World War I was extraordinary for many reasons: the staggering scope of the conflict, the more than 8 million battlefield deaths and more than 20 million casualties, the horrific conditions on the battlefield. It was also the first modern war of science, enlisting the aid of physicists, chemists and engineers to build weapons that had been the stuff of science fiction, including the chemical weapons that Higgie had been trained to use in France.
The research for my book Hellfire Boys principally focused on the largely forgotten story of the U.S. Chemical Warfare Service, which was established to answer Germany’s use of chemical weapons on the battlefield. Germany first used chlorine gas on April 22, 1915, to break through the intractable deadlock of trench warfare on the Western Front.
The German’s use of chemical weapons initially sparked international outrage, but soon all of the major combatants were rushing ahead with their own gas programs. Ultimately, chemical weapons gave none of the armies the edge on the battlefield they sought; rather, it just added a new layer of toxic misery to an already horrific war.
What I initially thought would be a narrow sliver of the war proved instead to be a window into the wider consequences of this catastrophic clash for dominance of Europe. One of those consequences in the United States was a realignment of science and academia to the military. For the first time, scientists would be seen as vital to the war effort, volunteering to work on scientific problems from aviation to submarine detection to—yes—chemical warfare. War would never be the same again.
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With the United States’ late entry into the war in April 1917, the War Department was completely unprepared for gas warfare, as it was then called, having made almost no preparations for U.S. troops facing chemical weapons on the battlefield.
The Army sought to correct that by establishing a research campus in Washington called the American University Experiment Station to work on both defensive measures, like the desperately needed gas masks and protective gear, as well as offensive capabilities—explosives, bombs and American-made chemical warfare agents to answer those of the Germans. By the end of the war, there would be nearly 2,000 soldiers and scientists working on research problems there. Thousands more worked at chemical manufacturing plants, gas mask factories and satellite labs around the country, including the massive chemical warfare boomtown, Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland.
That enormous effort has parallels to the Manhattan Project of World War II, and not just because of its scope and secrecy—in some ways, the effort to surpass Germany’s use of chemical arms was a dry run for the race to build a nuclear bomb, with some of the very same scientists involved in both.