Hellfire Boys

by Theo Emery

  Of the seventeen thousand chemists in the United States, a third of them worked directly for the government during the war, he went on. Another third worked in industries crucial to the war effort, and the final third were engaged in other types of war-related work. “I do not believe it will be discovered that any profession contributed a larger percent of its members directly to the military service, or the results of the activities of any profession were more essential to our national success than that of the chemists,” he said. He praised the foresight of the society in mobilizing members when the War Department lagged in its preparation. He praised the Chemical Warfare Service for both its offensive and defensive activities, as well as the First Gas Regiment. “The chemists did their share. They did it superbly,” he said.

  If there was any acrimony toward Baker from the crowd, it wasn’t exhibited in the official proceedings of the meeting, which noted only that Baker received “earnest and serious attention.” The chemists puffed on cigars at an evening social hour at the Scottish rite temple down the street, featuring opera singers, moving pictures, and a play. The entertainment made up for the “undue solemnity” from being a booze-free event.

  The next evening, about 125 of the chemists from the Research Division gathered for a private reunion. George Burrell presided over the dinner. Amos Fries was the guest of honor. Van Manning was there, too, as well as William Walker. Richmond Levering was the host. Major General Sibert couldn’t attend because of General Pershing’s return from Europe, but he sent a telegram with his salutations.

  When Manning rose to speak, he looked out on a room of familiar faces, men who had labored over test tubes and beakers, whose hands had reddened and blistered from the chemicals they handled. The war had transformed chemistry into a groundbreaking new realm of military technology and jumped-started a sluggish industry long inferior to Germany’s. Diminutive in stature, Manning had become a giant in scientific circles, praised for his foresight and his dogged efforts. But the recognition was not universal, and his contributions were largely overlooked by the public and even disparaged by the military.

  All that was behind him now. Manning told the veterans of the service that he hoped that the lessons of the war and the spirit of cooperation it required would have practical value in their postwar lives. The Bureau of Mines had returned to peacetime pursuits, he told the men. He would need their help with those problems, too.

  The War Department was getting the message. The day after the American Chemical Society meeting, Chief of Staff March returned to the House Military Affairs Committee hearing room to take up the issue of army reorganization and gas warfare. He praised the work of the service but reiterated his position that gas warfare was inhumane and ought to be abolished. In a dry aside, he said he was “well aware of the fact that the chemical-warfare-service people themselves are very much on the other side of the question,” a tacit nod to the lobbying from the American Chemical Society, the American Legion, and his own officers, Sibert and Fries.

  Out of the spotlight, Fries was a publicity dervish, pressing the benefits of chemical warfare publicly and privately. The seemingly boundless energy he used to build up the service remained in an unflagging defense of the service as he envisioned it. How he found enough hours in the day for his campaign is a mystery. He authored article after article about the humaneness of chemical warfare, about its strategic advantages, about its deterrence possibilities for preventing all-out gas warfare. No letter to the service went unanswered—every inquiry or criticism earned a personal response from the service, sometimes from Fries himself. Newspaper articles that Fries deemed to contain errors, misinformation, or falsehoods—however great or small—earned stern but always polite letters from Fries.

  All of the publicity had the ancillary effect of fanning public interest in chemical weapons. The War Department sponsored speeches and public presentations about gas warfare. Letters flooded into the Chemical Warfare Service offices from chemical companies wanting to snap up the stockpiles of chemicals. Others were from enterprising businesspeople with a poor understanding of chemistry, seeking gas for all varieties of uses, from protection of bank vaults to exterminating rodents. One man sought mustard gas to make into a skin cream.

  Around the country, political radicalism, socialism, and labor activism were on the rise, which Fries saw as another opportunity to argue for the Chemical Warfare Service’s continuation. Police departments clamored for access to chemical weapons to put down domestic unrest. One of his many screeds he sent to the War Department included one called “Mob Control,” in which he wrote that “handling of mobs” was another reason to preserve the service.

  Fries confided in letters to his allies that he was increasingly certain he had secured the political support he needed. Still, he continued to deploy his lieutenants in the publicity fight. Many of the men who surrounded him in France had returned to private life but continued to finance the public relations effort against the army staff. Fries admiringly called these men “true gold,” unrelenting chemical warriors giving up time and money toward their cause. Even General William Black, the chief of the Corps of Engineers who had been an adversary of the service at American University, sided with Fries, a switch that astonished even Fries.

  In fall of 1919, there was a crucial shift in the debate over chemical warfare. It was a subtle change, but it would have ramifications on the political wrangling over its future, its moral dimensions, and the stance of the United States toward international treaties. Throughout 1919, both sides of the chemical warfare debate agreed that gas caused an extremely high number of casualties. But in the waning days of August, the surgeon general completed a study of American casualties resulting from chemical attacks. The data showed that while gas caused 27.3 percent of American casualties, only 1.87 percent of gas casualties resulted in death. In other words, gas caused huge number of injuries but a relatively small number of fatalities. The statistics were incomplete for a simple reason: it only counted soldiers treated at U.S. field hospitals and dressing stations. Soldiers killed on the battlefield or treated by the Allies in their first-aid stations weren’t included. Nonetheless, the findings gave proponents of chemical warfare a new and powerful rhetorical weapon: gas was more humane because it disabled but rarely killed.

  Despite its flaws, the data appeared to confirm Fries’s argument that gas was less deadly than bullets or bombs. When the study was published, even Fries had trouble believing that it was possible that gas had killed so few soldiers. But he eagerly seized on the statistics, recognizing a political opportunity. “It would seem that in the face of these figures the cry of inhumanity against gas must soon cease through a realization of the criers of the absolute absurdity of their position,” he wrote to a friend in the chief of staff’s office.

  When Sibert was called to testify again to Congress in October, the hearing had barely gotten under way when Goliath asked that statistics about gas casualties be entered into the record. He returned to the issue of casualties later in the hearing. “You can put more men out of business—take them out of the ranks for a month or two—with gas than with anything else,” Sibert said.

  The army couldn’t ignore its own statistics. In November, General March released a statement highlighting the efficiency of chemical weapons in causing injuries and its inefficiency in killing. “In other words, based on the statistics, the claim is advanced that a man gassed has twelve times as many chances to recover as the man put out of action by other causes,” he said.

  The New York Times editorialized on March’s words the next day, reinforcing the argument that chemicals were a more humane form of weapon. The Times even noted that March and Sibert now agreed on this issue. The editorial went further, sympathetically reporting Sibert’s argument that “a nation without toxic gas, and without means of administering it, and without protection from it, will be almost at the mercy of its adversary.”

  The War Department gave in. Just before Congress adjourn
ed, the chairman of the House Military Affairs Committee announced that an accord had been struck with the War Department that would preserve the Chemical Warfare Service as an independent branch of the army. It took months for the army reorganization legislation to pass through Congress, but in May of 1920, the House and Senate eventually reached agreement on the legislation. Fries had won.

  As weather in Maryland cooled and summer turned to autumn of 1919, Fries and his family settled into their new lives at Edgewood. Two and a half years earlier, Fries had been little more than a custodian in Yellowstone Park, a ruler of dirt roads, maintaining order in a bubbling, volcanic laboratory of the nation’s untamed hinterlands. Back then, he rode by horseback among the mud pots burping clouds of sulfur and chloride, the boiling geysers spewing potassium and magnesium, pools of arsenic simmering in limestone cauldrons. Now he sat on the throne of a new military frontier, the king of a chemical empire. Edgewood was a fortified city of brickwork furnaces and factories. Through his force of will and unbending confidence, he had fought for chemical warfare to continue, and the tide had turned in his direction. The critics and the naysayers of gas warfare, the feeble pacifists and sympathizers with the nation’s enemies abroad, all of them had been beaten back.

  There on Gunpowder Neck, surrounded by furnaces and factories, Fries made his new home. Bessie put the house in Los Angeles up for sale, packed up the household, and brought the children east to Maryland. She shopped for milk, bread, and coffee at the officers’ mess, scoured the house with Old Dutch Cleanser, and scrubbed the children with Ivory soap. When she tucked the children in each night, their beds were less than a thousand yards away from seventeen hundred tons of phosgene, chloropicrin, mustard, and chlorine.

  Fries brought the same officious, no-nonsense sensibility to Edgewood that he did to the gas service in France. Innumerable practical considerations needed attention, such as razing fire-prone buildings scattered across the arsenal, safely storing the roughly two hundred thousand mustard shells on the premises, and dealing with leaking shells. The fens of Gunpowder Neck, which once teemed with ducks and wildlife, had become toxic pools from the chemical agents dumped into the water, including phosgene and chloropicrin. Fries halted the practice of disposing of chemicals in the swamps.

  He also drew up a long memo on future operations at the arsenal, including maintenance, training, and administration. The letter contained broad outlines of his vision for what he believed to be necessary for a thriving and prepared service. Barracks for twenty-five hundred officers and enlisted men, along with living quarters to accommodate families, since he felt that married men made the best officers. A complete research-and-development laboratory to replace the one at American University. A gas mask factory that could produce twenty-five hundred masks per day to supply a peacetime army. A small-scale manufacturing section to produce limited quantities of new chemical weapons, should the research yield promising compounds. In other words, he wanted to replicate the service’s wartime capacity on a smaller scale, a fiefdom in miniature of the chemical empire that the war had created.

  As the future of the Chemical Warfare Service brightened, one of the shipments of cylinders and shells from American University arrived at Edgewood. The tanks had been poorly marked, and some of the valves had blown out, releasing their contents. Fries and another officer went to inspect the damaged shipment. For more than a year in France, Fries had held forth on gas warfare, lecturing on its superiority as a weapon and on strategies for its use. He strode confidently across the experimental field at Chaumont and among the shells piled at the Puteaux lab for analysis. He had crawled without fear under the fiery tongue of a flamethrower and instructed seamstresses in how to repair defective gas masks. Fries knew gas warfare as well as anyone in the U.S. Army, and still he didn’t wear a mask when he went to look at the damaged tanks.

  Fries smelled nothing as he entered the storage area. Still, he held his breath to avoid inhaling any gas fumes, just in case gas had gotten loose. That paltry precaution did him little good. Soon after, his eyes began to water, and a few hours later, a deep exhaustion came over him. Chills racked his body. The chemical warrior, who survived the war without harm from the substances that he now defended so adamantly, had been gassed. Shivering and limp with paralyzing fatigue, he crept to the officers’ quarters, where he crawled under the covers to recover. “I had the greatest feeling of depression, accompanied by a chill,” Fries wrote in a letter to Atkisson. “I reached my quarters just in time to go to bed.”

  Epilogue

  “The Devil’s Perfume”

  On a scorching September afternoon in 2015, I finished my research at the archives of the U.S. Army Chemical Corps Museum at Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri. I had time to kill, so I wandered through the museum. The rooms were cool and quiet as I looked over the World War I exhibits, peering at small-box respirators, Livens projectors, and Stokes mortars behind the glass. I walked through an ersatz trench, complete with toilet paper stamped with the image of Kaiser Wilhelm. I examined Harold Higginbottom’s uniform in a glass case, with the regiment’s crossed retorts pinned to the collar, a bright yellow “1” for the First Gas Regiment stitched on the shoulder and his service chevrons sewn onto the sleeve.

  I had started this project three years earlier, when I stood in Spring Valley and watched the demolition of the house built on top of Hades. Since then, I had become familiar with projectors and mortars and cylinders that made up the chemical arsenal of World War I. In my mind, they were barely weapons—they had become harmless antiques or quaint artifacts, like arrowheads dug up from the soil. But as I wandered through the rooms of the U.S. Army Chemical Corps Museum, and the years on the exhibit placards rose, the items behind the glass became less and less familiar. The name of the organization changed, too; in a 1946 reorganization, it became the Chemical Corps. Finally, in a room displaying weapons from the 1960s, I stood in front of a display case. On the other side of the glass was a model of an M51 Little John rocket. The rocket had a range of eleven miles, and its payload held fifty-two round bomblets containing the nerve gas sarin. In flight, the payload would open, flinging out the bomblets. As they tumbled, the spinning armed the fuses. On impact, a burster charge in the middle of the orb would explode and spray 1.3 pounds of sarin gas into the air. The next room held a mock-up of an MC-1, a 750-pound bomb built to contain 75 gallons of sarin, made to be dropped from airplanes.

  Since World War I, the United States has never used lethal chemical weapons in combat, although during the Vietnam War, it used the flesh-burning incendiary napalm as well as tear gas to dislodge Vietcong and North Vietnamese soldiers from tunnels. (Arguably, the defoliant Agent Orange was a kind of chemical weapon as well.) But these weapons on display in the U.S. Army Chemical Corps Museum, the rockets and bombs to deliver sarin and the deadly nerve gas VX, were clearly intended to kill as many people as possible, in as efficient a manner as possible, in the shortest time possible. The insistence of early proponents that chemical warfare was more humane because it incapacitated rather than killed—an argument central to the successful efforts in 1919 to maintain an independent service—was a compelling one at the time, even if flawed and possibly a cynical ploy. These weapons put the lie to that argument, exposing it for what it was: a politically expedient line of reasoning that ultimately left the door open for weapons that could in no way be mistaken for anything humane.

  Of course, the U.S. military’s inroads into chemical warfare did not wither away with the end of World War I. Just the opposite—the unrelenting efforts of Amos Fries and his allies in and out of government ensured a robust future for the service, one that would stretch for another half century.

  The 1919 fight to maintain the Chemical Warfare Service was only the first skirmish in what would become a six-year battle over chemical warfare. Fries savored the victory, but he did not rest on his laurels. He continued to advocate aggressively for the service, writing articles that he mailed to members of Congress
, fellow veterans, and newspapers editors, extolling the humanity of gas warfare and its superiority as an airborne weapon to be dropped over enemy lines. Around spring of 1921, he began using the term “dew of death” for lewisite, describing how, when sprayed from airplanes, it would settle to the ground in a lethal cloud, killing everything it touched. The service also began publishing its own in-house publication, a magazine called simply Chemical Warfare, in which Fries could publish his own articles and then send them out to his supporters and associates.

  Fries’s aggressive advocacy had begun get attention, and not all of it positive. “The magazine ‘Chemical Warfare’ is as terrifying as General Fries himself,” the New York Times editorialized. Fries’s rhetoric appeared to have had the opposite affect that he intended, stirring public opposition to gas warfare.

  Fritz Haber also helped jump-start the scientific debate over the morality of gas warfare. In November 1919, the Nobel Prize committee belatedly awarded him the 1918 prize for chemistry for his discovery of fixed nitrogen. An international outcry ensued, and many scientists boycotted the award ceremony. As debate over Haber raged into 1920, a chemist wrote to an American University Experiment Station veteran, Arthur B. Lamb, for his opinion. Lamb responded that if Haber was not the originator of the gas program, then “he isn’t in a very different boat from many of us here.” But if Haber did start and advocate for gas warfare, “realizing its terrible potentialities, he deserves the contempt and execration of humanity! And he will get it. But that doesn’t affect his deserts as a scientist.” Haber’s mixed legacy remained imprinted upon American University. At the fixed-nitrogen laboratory that the government maintained at American University after the war, the equipment included a “Haber synthetic ammonia catalyst testing plant.”