by Theo Emery
The chief of staff’s reception shouldn’t have come as a surprise to Fries. He made no secret of his views on gas warfare, and the future he envisioned could not have been further from that of March and Baker. One of Fries’s most trusted officers, Lieutenant Colonel B. C. Goss, laid out Fries’s postwar position on the service for Sibert. Goss called gas a “recognized weapon of warfare” and said that war without it would be like trying to fight without rifles, machine guns, or artillery. The combatants in the just-concluded war had broken their promises to shun gas, “and the same thing will happen next time,” Goss wrote. The paper also anticipated what would become a defining point in the fight over chemical warfare that Fries would take up with gusto—its morality, or lack thereof: “A widespread feeling has existed in this country to the effect that gas is more barbarous and inhumane than other weapons of warfare. This is really not the case.”
The War Department, however, was deep into planning for a peacetime military. That calculus did not include Fries’s vision of chemical warfare. President Wilson had returned to Europe to wrangle over the terms of postwar peace, which reasserted bans on gas warfare once again. Secretary of War Baker and March backed the president’s position that chemical warfare should be shunned. The rustlings of the War Department’s intentions became apparent in February, when Baker stopped all gas warfare research and ordered the service’s records transferred to the Corps of Engineers, effectively shutting down the Chemical Warfare Service as an independent branch of the military.
For now, the future of the Chemical Warfare Service was uncertain, with months of negotiations over the terms of the peace in Europe still ahead. One thing was clear: there was no need for mass production of chemical weapons in peacetime. The previous months had been a race against time to produce gas for the battlefield; now, after eighteen months of planning and construction, everything had stopped. The assembly lines went quiet, the factories fell silent, and tons of lethal chemicals and weapons stockpiled in warehouses and storage yards, including the lewisite that came too late.
Edgewood Arsenal, which had been a huffing, churning furnace of gas production, was eerily quiet and empty as a graveyard after months of feverish activity. At its peak, there had been more than eleven thousand people working at the arsenal producing war gases, filling shells and grenades, erecting new buildings, and keeping the existing ones running. The arsenal and its satellite factories had generated more than ten thousand tons of war gases and smoke gases. More than nine hundred men had been injured at the arsenal, most of them in the process of making mustard. William Walker had planned for the arsenal to make almost eleven thousand tons of gas every month after January 1919.
Four months later, after the Armistice, a skeleton crew of barely a thousand remained. William McPherson, whom Major General Sibert had charged with writing a history of the arsenal, wrote lonely letters back to colleagues at Ohio State University. “I have but one thing on my mind at present and that is how I can, in the shortest possible time, wind up my work and report to the University,” he wrote.
Demobilization could not happen overnight—a vast number of details needed consideration, from the number of men let go, disposal of buildings, equipment, and chemicals, to continuity with any research remaining after the war. From Astoria to Willoughby, the army began to shut down the chemical warfare apparatus it had so painstakingly built, canceling leases, annulling contracts, and dismantling the factories. The buildings and plants at Kingsport, Bound Brook, and Niagara Falls were all auctioned at fire-sale prices. The Research Division began winding down its work on Mustard Hill. The Bureau of Mines, sidelined the year before, piped up to claim property that had been taken over by the army, including hammers and screwdrivers, a protractor, a vacuum cleaner, and two horses, named Happy and Hero. The War Department ordered the Army Corps of Engineers to fold up Camp Leach at American University and discharge the soldiers. By December 11, 1918, more than a thousand men had already been sent home or transferred, leaving just over two hundred men. The engineers dismantled the camp officers’ club and disposed of the decorations and furniture. The camp’s buildings went up for auction in June of 1919.
Disposal of surplus chemicals proved to be a complicated process. Raw chemicals with commercial value were sold to the highest bidder, but chemical agents deemed too dangerous for the marketplace needed to be either destroyed or stored. Since the latter was easier, the army’s stockpiles of war gas went on the move again—not to France, but to Maryland. Since the decision in the fall to shut down the American University Experiment Station and make Edgewood the new seat for the Chemical Warfare Service, leftover chemicals, mortar shells, and Livens drums went to the arsenal.
American University had its share of gas and chemical weapons that needed to be removed. On March 1, 1919, the Research Division’s ordnance officer received permission to ship thousands of bombs and shells from American University up to Edgewood. Gas shells, cylinders, jugs, and drums of various sizes containing mustard, phosgene, chloropicrin, and other chemical agents went to Edgewood by truck or train. Over the rest of the year, Sibert regularly requested more trucks to ferry armaments and weapons agents from American University to Edgewood and Fort Meade; there were at least five such requests in October of 1919 alone.
Not all of the weapons at American were shipped to Edgewood, however. Damaged or leaking gas shells posed an immediate danger. An Army Corps of Engineers memo from mid-1918 suggests those shells were “either carried out several miles to sea and sunk, or buried quite deeply in the ground,” which had been the policy of the British. At American, the military took the latter approach. Time would reveal several burial pits on the American University campus. “The munitions were taken back to the limit of the University acres and there buried in a pit that was digged for them,” the American University Courier reported in 1921. “Would that it were as deep as the cellar of Pluto and Proserpine. Requiescat in pace.”
Catholic University, where Winford Lee Lewis’s experiments produced lewisite, was either overlooked or ignored during the demobilization. It wasn’t until November 18, 1921, that a Chemical Warfare Service truck went to the university to cart away bottles of lewisite, stills for producing it, mustard, other chemicals, and equipment that had been simply stashed in a shed. Inside Maloney Hall, the fumes from the lewisite had peeled the paint off the ceilings of the labs, and the ventilation fans were broken, rendering all of the rooms unusable. The chemistry professor who insisted that the service come for their abandoned property also believed the government should pay for the repairs. Whether the army actually did so remains unclear. A letter from the chief of the Chemical Warfare Service Supply Division stated emphatically that the government had been released from all damage claims.
The process of dismantling the Mousetrap began almost immediately after the war ended but lasted more than a year. Willoughby had a unique problem. Despite the newspaper articles, lewisite’s existence officially remained a secret, so getting rid of the chemicals at the Ben-Hur plant was a more delicate endeavor than at other places. When the Purchase and Storage Division advertised the sale of chemicals there, Major General Sibert reacted with alarm, chastising the division for publicizing lewisite’s ingredients. The division responded that it “greatly regretted” publishing the names of the chemicals at the plant but pointed out the impossibility of selling surplus property without saying where it was located.
The lewisite that had actually been produced also posed a problem. The twenty-two steel drums had been stored in a warehouse at the Mousetrap since they had come off the production line. With no means of disposing of the material, Colonel Frank Dorsey asked Edgewood chief Colonel William Walker how to get rid of it. Walker’s solution was a simple one. “The only disposition which Edgewood Arsenal can make of the material herein described is to place the same upon a lighter [a boat], take it out to sea, and throw it overboard,” he wrote to Sibert. On January 30, Sibert ordered the lewisite sent to Edgewood by spe
cial train without delay. Arrangements for the rail shipment began the next day. The wheels started to turn.
Despite Sibert’s warnings against delays for the special train, problems arose even before the gas train left the Mousetrap. The shipment was scheduled for Wednesday, February 5, but the New York Central Railroad didn’t send enough steel-bottomed train cars that met regulatory requirements. “[The] rolling stock furnished by the New York Central was the rottenest they had in the yards around Cleveland,” reported one of the officers assigned to accompany the lewisite. Two days slipped by as workmen prepared the cars for the voyage. The New York Central agent and the officer in charge argued over fares for the men accompanying the train, until they decided to let the train depart and settle the dispute farther down the line.
On Friday, February 7, the cars waited on a rail siding next to the Ben-Hur factory. Barrel after barrel from the warehouse filled the fifteen-car train. Twelve cars contained chlorine tanks, one contained miscellaneous material, and another car contained the twenty-two steel drums of lewisite. There were also containers of phosgene, mustard gas, and lewisite-impregnated carbon.
When all the drums had been loaded and accounted for, guards took their places on the train. One lieutenant was the transportation representative. There were two officers from the Mousetrap and a sergeant and six enlisted men from Edgewood. The guards had rifles and gas masks, the former to protect the cargo, the latter to protect themselves. After a final inspection, the gas train crept out of the Mousetrap at 12:20 p.m.
The train passed through the Ben-Hur stockade, clattered along the tracks a few blocks from downtown Willoughby, then crossed the Chagrin River and turned east toward Ashtabula, about thirty-seven miles away. From there, the train continued eastward along the lakeshore, stopping in Erie, Pennsylvania, to replace a broken air valve and a wheel. Nearly four hours later, dark had fallen when the gas train started up again, trundling southeast into Pennsylvania.
Hour after hour, mile after mile, the engineer kept his eyes fixed on the tracks ahead, hand steady on the throttle as the train rolled eastward. The soldiers watched for interference or obstacles, masks ready in case a cask sprang a leak, in case the train derailed, in case the cars became uncoupled, in case there was something unexpected on the tracks. Just in case. If something went wrong, if the train derailed and tumbled down one of the steep escarpments, if a car unhitched and rolled backward, if a cask shook loose and spilled a plume of toxic liquid emitting a hothouse odor of geraniums, it would be a catastrophe. And so the train had to stop again and again, to replace broken parts and ensure that its cargo reached its destination.
Just after 3:00 a.m., the locomotive huffed up to the Allegheny Plateau and into Kane, Pennsylvania. The depot at the foot of Main Street was dark, the town’s residents slumbering, the brick mills and tanneries and glass factories silent. The brakes squealed, and the engine with its fourteen freight cars behind rolled to a stop at the roundhouse just outside of town.
The train idled for about a half hour in Kane. It was 3:45 a.m. when the engine began to roll slowly southward through the darkness. The train bed curved gently around the town, turning east and then southeast, as the engineer followed Wilson Run down out of the mountains toward Renovo, Pennsylvania.
Dawn broke during the 100 miles to Renovo, where the workmen replaced more air valves and six brake shoes. Another 200 miles of track lay ahead before the gas train would reach Edgewood and the sea. The train huffed on through the southern Allegheny Mountains to Marysville, Pennsylvania. Two more hours for repairs held the train there, and then the train continued on at 7:15 p.m. By then, the sun had set once again, and the cars snaked their way south. Finally, at 2:20 a.m. on Sunday, February 9, the gas train limped into Edgewood Arsenal. The train had made the 517-mile trip in thirty-eight hours, averaging 13.6 miles per hour. The men aboard must have breathed a weary sigh of relief at the sight of the smokestacks and brick filling plants. The cargo had arrived.
Precisely what happened next to the lewisite has either been lost or remains buried deep somewhere in the archives of the service. Press accounts later claimed that the barrels of lewisite were loaded onto an army vessel at Edgewood, towed out to sea, and dumped overboard. An army “historical sketch” about lewisite validates that claim: “shipment was sunk at sea after armistice to destroy gas,” the brief sketch read. Some accounts claimed that a ship loaded with lewisite was already en route to France at the Armistice, an account that is almost certainly incorrect.
One possible scenario—albeit unlikely—was that the same day the train from Willoughby arrived at Edgewood, its gas cargo was sent to Baltimore, then loaded aboard the gas ship USS Elinor. Since the Armistice, the Elinor had been to France and back. When the Germans surrendered on November 11, she had still been moored in Baltimore with a cargo of chemical weapons, but Sibert ordered it to France anyway, as a hedge against a collapse of the Armistice and the peace talks that followed. The ship had set out for France on November 23 with Livens drums and artillery shells filling the holds and stacked on the deck. Toward the end of January, the Elinor returned still loaded with 125,000 mustard shells and 11,200 Livens phosgene drums. On January 28, she was bound fast to the number 3 pier at the Canton docks in Baltimore. Sibert asked for permission to dump the gas shells and drums into the ocean, along with another 216 tons of mustard and 102 tons of phosgene that were in leaking containers, most likely from Edgewood. Three days later, Secretary of War Baker approved Fries’s request.
Originally, the Elinor was going to head to sea, dump the cargo that had been to France and back, then return to Baltimore for more gas shells from another ship, the USS Ysel Haven. On February 1, the army director of embarkation instead ordered the Elinor to carry the chemical cargo of both ships out into the ocean to dump “not less than fifteen miles off the Atlantic Coast.” In addition to the cargo from the ships, another 300 tons from Edgewood would also be loaded onto the Elinor to be thrown into the ocean as well.
On February 3, a twenty-four-soldier gas detail from Edgewood boarded the Elinor. That afternoon, a barge drew up alongside with drums of gas. Over the next several days, the men from Edgewood loaded drums of phosgene and other chemical weapons aboard the Elinor. On February 6, the USS Ysel Haven drew alongside so that its cargo could be transferred to the Elinor. Three days after that, on the same day the train from Willoughby arrived at Edgewood, more gas was loaded.
On February 10, a tugboat towed the Elinor from her berth. Under her own steam, the gas ship began churning south and anchored that night near the mouth of the Chesapeake. Just after 10:00 a.m. the next morning, the Elinor weighed anchor and continued south, turning east as she passed the Cape Henry Lighthouse in Virginia Beach. That night, when the ship was forty-two miles offshore, the gas crew began tossing seventy-five-millimeter shells overboard. Darkness fell as the men threw shell after shell into the Atlantic. The men began tossing phosgene shells overboard at 9:05 p.m. as the ship continued east. The dumping continued on February 12, pausing for meals, and into the next day. At 2:00 p.m. on Valentine’s Day, the dumping was complete. Then the Elinor made its way toward New York City. Just before 5:00 p.m. the day after, the ship was lashed to the pier in Brooklyn. The gas detail disembarked to return to Edgewood the next day. Their work was done.
On April 20, 1919, the New York Times splashed a sensational story across the front of the Sunday magazine: “Our Super-Poison Gas: First Story of Compound 72 Times Deadlier than ‘Mustard’ Manufactured Secretly by the Thousands of Tons.” Like the earlier Plain Dealer article, it was packed with tales of risk and ingenuity, a paean to the technical men and the chemists who toiled anonymously to make lewisite. The article told of the Ben-Hur plant, the near imprisonment of the men, and the mysterious drop box linking Willoughby to the outside world. For the first time, it described the gas train and casks of lewisite thrown into the water. There were photographs of Sibert and Frank Dorsey, the Mousetrap personnel, and a man swaddled from head
to toe in a gas-defense suit. Though Dorsey was the hero of the story, it also named other scientists who played crucial roles, such as James Bryant Conant. Winford Lee Lewis—the godfather of lewisite—wasn’t mentioned. Lewisite represented the pinnacle of offensive war gases—more lethal, fearsome, and faster acting than any before—and though it had been destroyed at sea, the article pointed out that the chemists were prepared to produce it again at a moment’s notice.
The lengthy article was comprehensive and dramatic, calling lewisite “the most terrible instrument of manslaughter ever conceived.” The article was also completely wrong in several respects, repeating the canard that lewisite was seventy-two times more lethal than mustard. Lewisite did have quicker and more aggressive vesicant properties, but the notion that a few tiny drops were lethal was completely untrue. The assertion that “thousands of tons” had been produced—“almost enough was on hand to destroy the entire people of the United States”—was untrue as well, as the only clear documentation of the quantity of lewisite produced is the twenty-two steel drums containing 8.6 tons of lewisite that was shipped east in early February of 1919.
Articles similar to the one in the Times soon followed. In late May, the Interior Department held an educational exposition in Washington featuring a booth with a bottle of lewisite on display, with an armed guard on duty day and night. Newspapers across the country published the newswire article about the expo, repeating many of the same outlandish claims about lewisite that were in the Times article.
The most egregious exaggeration in the Times article and articles like it related to its effectiveness. If lewisite sounded too good to be true, it was. The most closely guarded secret about lewisite turned out to be that it was not a particularly good war gas. While it was powerful and highly toxic, the handful of chemists acquainted with its properties knew that lewisite hydrolyzed in water—in other words, moisture caused it to break down and lose its toxicity. Mustard had no such problem. Its value was its stability in water or in damp conditions. In theory, lewisite would be effective in winter or in dry conditions—in the desert, perhaps—but it would be less than ideal for rainy environs such as Belgium and France.