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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 him at ease and told him in his Missouri drawl, “We’re going to have a gas service, and you’re going to head it.”