Hellfire Boys

by Theo Emery

  Fries was adamant that better training would reduce gas casualties substantially. Many casualties on the front resulted from poor training and inexperience; in a May 10 attack that lasted for seven hours and killed nineteen men, some of the men became hysterical with fear and knocked their comrades’ masks off. Others didn’t get their masks on quickly enough or removed them prematurely. In a different episode, an officer was disciplined for switching from one mask to another in the middle of an attack. “Americans yet have no real idea what gas means. Neither unfortunately, have many officers over here, but they are learning fast,” Fries wrote home to Bessie.

  Officers at the experimental field also solved technical problems that arose on the battlefield. When men at the front found a problem with mortar shells loaded with thermite, five hundred shells were sent to the gas field to be fixed. Equipment sent from the States could also be tested and tweaked at the field under an approximation of battlefield conditions.

  In addition to training, the experimental field’s staff of scientists also turned out reams of research reports. Every few days, Fries sent a passel of reports back to the States, handing them to couriers who boarded transports, carried the documents to Washington, and turned them over to Sibert in person. Some were translations of captured documents and prisoner interrogations. Many were technical reports with titles like Cleaning of Clothes and Underwear Contaminated with Yperite. In the July 23 packet, report number 25 from the British would be familiar to any of the scientists at Jones Point: Hexamethylenetetramine and Sodium Peroxide Incendiary Mixture. The British were also experimenting with Walter Scheele’s ship-bomb recipe.

  The experiment field was also headquarters for the Medical Division of the service. Though the physiological and pathological divisions in the United States had been studying effects of chemicals on the human body—as well as goats, dogs, mice, and other animals—they rarely got the opportunity to study and treat battlefield casualties. The number of gas cases had shot up since the Germans had begun soaking the front with mustard in the spring. Hundreds of casualties in March and April rose to almost 1,500 in May and 1,700 in the first two weeks of June. And then the numbers skyrocketed. In the second half of June, gas caused more than 6,200 casualties, and almost 6,000 more between July 1 and July 24.

  With the Americans suffering so many gas casualties, the Medical Division built a mobile decontamination unit to wash mustard and other chemicals off exposed soldiers. Unveiled on July 23, the unit was designed for quick assembly near troops gassed en masse. Showers rinsed off twenty-four men every ninety seconds, and up to seven hundred men without refilling the truck. Afterward, the men received clean clothes and soldiers showing symptoms of gas poisoning were hustled off for medical treatment.

  After the spring’s first incidents of mass casualties, a medical gas officer was assigned to every army division. The gas officer’s job was to train other officers and enlisted men in treating gas cases and supervising hospitals and dressing stations. It was also his job to sort out which exposure cases were real. Soldiers in gassed areas often claimed to be suffering from exposure when in fact they were not. In one instance, 281 men were admitted to a field hospital for treatment after a gas attack. The hospital’s commanding officer, puzzled by how few men exhibited physical symptoms, asked a medical board to review the cases. The board found that fewer than a third of the men were actually exposed; the rest returned to duty. The review concluded that some men were malingerers, claiming to be gassed to escape the trenches. A greater number probably believed they had been gassed and lapsed into what the doctors called “gas mania.”

  Between trips to Chaumont, Fries was in the midst of an ambitious project: forming the American strategy for chemical warfare for the rest of 1918 and into 1919. With the war entering a crucial stage, Fries believed that gas ought to play a major role in the offensives to come. That meant deciding what types, sizes, and quantities of chemical weapons the American forces would need, then determining the production necessary to meet that demand and the number of men required to carry it out.

  Fries envisioned gas troops that would operate very differently than the Hellfire Boys had up to that point. Rather than gas companies roving across France like a “moving circus,” he believed that every American division on the front should have its own regiment, able to launch attacks anywhere, anytime. With a million Americans flooding into France, that would require a vast expansion of the gas regiment. He had received everything that he had sought from Pershing—an independent service, a laboratory and a testing ground, and latitude to make demands of the domestic service—but he would need more. And to get it, he would need evidence that the expansion of the gas troops was justified.

  The problem was that the gas regiment wasn’t in action as frequently as Fries believed it should be. While the Château-Thierry offensive had been a success, the Hellfire Boys had played a minimal role in the victory. Despite “splendid targets” for gas attacks, the generals felt that the fluid nature of the front and the likelihood of a German retreat would prevent gas units from being effective—in essence, the line would move more quickly than the regiment would be able to prepare for and carry out an attack. Some of the commanders on the ground reported that more gas would have yielded more German casualties and a faster advance for the infantry; their statements provided grist for Fries’s schemes for an expansion of the service.

  Logistical problems also complicated Fries’s plans. In July, the French ran out of gas shells to supply the Americans, and the AEF ordered the domestic service to halt gas shipments to France—there was simply nowhere to put it until the problem of the shell shortage could be solved. It was only a temporary setback, however—the plants in the United States were on the brink of full production, and once the Ordnance Department could meet the demand, American gas would fill American shells, ready for shipment across the Atlantic.

  During the hot days of late July, Fries went to Paris for a conference and then returned to Tours for the weekend. He had just enough time for a good night’s sleep and a quiet Sunday morning before an afternoon call came ordering him to report back to the experimental field again. Fries left Tours midafternoon and drove most of the night. It wasn’t until the following morning of July 29 that Fries’s car turned off the Chaumont-to-Biesles road into the gas experimental field.

  Fries was at the experimental field for three days. In all likelihood, the emergency summons was to meet with an assistant secretary of war named Edward R. Stettinius, who traveled to France with an entire staff of accountants to survey the army supply-and-requisition system and represent the War Department on the War Industries Board. Fries had a vision for what his chemical corps would look like in the future. It was a vision of soldiers up and down the front with mobile gas tanks strapped to their backs. It was a vision of thermite showering down on the Germans like a molten summer rain, and fresh blankets of mustard lying like dew upon the battlefield. It was a vision of gas everywhere, omnipresent as air and earth—underfoot, overhead, and everywhere in between. For his vision to become a reality, it would have to go through Stettinius.

  After he left the experiment field, he met again with Stettinius at general headquarters about a week later about the gas program. “Evidently, he was satisfied,” Fries wrote.

  While Fries’s plans for the service gained momentum, the men of the gas and flame regiment were growing frustrated and restive over how rarely they were in action. Near the ruins of Château-Thierry, Company B was put to work with picks and shovels, not projectors and Stokes mortars. As the Americans continued to push the Germans back toward Reims, the gas regiment had been ordered to help repair the roads for the advancing American army. For a week, Company B dragged downed trees, filled shell craters, and buried the dead. Rain turned the roads into a slippery morass by day and seeped into men’s tents at night. The men grumbled that their skills weren’t being used and that German prisoners ought to be doing such work. Higgie carried out his duties stoi
cally, although he got a break from the work because of a huge blister on his foot. One day, Jabine worked for twenty-four hours straight with no food and no sleep, helping to move sixteen thousand rounds of artillery ammunition up to the front.

  On July 27, it was time to move again. After breakfast, Higgie set out on roads that were rivers of mud. Drenched to the bone, the men reached Épaux-Bézu about noon. Higgie and Jabine were back at work on the roads the next day and then ordered to clean up a farm for an ammunition dump. When they entered the farmhouse, something was scrawled on the wall. They deciphered the marks. The farmhouse was a crypt—twelve Germans were buried under the floor.

  Word arrived from headquarters to prepare for a Stokes mortar show with smoke and thermite. But the orders only included the First Platoon, led by Lieutenant Hanlon and another officer, Lieutenant Harry Favre. Higgie and Jabine’s Second Platoon would sit out the show. Higgie had an easy day working at the ammunition depot and playing poker in the afternoon. They worked on the road for a bit and unloaded shells for that night’s attack, then had a hearty supper.

  Though his men were eager to get back in action, Hanlon had a bad feeling. First Platoon had had its share of casualties, and the deaths among them had turned into an eerie pattern. The first private killed in the regiment had come from the platoon, as had the first noncommissioned officer. Hanlon confessed to the chaplain, Addison, that he had a premonition that the trend would continue and that the first commissioned officer to die would come from his platoon, too.

  The carrying party to lug the projectors up to the front left Épaux-Bézu at dusk, eighty men in all—twenty from Company B and sixty from Company D. They arrived at the forward ammunition depot at Villers-sur-Fère at 10:00 p.m. Division headquarters dithered for hours over whether to go ahead with the show; around midnight, they finally decided to attack in the early morning. Between the ammunition depot and the mortar position lay two miles of unfamiliar terrain infested with pockets of mustard gas, with shells falling all around. In the thick of a firefight, the carry began. With Hanlon at the rear, the long line of men stumbled through the dark, each hoisting as much as one hundred pounds of mortars and shells. Machine-gun bullets snapped over their heads, and shells whined in the distance. They crossed through marshy woods. An earsplitting crash, and clods of clay, rocks, and shell fragments rang against their steel helmets. In the darkness, a laugh, a curse, and a hoarse order to continue. The men crossed a bridge. The path grew muddier and more slippery. Men slid and fell under the weight of their portage. They finally reached an embankment and their own infantry in dugouts.

  “Are you going to relieve us?” one of the infantrymen hissed. They were not. The line crept on. More shells fell; one shell-shocked man began to crawl away into the darkness in terror. They rested in a marshy meadow. A medic ran up to the front of the line—a man was hurt, his head split open by shrapnel. He was loaded onto a stretcher and carried back toward the rear. More shells fell. Some were close, exploding toward the rear of the carrying line. The men at the front followed a line of willow trees and entered a patch of woods. Machine-gun bullets thunked into tree trunks around them. They pressed onward into the woods, where they found their hidden mortar position. Then they stopped to count their men.

  There were four casualties, all from Company B. A shell had landed almost on top of the rearmost men, killing two privates and badly wounding Hanlon and a third private. Hanlon died on his way back to the dressing station. His premonition had proved true. Later that day, the smoke and thermite show went off, followed by a second several hours later led by Favre alone.

  Shaken and grieving, the platoon arrived back at the billets at dawn and passed the news on to the rest of the company. Higginbottom noted Hanlon’s death in his diary the following day in his laconic shorthand. For Jabine, who had craved the company of his new friend, the shock was deep. “He and I were becoming good friends and it was a sad blow when he was lost,” Jabine wrote in a letter home.

  Hanlon’s funeral was at Chaumont on August 2, with members of his platoon as his pallbearers. Addison didn’t know about his former roommate’s death until the morning mail arrived the day after he was buried. The chaplain was still in bed in the officers’ quarters when a captain stunned the other officers with the news. One officer burst into tears. They spent the rest of the day in mournful silence. “It was a painful shock to all of us,” Addison recalled. By the end of August, the gas experimental field had a new name: Hanlon Field.

  Each morning, streetcars trundled up Massachusetts Avenue toward American University, packed with young soldiers headed to the experiment station from their rented rooms and boardinghouses. The notoriously unreliable trolleys made for an anxious journey; if the soldiers arrived even a few minutes late, they were docked a half day’s leave. In the predawn darkness, Charles William Maurer was one of the soldiers making the daily commute up to the hill and through the gates of the experiment station. Gazing out at the world through wire-rimmed glasses, Will yearned for distant places. He had wanted to go to France but ended up instead at American University.

  He was twenty-three, a preacher’s boy from West Texas. Short and compact, Maurer had a thatch of black hair that he combed to the side in a rakish wave. Even when he wore his uniform, his outsize ears and lopsided grin gave him a boyish look. His father was a hard-shell Baptist who had brought his wife and three boys to West Texas to preach. They settled in Marfa, a crossroads pinched between infinite sky and endless plains, where he built another Baptist church. Will and his two brothers grew up in the parsonage with a porch looking out across the rolling desert.

  Like his father, Will was restless. Even before he finished his studies at Baylor University, he applied to become a medical missionary in 1915 and was rejected. He was turned down again the following year—a physical exam revealed an irregular heartbeat and a hearing problem. He tried to enlist in the army and failed the army physical, too. By 1918, he still had not graduated. Desperate to get overseas, Will saw advertisements in scientific journals seeking volunteers for the gas and flame regiment. Even though he hadn’t taken many chemistry courses, he decided to take a gamble. He would go to Washington, present himself to the scientists, and try to enlist there, in the hope that the gas service might eventually land him in France. “I liked the idea of feeding the Huns their own medicine,” he wrote in a letter to Baylor after the war.

  After he decided on the plan, he returned to Marfa to say goodbye to his parents before leaving for Washington. He was at home when a letter from the army arrived at the parsonage. The letter ordered him to report to duty at an induction board in San Antonio at 8:30 a.m. on April 26, 1918. “From and after the day and hour just named you will be a soldier in the military service of the United States.” Though the army had already rejected him once, the army physicians deemed him fit to serve. From there, he went on for training at Fort Travis in Galveston.

  Many of his Baylor classmates were in his company; his former dorm roommate was in the next barracks over from his. As the unit trained for its June departure, Will imagined mighty exploits in France with his friends. Then a telegram arrived dashing Will’s hopes again. Instead of sending him on to France, the telegram ordered him to report to Washington, almost exactly as he had originally planned. His chemistry classes at Baylor made him a candidate for the Research Division at American University after all, as Manning’s census of scientists had intended. Will would never see the trenches of Europe. Though he was only going as far as Washington, he still boarded the train with the army unit from Fort Travis and headed east. When the train arrived at Union Station, he waved goodbye to his classmates and disembarked onto the platform by himself.

  Will arrived in a city transformed. The war had turned the nation’s sleepy and provincial capital into a metropolitan boomtown. Patriotic bunting hung from storefronts and window ledges, alongside HELP WANTED signs from business owners desperate for employees. Theaters filled to capacity at night, packed hotels pu
t up guests on cots in overflowing parlors, and chefs had trouble finding enough food to serve their patrons. Every patch of dirt, including parks in sight of the Capitol, had been turned over and the soil hoed into war gardens.

  Mustard Hill was going through a boom as well. New wooden buildings peppered the hill, and dozens of construction projects were under way. Construction of an explosives laboratory was finished in May, a bacteriological lab in early June, and a pyrotechnics lab a week later. A new dog kennel was built for canine test subjects and a stable for horses. Plumbers laid new water lines and hauled stone benches into the labs. On the Chemical Warfare Service’s side of the campus, the buildings haphazardly dotted the hillsides all around McKinley Hall, wherever the scientists deemed it most convenient and without any clearance from their landlords at the university. Foreboding symbols and phrases decorated the shacks that cropped up all over the hill. On shack number 5, the chemists wrote LOOK AND RUN, along with a crude skull and crossbones. There were new fences, new gas lines, new electrical lines. Plans for rail lines were drawn up, so that train cars could supply the station and connect to trunk lines to Baltimore and beyond. Engineers drew up blueprints for two new explosives pits. On the back side of the campus, down the hillside from the fenced perimeter of the station, was the area that the soldiers called Death Valley and Arsenic Valley, along with a disposal pit they called Hades.

  George Burrell had plans for many more projects as well. He wanted a central heating plant, a steel tower for experimental work. He wanted to expand the infirmary, the man-test laboratory, and the physiological laboratory. Work was also still under way on the huge new chemical laboratory that Manning had demanded be built across the quad from the College of History. It was, by far, the most expensive construction project on the hill, with a price tag of $250,000—an amount that would soon prove to be woefully underestimated. He also planned a new ventilation system for Catholic University’s lab across town, so that work could resume there.