Hellfire Boys Read online

  Jabine felt the same. The men in the regiment were “a dandy bunch,” he wrote home. He loved camp life. The constant exercise, the camaraderie, even the location pleased him. When Jabine wasn’t drilling, he was detailed to truck duty and spent his days rumbling around Washington, enjoying the sights and warm weather from the truck windows. “This is a delightful place for a camp. It is out in the country and yet not far from the city. Also, it is very high.We seem to be about even with the top of the [Washington] monument, so must be about 500 feet above the city.” City life was exciting. When he went to a play with a friend, he was seated in the front row of the mezzanine. President Wilson and his wife, Edith, entered the theater and sat down in a box about fifteen feet away. “I was so excited at seeing him that I lost track of time and we nearly were late getting back to camp,” Jabine wrote in an ebullient letter home to his mother.

  The men became accustomed to the constant drilling, and uniforms and gear had finally begun to arrive, albeit piecemeal. Every day, the regiment’s ranks swelled with new recruits, and soon there would be enough soldiers for two outfits, Companies A and B. A new name for the regiment had been spreading through camp, like flame licking through a cornfield. “They say that we are already known in the service as the ‘Hellfire 30th’!” Jabine boasted.

  The regiment’s second company—Company B—was officially organized on November 3, and Jabine was moved to that unit, separating him from Frank Devlin but bringing him closer with Ellis Frink.

  In the second week of November, he was able to move out of the crowded confines of the College of History building and into newly built barracks, which were much more comfortable and life was “much better in every way,” he wrote.

  The hill was becoming crowded. As the ranks of engineers grew, so did the number of chemists with the Bureau of Mines. Even with the wide-open campus and abundant land around it, the two groups were butting up against each other. The cantonments built for 1,800 engineers housed some 2,400 men, and even officers had doubled up in tiny rooms built for a single soldier. On November 20 alone, 120 men transferred in from Fort Slocum. In the College of History building that Jabine vacated, officers slept in vacant rooms, using piles of cardboard boxes as mattresses, while secretaries and stenographers worked at desks in the hallways. There was nowhere for the chemists to sleep either—all of them were traveling back and forth on Washington’s streetcars each morning or sleeping in their labs.

  Manning took up the space problem with the American University chancellor, asking if the university could surrender some of the rooms in the College of History building where it still maintained administrative offices. Bishop John William Hamilton wrote back granting permission for the additional space.

  Chief of Engineers William Black, on the other hand, was irate over the chemists’ demands and the bureau’s growing footprint on the hill. Not only had the bureau positioned itself to use the campus even before receiving a formal invitation, the chemists’ occupancy of rooms in the history building had never been part of the original agreement. To top it off, Manning was putting up temporary structures all around the grounds. In an attempt to rein in the chemists, Black suggested that the bureau and other government agencies needed a reminder of who was actually in charge of the campus and demanded that any changes on the hill would have to receive the engineers’ approval.

  Secretary of War Baker followed Black’s advice, sending a reminder to all his cabinet officials about the wartime arrangements at American. But the wrangling continued. Every time it appeared settled, the bureau would make new demands for space. In the College of History building, the chemists eyed the space where the engineer officers slept. The engineers eyed the space where the bureau planned to put in a lunchroom. Finally, the bureau worked out an arrangement, divvying up the rooms in the building in a way that seemed to satisfy both sides. But even then, the bureau warned that it would probably need still more space in the future.

  “I am quite confident that there will be future need for more office space than we are at present occupying, and I hope you will be able to keep this in mind, with the view to possibly accommodating us by permitting us the occupancy of such rooms as are now being used as sleeping quarters for your men,” the station superintendent, Lauson Stone, wrote to the engineers.

  In mid-November, a motorcade rolled into Camp American University. President Wilson stepped from one of the cars with his wife Edith to see the work of the engineers’ camouflage regiments. He was bundled up against the cold in a long black coat and leather gloves, a wide-brimmed hat tipped low over his eyes. The first lady walked beside him, her polished boots gleaming as the crowd of officials made their way across the withered grass to the middle of a field. Secretary of State Robert Lansing came for the outing as well, along with Secretary of War Baker, more than a dozen generals, and a passel of colonels. With the crowd gathered in an open field, an officer asked the president to try to spot the soldier hidden nearby. Wilson scanned his surroundings. When he gave up, the officer gave a signal. A moss-covered rock a few feet away from Wilson flipped over, revealing an underground listening post with a soldier practically under the startled president’s feet.

  The engineers made no secret of their training at Camp American University—just the opposite: the army courted press coverage. Having the president visit the camp was a chance to publicize the engineers’ ingenuity at deception. In the wide-open spaces around the campus, the camoufleurs of the Sixth Engineers practiced painting artillery to make it indistinguishable from the dun-colored ground and scrub brush. They wove reeds and leaves into netting that could be dragged over trenches or artillery. They practiced building and painting an entire dummy village that, from the vantage of aerial spies, would resemble a rural French hamlet.

  The engineers sought press coverage of the Hellfire Battalion as well. Newspapers around the country carried lurid, sensational stories about how the Thirtieth Engineers gas regiment would be a ferocious response to German barbarity. “If his satanic majesty happened to drop around at the American University training camp today, he would see the ‘Hellfire Battalion’ at work and blush with envy,” one wire article boasted.

  “On the War Department records the battalion is known as the ‘Gas and Flame Battalion of the Thirtieth Regiment Engineers,’” the article went on.

  Throughout the army they are known as the “Hell Fire Boys.” This name is literally descriptive. A group of red-blooded Americans, most of them youths, are daily training in gas and flame fighting and learning how to make a real inferno for the Germans… .Gas attacks always come in the heaviest battles, and the “hellfire boys” expect to be among those present at every big attack made by the American forces.

  The Bureau of Mines, on the other hand, had little interest in publicity. Manning, Burrell, and the bureau chemists took great pains to keep their work quiet and out of the public eye. It wasn’t always easy. As winter approached, more than five hundred civilians and soldiers—mostly chemists and engineers—were working in the American University laboratory and outbuildings. Detonations and explosions were daily occurrences. Tests of smoke candles and portable trench sprayers sent diaphanous clouds wafting on the breeze. Soldiers strapped on flamethrowers, the tanks of gas on their backs spewing a seething lance of flame a hundred feet from where the soldiers stood, and flares of different colors burst high over the hill.

  Another factor made it difficult to keep the research under wraps: pets were disappearing all around the heights. Their owners puzzled over why they vanished and never returned. An article in the Post shed light on the matter. The Hellfire Boys were practicing with “liquid lightning” and “concentrated extract of vaporized brimstone calculated to reduce instantly a German field marshal to a cake of soap.” As in New Haven and other Connecticut cities and towns, strays were being rounded up for use in the mysterious and deadly work on the hill.

  “They would rather have the Kaiser, or the crown prince, or a Bavarian grand duke to expe
riment with, for some of the fiery things they are squirting through their hose pipes are entirely too fancy to be wasted on anything less than the real Teutonic article, but in the absence of Germans, dogs and cats are providing fair substitutes, with dachshunds preferred,” the article read.

  Though the article painted the animal-testing issue with dark humor, the Washington Humane Society was not amused. The organization quietly fumed over the army’s use of dogs for experiments, likening the hill to a torture chamber for animals, but raised no public objections, for the sake of the soldiers who needed protection from gas.

  The medical investigations were fast becoming another major element of the research. The work had had a slow start in New Haven, because the physicians wanted to have more carefully controlled, methodical experimentation than the British and French. With the move to Washington, the work ballooned far beyond its modest beginnings. The 125 offensive war gases prepared on the hill all required toxicology tests, mostly with dogs and mice. Animals alone wouldn’t suffice, though. In mid-October, the gas mask division set up a “man-test section,” which was in charge of building gas chambers to put the masks through their paces. After Yandell Henderson tested the division’s first gas mask in June, he realized that there was no way to reliably conduct gas mask tests without soldiers actually wearing them in a gas cloud to determine how well they worked. As development of the masks progressed, men would don a new model, wear it for hours on end, and then fill out a report on its comfort and fit. When new war gases came out, soldiers would wear masks into the gas chamber of the man-test house to see how well the filter worked. New chemical agents also required skin tests—putting drops of chemicals on soldiers’ forearms to observe their effect on human flesh. Other developments hastened the imperatives for human testing. One was the early revelation at Yale that some animals were more resistant to gas than others, leading doctors to study treatments and medical care, including bleeding gas victims. In addition, the War Department’s decision to manufacture gas in huge quantities forced Henderson’s doctors to realize that workers in gas plants in the United States would soon need treatment, too, not just soldiers on the battlefield.

  In addition, the potential for accidents during research experiments forced the bureau’s scientists to confront the need for safety procedures, first-aid personnel, and fire alarms. After the station’s opening in the fall, George Burrell had called in his division chiefs to discuss safety and first aid. They had agreed that American University needed medical personnel, particularly experts in eyes and skin. Warning signs peppered the grounds, with flags that popped up when gas was in use nearby. But now the chemists worried that they didn’t have enough doctors on the grounds to take care of the men. Henderson proposed some bureaucratic sleight of hand to get more first-aid specialists on the hill. If they told the army they needed doctors for first aid, they wouldn’t get them, but if they claimed the doctors were necessary for research, they would be provided, he said.

  The expanding scope of the research meant that secrecy was becoming a concern. The work needed protection from snoops and busybodies, and from those with more-nefarious goals, such as spies, German sympathizers, and saboteurs. There were already safeguards in place. Burrell issued rules regarding secrecy to every member of the Research Division. Employees weren’t allowed to step into laboratories that weren’t their own without the permission of the section chief. Lists of each lab’s employees were posted on their doors. The scientists were forbidden from speaking of their work to anyone, even bureau chemists in other research sections, to keep a firewall of secrecy between research areas. Division chiefs needed to inspect and seal important correspondence in person before it could be mailed. Papers were locked up in safes every night.

  At a November 18 meeting, the bureau’s brass talked about further measures. Codes were needed, Norris said, in case reports fell into the wrong hands. The men came up with a system: take the number associated with a chemical compound, multiply it by three, and add one. They’d keep the list under lock and key in Norris’s office, where the chemists could consult it to refresh their memories. “The more codes we have the better off we are,” he said. The men agreed that they also needed more guards around the campus to keep out interlopers.

  Manning brought up the issue of security with Brigadier General Frederic V. Abbot, explaining that both McKinley Hall and the shared College of History building needed round-the-clock sentries. Abbot promised to beef up the guards. “In accordance with your suggestion I will take steps to see that an adequate guard is maintained at these buildings at all times,” he said.

  For Manning, it wasn’t enough. He continued to fret about saboteurs and spies and, in mid-December, asked the engineers to erect a tall fence topped with barbed wire around the section of the campus where the research work was under way.

  [In] view of the pernicious activity of the enemy in spying upon and attempting to destroy important government work, it seems to me desirable that a fence be erected outside of that portion of the grounds assigned to the Bureau of Mines, so as to prevent anyone from throwing fire or dynamite on to the buildings.

  Sabotage wasn’t the only concern. As the U.S. war plans progressed, the highest commanders in the army were discussing new ideas and tactics demanding the utmost secrecy. One of them was bombing German cities with gas. Some of the more lurid reporting on the gas and flame regiment forecasted such a tactic as a necessary response to the Germans. The Washington Herald had hinted at the idea of aerial bombing of German cities in its article in September, when it suggested that a secret fleet of thousands of planes was being prepared for an air offensive. Unlike other wildly exaggerated elements in those reports, this had a thread of truth.

  In late November, Charles L. Potter, the director of the Office of the Gas Service, received a confidential letter from across the Atlantic. It was from Amos Fries, asking the scientists at American University to investigate several new war gases. He also told Potter that the army must prepare to use weapons or tactics outlawed by treaties, such as chemical-coated shrapnel and aerial bombing with mustard. Early in the month, the army chief of staff had asked the gas service to develop chemical-filled aerial bombs in case Germany started to use such bombs, and the army general staff approved the request with the blessing of the Ordnance Department.

  It is not the idea of either this office or the General Staff, AEF, to employ such things as would be ordinarily against the laws of war, but since the enemy has shown himself utterly without conscience in other so-called laws of war, it is believed that the only policy for the Gas Service to adopt is one of preparedness to meet any attack the enemy may make.

  Naturally, all such investigations must be kept strictly confidential, Fries warned. “The knowledge of them should be limited to the fewest possible people and the necessity for secrecy urged upon them.”

  Across the Atlantic, General Pershing had asked the chief of the Army Aeronautical School to study and report back on the possibility of dropping gas from airplanes. The commander of the army’s aviation section responded that “dropping gas from airplanes is feasible if dropped in bombs,” and could be much larger than incendiary bombs because the shells could be thinner and lighter.

  Asked to comment, Fries wrote that “there is no doubt about the ability of planes to carry and drop gas bombs.” The question was not whether the Americans could, but whether they should. The Germans had never done it, and the French and the British opposed it. Now the U.S. Army was considering it. The diplomatic sensitivity and the need for secrecy were obvious to Fries, who warned: “It is not believed necessary or advisable to go into the details of this matter further at this time.”

  Three days before Christmas, two prominent chemists with the National Research Council, Wilder D. Bancroft and John Johnson, wrote an urgent letter to Van Manning. Both had consulted with Fries and a top British chemist and warned Manning of the gravity of the situation relative to offensive gases. The estimates from the AEF
and British gas officers were that the army would need 2,300 tons of gas each month, including 1,200 tons of mustard, 530 tons of phosgene, and 300 tons of chloropicrin. Fries recommended that half of all shells contain gas, and the AEF would likely use a million gas shells per month.

  “In the opinion of those best qualified to judge, no offensive can now be successful without the use of gas; our forces, therefore, will be seriously, and needlessly, handicapped unless they are promptly supplied with an adequate provision of this essential material,” the men wrote.

  Two years earlier, the chairman of the National Research Council, George Hale, had warned that war might plunge the United States into gas warfare along with her allies. Now, as 1917 drew to an end, his worry had proved true. In late December, Hale wrote to the War Industries Board that chemical warfare had grown from insignificant beginnings to “an offensive weapon of the first order.” Gas now filled a quarter of all shells fired on the western front and had caused twenty thousand British casualties in six weeks and poisoned morale. “There can be little doubt that gas is now becoming the determining factor in any successful offensive,” he warned.

  Chapter Eight

  Over There

  It was the strangest Christmas that Tom Jabine had ever known. Before dawn, plumes of smoke billowed over Camp American University. Winds and spitting rain made December 25, 1917, a damp, sour morning. Jabine stood in the gloom alongside the other Hellfire Boys, circled around a roaring bonfire, flames illuminating their faces. Washington was dark and still, with few astir to see the glow of the flames and the smoke coiling toward the sky. The drills were finished. It was time to go.