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
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