby was a small town of about twenty-six hundred people a half mile from the shore of Lake Erie, bisected by the winding Chagrin River. On July 12, Colonel Dorsey stepped from his car and surveyed a vacant building on the outskirts of the town. Dorsey was under pressure to find a factory as soon as possible to manufacture lewisite, but it needed to be secure from prying eyes. He had considered looking for properties in Cleveland or even adjacent to Nela Park but decided it was too risky. Word had leaked out about the mustard plant in Cleveland, and spies for the Germans surely knew about the building. He needed to make sure that the lewisite factory would be safe from spies, as well as Cleveland’s snooping newspaper reporters.
Willoughby was far enough from Cleveland that activities there could carry on without attracting attention, but it was still convenient to Nela Park. He had asked a former tax commissioner, John D. Fackler, to find potential manufacturing sites. The attorney brought Dorsey to a rambling factory where the Ben-Hur Motor Company had made a sporty touring car with leather seats and a sixty-horsepower engine. The car made a splash when it debuted in early 1917, but only about one hundred cars rolled off the assembly line before the company went bankrupt and the factory had been abandoned ever since. The building was sixty-six thousand square feet in all, two stories high, a block and a half long by a block wide. High windows let in plenty of light. A separate office building seemed to be in decent condition as well, and the property wasn’t far from train tracks where supplies could be shipped by rail. Though the factory was only a short distance from the town center, it was set off from downtown. With a fence and sentries, it would be easy to keep out trespassers and snoops. Dorsey didn’t spend much time at the Ben-Hur plant. He had found what he was looking for.
PART III
RETORT
Chapter Twelve
First Gas and Flame
Three cheers for the old “Gas and Flame”
Rip ’er up for the old “Gas and Flame”
We’ll smell phosgene and mustard forever
We are Vets of the old “Gas and Flame.”
—Robert B. MacMullin
Company E, First Gas Regiment
November 11, 1924
July was the slow month for the boys of Company B. Endless drilling filled hot, dull days and somnolent afternoons. Higgie’s farmhouse billet was a comfortable roost, the best in the village, and the company had the abandoned town to themselves. Nine miles from the fighting at Château-Thierry, they could hear the guns booming at the lines. Instead of setting projectors, they went for swims in the Marne. The men were bored and restless, but headquarters had ordered them to stay put. During the pause in the regiment’s action, headquarters reorganized, moving Companies A and C to First Battalion, while shifting Companies B and D to Second Battalion and billeting them next to each other in Mont-Ménard and Rougeville. The battalion headquarters claimed spacious buildings nearby in Saâcy for its offices. When shells fell too close for comfort, the headquarters moved to nearby Le Ferté.
Tom Jabine led Higgie’s platoon in drills, repeating the same tasks that the regiment had performed so many times. The two had become fast friends. The night after Jabine got his commission, the two men talked late into the night. “He is a swell fellow,” Higgie wrote in his diary.
Company B had become a tight-knit band after many months together on the line. Jabine was well liked among the men: at an evening retreat, Higgie and the other Company B boys had given him three cheers for his promotion to second lieutenant. Jabine worried that he would miss the camaraderie of the sergeant’s mess hall; fraternization between ranks was frowned on, and he worried that his friendships would fray.
Jabine also became friends with another officer, Lieutenant Joseph Hanlon, who had transferred from Company A. A chemist who had also attended Columbia University, Hanlon had introduced himself to Jabine in June. “He is one of our best—a hell of a nice fellow,” Jabine wrote to his brother. Back in June, Hanlon had bunked with the chaplain Addison; they
, too, had become friends.
When Jabine went to Paris on leave, he felt lonely even though the streets teemed with soldiers and sailors; he wished he had someone to see the sights with. “I never knew what it meant to be lonesome since I joined the army till I had this job wished on me!” he wrote home. After he returned to camp, Jabine drilled his men hard. He knew they hated it—it was stale and repetitive and they wanted to be at the front. But he needed to learn to lead, while the men needed something to occupy themselves. Higgie never complained. In one week, he got three letters from Irene, his sweetheart back in the States. He wrote letters, played catch, took expeditions into Le Ferté, and swam almost every day. One poker game in the billet lasted all day.
Then the shells began to fall again. On July 15, the German army crossed the Marne. A bombardment hit the next town over, and Higgie’s half-empty village suddenly filled with refugees. Drilling stopped, and the men were told not to congregate outside. A shell hit the train station in Le Ferté, and some of the men went over to help dig it out. Hopes began to rise that the regiment would be pressed into action. Plans were drawn up for a projector attack at Belleau Wood, the site of a bloody battle the previous month between the Germans and U.S. Marines. But then headquarters scuttled the plan, deeming the front too fluid and the German lines too unpredictable to justify an attack.
On July 18, marching orders finally arrived. A French counterattack had begun. Though there were no plans for gas shows, the regiment would move up to follow the retreating Germans. Higgie and his company rolled their packs to leave in the middle of the night. For several days, they marched, stopping in filthy billets that had just been abandoned. Even in retreat, the German artillery was active. Shells fell around them and lit the sky, and planes buzzed in the dark overhead.
On Sunday, July 21, Higgie gathered his platoon and marched into Château-Thierry. They were right behind the American infantry; the Germans had been driven out that same morning. Corpses sprawled everywhere. The rank stench of rotting flesh hung over the city, so putrid that men had to put on their gas masks. The air swarmed with flies, thriving in the carrion left in the battle’s aftermath. Germans’ helmets, bayonets, and guns lay everywhere. When Higgie had a spare moment, he ducked into a German dugout. It was an officers’ bunker, with plush chairs and an open bottle of wine on the table with half-full glasses beside it. The Germans had left in a hurry.
Addison moved forward, too. As he marched through the countryside, he gaped at splintered tree trunks and towns smashed to rubble. The rank stench of rotting corpses filled his nostrils. Trekking through a forest, the men came across the curled-up corpse of an American soldier, body shrunken and charred, blackened flesh shrunk tight over the skull. Abandoned American equipment filled the woods. They came upon a half-destroyed village, the body of a long-dead German soldier splayed on the ground. Addison stared at the exposed organs, half-eaten by worms, and the back of the man’s skull gnawed away. They continued through the town, past a gully filled with abandoned German gas masks and overcoats, and—unpredictably—a copy of the novel David Copperfield. He said a silent prayer over the grave of another American he helped bury; the soldier had been dead only about a day, shot in the mouth and chest, his skin yellowish gray. They pressed on. Outside the town of Belleau, a half-dozen decaying bodies were along the road, tattered clothes hanging from shriveled, blackened skeletons. At the edge of the village, German prisoners were digging graves for at least twenty American dead covered with a canvas tarp. Outside the canvas, the body of a young lieutenant lay exposed, his blown-off leg laid atop his lifeless body. It was the gruesome side of war that Addison hadn’t yet seen, and he would never forget what it looked like.
In Tours, a hard wind battered against the windows and sent curtains of dust whirling over the rooftops. The gusts lasted all through the day on July 20, a fervent, unsettled turn to the weather, as if the sky had torn open and released a storm front galloping across the city. As the wind howled, Amos Fries spent the evening gabbing with another officer. The colonel felt cheerful. A cablegram had arrived from Washington authorizing 2,363 officers and more than 20,000 men for the gas service. “I feel I have done something that is going to contribute a great deal toward winning the war,” he wrote home.
The cablegram from Washington wasn’t the only reason for his high spirits. Every day, good news arrived in dispatches from the front. When he spent a night at First Corps headquarters, he heard the boom of the guns for himself, the barrage before the Americans and the French attacked along a thirty-mile front. For months, Fries had harbored a quiet pessimism about the war. When thousands of mustard shells had rained down on the Allied troops in the spring, causing huge numbers of casualties, he worried that the war would grind on in an endless collision of armies, sowing another season of death across the western front. But over the summer his outlook had been brightened by the more than eight hundred thousand Sammies that marched off transports in Brest and Boulogne to bolster the Allied armies. Many more would follow. The Americans had proved that they could fight with the best. And now a third battalion of gas troops, Companies E and F, had reached French shores as well, bringing the regiment to six companies. A seventh, Company Q, would soon join them to provide replacement soldiers when casualties thinned the ranks of the other six.
The counteroffensive had forced the Germans to retreat, but Fries knew that gains could be quickly reversed. How long the retreat would last was anyone’s guess, and Fries judged that at some point—perhaps at the Aisne River—the Germans might stop, regroup, and counterattack. Many more victories would be needed to bring peace. “Confidence is increasing all the time and the people are talking everywhere of the American troops. It is fine but one hates to think of the thousands of fine fellows that will find their last resting place in sunny France before the war ends,” he wrote home.
Fries would soon get new service stripes to sew onto his sleeve to mark his year of overseas duty. The gas service had been performing splendidly—twenty-five officers and men from the regiment received the French Croix de Guerre in mid-July. Positive reports arrived regularly about the gas regiment after the regiment had launched attacks on June 18 and 19 and the next month when the regiment carried out shows on the stabilized front in the Vosges region on July 8, then again between July 19 through 21.
Despite his growing optimism, Fries was troubled. Even though he was almost single-handedly responsible for the overseas work of the gas service, he had heard little from Washington hinting at a promotion. Brigadier generals commanded every service in France but his. Without a general at the helm of the Chemical Warfare Service in France, he worried that the service would be seen as inferior, as lesser than other army departments. “Don’t know what that means unless they think Gas isn’t worthy of having a B.G. at the head. Maybe they are looking for a better man,” he wrote home to Bessie. Still, he pretended not to care, writing breezily that if he didn’t get a promotion, so be it: “c’est la guerre”—that’s war.
Finally, on July 20, the War Department ordered General Pershing to name a brigadier general to serve as chief of the service, which didn’t necessarily mean Fries. “They have a chance to promote me if they want to. Whether they will or not remains to be seen,” he wrote home to Bessie.
While Fries fretted about his status, he didn’t shirk his responsibilities. There was no end to his work, and he couldn’t get new men fast enough. After his bout with grippe, Fries had tried to slow the pace of his schedule. Practically a teetotaler already, he stopped drinking completely and began resting and exercising more. He tried to stay relaxed and shorten his workdays. Sometimes he opened his collar and loosened his Sam Browne belt. Unable to sleep at night, he took afternoon catnaps and cooled down in an armchair shaded by a magnolia tree in the courtyard of his quarters.
The gas headquarters’ relocation in the spring forced Fries to shuttle back and forth between Tours, Paris, and Chaumont, sometimes for meetings where he had nothing to contribut
e. When he wasn’t in his limousine, the train rides turned into a tedious commute, the crowded cars uncomfortable in the sticky summer weather.
The tiresome 250-mile trip between Chaumont and Tours was becoming more and more frequent, as the gas experimental field had in many ways become the epicenter of Fries’s work. Construction had been mostly completed by May. Though still smaller than the American University Experiment Station in Washington, it had expanded into a village of sixty-four buildings, including barracks for hundreds of enlisted men, a laboratory, and a man-test chamber, along with a mortuary, administrative offices, a warehouse, a meteorological bureau, classroom buildings, a YMCA, an infirmary, stables, and pens for goats, dogs, cats, and rats. There were three firing ranges for Livens projectors and Stokes mortars, two artillery ranges, and a cloud gas emplacement. Three areas were fenced off for persistence tests with mustard gas. Captured German machine guns, projectors, and short-range artillery called Minenwerfer were brought to the field for testing. Chemists cracked open and tested dud shells rushed from the front for analysis, and there were buildings for filling the Allies’ own shells. With so much activity at the experimental field, Fries was there often. When the Gas Defense School opened, he spent almost a week there, hovering like a mother hen and delivering two lectures.
The experimental field resembled Mustard Hill in that it was a proving ground and a parade ground, a training campus and a school, a place to teach and to exhibit the use of chemical weapons. There was a crucial difference, though: its proximity to the front. The soldiers who made up its training corps and taught classes had hard-earned battlefield experience.