European armies devised fairly effective countermeasures against these initially milder varieties of gases that at least reduced the number of fatalities. Between April 1915 and July 1917, British forces suffered 21,908 casualties and 1,895 deaths from gas warfare. On July 12, 1917, Germany unleashed much more potent mustard gas weapons against the British, again at Ypres. From that point until the end of the war the following November, British forces suffered 160,970 casualties and 4,167 deaths. Hence, by the time U.S. troops joined the fighting, deadlier varieties were being used by both sides, including those with phosgene, hydrogen cyanide, and mustard agents. Casualties skyrocketed, but, in relative terms, the number of fatalities declined sharply.75 American chemists were determined to change that.
The United States launched a large-scale chemical warfare research program run initially under the aegis of several different departments until centralized under the newly established Chemical Warfare Service on June 28, 1918. Research programs were initially dispersed on a number of campuses before being consolidated in the Experiment Station at American University in Washington, D.C., in September 1917. Most of the nation’s leading chemists descended on the campus to conduct the research. The effort eventually employed over 1,700 chemists, working out of more than sixty buildings, many hastily constructed. By war’s end, 5,400 chemists were serving in the military in what was being labeled “the Chemist’s War.”76
In rushing to serve their country, American chemists were following in the footsteps of their European colleagues. Germany’s chemical warfare research was centered in its prestigious Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry, where such luminaries as Fritz Haber, James Franck, Otto Hahn, Walther Nernst, and Richard Willstätter all lent their services. Institute Director Haber rallied the others behind the notion that “science… belonged to humanity in peacetime and the fatherland in war.”77 In Great Britain, scientists at thirty-three laboratories tested 150,000 organic and inorganic compounds in an effort to discover ever deadlier concoctions. The largest facility alone employed over a thousand scientists.78
Scientists of all nations were eager to do their part to assist the war effort. Johns Hopkins physicist J. S. Ames wrote, “For the first time in the history of science men who are devoting their lives to it have an immediate opportunity of proving their worth to their country. It is a wonderful moment; and the universities of the country are seizing it.” University of Chicago physicist Robert Millikan gushed, “the world has been waked up by the war to a new appreciation of what science can do.”79
The Chemical Warfare Service prioritized speed over safety. As a result, numerous deaths were recorded, according to electrical engineer George Temple, who had been head of motor maintenance at “Camp American University.” In an interview years later with the American University student newspaper, the Eagle, Temple recounted several incidents. In one, “three men were burned by a deadly dose of gas. The bodies were hauled away on a cart, the flesh ‘jiggling off their bones.’”80 Each morning, during roll call, workers were asked to volunteer for burning with experimental gases. Temple volunteered seven times. In the laboratories, leaks often occurred. Canaries were kept nearby. The death of a canary meant that it was time to evacuate the building.81
Temple described what it was like when researchers headed home after a day in the laboratories: “At the end of the day the camp personnel, their clothes impregnated by gas, would pile into the trolleys. As the trolley cars neared the downtown area, civilians began boarding them. Soon they were all sneezing or crying, depending upon the type of gas the soldiers had been working with.”82 Living near campus was not particularly safe either, as former U.S. Senator Nathan Scott discovered. Scott, his wife, and his sister were “gassed” by a “cloud” that escaped from one of the campus labs. Scott and his sister sought treatment from the Experiment Station doctor and then at a local hospital.83
Among those at American University was young Harvard chemist James Conant, who would go on to head U.S. scientific research during the next world war. His successful research on lewisite earned him a promotion in July 1918. The newly appointed twenty-five-year-old major was deployed to a Cleveland suburb to oversee a project to mass-produce lewisite. Working out of the factory of the Ben Hur Motor Company in Willoughby, Conant’s team produced artillery shells and aerial bombs packed with the deadly substance, of which contact with even the smallest amount was believed to cause “intolerable agony and death after a few hours.”84
The CWS established its largest production facility adjacent to the Aberdeen, Maryland, proving ground. In early 1919, the New York Times detailed the massive operation at the site officially known as the Edgewood Arsenal, which it described as “the largest poison gas factory on earth,” producing three to four times as much as the British, French, and Germans combined. Reporter Richard Barry, who toured the facility, wrote, “I went through the hospitals and saw the men who had been struck down by the fiendish gases while at work; 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.” Barry guessed that the casualty rate might have exceeded that of any division in France.85
The facility was enormous, containing almost three hundred buildings serviced by twenty-eight miles of railway and fifteen miles of roads. It produced 200,000 chemical bombs and shells daily. Twelve hundred researchers and seven hundred assistants studied more than four thousand potentially poisonous substances.86 Barry interviewed Colonel William H. Walker, the former chair of MIT’s chemical engineering department, who served as commanding officer of the proving grounds. Walker reported that two months before the armistice, the United States had perfected a new deadly approach to using chemical weapons. The United States was prepared to have its planes drop one-ton mustard gas containers over fortified German cities. One ton of gas would engulf an area of an acre or more and, Walker assured readers, “not one living thing, not even a rat, would live through it.” The new weapons were ready to deploy in September 1918, but the Allies balked at their use. England finally acceded, but France, fearing reprisals, withheld approval until the Allies had advanced sufficiently that the gas couldn’t blow back into French territory and the Allies commanded “the air so as to insure safety from possible reprisals.” Those conditions would not have been met until spring 1919.