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
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