by Theo Emery
Despite Burrell’s and Sibert’s insistence on the safety of the work, the accident would have a profound impact on Mustard Hill that would dramatically shape the future of the service. In the short term, however, the accident provided an unexpected boon in one respect: a cover story to explain to lower-level researchers at American University why the lewisite experiments were ending. Winford Lee Lewis had to tell his loyal cadres of chemists, who had endured terrible conditions and personal injury in their investigations, that the lewisite research was shutting down because the compound was too dangerous and uncontrollable to be used. The lie pained Lewis because he knew the opposite to be true—in fact, lewisite was considered wildly successful, so much so that it had become a key part of the U.S. chemical warfare strategy for the coming months. Lewis also knew that work on the large-scale manufacture of lewisite was already well under way in Willoughby, Ohio, far away from Washington and under a deep cloak of secrecy. He watched in dismay as the morale of his unit plummeted over the misinformation that their discovery had failed. “My men were depressed and the esprit de corps suffered greatly,” he recalled years later.
There was something strange about Willoughby, Ohio. Nate Simpson had never heard of the town where he was headed, and no one else seemed to know anything about it either as he asked around at the YMCA in downtown Cleveland. A fresh-faced chemist with a shy smile and spectacles, Simpson had turned twenty-three a few weeks before he was inducted into the army. He was bundled off to Fort Dix in New Jersey to join the 153rd Depot Brigade, where he spent several miserable weeks slogging through bleak weather and choking down inedible food before he got new orders to pack his bag for Ohio.
The YMCA in downtown Cleveland, with its enormous illuminated sign on the roof, was a huge, bustling way station for hundreds of young men, who could exercise in gymnasium classes, take Bible classes, attend club meetings, and mingle in the packed dining room at night. Simpson was relieved to have avoided the trenches, but anxious about his mysterious destination. After a day or so, the YMCA manager told Simpson and the nine other men who had arrived at the same time to report to the General Electric Company at Nela Park. A streetcar there would take them to Willoughby.
When the ten men boarded the Willoughby trolley at Nela Park, the conductor collected their fares and told them to sit together. No one else boarded the car. The conductor didn’t help the situation when he tried to make lighthearted banter with them.
“You know what? There is something mighty queer about that town, Willoughby,” he told Simpson and the other men. “I’ve taken more than a hundred GI’s out there, and never brought one back!” Not one of the men laughed.
The trolley trip ended at the Ben-Hur plant. After Simpson was ushered past the armed guards and inside the barbed-wire fence, the plant superintendent warned him that if he said anything about the plant, even the slightest word to his family back home, he would be court-martialed. There was no mailing address for the station, only a generic drop box with the inscrutable name LOCK DRAWER 426, which routed mail through Cleveland. Every letter that went in or out was read and censored. He was forbidden from leaving the plant except for meals, which he would take in town with all the other soldiers. There were no barracks; he was assigned a cot on the crowded ground floor of one of the office buildings.
Simpson was among a second wave of soldiers to arrive at Willoughby after the civilian contractors had wrapped up their work. Within days of Dorsey giving the plant the green light, a frenzy of activity had enveloped the factory. James Bryant Conant had arrived in July, with a warning from Dorsey that there were no officers’ quarters at the factory, and he would have to find his own lodgings. The same day as Conant’s arrival, Dorsey assigned a lieutenant colonel under his command as plant superintendent. He also assigned twenty-five soldiers to Willoughby to guard the plant day and night while it was converted into a chemical plant.
Absolutely secrecy was demanded of everyone connected to the factory, under threat of court-martial. Even uttering the word “Willoughby” was forbidden. A story circulated about the consequences of loose lips. When a Nela Park employee asked an ill-advised question about the mysterious activity at the other end of the streetcar line, he was promptly sent to Willoughby. Word of the incident spread among men in the service, and soon Willoughby Station gained a nickname. “The Mousetrap,” they called it, because the men who went in never came out.
Rumors flew through the town that something big was happening down at the old Ben-Hur plant, but what it was, no one could say. The only thing that could be coaxed out of John Fackler, the attorney for the Ben-Hur Company’s bankruptcy receivership, was something vague about supplies for the government. And that construction was in the offing—a lot of it, “the building of 300 houses,” according to an article that ran in the Willoughby Republican on the same day Dorsey appeared at the Ben-Hur plant. Details in the newspaper were vague and few. The Republican’s editors, it turned out, knew far more about what was going on in Willoughby than the pages of the newspaper revealed. The Republican agreed not to report details of what was afoot down at the Ben-Hur plant in exchange for an eventual exclusive. For now, the newspaper would sit on the story.
The first job was to erect a barbed-wire fence, which went up around the perimeter of the property in short order. The plant was in rough shape—worse than Dorsey had grasped when he made his cursory tour of the property. The adjoining office building had been outfitted as a functioning headquarters for the plant, but the previous winter’s cold had ruined all the plumbing, and much of the electrical wiring needed replacement. The factory building itself was in even worse condition. The rolling dirt floor dipped several feet below grade in places. No plumbing or bathrooms. No phone lines. There was no rail siding for deliveries by train.
Workmen quickly rewired the buildings and strung phone lines, graded the dirt floor, poured concrete. Draftsmen bent over improvised tables as the building took shape around them. Carpenters under Conant’s supervision went to work to set up a laboratory in one corner of the factory. When Conant ordered the equipment for the plant, it was shipped in trunks, as if it were personal baggage.
Vast amounts of chemicals were needed for the Willoughby operation—Dorsey requested thirty-three tons of sulfuric acid per day, for example, a staggering quantity that required permission from the War Industries Board lest it disrupt other industrial markets. Because the orders for Willoughby piled up so quickly at Nela Park, the Development Division brought in a man to sort out the mess, a twenty-nine-year-old sergeant from Iowa named Harold French Davidson. Davidson took over the job of procuring chemicals. The best chemists in the country were hard at work in Willoughby “manufacturing something nice for the ‘Huns,’” he wrote home to his mother. Of course, he never actually saw these chemists because they were sequestered inside the Mousetrap, “and if you get in there you do not get out again.”
On the same Saturday that the lewisite explosion injured Senator Scott in Washington, two medical officers arrived at Willoughby to take charge of emergency care at the plant, where it was almost guaranteed that injuries would be rampant. The two officers ordered supplies and equipment and instituted physical examinations of the enlisted men and the sanitary conditions at the plant. The chief of the Medical Corps recommended that the proposed officers’ quarters be made into a temporary hospital until a more permanent one could be built and equipped. Not long after, the plant had its first fatality—a civilian contractor named Anthony Tripping from nearby Painesville, who died after a bin of castings tipped over on top of him.
Before Simpson arrived at the plant, a kind of grim, rigid martial law dictated life for the men of the Mousetrap during its first few weeks. While enlisted men like Simpson slept on the floor of the office building, officers slept in tents outside. There was no mess hall or kitchen either. At mealtimes, guards marched the men to the Willoughby Inn, where they gulped down their meals and then returned to the plant. If they met anyone from town, the
y were not to mention anything about what was going on behind the barbed-wire fence. Each morning, the public-address system came alive, and Major Conant’s voice crackled over the speakers singing “All Up” to rouse the soldiers for the workdays that lasted from 6:00 a.m. until 10:00 p.m. or midnight, seven days a week. Confined by barbed wire, the men spent long days toiling to ensure that lewisite remained on Conant’s ambitious schedule. Inside the plant, a giant war map hung on an office wall, pins denoting the positions of the armies in Europe. Other than the map and the regimented mealtime expeditions, it was as if the outside world no longer existed.
On August 10, General Sibert visited the lewisite plant to see the progress for himself. Goliath’s visit proved to be a boon to the soldiers stationed there. The men who assembled to listen to their chief pledged to guard the secrets of Ben-Hur, so Sibert issued an order relaxing the strict rules at the plant, which would henceforth be governed as a regular army post, albeit with a few more restrictions. Men could receive passes to leave the plant and even visit Willoughbeach, the town to the northwest on the shores of Lake Erie. Of course, the men were still strictly forbidden from discussing the work or even acknowledging the existence of the plant. Cleveland was also off-limits, but now at least they had a modicum of freedom that they didn’t have before.
Even though the purpose of the plant was shrouded in mystery, the residents of Willoughby welcomed the influx of soldiers into their midst. Each morning, town residents left fresh fruit outside the gates of the stockade and occasionally cakes and pies as well. The townspeople collected books and magazines for the men and gave them bathing suits so that they could swim in Lake Erie. Residents invited the men into their homes for dinners. The Red Cross held a dance for the soldiers on August 31, serving ice cream, cake, and punch. Music from a donated phonograph and piano brightened the evenings.
Despite the occasional chance for socializing and relaxation, the work at the plant moved ahead at a breakneck pace. Life at the Mousetrap was a monotonous blur, with Conant’s voice blaring over the public-address system at the start of each day, signaling another long work shift stretching from sunup to sundown. The marches to the inn for meals punctuated the tiresome days, which ended after dark in cramped and crowded bivouacs in the half-completed buildings.
Conant’s laboratory was the first part of the plant to be completed and was ready for operation on August 11. Throughout the frantic construction at the plant, Conant stayed in touch with colleagues back at American University, where the work on lewisite had gravitated from Catholic University. Conant was as tightly bound to secrecy as the soldiers under his command. In his correspondence with Elmer Kohler back on the hill, he used the code name “G-34” when he referred to lewisite. Conant reported that everything was moving smoothly in Willoughby and, in a veiled reference to Sibert’s loosening of the rules at the plant, that “the stockade is more flexible than was first planned.” Kohler kept Conant up to date on the work related to the work at American University and ribbed Conant for having “disgracefully abandoned” the efforts there.
The two also discussed problems resulting from the militarization of the research, when it was moved out from under the Bureau of Mines in July. It had become extremely difficult to quickly bring new scientists into the research because the army had capped the number of new soldiers who could join the effort. The service had already exceeded its quota, which meant that lower-ranking officers couldn’t get promotions and new scientists couldn’t be recruited to the effort unless replacing someone who was departing, creating serious personnel shortages for the scientists, Kohler wrote. Conant had hoped that a chemist he worked with at American University named Frank R. Fields could be commissioned and sent to Willoughby. But such commissions had become hard to come by under the new military rules. Moreover, Fields was injured in an explosion, perhaps even the same blast that tore apart shack number 8 and gassed former senator Scott, though Kohler wasn’t specific in his letter to Conant. Even though Fields exhibited no ill effects at first, he was given a week’s furlough “to get it out of his system.” But he fell ill again soon after he returned to the American University lab, unable to keep down any food other than ice cream. “I doubt very much whether you can count on him doing any more G-34 work,” Kohler wrote. It was a blow to Conant; now, it was impossible for Fields to come work at the Mousetrap.
The news from Kohler came just as trained chemists were most in demand in Willoughby. By mid-August, civilian contractors were finishing their work and departing the plant, replaced by chemists and engineers who would work on the manufacturing plant itself. Originally Conant had estimated that the operation would require about three hundred men. But after reexamining the plant’s capacity and the demands for its output, the station superintendent calculated that the manufacturing capability would need to be doubled. Everything about the plant needed to be quickly redrawn as a result, from the layout of the factory to the ventilation system to the barracks. The plant needed more water, more electricity, more land. And above all, it needed more men to build, operate, and maintain the expanded operation; instead of three hundred men, the plant would need more than a thousand.
Inevitably, accidents occurred at the Mousetrap as well. A chemist named John F. McGrory, a private first class who arrived at Ben-Hur on August 14, was badly burned on both hands and his head in a chemical accident. Confined to quarters for more than a month, he was unable to do work of any type, until he was eventually assigned to a clerical job, his skills as a chemist going to waste.
To protect the men, a shipment of the latest gas masks—known as the Tissot model—arrived at the plant in the third week of August. Drills became an ingrained part of the daily regimen. Masks were always in easy reach in the event of an explosion or a leak, and Klaxon horns and alarms were installed throughout the station. A fire chief made frequent inspections of protective equipment, and laundry facilities made sure that no one at the plant ever left the property wearing clothes tainted with toxins.
Experimental units for the first two steps of the five-step lewisite-production process were completed on August 30. By September 10, the men completed the apparatus for producing the raw materials for lewisite. One of the plants worked well; the other had unsuccessful early runs but was soon running smoothly as well. Within a few weeks, the apparatus for the other steps in the process had been ironed out, and full-size equipment for large-scale production was ordered. Rail sidings were placed on each side of the factory, and materials began pouring into the plant. The zero hour for full-scale production of lewisite was set. By November 15, the plant needed to be up and running.
At Jones Point, tension between Scheele and his captors had calmed and the laboratory had settled into a kind of steady, quiet rhythm. Levering was out of the picture as far as the day-to-day operations. Agent Frank X. O’Donnell filed brief daily reports, a monotonous recitation that nothing of consequence was happening at the compound. On August 15, a car went down to the Haverstraw hotel. Marie Scheele loaded her belongings and motored back to Jones Point, where she at last took up residence with her husband in his barracks, with a federal agent sleeping in the next room.
Two days later, Walter Scheele’s name surfaced in the news again. President Wilson signed an order forbidding aliens in the United States from leaving the country without special State Department permits. Quoting the State Department, articles about the order noted that several infamous Germans, Scheele among them, had escaped to Cuba in 1916 because of inadequate laws. While the articles didn’t say he wasn’t in custody, they left the distinct impression that he was still at large—perhaps a deliberate effort by the government to cast doubt about Scheele’s whereabouts.
The calm lasted until September 16, when O’Donnell arrived for his shift. Overnight, Scheele had fallen seriously ill, and signs pointed to appendicitis. Getting medical help while keeping his identity hidden was a tricky proposition. Charles DeWoody instructed O’Donnell to find surgeons and ordered him and
another agent to stay by Scheele’s side. A doctor from nearby Stony Point recommended monitoring Scheele until morning; in the meantime, he suggested surgeons who could come up from Manhattan if necessary.
In the morning, the physician examined Scheele, who showed improvement. By that afternoon, though, the chemist had taken a turn for the worse. This time the doctor said Scheele needed to go immediately to Nyack Hospital, more than twenty miles away. The doctor, Scheele, his wife, and the agents all dashed to Nyack. O’Donnell frantically tried to call the surgeons in New York but couldn’t reach either of them. By 9:00 p.m., Scheele’s condition was considered life threatening, and there was no more time to wait. At 9:15 p.m., the chief surgeon at Nyack Hospital sliced open his abdomen and removed his appendix, with four other doctors assisting and the agents and Marie waiting anxiously outside the operating room.
The operation was a success, and by midnight Scheele was resting comfortably. He was given a private room, and no one was allowed inside without the consent of the agents guarding his door. O’Donnell got a nearby room where he could stay for as long as the doctor was hospitalized, and settled in to wait.
Celebration rippled through Paris as Amos Fries arrived in the city on August 11. A few days earlier, a long-awaited British drive on the Amiens front had proved wildly successful. The attack had surprised the Germans, throwing their troops into disarray and forcing a chaotic retreat. The Allies took tens of thousands of prisoners and seized hundreds of guns. For the first time in years, the threat to Paris had diminished. The Germans’ long-range cannons briefly resumed their shelling of the city but soon fell silent. As the days went on, more good news arrived with every hour, and celebrations broke out in the sun-dappled streets.
Fries had good news of his own. For weeks, he had anxiously awaited word from Pershing or the War Department that he would reach the rank that he craved. It arrived in the form of a telegram, addressed to “Brigadier General Amos Fries.” Inadvertent, perhaps, but as sure a sign as any that Washington’s bureaucratic gears were turning, and he would soon have his promotion. His office erupted in celebration at the hint that their chief was moving up in the ranks. The official confirmation came a day later in another telegram recommending his promotion. It would mean more work, more travel, more long days, but it also elevated the Chemical Warfare Service another notch higher on the totem pole of the military.