Into the Night

The War Department last week just barely lifted the lid of a Pandora's box, gave the public a quick look at the horrors within and then slammed the lid down. The glimpse was enough to show how the Army's little-known Chemical Warfare Service, without firing a shot, had won its weird war.

The lid-lifting also disclosed a taut, little major general who is as little known as the service which he heads. Alden Harry Waitt joined CWS when it was organized in 1918, has stayed with it ever since, taking time out to earn an aviator's wings and qualify as a tank driver. A training accident made Waitt so allergic to tear gas that the slightest whiff of it puts him on the sick list.

In a business whose hallmark is frightfulness, Waitt's CWS did its job so well that it made any hostile use of chemical warfare unprofitable. Though the U.S. never mass-produced killing and maiming gasses (Germany stored well over 250,000 tons), it kept up production of their basic components, such as chlorine. It also produced 35,000,000 gas masks for men, 39,000 for Army horses and mules, 1,400 for dogs. It turned out some 2,200,000 decontamination appliances, 162,000,000 tubes of anti-blister ointment.

Safety in Smoke. Other CWS researchers made fire into a weapon to sweep whole cities. When Japanese planes swarmed over Pearl Harbor the U.S. had not a single incendiary shell or bomb in stock. Military bigwigs were not even interested. But CWS went to work and turned out 260,000,000 of them.

CWS ran into opposition again as it got its smoke program under way. But field commanders soon found that white phosphorus, which not only screens but burns on contact, was more feared by the enemy than high explosive. The Navy was even more pleased with CWS's protective smokes. Not a ship was lost by air attack at Anzio after CWS touched off its smoke pots. At Okinawa even the Navy's big battlewagons were glad to come in under CWS's smoke to hide from the Kamikaze planes.

Death by Bottle. These were CWS's everyday jobs. It was in another phase of its work that CWS explored a nightmare region: bacterial war. In a report to the War Department prepared by Special -Consultant George W. Merck, CWS was carefully inexplicit. CWS had developed improved laboratory techniques for the production and study of microorganisms, methods for detecting and controlling disease, protective clothing and equipment. But there was evidence that the danger of a bacteria-charged attack was no fantasy, that the U.S. was ready to thwart any enemy efforts*--and retaliate in kind.

At one of its camps, CWS prepared a toxoid against botulism, a form of food poisoning which it was feared the Germans might use in Normandy. It developed antibiotics and therapeutic agents against another mysterious, unnamed disease. It discovered a chemical agent to destroy crops (which will have a peacetime use as a weed killer). In an allied project the Navy worked out a plan to spread fatal organisms by mist.

Compared to the atom bomb, the CWS project was a shoestring venture--well under $100,000 for bacterial-warfare research; $2 billion for the bomb. Bacterial warfare could be even more hideous than sudden atomic death. The mere existence of CWS showed how little man trusted man; how far man feared man's inhumanity would go.

* One apparent Jap attempt still puzzles CWS. Two bottles of water drifted in from the Pacific by balloon. One was no more polluted than tap water in some careless cities' municipal water systems; the other, for reasons known only to Tokyo, contained sterile water.

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