Man of the Hour

by Jennet Conant

  The German high command had hoped that this shocking new weapon would break the stalemate and bring about a quick victory. It was specifically designed by two leading German chemists, Walther Nernst and Fritz Haber, as a technological fix for static trench warfare, a chemical way of driving the enemy from their dugouts and breaking through the lines. (The pride of German chemistry, including five future Nobel laureates, collaborated on chemical warfare: Fritz Haber, Walther Nernst, Otto Hahn, James Franck, and Richard Willstatter.) When it failed, and the next day enemy troops mounted a successful counterattack and were soon back in place and protecting themselves with improvised mouth pads—usually made of dry or urine-soaked socks—worse toxins followed. Allied scientists immediately rushed to develop protective gear, creating a succession of masks, hoods, helmets, goggles, respirators, and filter boxes.

  On December 19, 1915, the Germans raised the stakes, deploying phosgene, an even more powerful lung irritant. When the Allies quickly contained the damage, outfitting troops with improved masks, the Germans invented an even more powerful toxin that could penetrate those defenses. Once it became clear that German scientists would invariably bring all their brainpower and technology to bear on increasingly virulent gases, those on the receiving end—Britain and France—felt completely justified in responding in kind, inaugurating national chemical warfare programs mobilizing their full academic, industrial, and economic resources. Soon both sides were deploying chlorine and phosgene, and developing gas artillery shells that would eliminate dependence on fickle winds for delivery.

  The summer of 1917 ushered in a new, acute phase of the chemical war. Beginning in mid-July, just as the first American troops were arriving in France, the Germans launched an overwhelming gas assault. These mustard-loaded artillery shells did not pulverize the barricades, but rather burst with a plop and smothered the trenches in poison. Mustard gas—also known as Yellow Cross, for the German shell markings—proved to be a highly effective weapon, causing extensive incapacitating injuries to the eyes, lungs, and skin. Five times more toxic than phosgene, it was deemed an almost perfect battle gas—“king of the battle gases”—so powerful that even minute traces could penetrate protective clothing, even rubber boots and leather gloves. Moreover, it rendered the battlefield uninhabitable for as long as a day—it remained active in the soil for weeks—allowing the Germans to stall Allied advances. The heavy, ground-hugging vapor settled in ditches and shell holes, and remained a persistent hazard for soldiers and their horses, causing many to suffer reexposure in the course of evacuating.

  Mustard gas (no relation to the harmless mustard seed) was also insidious, giving off a characteristic garlicky odor that on initial exposure did little more than induce sneezing. When British troops first encountered it in the field, they removed their gas masks because they thought the pungent smell was just a ploy on the part of the Germans to fool them into believing a gas attack was under way. Unlike with cloud gas, they experienced no immediate pain or obvious symptoms on contact, but in a matter of hours were covered in blisters, coughing severely, and vomiting. One of the most distressing features of mustard was that injuries became progressively worse, particularly those to the eyes, so the men became temporarily blind. Its heavy toll—fourteen thousand British gas casualties in the first three weeks, more than all the gas casualties in the entire previous year—shook the Allies’ confidence. In a bloody war of attrition, mustard’s military value was that it wounded rather than killed, removing soldiers from action for weeks or months, weakening their effectiveness, and tying up large numbers of personnel and medical facilities required for their care. From a morale point of view, it was devastating. For Germany, mustard gas represented a technical triumph. It increased uncertainty and apprehension completely out of proportion to the threat, particularly as the Allies had nothing comparable with which to respond.

  The United States entered the war late and unprepared. It lagged far behind both the Allied and Axis powers not only in traditional war materiel, but also in understanding of the technology and tactics of the new generation of chemical weapons. For help in the crisis, the government turned to the one agency experienced with asphyxiating gases, the US Bureau of Mines. By the fall of 1917, James Norris, now an army colonel, was director of both offensive and defensive research, and busily recruiting hundreds of university chemists for the gas warfare program. He immediately put Conant to work on making mustard gas, leading a team of four chemists in Organic Unit No. 1 at the American University Experimental Station (AUES) located on the outskirts of Washington, DC. American University was brand new when the war broke out and had graduated only a single class when its board of trustees offered its campus to President Wilson for the war effort.

  By the time Conant arrived, the campus looked like a vast construction site, as dozens of new office buildings, laboratories, and testing facilities were being hastily erected for research into all aspects of the new type of warfare: chemical, psychological, pharmacological, and mechanical. The Harvard Chemistry Department had become practically a section of the War Department: his favorite professor, Elmer Kohler, along with another senior colleague, G. P. Baxter, were developing war gases; Arthur Lamb headed the defensive section and was working on gas masks; and Roger Adams, whose shoes Conant had filled the past nine months at Harvard, came a short time later as another group leader under Norris. More familiar faces arrived every day, which, he wrote Patty, “helps to cheer us up in spite of the gloomy news from Europe.”

  They spent the first four or five months playing catch-up with the British and French, who were already struggling in the laboratory to repeat the scientific steps taken by the Germans to produce mustard gas, or dichlorodiethyl sulphide. Conant was in touch with Sir William Jackson Pope, whose Cambridge laboratory was one of the first centers of gas research in England. He knew the British had been hampered in their progress by the shortage of ethylene chlorohydrin, a critical material. Pope tried another method, proposed by William F. Guthrie, starting with sulphur monochloride, but after several frustrating weeks had not gotten much further. A third group, at Manchester, was investigating sulphur dichloride. The French also had three teams tackling the problem, and faced many of the same hurdles. In the end, they were the first to hit on a solution—low operating temperature, precise control of the exothermic reaction, and constant stirring of the reactants—and began producing mustard gas several months before their Anglo-American colleagues.

  At the start of 1918, Conant’s unit was enlarged. Early on, it suffered the same ethylene supply problems as the British, and Conant devoted significant effort to finding other sources. He even worked on cracking crude oil to obtain mixed olefins from which ethylene could be extracted. After weighing the effectiveness of the different manufacturing processes, Conant opted for Guthrie’s “cold” method. It took another two months of studying the optimum conditions for the monochloride-ethylene reaction before the Americans perfected their own manufacturing process. The next step was to do a test run to see if they could produce satisfactory batches of mustard gas. A vast new poison-gas factory was being built at the Aberdeen Proving Ground along the Chesapeake River, and combined with the country’s major gas shell-filling plant. In record time, the new federal arsenal in Edgewood, Maryland, was up and running, along with specially constructed roads, railroad sidings, water supply and power station. The first experimental batches were made at Edgewood in early June, and the gas went into mass production in August. From then on, Edgewood churned out an average of thirty tons of mustard gas a day. By the end of the war, the United States was producing more mustard gas than England, Germany, and France combined. According to Ludwig F. Haber, an eminent historian and the son of the German army’s director of gas warfare, “It was an extraordinary performance,” made possible in part by the “lavish use of manpower”—at the peak of activity, seven thousand enlisted men worked at Edgewood, aided by another three thousand civilians—and by the large pool of skilled chemists d
rawn from industry and academe.

  What began as a civilian job in Washington had quickly morphed into military service when Conant and his fellow chemists were given commissions in the army. Still sounding rather amazed to find himself in uniform, he had written to Patty in early January 1918 that he had been made a first lieutenant in the Sanitary Corps. “Cambridge and Harvard seem a long way (and time) distant in this hurly-burly of war work which we are all struggling with down here,” he informed her. “I am attempting (at times, it seems vainly) to help in this hideous business of beating the devil at his own game, or more specifically of ‘gassing’ the originators of ‘gas.’ My work is connected with an organic research laboratory which in outward appearance is not so different from the usual organic laboratory, but the substances we brew are a merry collection of devilishness.”

  Conant’s determinedly upbeat tone masked his own unease about his assignment. Mustard gas—actually an oily brown liquid at room temperature—was nasty stuff. Not typically deadly, it was a highly toxic vesicant, or blister-forming agent, that attacked not only the skin but also all tissue it came in contact with, especially that of the eyes and airways. The “brewing,” or synthesizing, process was dangerous, exacting, and unpleasant work. Accidents were unavoidable. Pipes would leak, vats would boil over. There was no effective antidote. Protection depended on preventing exposure and immediate decontamination to limit injury. Large basins of soapsuds stood at the ready for anyone who came into contact with the chemical, and each time it happened there would be much frantic dunking and scrubbing and general alarm. As in the coal mines, canaries were scattered throughout the premises to warn workers when gas levels were not safe. Conant could not bring himself to admit, even to himself, how strange it was for the son of a Quaker mother to be tasked with manufacturing such a noxious substance. He revealed only a hint of his misgivings in a grim aside to Patty that he found his new position “rather anomalous,” as the Sanitary Corps was “supposed to be connected only with saving life.” But then, he noted with resignation, “Everything is mixed up in the army.”

  * * *

  In the spring of 1918, Conant was transferred to the newly formed Chemical Warfare Service (CWS) branch of the army, which was in the process of assuming responsibility for all weapons-related research, and made a captain. He wrote to Patty about his promotion, and warned her that it meant he would most likely not be coming back to Cambridge anytime soon. “I will have to postpone the pleasure of seeing you,” he added regretfully, “and ‘flashing my bars’ and displaying my regimentals.” As much as he missed the “peaceful shade” of Harvard, he was self-conscious about not seeing any action and worried that she might think less of him for it. Even his sister Marjorie had enlisted in the armed forces, and would be serving with a newly formed group of women artists doing occupational therapy with shell-shocked patients in American hospitals in France. “I certainly envied her,” he admitted. “This being a chemist and staying in the USA isn’t any sort of job at all for a person my age, particularly with one’s friends getting wounded and killed ‘over there.’ But I guess we’ll have to see it through for the present time.”

  Having perfected a method for making mustard gas, Conant was assigned to a new classified military project about which he was honor bound not to disclose the location or even its very existence. This “highly secret operation,” he later recalled, involved the development of the “great American gas which would win the War.” As the technological advances in gas warfare accelerated, and new and better defenses made the early toxins less debilitating, Allied and Axis scientists were competing to invent more effective offensive agents. Both sides wanted to claim their chemical weapons were superior.

  Captain Winford Lee Lewis, a forty-year-old Northwestern University professor of chemistry working under Conant’s supervision, was tasked with creating a new, more powerful chemical agent before the Germans. Lewis was specifically charged with developing a gas that would be effective in small concentrations, capable of injuring all parts of the body, and difficult to protect against. If it could be cheaply manufactured in large quantities, and easily transported, so much the better. An unsigned memo regarding their progress by May 1918 reflects the extreme secrecy surrounding the project:

  “Captain Lewis at the Catholic University [in Washington, DC], is making no report, as he has instructions to place nothing regarding his work in writing at this time. Captain Conant is also doing certain work with which you are familiar, and concerning which nothing is said.”

  Lewis and his team decided to investigate arsenic, an ancient poison. Both sides had experimented with arsenic early in the war and rejected it as not particularly useful as a weapon. While researching the subject, however, Lewis heard about a young priest who had accidentally discovered a poisonous substance while working on his dissertation at Catholic University of America. The Belgian-born Julius Aloysius Nieuwland had attended the graduate seminary at Holy Cross College, was ordained a Catholic priest in 1903, and the following year earned a PhD in chemistry at CUA. (Nieuwland went on to become a famous inventor, recognized for his role in developing synthetic rubber, an acetylene-based product later known as neoprene and marketed by DuPont beginning in 1932.) His thesis, entitled rather banally “Some Reactions of Acetylene,” consisted of a long list of reactions between acetylene and seventy-five other compounds, and had been sitting on the library shelf collecting dust for more than a decade. Lewis would never have given it a second look if it had not been for Father John Griffin, Nieuwland’s old thesis advisor, who was still on the faculty of CUA. Griffin not only pointed out the relevant section describing an experiment that yielded a highly toxic mixture, he remembered that it caused his student to become “so sick that he was hospitalized for several days.”

  Intrigued, Lewis read Nieuwland’s description of what happened when he bubbled acetylene gas through liquid arsenic trichloride, using aluminum chloride as a catalyst. “The contents of the flask turned black,” he wrote, and when poured into cold water decomposed into a black gummy mass. “The tarry substance possessed a most nauseating odor, and was extremely poisonous. Inhalation of the fumes, even in small quantity caused nervous depression.” Lewis immediately set to work trying to re-create the toxic mixture, and was fairly sure he was close when the fumes gave him a splitting headache. He placed a tiny drop of the liquid on his hand, which immediately became swollen and painful. In order to identify exactly what the compound was chemically, he and his team attempted to purify it, but the normal distilling process did not work. Every time the mixture was heated, it exploded. When Conant learned of the problem, he suggested using a 20 percent HCl wash to “desensitize” the mixture by removing the aluminum chloride catalyst. That did the trick. The explosions stopped, and Lewis was able to identify three arsenic-containing compounds that came to be known as lewisite 1, 2, and 3. L1 was the most deadly—and militarily, the most desirable.

  By the end of June, the basic research phase was complete. Lewis handed his lethal arsenic compound over to Conant, who took charge of the development of lewisite as a weapon of war. Conant worked on evaluating the character and properties of the new gas, ascertaining whether it could be manufactured on a large scale, and devising a method for its preparation. For security reasons, it was decided that the new poison be designated as G-34, using one of the existing mustard codes in the war department’s files to throw off any potential spies. In some communications, it was called “methyl,” another camouflage name.

  Conant shepherded lewisite through the various sections of CWS’s research division, which included animal and human testing. After several weeks, the pharmacologists concluded that a man of average weight would be killed by one third of a teaspoon of lewisite applied to the skin. Its chief tactical advantage was that its effects were immediate, unlike the delayed effects of mustard, which made the latter a better defensive than offensive weapon. Using lewisite, advancing forces could move into enemy territory without fear
of choking on their own toxic fumes. G-34 was the new American gas, regarded by the Department of Defense as “the premier of them all,” and the weapon the Allied forces had been waiting for. General William L. Sibert, the director of the Chemical Warfare Service, was convinced that a surprise assault using lewisite could deliver a crushing blow to the German army and finally bring the war to a decisive end. He ordered that three hundred tons of the toxin, in drums and shells, be in readiness on the battlefield by March 1, 1919.

  Getting the new poison gas into mass production in time for the planned spring Allied offensive was going to take a herculean effort. On July 18 Conant was promoted to major and ordered to the top-secret production facility in the sleepy town of Willoughby, Ohio. Exactly one week earlier, on the day Conant’s experiments proved G-34 could successfully be produced in the laboratory, Frank Dorsey, a thirty-eight-year-old chemical engineer and colonel at National Lamp Works, one of GE’s industrial labs in Nela Park, Cleveland, had been dispatched to find a site for the new lewisite plant. Dorsey had been instructed to take all possible precautions to prevent the Germans from discovering anything about the new gas and developing countermeasures. Scouting for an isolated location within commuting distance of his headquarters, he selected an old, shuttered Ben-Hur Motor Company plant about a mile outside Willoughby, on the banks of the aptly named Chagrin River.