The Last Gasp Read online

  Cyanide gases were among the poisons studied under laboratory conditions. John Barcroft headed the unit’s physiology department. Previously French scientists had tested one such gas on dogs, which had died, but the British had tried it on goats, which survived, leaving the question of its effectiveness open to debate. Barcroft, an intrepid Quaker, decided he would personally intervene to settle the matter. One night, when everyone had gone to bed, he instructed a corporal to witness his experiment. Barcroft then flooded the gas chamber with a one in two thousand concentration of hydrogen cyanide and, without donning a mask, he entered the gas-filled chamber along with a dog. The air had a distinctive almond smell. “In order that the experiment might be as fair as possible and that my respiration should be relatively as active as that of the dog,” Barcroft wrote,

  I remained standing, and took a few steps from time to time while I was in the chamber. In about thirty seconds the dog began to get unsteady, and in fifty-five seconds it dropped to the floor and commenced the characteristic distressing respiration which heralds death from cyanide poisoning. One minute out [and] thirty-five seconds after the commencement the animal’s body was carried out, respiration having ceased and the dog being apparently dead. I then left the chamber. As regards the result upon myself, the only real effect was a momentary giddiness when I turned my head quickly. This lasted about a year, and then vanished. For some time it was difficult to concentrate on anything for any length of time.22

  Based on his first-hand observations, Barcroft and his colleagues concluded that hydrocyanic acid at higher concentrations was indeed lethal. His Quaker sensibilities may have been offended by the deadly uses to which this knowledge was put, for shortly afterward, in July 1916, the Allies introduced hydrogen cyanide and cyanogen chloride, or CC (later called CK), which the French called mauguinite or HCN, which was also known as forestite.23 The French used hydrogen cyanide in artillery shells in the Battle of the Somme and afterward. Both sides also used additional cyanide mixtures including cyanogen bromide (French name campilite, German name E-Stoff) and bromobenzyl cyanide (camite to the French and White Cross to the Germans).

  A Swiss human rights writer, Gertrud Woker, later reported, “On the Austrian Alpine front, trenches were frequently found in which all the soldiers had died from the poison [cyanide] gas of the Italians. No less horrifying are the reports of the doctors who went with the Austrian troops into the Italian lines where poison gases were employed; this was at the time when cyanide gases were first used. The dead held the exact positions they were in when attacked by the cyanide gas. There sat men turned to stone at the games, the cards in their hands, motionless; an indescribable picture!”24 Woker couldn’t know it at the time, but similar images involving cyanide gas would later come back to haunt the world a generation later.

  The United States didn’t enter the war until April 1917. By then the military standoff had lasted for thirty-three agonizing months and millions of combatants and civilians had perished. Large areas of Europe lay in waste, its soil, water, and air poisoned by toxic chemicals “where ignorant armies clashed by night.” The United States remained ill prepared for waging such a war. Few American officials had grasped the importance that would be attached to poison gases. When one of the nation’s leading chemists had contacted the secretary of war, Newton D. Baker, to offer his services, Baker replied the help would be “unnecessary” because the War Department “already had a chemist.”25 Only a few observers initially realized what it would mean, but they would come to find out soon enough. As one representative of the American chemical industry exhorted his colleagues, “The holocaust now raging in Europe has forced opportunities upon American chemists and has correspondingly increased our responsibilities.”26

  At the time, the United States already had become the world’s leading industrial power, but the state of its chemical industry didn’t compare to Germany’s.27 German scientists had achieved many of the recent breakthroughs in research; German firms dominated the production of synthetic organic chemicals such as dyes and related pharmaceuticals; and German chemistry school programs were without peer. When America entered the war, the U.S. Army had “no gas masks, no supply of offensive chemicals, and its troops received no gas training.”28 Virtually overnight the nation found itself embroiled in what was increasingly being called “the chemist’s war.”29

  But that was about to change. American authorities immediately halted the supply of German chemicals into the United States and seized many vital German assets; agents confiscated 4,800 German dyestuff and chemical patents, for everything from aspirin to munitions, and eventually made them available to American firms. Chemical companies that were run by German Americans but linked to German interests rushed to proclaim their allegiance to the United States. The American Chemical Society, representing American chemical interests, offered its services to the U.S. government and conducted a nationwide census of chemists who could be called upon to assist the nation in war.30 Much of the funding for research came from private sources such as the Rockefeller and Carnegie Foundations.31 To obtain chemicals and equipment for its new research laboratory, the military turned to Chester G. Fisher, the president of the Fisher Scientific Materials Company of Pittsburgh, which previously had relied on producers in Bavaria for its supplies.32 The federal Bureau of Mines, by virtue of its prior experience dealing with hazardous respiratory conditions in mining, assumed primary responsibility for U.S. development of poison gas, with James F. Norris of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as its director of chemical research.33 Many university chemistry departments across the country virtually became part of the War Department. “In view of the present emergency the Catholic University of America has the honor to offer itself to you for such services as the Government of the United States may desire from it,” its rector, Thomas Shahan, wrote to President Woodrow Wilson.34 Shahan informed his students, “This war itself is a scientific war; and before it ends we shall need, as other nations have already found, to continue unremittingly at the task of research and preparation.”35 By end of May 1917 the Bureau of Mines had enlisted the aid of laboratories in twenty-one colleges and universities, including the University of Michigan, University of Chicago, and Western Reserve University; it also drew on three industrial companies and three government agencies. Yandell Henderson of Yale, the nation’s foremost expert on poison gases and automobile exhaust, personally tested his new gas mask design in a specially constructed chlorine gas chamber.36 George Burrell, who before the war had studied such phenomena as the effects of carbon monoxide on small animals, became the new chief of the Research Division. A researcher on the use of chemicals to maintain swimming pools became engaged in developing lethal poisons.37 According to some accounts, of all the chemists in the nation who were asked to join in the government’s war gas research, only one chemist refused.38 “War, the destroyer,” wrote the executive secretary of the American Chemical Society, “has been… the incentive to marvelous chemical development with a speed of accomplishment incomprehensible in normal times.”39 Within a few months of entering the war, America’s chemical industry was thriving so much that American chemists had “accomplished in two years what it had taken Germany forty years to attain.”40

  Immediately upon America’s entry into the war, a colonel from the Army Corps of Engineers, Amos A. Fries, was ordered to France as director of road building. Then forty-three years old, the former West Pointer already had made a name for himself as a talented, no-nonsense administrator who had engineered the construction of the Dalles-Celilo Canal in Oregon, directed all harbor work in Southern California and the Colorado River, developed the plans for the Los Angeles harbor, and helped to carve out Yellowstone National Park. Three days after his arrival in Paris, the immaculately groomed Fries appeared before the commander of the American Expeditionary Forces, General John J. “Blackjack” Pershing, and snapped to attention. Pershing, who remembered him from their service together in the Philippines, put h
im at ease and told him in his Missouri drawl, “We’re going to have a gas service, and you’re going to head it.”

  Fries proved to be an excellent choice. Promoted to brigadier general, he moved with remarkable speed, helping to set up a major research laboratory, working feverishly with several top scientific and industrial leaders to develop America’s chemical warfare program, and launching a training program to prepare his troops for the terrifying realities of gas warfare.41 He received permission from the French government to convert a former tuberculosis research laboratory at Puteaux, near Paris, into a chemical warfare laboratory, and he created a test field near Chaumont.42 In January 1918 contingents of American chemists began to arrive with supplies. They included Gilbert N. Lewis of the University of California, one of the world’s top physical chemists; Joel H. Hildebrand, the future president of the American Chemical Society; and Frederick G. Keyes, later of MIT.43

  On May 11, 1918, the War Department ordered famed Major General William L. Sibert to draw up plans for a new gas service structure. Sibert, of Alabama, had served in the Philippines and was best known for having superintended the epic building of the Panama Canal. In June 1918, just as the Allies were first employing their own mustard gas against the Germans, President Wilson signed Executive Order 2894 approving Sibert’s plan for the Chemical Warfare Service.44 The Americans’ military-industrial-scientific-educational complex already had gone into high gear.

  Back in the states, the U.S. government had established its chemical research at American University on the northwestern outskirts of Washington. Over the next 600 days it would grow from a single building to 153 facilities employing more than 1,700 chemists and 700 service assistants, as it became the largest federal scientific research project yet undertaken and the prototype for the later project that would build the atomic bomb a generation later.45 Its director was Captain James B. Conant, a young organic chemist from Harvard University (who later would become its president and play a key role in organizing the Manhattan Project, which built the atomic bomb).46 Conant and his colleagues would end up testing the effects of more than 1,600 compounds on mice, rats, dogs, and other animals, as well as on American soldiers.

  Figure 3 General Amos Fries (left) of the Chemical Warfare Service tries out new chlorine gas chamber at Veterans Bureau, 1925. National Photo Company Collection. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

  One of their first priorities was to assess previous research. In 1903, at a laboratory at the University of Notre Dame, a Roman Catholic priest, Julius Aloysius Nieuwland, had combined arsenic trichloride in the presence of aluminum chloride to cause a highly toxic compound (dichloro-2-chlorovinyl arsine) to form. Notes about his work had been filed away for more than a decade. Then, during the war, the chemist Captain Winford Lee Lewis of Northwestern University, working at Catholic University, learned of Nieuwland’s previous discoveries and purified the compound into a substance that came to be called methyl or lewisite.47

  A highly explosive oily amber liquid, the compound carried the gentle fragrance of geranium blossoms but burst into flame when combined with water. Lewisite also proved extremely deadly with the slightest contact or inhalation and was rated seventy-two times more lethal than mustard gas, making it the strongest poison ever discovered to that point. Working at American University’s Experimental Station (AUES), Conant and his staff investigated it with as much caution as they could summon. They tested specimens on snails, slugs, mice, rats, guinea pigs, and canaries, and tied thousands of dogs, monkeys, and goats to stakes in nearby farmers’ fields in order to expose them to chemical bombs. The animals’ symptoms were carefully recorded over a period of several days, and the dead ones were subjected to postmortem examination, some of their vital organs preserved in glass jars or rendered by artists with oil paints.48

  The Bureau of Entomology of the Department of Agriculture also collaborated with the Chemical Warfare Service to test four gases that would combat another of the army’s biggest problems at the front: lice. The objective was to place soldiers wearing gas masks in a gas chamber and subject them to the right lethal gas that would “kill all cooties and their nits.”49 The researchers saw themselves as waging war against the insect world.50

  The AUES researchers also conducted human tests in a “Man Test Laboratory” that was unluckily designated number 13, a low, squat barracks that was kept stocked with canaries to warn the soldiers of dangerous gas levels and equipped with a “vast tub of soapsuds [that] awaited the frenzied plunges of men on whom the horrid stuff had settled.”51 One serviceman who was exposed to lewisite but survived to tell the tale, Sergeant George Temple, later said he believed that more American soldiers were killed by gas at the AUES than died from gas in battle.52 The director of the research division, Colonel George A. Burrell, said the AUES casualty rate was higher than in any other unit in the army except the infamous gas-manufacturing unit at Edgewood Arsenal.53

  On the bright summer morning of August 3, 1918, a former United States senator from West Virginia, Nathan Bay Scott, was seated with his wife and sister on the back porch of their home, about four hundred yards away from AUES, relaxing and enjoying the breeze, when suddenly he noticed a dense cloud of yellowish gas advancing toward them. The group smelled a faint odor and felt intense burning in their eyes. After rushing inside the house and shutting the windows, they looked out and saw dead birds and small animals littering the ground. Some soldiers who were nearby were also stricken and had to be hospitalized. Despite the senator’s complaints, however, the matter was hushed up. But lewisite had been the culprit.54

  American factories played a key role in the chemical war, churning out 5,920,000 gas masks, more than 45,000 signal horns to warn troops of gas attacks, and more than 50,000 specially designed oversized fans to blow poison gas vapors out of trenches and dugouts.55 To produce its mustard gas and other poisons, the army relied on a web of plants scattered throughout the Northeast and Midwest. Contracts were secretly arranged with chemical manufacturing facilities at Stamford, Connecticut, Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, Kingsport, Tennessee, Croyland, Pennsylvania, Niagara Falls and Buffalo, New York, Charleston, West Virginia, and Midland, Michigan, all of which were expected to produce tons of poison gas.

  The largest American workshop was Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland. Specially constructed on a three-hundred-acre tract of former farmland along the Chesapeake, twenty-six miles from Baltimore, and surrounded by miles of fence and heavily guarded by soldiers with drawn bayonets, it rapidly became the largest lethal gas factory on earth, manufacturer of mustard gas, chlorine, sulfur monochloride, chloropicrin, and phosgene. Its commander was Colonel William H. Walker, a former professor of chemical engineering at MIT. Under his supervision Edgewood grew to become a city of brick kilns, high chimneys, correlated vats in innumerable series, eleven miles of high-tension electric lines, fifteen miles of roadways, twenty-eight miles of railway, countless miles of elevated pipelines, and “machinery of the finest type and the most perfect installation, housed in concrete and sheet iron, built apparently for permanence”—all of it capable of producing two hundred thousand chemical bombs and shells per day.56

  Work in America’s poison gas plants was extraordinarily dangerous. The army’s official figures indicated that in the period from June to December 1918 alone Edgewood suffered 925 casualties—769 of them from August through October. Mustard gas accounted for 674 of the total, followed by stannic chloride (50), phosgene (50), chloropicrin (44), bleach chlorine (44), liquid chlorine (18), phosphorous (15), caustic soda (10), sulfur chloride (9), sulfuric acid (8), picric acid (2), and carbon monoxide (1).57 A New York Times reporter who was allowed to visit the site shortly after the armistice witnessed two large dormitories that were still serving as hospitals for many of those who had suffered as a result of work-related accidents. “I saw boys who had been struck down by the fiendish gases while at work,” the visitor wrote:

  some with arms and legs and trunks shriveled and scarred
as by a horrible fire, some with the deep suppurations still oozing after weeks of careful nursing. In one case a drop of mustard oil had fallen from a conduit pipe under which a soldier had walked, hitting his shoe. He wiped it off, thinking that made him safe. The next day his flesh began to peel. Now, five weeks later, his foot looks like a charred ember. Another had accidentally kicked over what he thought an empty pipe. It contained phosphorous, which flew over his face and upper body. Now, weeks later, he is still a mass of horrible burns. Another case (one of the fatalities) was that of an officer who came in from the works to the office. He wore rubber gloves, as they all do when near the gases, but did not know he had been near enough to pick up the mustard oil. He picked up a chair and placed it in front of his desk, intending to seat himself. At that moment the telephone rang and he stepped to the wall to answer. A friend, another officer, entered and took the seat by the desk. Forty-eight hours later the second officer was dead. The first officer had accidentally rubbed mustard oil on the back of the chair. It went through the clothes and into the spine of the second.58

  The army was eager to put lewisite to work in ways that would achieve its maximum effect. General Sibert had ordered that three thousand tons of the methyl in artillery shells and storage drums must be ready on March 1, 1919, for a massive spring offensive he was planning against Germany. Captain Conant’s most important mission was to ensure this deadline was met in absolute secrecy. To carry it out, he selected a site in a tiny Cleveland suburb, Willoughby. In early 1918 he commandeered the abandoned Ben Hur Motor Company plant and instituted airtight security.59 It was there, he hoped, that the material known by its top-secret designation of G-34 would become “the great American gas which would win the war.”60 Working through the spring and into the torrid August heat, when gases were at their most volatile, Conant and his team geared up their machinery to produce an output of ten tons a day, or one ton more than what could have “depopulated” Manhattan, a city of four million. This volume was more than ten times the Germans’ total output of poison gas, and Conant’s variety was also seven times more deadly—more than enough, it was said, to exterminate Berlin.61 Remarkably, although many workers at Willoughby received serious burns as a result of their work, no soldier died, and there was no catastrophic accident.62