The Last Gasp

by Scott Christianson

  Meanwhile, in France, Fries was trying to improve the ability of American soldiers to survive chemical attacks. Knowing that many new recruits would fail to heed their instructors’ call to quickly don their gas masks and keep them in place, somebody hatched the idea to win over the doughboys by using sports celebrities as their trainers. Some of those selected were baseball greats Ty Cobb, George Sisler, Christy Mathewson, and Branch Rickey. The ball players were told to put their trainees through an ordeal that included constant gas mask drills and immersion in a specially constructed gas-filled container known as the “gas chamber.”

  Commissioned as a captain, the irascible Cobb reported to the Allied Expeditionary Forces headquarters in Chaumont in October 1918, assigned to the Gas and Flame Division. He and his company had hundreds of soldiers to train. “Those that gave us trouble and didn’t heed orders didn’t last long,” he later wrote, “for we weren’t fooling around with simulated death when we entered the gas chambers. The stuff we turned loose was the McCoy and meant to train a man to be on qui vive—or else.”63

  One of their training exercises involved marching men into an airtight underground chamber. Once the troops were inside they were given a hand signal, at which time everyone was immediately supposed to snap his mask into position. Trainees were primed to be as alert and quick as possible. “I’ll never be able to forget the day when some of the men—myself included—missed the signal,” Cobb later recalled.

  Many screamed and panicked when they caught a strange whiff in the air. Some stampeded toward the exit and became entangled in a terrified mass. As soon as Cobb realized what had happened, but only after he and many of the others had inhaled some of the poison vapors, he fixed his mask and groped his way to the wall, struggling to work past the thrashing bodies. Leading the mob to safety proved hopeless, and it turned out to be every man for himself. “When I staggered out and gulped in fresh air, I didn’t know how badly my lungs had been damaged,” Cobb later recalled. He emerged to find sixteen bodies on the ground. Eight men died within hours, and more became disabled over time. For weeks, a colorless discharge drained from his chest, and he was wracked by a hacking cough. “I remember [Christy] Mathewson (baseball’s all-time greatest pitcher) telling me, ‘Ty, I got a good dose of the stuff. I feel terrible,’” Cobb later said. “He was wheezing and blowing out congested matter.”

  Mathewson was subsequently diagnosed with “tuberculosis” in both lungs and died seven years later, at the age of forty-five. After attending his friend’s funeral, a grieving Cobb said, “Big Six looked peaceful in that coffin, that damned gas got him and nearly got me.”64 But the ball-players’ experience with gas was largely downplayed: once the war was won, their service to their country had exhausted its publicity value.

  The army’s secret plan for the spring 1919 offensive called for a stepped-up use of poison gas that would have turned the fighting largely into a chemical war. The strategy included a series of massive attacks that would unload tons of mustard gas on German strongholds and dump an even deadlier payload of lewisite (which Fries called “the dew of death”) on Berlin with the aim of annihilating everyone.65 The methyl was packed into 155-millimeter shells and drums, each carrying from 350 to 400 pounds, that were intended for bombardment from airplanes. Edgewood’s commander, Colonel Walker, the nation’s leading chemical engineer, later explained:

  We had been working for some time on a device whereby mustard gas could be transported in large containers by airplanes and released over fortresses of the Metz type, and at last it was perfected, fully sixty days before the armistice was signed. Mustard has been found, for all-around purposes, to be the most effective gas used in warfare, because it advances comparatively easily and also because it is the most difficult to protect against. People used to think Prussic acid was terrible. Well, the Germans discarded the use of Prussic acid because it was too mild and used mustard gas instead.

  Our idea was to have containers that would hold a ton of mustard gas carried over fortresses like Metz and Coblenz by plane, and released with a time fuse arranged for explosion several hundred feet above the forts. The mustard gas, being heavier than air, would then slowly settle while it also dispersed. A one-ton container could thus be made to account for perhaps an acre or more of territory, and not one living thing, not even a rat, would live through it. The planes were made and successfully demonstrated, the containers were made, and we were turning out the mustard gas in the requisite quantities in September.66

  Walker may or may not have known about the plans to utilize lewisite from Willoughby as well. During the war the plans were never publicly revealed, nor was there any debate about their legality or morality. Whether the Germans were ever warned of the threat, or learned of it by means of espionage, remains an open question, for according to Walker:

  They capitulated, and I am sure that a very big factor in that capitulation was the knowledge they certainly possessed of our gas preparations. What we were doing here was known to the German Government. They knew that when this plant was going into full blast their last hope was gone. They knew that if they had been able to make gas in even half the quantity we could produce here they would have swept over all France long ago. If there was any final argument to help them make up their minds it was our gas production.67

  Some historians later contended that the Allies would not have used gas bombing “unless they had to,” and noted that the published record of the Supreme War Council did not discuss possible use of gas in the spring of 1919.68 It is unclear the extent to which German intelligence knew about or believed in the power of the Allies to carry out such threats involving gas. It’s possible that such calculations by the German high command may have helped to explain why Kaiser Wilhelm II abruptly surrendered effective November 11, 1918.69 In the absence of a clear explanation, however, many vanquished German combatants simply felt betrayed.

  The human cost of the war was beyond anyone’s comprehension. According to some estimates, it killed 8.5 to 19 million persons and wounded 21 million others, including 1.3 million in losses from the new horror of chemical warfare. Civilians accounted for as many as 9 to 13 million casualties, marking an end to “civilized” warfare.70 One-tenth of Germany’s entire population was dead. Although about 27.3 percent of America’s battlefield casualties (74,779 of 274,217) were officially attributed to gas, the real numbers were much higher, as the government didn’t acknowledge the thousands of delayed but premature deaths, such as Mathewson’s, which should have been attributed to gas. Had the conflict continued, the war’s toll from gas certainly would have skyrocketed due to the increased lethality of the weapons and the combatants’ greater desperation.

  By war’s end, American plants were said to have shipped 3,662 tons of gas that had been loaded into shells and used by the American troops or their allies. The New York Times later reported that “while American gas was not actually fired in American shell against the Germans, American gas was used against the enemy and America furnished at least as much gas as she fired.” The gas was made in the United States, shipped to France, and placed in shells that had been made in England or France. America also shipped 18,600 Livens drums loaded with phosgene, containing 279 tons of gas, some of which was also fired at the enemy.

  The armistice left tons of deadly lewisite in anxious American hands. “What was to be done with it, now that there was no longer any occasion for exterminating Germans?” one commentator asked. Cleveland did not want the deadly stuff dumped into Lake Erie, and there was no practical way to neutralize it. Scientists estimated there was almost enough of the poison left to kill every man, woman, and child in the United States if properly administered. The ocean seemed the only option. After hair-raising transport by rail, 364 fifty-five-gallon drums of the lethal cargo were loaded onto ships and taken fifty miles out into the Atlantic. Dumped into the sea at a depth of three miles in undisclosed and unmarked locations, it was left to await its inevitable leakage.71

&
nbsp; Although Haber feared he would be treated as a war criminal for having unleashed chemical weapons upon the world, a year after the fighting stopped he was startled to find himself receiving a Nobel Prize instead, albeit for his prewar synthesis of ammonia. One of his American counterparts, Conant, later observed, “To me, the development of new and more gases seemed no more immoral than the manufacture of explosives and guns. I did not see in 1917, and I do not see in 1968, why tearing a man’s guts out by a high-explosive shell is to be preferred to maiming him by attacking his lungs or skin.”72 Nobody was ever prosecuted for war crimes involving poison gas.

  Many of those who initially survived being gassed went on to suffer from debilitating wounds, both physical and psychological. An Austrian corporal, Adolf Hitler, had been gassed and temporarily blinded in October 1918, shortly before the war’s sudden ignominious end, and the experience left him permanently scarred and embittered.

  In Germany, the vanquished titans of the chemical and munitions industry managed to evade accountability. American scientists, on the other hand, especially the chemists, were flushed with success, believing they had decided the war’s final course. The big American chemical interests had become supremely powerful. And people the world over had learned about the boundless lethal potential of poisonous chemicals and political powers that had displayed no compunction about using them against enemies of all types. Gas had proved itself to be a frightful weapon of war, and the real-life horrors of injury and death by chemical poisons had stripped gas of some of its associations with painlessness. The lethal chamber, which previously had been reserved for dogs and cats, now seemed much more familiar. Some saw in it more potential for experimental and educational purposes, although anyone who had been through any manner of gas chamber or gassing during the war must have come away with an abiding dread for its unpredictable terrors.

  CHAPTER 3

  DEVISING “CONSTRUCTIVE PEACETIME USES”

  When the war ended, America shut down its poison gas plants for a time.1 Most soldiers and chemists went home, and the military-industrial gas complex was largely disbanded. Army chief of staff General Peyton C. Marsh said he remained haunted by witnessing children who had been gassed to death. The secretary of war said he favored ending all chemical warfare activities. Amid the war’s tumultuous wake in March 1919—the time when some commanders had expected to launch their most poisonous campaign and annihilate Berlin and other cities—the Chemical Warfare Service (CWS) was set to be dissolved and General Amos Fries found himself demoted to lieutenant colonel.2

  But Fries and the chemical industry vowed to fight the dismantling of the precious apparatus they had worked so hard to build. They would not renounce their war gases, allow the valuable stockpile to be totally destroyed, or permit research and production to be discontinued. Fries called gas “the most powerful and the most humane method of warfare ever invented,” and he insisted that the United States must retain the strategic advantage it had won during the war.3 “What we need now,” he wrote to one CWS veteran, “is good, sound publicity along lines showing the importance of Chemical Warfare, its powerful and far-reaching effects in war, and its humanity when you compare the number of deaths per hundred gassed with the numbers of deaths from bullets and high explosives for each hundred injured by those means.”4

  To spread this message, Fries encouraged many of his present and former subordinates to lobby Congress and write letters to newspapers. Behind the scenes, he worked closely with the chemical manufacturers and two of his friends in Congress, Senator George E. Chamberlain Jr., a conservative Democrat from Oregon who was chairman of the Senate Committee on Military Affairs, and Representative Julius Kahn, a German-born Jewish Republican of California, to fight moves to end his Chemical Warfare Service and cease production of the valuable poisons they had developed.5

  Due to their efforts, despite overwhelming public opinion against gas warfare and strong political opposition from his own commanders, Fries and his allies somehow succeeded in gaining passage of the National Defense Act of 1920, which not only saved the Chemical Warfare Service from extinction, but also turned it into a permanent part of the army. The feat made Fries a legendary figure in military circles. Politically, he had become unusually powerful.

  Fries publicly disputed notions that poison gas was any more inhumane or dishonorable than other weapons of war. “As to non-combatants,” he wrote, carefully parsing his statements, “certainly we do not contemplate using poisonous gas against them, no more at least than we propose to use high explosives in long range guns or aeroplanes against them.” As for the abandonment of poison gas, “it must be remembered that no powerful weapon of war has ever been abandoned once it proved its power unless a more powerful weapon was discovered.” Fries argued that poison gas would never be abandoned or effectively stopped by any international agreement. Some nations would continue to use it. “Let the world know,” he urged, that Americans would “use gas against all troops that may be engaged against us, and that we propose to use it to the fullest extent of our ability.” Such a stance would form a powerful deterrent, he said, and “do more to head off war than all the peace propaganda since time began.” He also rejected arguments that gas should never be used against adversaries that were not also equipped with gas. “Then why did we use repeating rifles and machine guns against Negritos and Moros armed only with bows and arrows or poor muskets and knives?” he asked. “Let us apply the same common sense to the use of gas that we apply to all other weapons of war.”6

  But Fries and his allies had to face other mounting obstacles. The 1919 Treaty of Versailles forbade the “use of asphyxiating, poisonous or other gases and all analogous liquids, materials, or devices being prohibited, their manufacture and importation… in Germany” (italics added), and President Woodrow Wilson and the International Committee of the Red Cross favored banning chemical weapons. When Republican Warren Harding swept into the White House in 1921, his administration favored a position at the Washington Arms Conference that would curtail gas warfare as well as submarine and aircraft attacks.7 A survey of the American public found 385,170 votes for the abolition of chemical weapons and only 169 for retention.

  To buttress their case, Fries and the chemical lobby argued that war gases and other poisons offered countless constructive domestic benefits in peacetime. Much of this perceived value lay in expanded industrial applications. Under Fries’s leadership, the CWS publicly turned its attention to undertaking cooperative enterprises with various government departments to harness the fruits of wartime gas research in constructive, peaceful ways. Soon the Bureau of Mines was exploring means to introduce some of the benefits of its wartime knowledge into the mining industry. The Department of the Interior helped test gas masks for commercial use in refrigeration plants, firefighting, and other settings. The Treasury Department fumigated ships at port with HCN gas, and public health and agriculture officials employed deadly phosgene to kill rats and gophers.

  The U.S. Public Health Service was especially supportive. President Wilson’s final appointee as surgeon general, Dr. Hugh S. Cumming of Virginia, demonstrated a knack for politics that enabled him to get along with many different interest groups. A former Marine officer who maintained excellent relations with the military, members of Congress, leaders of the eugenics movement, the medical profession, and the chemical industry, Cumming was also a staunch believer in states’ rights, white supremacy, and immigration restriction—and he proved a key ally for Fries. Their common beliefs converged. Cumming and his staff vastly expanded the use of gas to fumigate ships in all of America’s major ports. (One of the most obvious problems posed by using hydrocyanic acid in that way entailed how to determine that the highly poisonous gas had been removed from all parts of the vessel, so as not to accidentally kill longshoremen or seamen.)8 On his watch the federal government became the biggest single user of cyanide for fumigation purposes. Through the good graces of the Pan American Sanitary Code (1924), Cumming a
lso got all republics in the Americas to require HCN fumigation in their ports. His agents carried the fumigation message throughout the world.

  Although the war was over, the chemical industry was conducting additional research to devise alternate uses for its deadly war gases. Scientists were now testing them for every use, from exterminating pests to fighting fires.9 Phosgene, for example, was already known to be useful in making dye, and the war experience had enabled industry to reduce its price from $1.50 to 15 cents a pound. Now chemical industry spokesmen said housewives could also use phosgene for a variety of other tasks, such as adding color to rustling silk or polishing the family’s valuable crystal. Chlorine as well had many applications for cleaning.10 Chemical scientists hadn’t yet figured out any beneficial uses for mustard gas, but within a few years Fries would claim it was an effective tool against marine borers that were destroying docks and other waterfront structures.11 He also proclaimed that a perfected gas mask would soon protect Americans from every known type of poison gas and prove invaluable for the nation’s fire fighters.12 The mission of the Chemical Warfare Service, he said, had changed; now the agency was simply doing “peace work principally.”13