by Theo Emery
The Mousetrap had a looming deadline, too, but its schedule was a secret too sensitive to even whisper. Under Conant’s schedule, lewisite production was to start by November 15.
Earlier that fall, plans to build barracks and mess halls for five hundred men needed to be redrawn in midconstruction to accommodate the eleven hundred men that were now slated to fill the facility. In late September, hundreds more workers arrived. The supervisor at the commissary of a nearby army camp came with two trucks full of kitchen equipment, and the army began canvassing the town for additional sleeping quarters for the men, such as the local telephone company building and even the town hall.
In early October, the contractor finished the first barracks and mess hall, completed with record speed. Work soon began on a forty-eight-bed hospital. Frenzied construction filled the property as the contractor erected a storage building on the compound’s north side, along with sheds, a transformer house, and a garage. The New York Central Railroad completed two rail sidings, one on either side of the plant, to at last allow materials to be brought directly to Ben-Hur by train. Vast amounts of equipment, materials, and supplies began to pour into the plant.
It was fall, and around the Ben-Hur stockade, the leaves turned shades of gold and red. For soldiers like Nate Simpson, the new barracks were surely a welcome addition, and the mess hall meant the men no longer made the hungry march down to the Willoughby Inn in front of curious townspeople and shop owners.
With the additions to the property came constant reminders of the dangers the men faced. Gas alarms sounded periodically, and leaks triggered the Klaxon horns. Sometimes they were drills, sometimes they were real, but every time, the soldiers reached for their masks. Simpson’s circle of friends, the ones he called the Nifty Nine and Briggs, had become a tight-knit group since the day they all left the Cleveland YMCA together. The ten were from all over the country, each with his own distinctive regional accent, including one from Louisiana with a thick drawl. One of the ten requested duties that didn’t involve making poison gas—probably out of religious conviction—and was assigned to the kitchen, where he cooked steaks to perfection.
Though the men were driven to the point of exhaustion, there were opportunities to get out of the compound. The townspeople invited soldiers for home-cooked meals; Simpson and the rest of the Nifty Nine got one of those invitations and descended on the family for dinner. Another time, when Simpson and a friend wandered through Willoughby peering into shopwindows on a Sunday, a store owner and his wife asked if they wanted an automobile tour of the area. They turned out to be Mormons trying to convert the men.
The days flowed past in a blur. On November 1, the pieces were in place. All of the station’s buildings were complete. One of the two precursor chemicals was on hand in sufficient quantity to begin mass production, and the plant for the second precursor was almost finished. The lewisite factory was ready ahead of schedule.
What happened in Willoughby over the final days of October and the beginning of November 1918 was a closely kept secret of the war, one that a century later remains shrouded in mystery. It’s not clear precisely when production began, but at some point, the Ben-Hur lewisite plant came to life. The building filled with the sound of purring water pumps and the compressors on the refrigeration units. The ventilation fans roared, the agitator motors hummed as they stirred the kettles of lewisite, engine belts slapped overhead, and heating steam hissed as it vented from escape valves. After the collection kettles filled with viscous liquid, masked soldiers swaddled in gas-defense suits slowly and carefully drained the liquid into fifty-five-gallon drums.
Reports of the exact quantity of lewisite made at Willoughby varied wildly after the war. One account claimed that the plant generated 150 tons, and Amos Fries wrote in a 1921 letter that “we were starting to make ten tons per day of lewisite” after the plant was complete. Records suggest that the factory produced much less: only a single batch of 17,300 pounds—or 8.65 tons—that filled twenty-two steel drums weighing 19,544 pounds when full, a first batch of the new gas that would be sprung upon the Germans in 1919.
Willoughby wasn’t the only chemical warfare outpost that kicked into production in the waning days of October. Like water through sluice gates of a dam, a river of chemical weapons streamed out of American gas factories. In Niagara Falls, the phosgene plant at the Oldbury Electro-Chemical Company roared at full capacity, generating ten tons each day. Two units at Edgewood were making 10 tons or more of phosgene per day, with additional plants there expected to boost that output to 80 tons per day by January 1. The refurbished factories at Edgewood using the improved British formula produced 17 tons of mustard per day; Dow Chemical’s mustard plants in Midland, Michigan, added 3 to 4 tons of mustard daily. The American Synthetic Color Company in Stamford, Connecticut, was churning out 15 tons of chloropicrin each day, with Edgewood producing another 15 tons.
When all of the plants were at full capacity, the service expected to make 900 tons of mustard per month; 1,050 tons of phosgene; 1,500 tons of chloropicrin; 895 tons of chlorine and lewisite. Shell-filling plants could fill 2.4 million 77-millimeter shells per month; 450,000 7.4-inch shells; 540,000 155-millimeter shells; 750,000 gas grenades; 480,000 smoke grenades; and 30,000 Livens drums. After America’s slow start, its capacity for gas warfare was greater than that of all its allies combined, and more even than Germany’s.
Before the weapons could be loaded onto ships, they needed to get safely to port. Moving explosives or poison gas on the nation’s rail lines demanded a carefully choreographed plan. The U.S. Railroad Administration, which President Wilson created when he nationalized the country’s rail system earlier in 1918, required special gas trains outfitted according to rigorous new safety regulations. Armed guards with gas masks accompanied the freight, the tracks ahead and behind were cleared of other trains, and the trains moved slowly on carefully synchronized schedules so they could travel unimpeded.
On November 9, an officer in charge of transportation drew up a list of all of the weapons awaiting shipment overseas. There were 125,000 artillery shells packed with mustard, 125,000 chloropicrin-filled shells, 125,000 gas grenades, and 500 Livens drums, all ready for shipment.
Once the chemicals reached port, they were loaded onto ships outfitted for gas cargo per Sibert’s instructions. The USS Isabella was finished on November 5. Work on the USS Munwood would be done November 10. And the USS Elinor would be ready to sail on November 15.
The Elinor had been docked in Baltimore since September 17 after a three-week passage from France. The forty-three-hundred-ton freighter was christened the General de Castelnau after she rolled off the dry docks in Baltimore, then was commissioned by the U.S. Navy for wartime service and renamed in March of 1918. The officer in charge, Lieutenant Commander Carl H. Anderson, had joined the crew of about ninety men in June and had been on the Elinor for two transatlantic voyages. Black-and-white camouflage striped her hull, curled over the bridge, and ringed the smokestack. Since the ship had docked at Baltimore, stevedores had been loading up the ship with hundreds of pounds of fish, beef, bread, and other provisions for her next voyage.
While she was docked, workmen outfitted the ship to carry chemical weapons, installing ventilation fans that sat atop the deck and exhaust ducts leading to the rear of the ship to fumigate toxic vapors from the hold in case there was a leak or a spill. On November 8, after the cargo boom and the holds had been inspected, the ship’s freight began coming aboard. There were 144 gas masks for the crew, along with about 160,000 pieces of ordnance: 125,000 gas shells and 11,700 Livens drums in the holds below and 25,000 gas shells aboveboard on deck, ready for delivery to France.
Chapter Fifteen
“War to the Knife”
After a four-hour ride to the town of Romagne-sous-Montfaucon on October 27, Higgie’s platoon jumped down from their truck as shells began to rain onto the village. Higgie ran for cover as artillery thundered all around them and the streets filled with sn
eezing gas. They finally found a dugout and squeezed inside when a shell landed outside the doorway. The blast roared in through the entrance, a shard injuring Higgie’s lieutenant in the head. Higgie was all right, but they couldn’t stay in the dugout, and their orders were to remain overnight in the town. He scurried through the ruined streets until the platoon found another crowded dugout with barely any room. Higgie squeezed into a corner and propped himself upright against some stairs, where he dozed until dawn.
When morning finally came, they hunted for a better shelter. They discovered a grubby dugout they cleaned up as best they could, clearing out the dirt and rubble and hauling in a small stove. The next day, they found abandoned machine guns and set them up behind the billet. When they were bored, they spent idle hours firing at German planes. Propaganda leaflets fluttered down around them, urging surrender. After lunch on October 31, Higgie and Shap went up to their position to set their Stokes mortars. It was a month into the Battle of the Meuse-Argonne, and the next phase of the offensive was starting on November 1. Company B’s job was to set a smoke screen for the Eighty-Ninth Division infantry. It was a rough hike through heavy artillery fire; one of Higgie’s friends was killed on the way back. When they returned to the billet, they spent the afternoon in their improvised machine-gun nest behind the dugout, spitting bullets skyward in an angry refrain.
That night, Higgie had been asleep only a few hours when someone shook him awake. Night was for fighting, a sodden cloak for an army of muddy ghosts fumbling with guns and gas masks and mortars in the mist and smoke. Around midnight, the platoon clambered up into a truck and headed toward the line, following a sunken road pocked with shell craters. The truck bounced along the torn-up road. Swaying and jolting in the back, Higgie and the other men heard artillery all around. The truck came across a crater where a shell had just landed on top of an infantry unit, killing several men. A stretcher-bearer in the truck with Higgie cracked at the sight, hysterical with fear. They sent him back behind the lines, to safety, and the truck continued on through the storm of artillery fire around them. There was no place for the men who lost their nerve as death stared them in the eye.
When Higgie reached his position, he reseated his mortar before zero hour at 5:30 a.m. Stokes mortars fired to his right, and bursting shells showered the German lines with thermite, streaks of liquid metal searing the night sky. The Germans fired back. As Higgie watched, shells fell on Company F’s guns and killed an entire gun team of five men right before his eyes. At 3:30 a.m., the American artillery opened up with a bellow and a deafening chatter of machine guns. It was the heaviest barrage Higgie had ever heard. So many shells were going up that Higgie wondered if a German raiding party had come over the top at them. A dithering sergeant named Earl H. Bailey had replaced the injured lieutenant. As zero hour approached for the firing of the smoke shells, Bailey was so nervous that he scarcely knew what to do. Higgie had to yell instructions at him through the roar of the guns.
At zero hour, the show went off without a hitch. Higgie fired the guns; other men in the platoon watched the angle to make sure the mortars were shooting at the right trajectory. After the show, Higgie and his platoon took cover for a few minutes. As the firefight thundered around them, Sergeant Bailey was paralyzed with indecision, unsure of whether the men should shelter in place or move. German shells were falling behind them. Higgie knew from experience that the barrage would soon creep toward their position. We better get moving, Higgie yelled through the noise, and they did. Soon after they vacated the trench, bombs fell directly on it.
They sprinted away from the lines as fast as they could, toward the Romagne road. Clouds of sneezing gas filled the woods. The gas seeped through the filters and made the masks impossible to wear, so Higgie and the others left them off, praying that nothing more deadly—mustard or phosgene—was mixed in. When the platoon reached the sunken road, they lay down in some shell holes to rest.
Higgie was still trying to catch his breath when a shell whistled directly toward him through the mist and gas. Private First Class John Bleight, a stout farmer’s son from Florida who had marched out of American University with Higgie, hugged the ground in the crater beside Higgie’s when the shell detonated. A shell fragment whizzed into the back of Bleight’s skull and killed him instantly.
Higgie and the rest of the fellows straggled back to Romagne, ate some breakfast, and then went to bed, exhausted. He slept until noon. It was a misty, overcast day. For once, no airplanes muttered overhead. The seventy-fives and the other big guns fired all through the day. Thousands of German prisoners streamed back from the Allied lines. Trucks loaded with ammunition and supplies crowded the road through Romagne, following the advancing infantry northward. Higgie wasn’t prone to emotion, but as he wrote in his diary, there was a sense of disbelief, even sadness, that Bleight’s life had been snuffed out beside him while he had been spared.
When daylight came, some of the fellows returned to the sunken road to find and bury Bleight. Higgie stayed behind and chopped wood by himself until rain drove him inside. The AEF printed up a leaflet to circulate among the troops announcing that Austria, Bulgaria, and Turkey had all surrendered and that Romania had declared war on Germany as well. “Now is the time to strike and strike hard,” the leaflet read.
“Another day ended and another enemy country out of the war for keeps,” Fries wrote home to Bessie on November 4. Austria had signed a peace deal and surrendered, leaving Germany the only member of the Central powers still fighting. Fries had returned to Tours on a beautiful, warm autumn day. Toward evening, he went for a stroll with another officer, admiring the sunset before retiring to his quarters:
It begins to look more than ever like the war [will] end this month. If it does not I imagine it will go on until next spring though I can’t see how the Bosche will be so foolish for now he can’t hope for even a poor draw. And also he knows that with the coming spring the bombing of his Rhine cities will make them absolutely uninhabitable.
From the Dutch border to the Ardennes, the Allies hammered at the Germans. After four years, French, British, and Belgian infantries had finally retaken much of Flanders, as well as occupied cities in northern France. With Kaiser Wilhelm’s fortunes withering by the day, the war had become a diplomatic battle as well as a military battle. Facing near-certain defeat, the Germans were attempting to exit the war with the greatest dignity, gain the best peace terms, and avoid reparations for the carnage and destruction they had wrought across Europe.
As President Wilson awaited a response to his demand of unconditional surrender, newspapers reported the spread of riots throughout Germany and shortages of raw materials. Mobs roamed through Berlin, and when the kaiser addressed the Reichstag, socialists called for the abolition of the monarchy and establishment of a democratic republic. One of the most powerful men in the German army, First Quartermaster General Erich Ludendorff, had resigned on October 27. But despite signs that the war was nearing its end, there were no guarantees. An unnamed German diplomat told the New York Times that his country had nothing to gain and everything to lose by surrendering. “It is war to the knife now. Germany can fight another five months, and we must take a last chance.”
Pershing had unsheathed his knife for mortal combat as well, unwilling to wait for diplomatic efforts to bear fruit. The First Army had made gains in the first phase of the Argonne offensive, as the British and the French had to the north, but the advance had been slower in October. Now the new stage of the offensive that began on November 1 was turning into a rout, the kaiser’s demoralized Third and Fifth Armies barely able to fight back. As in the earlier phases of the offensive, the Hellfire Boys would shoot thermite and gas, but one of their most significant roles was throwing smoke screens to obscure American infantrymen as they forded the Meuse River. “I expect to see some very hard fighting during the next week as the Bosche will drive them back if he possibly can, and he can’t,” Fries wrote home.
General Fries felt steady a
nd strong, in fighting form. His convalescence on the Riviera had provided a restful interlude of sightseeing, golf, and seaside promenades. But even in his luxurious surroundings, his thoughts had never strayed from the war, and he scanned the newspapers each morning and updated his war maps. Despite his doctor’s recommendation of three weeks of rest, Fries departed after two to attend a third interallied gas conference in Paris. A bit of vanity also lured him back: he got word that he was to receive the French Legion of Honor. It wasn’t specific to him—the chief of every country’s gas service at the conference was to receive one—but he felt honored nonetheless and duty bound to be present. He tinkered with an acceptance speech, in case he was asked to say a few words.
After a week at the Paris conference, he resumed his busy schedule, returning to Tours for meetings with officers that General Sibert had sent over from the United States. He respected Sibert, but he still had a somewhat disdainful view of the American side of the operation. “The work over there is nowhere so nearly organized as over here and there are jealousies and some bickerings over there that are entirely foreign to us over here,” Fries wrote to Bessie.
With the war’s end now in sight—perhaps a week away, perhaps a month, but inevitable—he had begun to fret about the future of the service. He professed not to care what happened next—“All I want is to finish this war with a fine service and the rest can go hang”—but in truth he wanted to lead the service himself, or at least be Sibert’s second-in-command. The worst thing would be if it was absorbed into another branch or taken over by a newcomer.