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11-12-2004, 05:23 PM
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DUTY, HONOR, BETRAYAL: How U.S. turned its back on poisoned WWII vets
As enlisted men, they were the military's lab rats
November 10, 2004
BY DAVID ZEMAN
FREE PRESS STAFF WRITER
The room is small and cramped, like a vault. The soldiers are in full combat gear, rifles in hand, packs anchored on their backs. As the steel door slams shut, the men look about, this way and that.
And the ground begins to hiss. Army Pvt. Sidney Wolfson notices it at once, a faint green aerosol seeping from the floor, rising in lazy corkscrews around his waist, arms and chest and across his eyes.
It's adamsite, what the troops come to know as puke stuff, a vomiting agent. The soldiers cower. They flop on their bellies and retch. Wolfson rises to leave, but can't. He pounds and pounds and screams for the doctors, but he can't leave. He can't get out!
"It's like I'm in jail," he says, quietly now. And he fidgets. Six decades after exiting the chambers of his youth, Sidney Wolfson sits in his Farmington condo and squirms. He is 85 and frail, but the dream is still vivid, the image keen.
He was young and fit once, part of the 1st Chemical Casual Company, a unit of 100 bright soldiers who struggled through chamber tests of mustard agent, lewisite, phosgene and other poisons on a military base near Baltimore in 1943.
Some are still struggling.
This is the story of patriots deceived -- not once but three times: first as young recruits, conned into entering chambers of lethal gas during World War II; then as war-hardened soldiers, shipped home with no warning of the time bombs lurking in their bodies; and finally as aging veterans, misled by a government that promised to find them, wherever they lived, and compensate those who were harmed.
"At no time after these experiments was I notified or told anything," said Franklin Smith, echoing the account of many men. "They shipped my butt over to the Pacific and that was the last I heard from the War Department."
By the end of World War II, the military had exposed more than 70,000 Army and Navy recruits to poison gases in various forms -- from swabs of mustard agent on their arms, to the more than 4,000 servicemen who marched into chambers or through fields soaked with chemicals. The mission was noble: to develop protective gear and ointments that would insulate troops from enemy chemical attack. The means were not: Officers deceived the men about the health risks and intimidated those who balked.
The recruits, many still teenagers, were sworn to secrecy. In the decades that followed, some of these veterans sought benefits from the Department of Veterans Affairs for illnesses linked to the tests. But the military had a ready reply: The tests never happened. Not until 1991, when four Navy vets swayed an influential congressman to their cause, did the Pentagon acknowledge the secret program and apologize. The government, at long last, vowed to make amends.
But the Free Press has found that Washington broke its promise. The VA, which pledged a painstaking effort to track down and compensate the men, contacted nobody. Not one letter. Not a single phone call -- even after the Pentagon turned over lists of thousands of potential victims. The VA relied mainly on unpaid public service ads in veterans magazines, even though the agency was aware that most veterans don't see those publications.
In recent years, a few veterans who did press claims were rebuffed -- often with form letters, and even when it was clear they had diseases linked to the wartime experiments.
VA Secretary Anthony Principi, who as deputy secretary in 1991 pledged to "do right" by the veterans, said in an interview last month he was unaware the veterans had been ignored.
"My assumption was that steps were taken to do what was possible to reach as many as we could find and to provide them with the benefits they've earned," he said. "If more needs to be done, it will be done."
The men of the 1st Chemical Casual Company represent only a sliver of the WWII recruits exposed to poison gases. But to the government, they are less than that. The unit does not even exist in Washington's official database on the testing program. It's almost as if they were never there.
But they were.
And 61 years later, they're still waiting for help.
'The place God forgot'
The soldiers grabbed their gear and stepped wearily from the train.
It was Sept. 3, 1943, and after riding all night through the Appalachians, the men found themselves standing before the front gate of Edgewood Arsenal, a leafy Army outpost on Chesapeake Bay, 20 miles northeast of Baltimore.
It looked swell, that's for sure.
From its inception in 1917, Edgewood's 3,400 acres of rolling farmland and pleasant rivers belied the serious and occasionally deadly work performed in its covert factories. Horses still ambled across fields once crossed by Susquehannock Indians and George Washington's troops. The grounds of the Gunpowder Neck peninsula were thick with sweetgum and blackberry. Overhead, bald eagles shared the breeze with osprey, sandpipers and other shorebirds.
Though the soldiers could not see it from where they stood, the Aberdeen Proving Ground, a testing ground for artillery and other ordnance, lay just to the north across the Bush River.
The twin posts of Edgewood and Aberdeen had sprung up in World War I after the Germans unleashed chlorine gas on Allied troops in Belgium. Edgewood quickly became the headquarters of chemical warfare research, its factories producing chlorine, a lung irritant; chloropicrin, a vomiting gas; phosgene, a lethal choking agent, and mustard gas, a blistering compound that could be lethal if inhaled.
Notoriety soon followed.
"At Baltimore, we began to hear about the terrors of this place," wrote one dashingly named World War I recruit, Jet Parker, as he rode a train to Edgewood in 1918. "Everyone we talked to on the way out here said we were coming to the place God forgot! They tell tales about men being gassed and burned ..."
Another private, Alexander London, wrote a grim ode to Edgewood's perils:
"... If a little drop of any gas would touch the head or face,
It meant a speedy ride and a long stay at the base.
A pal of mine was working at the filling plant one night,
When a poison shell exploded and my pal lost his sight.
He suffered untold agonies, for the poison entered deep,
It was a sight to make brave men stop in their tracks and weep."
But to the 1st Chemical soldiers who arrived in September of '43, Edgewood must have seemed like heaven itself.
The men had entered the Army seven weeks earlier, in a nasty slice of hell known as Camp Sibert, Ala.
They were an unconventional group of Army grunts, that's for sure. Nearly all were college boys or on the way to college. They studied chemistry, which is why they had been earmarked for Sibert, in the military's chemical weapons service.
Most had joined eagerly. Walter Butinsky, the nearsighted son of Ukrainian immigrants, wanted in so badly he memorized the reading test to pass his induction exam. Abe Hedaya, a 19-year-old Brooklyn boy, dropped out of his beloved Columbia University. Franklin Smith could have stayed home to support his widowed mother. But with her blessing, he joined, too. Six buddies signed from the University of Scranton. Six more arrived from Mississippi State University.
And for what, they must have wondered as they arrived in the steamy Alabama summer.
They were put to work building barracks and roads for the 5,000 soldiers descending on Sibert. They received "a spade, a shovel and a short pep talk almost before they had officially reported to their company officers," one historian wrote.
The barracks, if you could call them that, were wooden beams covered by tar paper, with wood-burning stoves at each end. They shielded the men from summer rains, but not from the heat. And certainly not from the insects that drove the soldiers to distraction.
"I wanted to get the hell out of Alabama," said Lee Landauer, a gruff, compact recruit from Baltimore. "Camp was terrible. We were sleeping in tar-covered paper bags."
As for social life, there was nearby Gadsden, or as some recruits called it, Gonorrhea Gardens.
"When you went out there, there was nothing to get out for," Landauer said. "So you never went out again. It was just a hell of a place."
The men were only a few weeks into training when a commander gathered them one day and offered a deal: If they volunteered for chemical experiments in Maryland, they would receive 10-day furloughs. These many years later, the men differ on the particulars of what was said that day. But they do agree on two things. The commander was not terribly specific. And the opportunity to decline the offer was never really on the table. "You're not told too much, just line up and shut up," is how Richard Wickens, who now lives in Albuquerque, N.M., described it.
Smith recalled, "There was a great deal of talk about what a wonderful thing this was to do for our country and you guys are heroes and it would save a great many lives.
"I was a totally green 19-year-old. I had grown up in a remote little farming town in Oklahoma called Texhoma. The war was going full blast, and we were all dedicated to winning. They certainly convinced me at the time their motives were pure."
New Jersey recruit Michael Geiger had his own reason to join.
"I think I lost 30 pounds in three weeks in Alabama," Geiger said. "You'd go out on 10- to 20-mile hikes every day -- you couldn't even eat at night, you were so tired. All you wanted to do was drink the water. Any change couldn't have been worse. I ran up and signed."
Even for Southerners, the Maryland shore had its appeal.
"I looked forward to it," said Cham Canon, a self-described country boy from Mississippi. "But with some apprehension, because we did not understand until we got there what we would be doing."
What they would be doing wasn't entirely clear to a lot of the soldiers. "I thought we would be doing studies, working with chemicals," said Wolfson, the recruit from Michigan. "When we got there, lo and behold, it was a different story."
At first, good food and leisure
The soldiers settled in at Edgewood, happy to have quarters with four walls and a ceiling. Spread before them were single beds, widely spaced. Over there were the latrines -- sparkling clean. On the grounds, the men noticed an absence of military staples: no surly officers, no saluting at every corner, not even many uniforms.
That first day, the soldiers savored their first decent meal since leaving their mothers' kitchens. "They gave you all you wanted to eat -- bacon and eggs, real steak," Landauer said. "At Sibert, all you got was chopped beef stew, seven days a week."
This, they could live with.
After a day or so of leisure, the men of 1st Chemical were ushered into Edgewood lab buildings, where they changed into chamber gear: cotton undershirts and shorts; khaki or herringbone twill pants, shirts and jackets; canvas leggings; a wool hood and white wool socks. The clothing was soaked in agents meant to neutralize the test chemicals, which left the garments stiff and hot.
The gas masks, with their conical snouts and wide lenses, made the men look like immense insects, though they usually kept the poison at bay. Usually. High levels of chemicals could overwhelm some masks. And even a two-day stubble of beard could break the seal around the face.
The men gathered their rifles and backpacks and marched for 30 minutes until perspiration soaked their bodies. They were then placed in single-file lines, a yard apart, before a chamber door.
They entered in groups of five to seven. It might be the chamber in Building 325, a 9-foot-by-9-foot cube of hollow tile; or one of two chambers in Building 358; or the glass cylinder chamber in Building 357.
The door was quickly shut. Researchers peered in through a small porthole as they jotted notes. The mustard vapor entered with a whisper, running through a hose in calibrated bursts. The soldiers recognized the faint odor of garlic, or a pleasing sweetness. The vapor was colorless or a light yellow and they were quickly enveloped as it probed the seams of their trousers, or the rim of their masks, searching for a pathway to their skin.
The warmer the conditions, the more potent the gas became. Indeed, the tests were designed to mimic jungle conditions in the Pacific, where Allied forces guessed the Japanese might unleash chemical shells. In some tests, the exposure level equaled that faced on World War I battlefields. As the men marched in 90-degree-plus heat, with the chamber's humidity kept at 84 percent, they perspired under their arms, inside their hoods, or near their knees and genitals.
They were soon drenched, which only heightened the mustard's ardor for human skin.
Once the gas reached skin, it snaked through pores deep into the tissue, or entered the bloodstream. Within minutes, the mustard quietly went to work, binding to strands of DNA deep within cells, causing them to mutate and die. The damage was irreversible.
Mustard's toll was not immediately apparent. It took hours or days for soldiers' skin to turn crimson along sweaty regions like the thigh or buttocks; or where skin was bare, like the hands or neck.
The skin began to itch and burn like a griddle. A day later, the red patches turned to watery blisters 2 inches high. The fluid was actually the body's tissue, which had liquefied under the assault.
"They told us not to puncture it," Smith said. "But if you turned your arm a quarter turn, the weight of the fluid would tend to separate the skin from your arm. So some guys just punctured these things, because it hurt so bad."
Painkillers helped.
Other men suffered grotesque burns on their genitals, causing their scrotum and penis to swell and blister, the skin to peel away in strips. Years later, some discovered cancerous skin growths or genital scarring that made it difficult to father children.
Sometimes, frayed uniforms left elbows or legs exposed. Other times, the gear was almost comically inadequate. Take, for instance, the neck and ear protection afforded soldiers in some tests, as described in a 1943 Army record: "Two socks wrapped around the neck, with the upper portion of a sock covering each ear. The socks are held in place by string and by the gas mask straps."
Equipment breakdowns were common in the trials, which lasted up to two months. Faulty masks allowed vapors to bind to the eye, causing soldiers' eyelids to swell and spasm.
Their noses ran steady, like the onset of a cold. They emitted a dry cough and began to vomit. The mustard had reached their lungs, inflaming the tracheal lining, which might simply slough away. Years would pass, even decades, before other problems arose.
A willing sacrifice
America, as historians remind us, was a far different place in the 1940s from the era since Vietnam. Isolationist sentiments that prevailed when war erupted in Europe in 1939 largely evaporated after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941. Millions of men enlisted to fight. Millions of women joined factories that fed the war machine. Children collected scrap metal for tanks. Civilians rationed sugar, coffee, gas and other staples. Sacrifice was the theme and urgency its byword against a potent and frightening enemy. The notion that a few people might sacrifice for the greater good of our troops was neither controversial nor seriously questioned.
The United States spent more than $25 million on ethically dubious studies to find antidotes for conditions faced by troops: orphans were injected with dysentery; prison inmates were given malaria; mentally ill people were infected with influenza.
Against this backdrop, military scientists were exhorted to improve the protective gear used by American troops. Young recruits -- still stateside while their brethren were dying overseas -- were asked to test this new gear. They performed their duty, as they were told.
"We desperately needed research in a variety of areas to move the war effort forward," said David Rothman, director of the Center for the Study of Society and Medicine at Columbia University. "Patient consent, which had been recognized earlier as a major consideration, was now ignored because the military's needs seemed to trump all others. It was purely a utilitarian calculus: the greatest good for the greatest number."
America's fear of chemical attack was well founded. The Germans had released chlorine and mustard gas against the Allies in World War I; Japan and Italy had used poison agents in the 1930s. Such was the fear that the Walt Disney Co. designed a Mickey Mouse gas mask so children would not be afraid to use masks in the event of an assault.
In their initial research, U.S. scientists used goats, cats and other animals to test mustard and other blistering agents on the skin. But they found it difficult to extrapolate the results to human skin. Scientists thought they solved this dilemma by using Mexican hairless dogs, but abandoned the plan after the dogs proved too costly.
They eventually concluded only human skin would do. Citing tests already under way in Canada and England, U.S. officials played down the health risk to humans.
"In the hands of competent experimenters, much can be learned concerning the prevention and treatment of gas burns in men without subjecting them to more than relatively trivial annoyance or disability," Alfred Richards, the chairman of a government committee on medical research, wrote to Secretary of War Henry Stimson in April 1942.
The Army and Navy secretaries formally approved the test program a month later.
A break from camp
That autumn -- one year before the men of 1st Chemical arrived -- the first 200 soldiers from Camp Sibert were shipped to Edgewood for "patch tests" on their arms. The arrangement ended badly. Sibert's officers howled about the loss of their soldiers. And it soon became apparent that few soldiers at Sibert were eager to replace the first wave of volunteers.
That "may have been due to the look of the scars on men returned to the training companies," wrote Rexmond Cochrane, a military historian stationed at Sibert during the war.
So commanders in Washington hatched a plan to make the tests more palatable. They promised the men furloughs and a change of scenery in exchange for their willingness to test "summer uniforms." It worked. By war's end, at least 4,000 soldiers and seamen were tested at more than a half-dozen facilities beyond Edgewood -- from Florida to Illinois, Utah, Panama and, in great numbers, at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington.
Insurrection was never a problem. Commanders made sure of that.
"The fact that has been most obvious throughout these experiments is that when the men first begin the work they should not be told too much," a Navy commander wrote in August 1943. "If they are, it sets up a fear reaction that remains for varying lengths of time and definitely affects their 'virgin' runs in the chamber, and, occasionally, requires a removal from the chamber before the run is completed. However, after the first two runs in the chamber, the men become veterans and can be told almost anything without affecting their morale."
That sounded about right to Landauer of Baltimore who, despite encounters with mustard gas, lewisite and what he believed to be nerve agent, preferred his lot at Edgewood to the perils of combat in Europe.
"It was a question of having a pretty good life and figuring these guys aren't going to kill you," Landauer said of the Edgewood scientists. "Once you last three or four days in the chamber without dying, you figure, 'What the hell.' "
Only rarely did recruits balk. When that happened, the Navy memo noted, "A short explanatory talk, and, if necessary, a slight verbal 'dressing down' has always proven successful. There has not been a single instance in which a man has refused to enter the gas chamber."
Recruits who complained of nausea, headaches, laryngitis or eye infections were told their "physical unfitness" -- not the tests -- was to blame. "Occasionally," the memo continued, "malingerers and psychoneurotics are discovered. These cases have all been handled so far by minimizing their symptoms and then sending them into the chamber."
As critics would note decades later, U.S. scientists downplayed the dangers despite research dating to 1928 of long-term ailments linked to mustard gas. Medical journals in the United States and abroad reported bronchitis, emphysema, bronchial asthma and conjunctivitis among World War I chemical casualties. By the late 1930s, delayed-action blindness also was reported.
But these medical findings were never shared with the World War II guinea pigs.
Watching the rabbit die
Some men in 1st Chemical were sent into chambers without masks. Joining the soldiers in one test was a very unhappy rabbit. The men trudged in and waited for the vapors. It is unclear which gas was being tested that day, but whatever it was, it didn't sit well with the rabbit, which fell over and died.
"I can still see the expression on this one poor guy's face," Landauer recalled. "He was pounding on the door. He wanted to get the hell out of there."
On another day, Pvt. John Berzellini, an asthmatic, grew increasingly anxious as his mask filled with drool and mucus. Hours passed, but the researcher monitoring the test would not allow Berzellini to leave. He had to tilt open the mask to drain the fluids, exposing his face to vapors. "He was forced, asked, cajoled to stay in there," recalled Bill Chupka, who was inside the chamber with his friend. "I suppose that if he collapsed he would have been removed immediately."
In Building 326, meanwhile, soldiers were exposed to another blistering agent, lewisite, an arsenic-based compound with the scent of geraniums. Touted as the dew of death by newspapers of the day, lewisite never quite fulfilled its promise as a more lethal successor to mustard gas. While mustard bided its time, lewisite caused immediate pain and blisters. Yet the oily liquid was not nearly so toxic as a battlefield vapor and eventually fell into disfavor.
Blistering agents were not the only poisons at Edgewood.
Some men said they were subjected to what they described as low levels of nerve agents, designed to incapacitate enemy soldiers during an attack. Among other things, exposure to the agent caused the men's pupils to shrink to the size of pinpricks and blurred their vision for days.
"They took us out to shoot at the rifle range," Landauer said. "Then we came back and they put us in a chamber, eight to 10 of us, for less than a minute. It was some kind of nerve gas. Then it was back to the rifle range to re-shoot the same targets. By the time we got out there, we couldn't see the targets.
"Our buddies had to cut our food up for us that night."
What's remarkable about these accounts is that the Pentagon has always maintained it did not conduct human testing with nerve agents -- such as sarin -- until after World War II.
Pentagon officials did not respond to requests for comment on whether nerve agents were tested.
Though the tests were harrowing, the time between them was a pleasure.
The men passed their downtime, which was considerable, reading books, playing cards and getting to know each other. The base had a library and movie theater. Its staff arranged dances with local girls. Soldiers usually could find enough friends for a game of baseball or volleyball. Walter Butinsky whipped all comers at chess. On days off, the men took a train or bus to Washington or Baltimore for burlesque shows or dates. For the Eastern boys who went home on weekends, the greatest fear was that their parents would see their burns and raise hell with the military.
Jesse Schraub, who had never left Brooklyn before enlisting, remembers one humid evening having dinner back home, wearing long sleeves to cover his burns. "The pain was excruciating, but of course, I wasn't supposed to tell anybody," Schraub said. "I was afraid of what my dad's reaction would be."
Some men formed close bonds. In their first weeks at Edgewood, some Christian soldiers took on extra kitchen and guard duty so their Jewish buddies could go home for Yom Kippur. The men held friendly wagers over whose arm yielded the biggest blister. For those with more severe burns, friends stood ready to help them comb their hair, or use the bathroom.
"It was the first time I began to feel like a person in the Army, like an individual," Howard Hoffman wrote in a war memoir.
For some men, it was a sad day when, in late October, they were returned to Alabama.
"My husband was very happy at Edgewood," Nellie Strauss said of her husband, Alfred. "He was a good soldier and he felt he was doing his duty. He never complained."
Nellie concedes she was pretty tickled, too.
"He was way over 200 pounds when I married him, and he went down to 170 pounds when he came home," she said.
"He looked gorgeous."
DUTY, HONOR, BETRAYAL: How U.S. turned its back on poisoned WWII vets
As enlisted men, they were the military's lab rats
November 10, 2004
BY DAVID ZEMAN
FREE PRESS STAFF WRITER
The room is small and cramped, like a vault. The soldiers are in full combat gear, rifles in hand, packs anchored on their backs. As the steel door slams shut, the men look about, this way and that.
And the ground begins to hiss. Army Pvt. Sidney Wolfson notices it at once, a faint green aerosol seeping from the floor, rising in lazy corkscrews around his waist, arms and chest and across his eyes.
It's adamsite, what the troops come to know as puke stuff, a vomiting agent. The soldiers cower. They flop on their bellies and retch. Wolfson rises to leave, but can't. He pounds and pounds and screams for the doctors, but he can't leave. He can't get out!
"It's like I'm in jail," he says, quietly now. And he fidgets. Six decades after exiting the chambers of his youth, Sidney Wolfson sits in his Farmington condo and squirms. He is 85 and frail, but the dream is still vivid, the image keen.
He was young and fit once, part of the 1st Chemical Casual Company, a unit of 100 bright soldiers who struggled through chamber tests of mustard agent, lewisite, phosgene and other poisons on a military base near Baltimore in 1943.
Some are still struggling.
This is the story of patriots deceived -- not once but three times: first as young recruits, conned into entering chambers of lethal gas during World War II; then as war-hardened soldiers, shipped home with no warning of the time bombs lurking in their bodies; and finally as aging veterans, misled by a government that promised to find them, wherever they lived, and compensate those who were harmed.
"At no time after these experiments was I notified or told anything," said Franklin Smith, echoing the account of many men. "They shipped my butt over to the Pacific and that was the last I heard from the War Department."
By the end of World War II, the military had exposed more than 70,000 Army and Navy recruits to poison gases in various forms -- from swabs of mustard agent on their arms, to the more than 4,000 servicemen who marched into chambers or through fields soaked with chemicals. The mission was noble: to develop protective gear and ointments that would insulate troops from enemy chemical attack. The means were not: Officers deceived the men about the health risks and intimidated those who balked.
The recruits, many still teenagers, were sworn to secrecy. In the decades that followed, some of these veterans sought benefits from the Department of Veterans Affairs for illnesses linked to the tests. But the military had a ready reply: The tests never happened. Not until 1991, when four Navy vets swayed an influential congressman to their cause, did the Pentagon acknowledge the secret program and apologize. The government, at long last, vowed to make amends.
But the Free Press has found that Washington broke its promise. The VA, which pledged a painstaking effort to track down and compensate the men, contacted nobody. Not one letter. Not a single phone call -- even after the Pentagon turned over lists of thousands of potential victims. The VA relied mainly on unpaid public service ads in veterans magazines, even though the agency was aware that most veterans don't see those publications.
In recent years, a few veterans who did press claims were rebuffed -- often with form letters, and even when it was clear they had diseases linked to the wartime experiments.
VA Secretary Anthony Principi, who as deputy secretary in 1991 pledged to "do right" by the veterans, said in an interview last month he was unaware the veterans had been ignored.
"My assumption was that steps were taken to do what was possible to reach as many as we could find and to provide them with the benefits they've earned," he said. "If more needs to be done, it will be done."
The men of the 1st Chemical Casual Company represent only a sliver of the WWII recruits exposed to poison gases. But to the government, they are less than that. The unit does not even exist in Washington's official database on the testing program. It's almost as if they were never there.
But they were.
And 61 years later, they're still waiting for help.
'The place God forgot'
The soldiers grabbed their gear and stepped wearily from the train.
It was Sept. 3, 1943, and after riding all night through the Appalachians, the men found themselves standing before the front gate of Edgewood Arsenal, a leafy Army outpost on Chesapeake Bay, 20 miles northeast of Baltimore.
It looked swell, that's for sure.
From its inception in 1917, Edgewood's 3,400 acres of rolling farmland and pleasant rivers belied the serious and occasionally deadly work performed in its covert factories. Horses still ambled across fields once crossed by Susquehannock Indians and George Washington's troops. The grounds of the Gunpowder Neck peninsula were thick with sweetgum and blackberry. Overhead, bald eagles shared the breeze with osprey, sandpipers and other shorebirds.
Though the soldiers could not see it from where they stood, the Aberdeen Proving Ground, a testing ground for artillery and other ordnance, lay just to the north across the Bush River.
The twin posts of Edgewood and Aberdeen had sprung up in World War I after the Germans unleashed chlorine gas on Allied troops in Belgium. Edgewood quickly became the headquarters of chemical warfare research, its factories producing chlorine, a lung irritant; chloropicrin, a vomiting gas; phosgene, a lethal choking agent, and mustard gas, a blistering compound that could be lethal if inhaled.
Notoriety soon followed.
"At Baltimore, we began to hear about the terrors of this place," wrote one dashingly named World War I recruit, Jet Parker, as he rode a train to Edgewood in 1918. "Everyone we talked to on the way out here said we were coming to the place God forgot! They tell tales about men being gassed and burned ..."
Another private, Alexander London, wrote a grim ode to Edgewood's perils:
"... If a little drop of any gas would touch the head or face,
It meant a speedy ride and a long stay at the base.
A pal of mine was working at the filling plant one night,
When a poison shell exploded and my pal lost his sight.
He suffered untold agonies, for the poison entered deep,
It was a sight to make brave men stop in their tracks and weep."
But to the 1st Chemical soldiers who arrived in September of '43, Edgewood must have seemed like heaven itself.
The men had entered the Army seven weeks earlier, in a nasty slice of hell known as Camp Sibert, Ala.
They were an unconventional group of Army grunts, that's for sure. Nearly all were college boys or on the way to college. They studied chemistry, which is why they had been earmarked for Sibert, in the military's chemical weapons service.
Most had joined eagerly. Walter Butinsky, the nearsighted son of Ukrainian immigrants, wanted in so badly he memorized the reading test to pass his induction exam. Abe Hedaya, a 19-year-old Brooklyn boy, dropped out of his beloved Columbia University. Franklin Smith could have stayed home to support his widowed mother. But with her blessing, he joined, too. Six buddies signed from the University of Scranton. Six more arrived from Mississippi State University.
And for what, they must have wondered as they arrived in the steamy Alabama summer.
They were put to work building barracks and roads for the 5,000 soldiers descending on Sibert. They received "a spade, a shovel and a short pep talk almost before they had officially reported to their company officers," one historian wrote.
The barracks, if you could call them that, were wooden beams covered by tar paper, with wood-burning stoves at each end. They shielded the men from summer rains, but not from the heat. And certainly not from the insects that drove the soldiers to distraction.
"I wanted to get the hell out of Alabama," said Lee Landauer, a gruff, compact recruit from Baltimore. "Camp was terrible. We were sleeping in tar-covered paper bags."
As for social life, there was nearby Gadsden, or as some recruits called it, Gonorrhea Gardens.
"When you went out there, there was nothing to get out for," Landauer said. "So you never went out again. It was just a hell of a place."
The men were only a few weeks into training when a commander gathered them one day and offered a deal: If they volunteered for chemical experiments in Maryland, they would receive 10-day furloughs. These many years later, the men differ on the particulars of what was said that day. But they do agree on two things. The commander was not terribly specific. And the opportunity to decline the offer was never really on the table. "You're not told too much, just line up and shut up," is how Richard Wickens, who now lives in Albuquerque, N.M., described it.
Smith recalled, "There was a great deal of talk about what a wonderful thing this was to do for our country and you guys are heroes and it would save a great many lives.
"I was a totally green 19-year-old. I had grown up in a remote little farming town in Oklahoma called Texhoma. The war was going full blast, and we were all dedicated to winning. They certainly convinced me at the time their motives were pure."
New Jersey recruit Michael Geiger had his own reason to join.
"I think I lost 30 pounds in three weeks in Alabama," Geiger said. "You'd go out on 10- to 20-mile hikes every day -- you couldn't even eat at night, you were so tired. All you wanted to do was drink the water. Any change couldn't have been worse. I ran up and signed."
Even for Southerners, the Maryland shore had its appeal.
"I looked forward to it," said Cham Canon, a self-described country boy from Mississippi. "But with some apprehension, because we did not understand until we got there what we would be doing."
What they would be doing wasn't entirely clear to a lot of the soldiers. "I thought we would be doing studies, working with chemicals," said Wolfson, the recruit from Michigan. "When we got there, lo and behold, it was a different story."
At first, good food and leisure
The soldiers settled in at Edgewood, happy to have quarters with four walls and a ceiling. Spread before them were single beds, widely spaced. Over there were the latrines -- sparkling clean. On the grounds, the men noticed an absence of military staples: no surly officers, no saluting at every corner, not even many uniforms.
That first day, the soldiers savored their first decent meal since leaving their mothers' kitchens. "They gave you all you wanted to eat -- bacon and eggs, real steak," Landauer said. "At Sibert, all you got was chopped beef stew, seven days a week."
This, they could live with.
After a day or so of leisure, the men of 1st Chemical were ushered into Edgewood lab buildings, where they changed into chamber gear: cotton undershirts and shorts; khaki or herringbone twill pants, shirts and jackets; canvas leggings; a wool hood and white wool socks. The clothing was soaked in agents meant to neutralize the test chemicals, which left the garments stiff and hot.
The gas masks, with their conical snouts and wide lenses, made the men look like immense insects, though they usually kept the poison at bay. Usually. High levels of chemicals could overwhelm some masks. And even a two-day stubble of beard could break the seal around the face.
The men gathered their rifles and backpacks and marched for 30 minutes until perspiration soaked their bodies. They were then placed in single-file lines, a yard apart, before a chamber door.
They entered in groups of five to seven. It might be the chamber in Building 325, a 9-foot-by-9-foot cube of hollow tile; or one of two chambers in Building 358; or the glass cylinder chamber in Building 357.
The door was quickly shut. Researchers peered in through a small porthole as they jotted notes. The mustard vapor entered with a whisper, running through a hose in calibrated bursts. The soldiers recognized the faint odor of garlic, or a pleasing sweetness. The vapor was colorless or a light yellow and they were quickly enveloped as it probed the seams of their trousers, or the rim of their masks, searching for a pathway to their skin.
The warmer the conditions, the more potent the gas became. Indeed, the tests were designed to mimic jungle conditions in the Pacific, where Allied forces guessed the Japanese might unleash chemical shells. In some tests, the exposure level equaled that faced on World War I battlefields. As the men marched in 90-degree-plus heat, with the chamber's humidity kept at 84 percent, they perspired under their arms, inside their hoods, or near their knees and genitals.
They were soon drenched, which only heightened the mustard's ardor for human skin.
Once the gas reached skin, it snaked through pores deep into the tissue, or entered the bloodstream. Within minutes, the mustard quietly went to work, binding to strands of DNA deep within cells, causing them to mutate and die. The damage was irreversible.
Mustard's toll was not immediately apparent. It took hours or days for soldiers' skin to turn crimson along sweaty regions like the thigh or buttocks; or where skin was bare, like the hands or neck.
The skin began to itch and burn like a griddle. A day later, the red patches turned to watery blisters 2 inches high. The fluid was actually the body's tissue, which had liquefied under the assault.
"They told us not to puncture it," Smith said. "But if you turned your arm a quarter turn, the weight of the fluid would tend to separate the skin from your arm. So some guys just punctured these things, because it hurt so bad."
Painkillers helped.
Other men suffered grotesque burns on their genitals, causing their scrotum and penis to swell and blister, the skin to peel away in strips. Years later, some discovered cancerous skin growths or genital scarring that made it difficult to father children.
Sometimes, frayed uniforms left elbows or legs exposed. Other times, the gear was almost comically inadequate. Take, for instance, the neck and ear protection afforded soldiers in some tests, as described in a 1943 Army record: "Two socks wrapped around the neck, with the upper portion of a sock covering each ear. The socks are held in place by string and by the gas mask straps."
Equipment breakdowns were common in the trials, which lasted up to two months. Faulty masks allowed vapors to bind to the eye, causing soldiers' eyelids to swell and spasm.
Their noses ran steady, like the onset of a cold. They emitted a dry cough and began to vomit. The mustard had reached their lungs, inflaming the tracheal lining, which might simply slough away. Years would pass, even decades, before other problems arose.
A willing sacrifice
America, as historians remind us, was a far different place in the 1940s from the era since Vietnam. Isolationist sentiments that prevailed when war erupted in Europe in 1939 largely evaporated after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941. Millions of men enlisted to fight. Millions of women joined factories that fed the war machine. Children collected scrap metal for tanks. Civilians rationed sugar, coffee, gas and other staples. Sacrifice was the theme and urgency its byword against a potent and frightening enemy. The notion that a few people might sacrifice for the greater good of our troops was neither controversial nor seriously questioned.
The United States spent more than $25 million on ethically dubious studies to find antidotes for conditions faced by troops: orphans were injected with dysentery; prison inmates were given malaria; mentally ill people were infected with influenza.
Against this backdrop, military scientists were exhorted to improve the protective gear used by American troops. Young recruits -- still stateside while their brethren were dying overseas -- were asked to test this new gear. They performed their duty, as they were told.
"We desperately needed research in a variety of areas to move the war effort forward," said David Rothman, director of the Center for the Study of Society and Medicine at Columbia University. "Patient consent, which had been recognized earlier as a major consideration, was now ignored because the military's needs seemed to trump all others. It was purely a utilitarian calculus: the greatest good for the greatest number."
America's fear of chemical attack was well founded. The Germans had released chlorine and mustard gas against the Allies in World War I; Japan and Italy had used poison agents in the 1930s. Such was the fear that the Walt Disney Co. designed a Mickey Mouse gas mask so children would not be afraid to use masks in the event of an assault.
In their initial research, U.S. scientists used goats, cats and other animals to test mustard and other blistering agents on the skin. But they found it difficult to extrapolate the results to human skin. Scientists thought they solved this dilemma by using Mexican hairless dogs, but abandoned the plan after the dogs proved too costly.
They eventually concluded only human skin would do. Citing tests already under way in Canada and England, U.S. officials played down the health risk to humans.
"In the hands of competent experimenters, much can be learned concerning the prevention and treatment of gas burns in men without subjecting them to more than relatively trivial annoyance or disability," Alfred Richards, the chairman of a government committee on medical research, wrote to Secretary of War Henry Stimson in April 1942.
The Army and Navy secretaries formally approved the test program a month later.
A break from camp
That autumn -- one year before the men of 1st Chemical arrived -- the first 200 soldiers from Camp Sibert were shipped to Edgewood for "patch tests" on their arms. The arrangement ended badly. Sibert's officers howled about the loss of their soldiers. And it soon became apparent that few soldiers at Sibert were eager to replace the first wave of volunteers.
That "may have been due to the look of the scars on men returned to the training companies," wrote Rexmond Cochrane, a military historian stationed at Sibert during the war.
So commanders in Washington hatched a plan to make the tests more palatable. They promised the men furloughs and a change of scenery in exchange for their willingness to test "summer uniforms." It worked. By war's end, at least 4,000 soldiers and seamen were tested at more than a half-dozen facilities beyond Edgewood -- from Florida to Illinois, Utah, Panama and, in great numbers, at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington.
Insurrection was never a problem. Commanders made sure of that.
"The fact that has been most obvious throughout these experiments is that when the men first begin the work they should not be told too much," a Navy commander wrote in August 1943. "If they are, it sets up a fear reaction that remains for varying lengths of time and definitely affects their 'virgin' runs in the chamber, and, occasionally, requires a removal from the chamber before the run is completed. However, after the first two runs in the chamber, the men become veterans and can be told almost anything without affecting their morale."
That sounded about right to Landauer of Baltimore who, despite encounters with mustard gas, lewisite and what he believed to be nerve agent, preferred his lot at Edgewood to the perils of combat in Europe.
"It was a question of having a pretty good life and figuring these guys aren't going to kill you," Landauer said of the Edgewood scientists. "Once you last three or four days in the chamber without dying, you figure, 'What the hell.' "
Only rarely did recruits balk. When that happened, the Navy memo noted, "A short explanatory talk, and, if necessary, a slight verbal 'dressing down' has always proven successful. There has not been a single instance in which a man has refused to enter the gas chamber."
Recruits who complained of nausea, headaches, laryngitis or eye infections were told their "physical unfitness" -- not the tests -- was to blame. "Occasionally," the memo continued, "malingerers and psychoneurotics are discovered. These cases have all been handled so far by minimizing their symptoms and then sending them into the chamber."
As critics would note decades later, U.S. scientists downplayed the dangers despite research dating to 1928 of long-term ailments linked to mustard gas. Medical journals in the United States and abroad reported bronchitis, emphysema, bronchial asthma and conjunctivitis among World War I chemical casualties. By the late 1930s, delayed-action blindness also was reported.
But these medical findings were never shared with the World War II guinea pigs.
Watching the rabbit die
Some men in 1st Chemical were sent into chambers without masks. Joining the soldiers in one test was a very unhappy rabbit. The men trudged in and waited for the vapors. It is unclear which gas was being tested that day, but whatever it was, it didn't sit well with the rabbit, which fell over and died.
"I can still see the expression on this one poor guy's face," Landauer recalled. "He was pounding on the door. He wanted to get the hell out of there."
On another day, Pvt. John Berzellini, an asthmatic, grew increasingly anxious as his mask filled with drool and mucus. Hours passed, but the researcher monitoring the test would not allow Berzellini to leave. He had to tilt open the mask to drain the fluids, exposing his face to vapors. "He was forced, asked, cajoled to stay in there," recalled Bill Chupka, who was inside the chamber with his friend. "I suppose that if he collapsed he would have been removed immediately."
In Building 326, meanwhile, soldiers were exposed to another blistering agent, lewisite, an arsenic-based compound with the scent of geraniums. Touted as the dew of death by newspapers of the day, lewisite never quite fulfilled its promise as a more lethal successor to mustard gas. While mustard bided its time, lewisite caused immediate pain and blisters. Yet the oily liquid was not nearly so toxic as a battlefield vapor and eventually fell into disfavor.
Blistering agents were not the only poisons at Edgewood.
Some men said they were subjected to what they described as low levels of nerve agents, designed to incapacitate enemy soldiers during an attack. Among other things, exposure to the agent caused the men's pupils to shrink to the size of pinpricks and blurred their vision for days.
"They took us out to shoot at the rifle range," Landauer said. "Then we came back and they put us in a chamber, eight to 10 of us, for less than a minute. It was some kind of nerve gas. Then it was back to the rifle range to re-shoot the same targets. By the time we got out there, we couldn't see the targets.
"Our buddies had to cut our food up for us that night."
What's remarkable about these accounts is that the Pentagon has always maintained it did not conduct human testing with nerve agents -- such as sarin -- until after World War II.
Pentagon officials did not respond to requests for comment on whether nerve agents were tested.
Though the tests were harrowing, the time between them was a pleasure.
The men passed their downtime, which was considerable, reading books, playing cards and getting to know each other. The base had a library and movie theater. Its staff arranged dances with local girls. Soldiers usually could find enough friends for a game of baseball or volleyball. Walter Butinsky whipped all comers at chess. On days off, the men took a train or bus to Washington or Baltimore for burlesque shows or dates. For the Eastern boys who went home on weekends, the greatest fear was that their parents would see their burns and raise hell with the military.
Jesse Schraub, who had never left Brooklyn before enlisting, remembers one humid evening having dinner back home, wearing long sleeves to cover his burns. "The pain was excruciating, but of course, I wasn't supposed to tell anybody," Schraub said. "I was afraid of what my dad's reaction would be."
Some men formed close bonds. In their first weeks at Edgewood, some Christian soldiers took on extra kitchen and guard duty so their Jewish buddies could go home for Yom Kippur. The men held friendly wagers over whose arm yielded the biggest blister. For those with more severe burns, friends stood ready to help them comb their hair, or use the bathroom.
"It was the first time I began to feel like a person in the Army, like an individual," Howard Hoffman wrote in a war memoir.
For some men, it was a sad day when, in late October, they were returned to Alabama.
"My husband was very happy at Edgewood," Nellie Strauss said of her husband, Alfred. "He was a good soldier and he felt he was doing his duty. He never complained."
Nellie concedes she was pretty tickled, too.
"He was way over 200 pounds when I married him, and he went down to 170 pounds when he came home," she said.
"He looked gorgeous."