Hellfire Boys

by Theo Emery

  It will be used in grenades, field guns, by heavy artillery and by tanks and ships. Airplanes will drop it in bombs, or sprinkle it in large drops like a tropical rain storms [sic] or yet spread it as a fog coming over the land from the sea, but with a speed no wind ever knew. It will search out woods, deep trenches, cellars, and rocky canyons with the thoroughness of giant ants of Africa that devour everything in their path.

  He also argued that gas would create what he called “continuous warfare.” Rather than the sporadic conflict of episodic battles, chemical warfare would be constant, with diaphanous gas weapons everywhere all the time, like air itself. “Gas makes battles as continuous as heart beats and protection as necessary as breath itself… .Gas makes the battle continuous and adds new force to the old adage, ‘Eternal vigilance is the price of success.’” After he died in 1963, the words chiseled into his headstone at Arlington National Cemetery read CHIEF OF CHEMICAL WARFARE SERVICE.

  Fries’s dark vision never came to pass. In 1974, almost fifty years after the Geneva Conventions, the U.S. Senate finally adopted the treaty, and President Gerald Ford signed the ban in January 1975. The reason for the belated ratification was that momentum was gathering internationally for stronger disarmament measures that would do away with chemical weapons altogether. The Geneva Protocol still had the same provisions for developing chemical weapons and using them against violators of the ban and nonsignatories. Diplomatic efforts to ban biological and chemical weapons had diverged, but when the United States ratified a 1975 treaty against germ warfare, it included a provision affirming the goal of a complete ban on chemical weapons. Chemical weapons had been used several times over the years—in Ethiopia in the 1930s and in Yemen in the early 1960s—but it was Saddam Hussein’s use of chemical weapons against Iran and Iraqi Kurds in the late 1980s that opened a window for a stronger international agreement. The result was the Chemical Weapons Convention; more sweeping and aggressive than the earlier treaty, it banned the use, development, and production of chemical weapons and had a verification system to snuff even early efforts to create such weapons. The United States signed in 1996, and the convention went into effect in 1997.

  Finally, the world would be free of chemical weapons. At least, that seemed to be the case until 2013, when Syrian president Bashar al-Assad’s forces were accused of attacking a Damascus suburb with sarin-filled mortars, then chlorine-filled barrel bombs. ISIS, or the Islamic State, followed suit with mustard shells in August of 2015. In a gruesome first, the estranged half brother of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un died in a Malaysian airport in February of 2017 after hired assailants smeared the nerve agent VX on his face in an apparent assassination. Then on April 4, 2017, Assad again faced accusations of using sarin, this time in an attack in the northern Syrian province of Idlib. Images of dead children filled television screens, prompting American air strikes against Syrian targets. In 1919, Chief of Staff Peyton C. March had invoked the image of “innocent little children who had nothing to do with this game at all” to argue for the abolition of gas warfare. President Trump used similar language of outrage, decrying how “even beautiful babies were cruelly murdered in this very barbaric attack.” Though Syria had joined the Chemical Weapon Convention after the 2013 attack, international law had again proved toothless, just as in 1915.

  Today, chemical weapons are seen as anachronistic throwbacks, almost medieval in their clumsy simplicity and brutal deployment. Their patina of atavism has turned gas masks into a visual shorthand for latter-day apocalypse. Arguably, that’s because chemical weapons today seem like both a throwback to an early form of warfare as well as forward looking to a nightmarish tomorrow when chemicals saturate land, sea, and air—a vision not that distant from Amos Fries’s predictions of chemical weapons as the ultimate weapon of the future. If there was a doomsday ring to his predictions, it’s because he saw chemical weapons as doomsday weapons. Fries was full of contradictions. Despite his insistence in the “humanity” of gas warfare, he also predicted a battlefield so toxic, so drenched in blistering, suffocating poisons, that it needed to be avoided at all costs.

  The legacy of the U.S. Chemical Warfare Service in World War I proved to be conflicted and ambiguous. Chemical weapons unquestionably made an already horrific war worse and may have hastened the end, but gave neither side the game-changing edge that could end the war. And while some in the military argued that chemical weapons—like nuclear weapons later—would prevent future wars, few today would argue the human race is well served or the world has ever been a more peaceful place because of chemical weapons.

  Yet far from being a mere footnote, the American experience with chemical warfare in world war had much more than a passing influence on the country; rather, it left indelible impressions on the military and on American society.

  One of the changes wrought by World War I was a reconfiguration of the relationship between the military, scientists, and academia. The Chemical Warfare Service could not have come into being without the energetic contributions of scientists in the public and the private sectors. The rapid expansion of the service, in turn, gave an enormous boost to the burgeoning field of industrial chemistry. “The new profession got its trial by fire in World War I… .The war put [the] American chemical industry firmly on its feet,” Warren K. Lewis wrote after the war.

  Skeptics in later generations would criticize such cozy relationships as corrosive to science and the integrity of scientists. President Dwight Eisenhower coined the phrase “military-industrial complex” in 1961, but this wedding of public and private in wartime endeavors began in World War I. Never before had the military worked so closely with private industry in a cooperative enterprise, so closely that factories were militarized, soldiers worked side by side with civilians, and government and business became almost indistinguishable, as they did at Nela Park, the Dow plants in Midland, Michigan, and other chemical production centers. James Bryant Conant, who would become the president of Harvard only a few short years after the war, noted the change.

  “To those of us who remember the situation in 1914 when the European conflagration broke out, the United States’ entry into World War I marked a turning point in the relation of scientists to the Federal Government and, what is more important, to the national economy,” Conant wrote in notes for an autobiography.

  Chemical weapons also had a profound impact upon military strategy in the twentieth century. Though nuclear weapons far eclipsed chemical agents in power and lethality, the world’s experience with chemical warfare in World War I is the DNA at the heart of the nuclear arms race. In a sense, the seeds of the Cold War were planted in Flanders fields. In the aftermath of World War I, proponents of chemical warfare, such as Amos Fries, firmly believed that chemical weapons could and would be used on a mass scale and that civilian population centers behind enemy lines were legitimate targets. That premise sprouted in the war’s aftermath into a strategic framework that undergirded the notion of deterrence. Even the most vociferous critics of chemical arms within the War Department agreed that some stockpile, however small, must be maintained in case another country broke the arms conventions again, as Germany did in 1915. There was also agreement that an embryonic program needed to stay in place, with contingencies for swiftly expanding back into a full-scale chemical weapons program on a wartime footing, in the event of a new outbreak of gas warfare.

  Under the rubric of deterrence, complete disarmament is never truly an option. Banning a weapon, no matter how repugnant or how widespread a consensus against it, was out of the question for the simple reason that no player on the world stage can be trusted to abide by international conventions. The risk of violation demanded “eternal vigilance”—Fries’s words—to ensure that the United States would not be attacked with chemical arms in the future. The genie cannot be forced back into its bottle; a weapon, once discovered or used, can never be abandoned. In the decades to come, the United States would develop chemical weapons such as those on display at Fo
rt Leonard Wood, including those appropriated from Germany after World War II and newer ones such as the nerve agent VX, one of the most lethal chemical weapons in existence. With the dawn of the nuclear age and the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the same strategy of deterrence undergirded the Cold War, requiring more-powerful weapons with greater reach, and in greater quantities.

  In this context, lewisite’s legacy is both fascinating and infuriating. The postwar reporting on the “super-poison gas” that the Mousetrap produced did not square with the reality, in terms of its potency or persistence. Despite my best efforts, I was unable to locate primary documentation that answered how, or if, lewisite would have been used had the war continued. Conclusive documentation about how much was made, and what became of it after the war, also eluded me. Similarly, I was stymied in my efforts to find clear documentation of the extent to which aerial gas bombardment was part of the 1919 war strategy, postwar statements to the press notwithstanding. In one of the AEF’s postwar histories of the service, I discovered a telling hint to the War Department’s reluctance to disclose such information. In a draft of a document I found, entitled History of Chemical Warfare Service, AEF, the section referring to development of aerial gas bombs and approval from the general staff was crossed out and marked for deletion.

  So were the pronouncements about drenching German armies and cities with lewisite real, or were they bluster and propaganda, an empty threat that the United States could not—or would not—deliver had it been capable of doing so? My uneasy conclusion, based on the documentary evidence I have seen, is that the War Department was prepared for massive gas use in 1919 but was probably not prepared to deliver aerial gas bombs—whether lewisite or other weapons—on a large scale (though development of incendiary bombs was quite advanced by that time). Unquestionably the United States was poised to become a chemical warfare powerhouse, but if the reports about lewisite seem far-fetched, they were. Exaggerated and inflated, the stories about America’s monstrous new weapon were stitched into a new era of deterrence. Fries himself acknowledged this in a startlingly candid letter to a newspaper editor in 1923. In his letter, he debunked some of the myths about lewisite, writing that it was “unfortunate that such extravagant statements are made concerning chemical warfare materials”:

  The real reason for many of the extravagant statements which continue to appear in the Press from time to time is that during the war it was considered wise by both sides to use this propaganda to bolster up the inventions, and to raise the morale of one’s own side while depressing or casting a damper on the other. Gas being so new and powerful, particularly against unprotected peoples, it appealed to the imagination of both sides.

  There was another legacy of the Chemical Warfare Service—a very concrete one. The work at American University and the lightning-fast stand-up of the Willoughby plant was in many ways a dry run for the Manhattan Project. Some of the very scientists who participated in the Chemical Warfare Service—James Bryant Conant, Warren K. Lewis, and Robert A. Millikan among them—also worked on the atom bomb. The organization of the Manhattan Project followed a similar organizational structure as lewisite’s development in World War I, with scientists ignorant of the work of their colleagues within the same project, keeping each segment of the work segregated through secrecy.

  When I began this project, I expected to find plentiful personal accounts of the soldiers stationed at American University. After all, these were bright young men educated at top universities who must have written letters home, kept diaries, and recorded their thoughts for posterity. I was mistaken—it proved difficult to find first-person accounts from American University. My theory was that the soldiers at the station maintained their wartime silence about their work long after the work ended. Perhaps they did so out of a sense of patriotic duty. Perhaps it was because of the prevailing public sentiment that turned against gas warfare. Or perhaps it was simply because the war was over, and it was time to move on.

  One group that enthusiastically documented its wartime endeavors, however, was the veterans of the First Gas Regiment, who maintained a vibrant veterans’ organization called the First Gas Regimental Association. They held regular reunions for many decades, all the way into the 1980s. At the U.S. Army Chemical Corps Museum, I looked through dozens of issues of the gas regiment association newsletter. Called Gas Attack, it was full of rich anecdotes, funny stories, poetry, and a deeply melancholic obituary section that got longer with each edition, as members of the group slowly passed away. Doubts, criticisms, questions about chemical warfare, were not to be found in the pages of Gas Attack, which was still published quarterly into the 1990s. This was a veterans’ organization, and these original chemical warriors took great pride in what they had done.

  Tom Jabine rarely spoke of his service and, according to his son, developed a strong aversion to war. After he returned from France, he married and had children and worked for the Central Hudson Gas and Electric Company. He died in Poughkeepsie, New York, on February 1, 1938. His gassing at Charpentry in October 1918 caused health problems that plagued him for the rest of his life and that his son believed contributed to his early death at the age of forty-six.

  Harold Higginbottom—“Higgie”—became a consistent reunion attendee and, eventually, the association president. After the war, Higgie had left Lawrence to take a job as a textile chemist in Duluth, Minnesota, and returned six months later to get married and take Irene away with him to Minnesota. On December 25, 1920, three years to the day after he marched off to war in a snowstorm, he and Irene married in her parents’ house, underneath an evergreen arch. Irene wore a white silk gown trimmed with pearls and carried a bouquet of lilies of the valley. She also carried a white handkerchief—perhaps the very one she mailed to Higgie in France to signal her devotion to him. The pastor from Lawrence Street Congregational Church wed them. The wedding announcement that ran in all three Lawrence newspapers the following Monday noted his overseas duty: “he served overseas as a sergeant in Company B, First Gas Regiment, and for a period of fifteen months saw very active service in the front line trenches.”

  In the reunion photographs, Higgie is reliably present, his long, mournful face immediately recognizable, Irene at his side. After her death he attended alone. In 1986, he told a fellow regimental association member, “Jack, the parts are plain worn out.” He died just a few days later, on September 11, 1986, in Towson, Maryland, just outside Baltimore. About two weeks after Higgie’s death, his son brought his father’s footlocker to the association trustee. In it, neatly folded, was Higgie’s uniform, along with his .45, leggings, overcoat, and, of course, his gas mask.

  Acknowledgments

  When I read the diary of Harold J. Higginbottom at the U.S. Army Chemical Corps Museum, I found a letter with it from the outgoing Gas Regimental Association president, Robert B. MacMullin. “Great source material in case some future historian or novelist takes a notion to write about the war,” MacMullin wrote to Higgie. I don’t know if I am that historian or there is another yet to come, but I am certain of this: Hellfire Boys is not the work of one person. Over the course of working on this book, I have had more consultations, discussions, and exchanges online, in person, and over the phone than I can count, so many in fact that it seems ridiculous to consider myself the sole author of this book. Thanking every individual who has assisted me along the way will inevitably omit some helpful soul, so let me apologize in advance to anyone unintentionally excluded from this recitation of thanksgiving.

  The many descendants of scientists, soldiers, and officers of the Chemical Warfare Service I’ve talked to and corresponded with have been legion. Without them, this endeavor would have been impossible. I’m particularly indebted to the Olson family, the descendants of Charles William Maurer. Addie Ruth Maurer Olson, who sadly passed away in early 2016, graciously invited me into her home twice and allowed me to look at her father’s papers and letters, which provided me with a glimpse of life at
the American University Experiment Station. Erik Olson, her son and Sergeant Maurer’s grandson, generously provided me with the photos of the American University Experiment Station and extended permission to use those photos in this book, for which I am extremely grateful. L. Philip Reiss, Winford Lee Lewis’s grandson, welcomed me to visit him at his home in Sonora, California, over two days, to conduct an extensive interview and review Lewis’s papers, photographs, letters, and memoir, all of which provided invaluable insight into an important character at the heart of this book. Not satisfied with discussing the subject of my book alone, Phil—or “Mr. Science Dude”—also gave me a crash course on the history of the gold rush, introduced me to the breathtaking beauty of the Sierra Nevada, and showed me such an enthusiastic welcome that I still grin to this day when I think back on my visit with him.

  I was thrilled to have met Thomas Jabine Jr., the son of Thomas Jabine, who invited me to lunch and shared with me his recollections of his father. Descendants of William L. Sibert showed great interest in my book as well, including George and Kathy Sibert, who met with me for coffee and answered my questions, and Anne Sibert Buiter, who allowed me to read her grandfather’s letters and sat for a photo portrait in her living room.

  I’m grateful as well to three descendants of Vannoy H. Manning: Kim Zvik put me in contact with her relatives, Pam Manning Fein and Petrie M. Wilson, both of whom provided me with documents about Van Manning. Rosalind Williams, the granddaughter of Warren K. Lewis, invited me to her office at MIT to look through a box of documents about her grandfather. Her reminiscences of him and his comments about the ethical dimensions of his work in both world wars—a fraught subject not easily broached—helped me grasp the moral quandaries these scientists faced in wartime. I’m deeply grateful to her for her guidance and patience. I had a wonderful visit with Theodore Conant, the son of James Bryant Conant, sitting on the porch of his lovely home in Hanover, New Hampshire.