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.
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: