Fig. 13.—Firing a 155-Millimeter Howitzer.
The men are wearing gas masks to keep out the enemy gas fired at them in Oct., 1918.]
Staff Troops. The staff troops of the Chemical Warfare Service performed all work required of gas troops except that of actual fighting. They handled all Chemical Warfare Service supplies from the time they were unloaded from ships to the time they were issued to the fighting troops at the front, whether the fighting troops were Chemical Warfare or any other. They furnished men for clerical and other services with the Army, Corps and Division Gas Officers, and they manufactured poisonous gases, filled gas shells and did all repairing and altering of gas masks. Though these men received none of the glamour or glory that goes with the fighting men at the front, yet they performed services of the most vital kind and in many cases did work as dangerous and hair raising as going over the top in the face of bursting shell and screaming machine gun bullets.
Think of the intense interest these men must have felt when carrying from the field of battle to the laboratory or experimental field, shell loaded with strange and unheard of compounds and which might any moment burst and end forever their existence! Or watch them drilling into a new shell knowing not what powerful poison or explosive it might contain or what might happen when the drill “went through”!
And again what determination it took to work 12 or 16 hours a day way back at the depots repairing or altering masks, and, as was done at Chateroux, alter and repair 15,000 masks a day and be so rushed that at times they had a bare day’s work of remodeled masks ahead. But they kept ahead and to the great glory of these men no American soldier ever had to go to the front without a mask. And what finer work than that of these men who, in the laboratory and testing room, toyed with death in testing unknown gases with American and foreign masks even to the extent of applying the gases to their own bodies.
Heroic, real American work, all of it and done in real American style as part of the day’s work without thought of glory and without hope of reward.
The First Gas Regiment. In the first study of army organization made by the General Staff it was decided to recommend raising under the Chief of Engineers one regiment of six companies of gas troops.
Shortly after the cable of August 17, 1917, was sent stating that Lieut. Colonel Fries would be made Chief of the Gas Service, the War Department promoted him to be Colonel of the 30th Engineers which later became the First Gas Regiment. At almost the same time, Captain Atkisson, Corps of Engineers, was appointed Lieut. Col. of the Regiment. Although Colonel Fries remained the nominal Commander of the regiment, he never acted in that capacity, for his duties as Chief of the Gas Service left him neither time nor opportunity. All the credit for raising, training, and equipping the First Gas Regiment belongs to Colonel E. J. Atkisson and the officers picked by him.
Immediately upon the formation of the Gas Service, the Chief urged that many more than six companies of gas troops should be provided. These recommendations were repeated and urged for the next two months or until about the first of November, when it became apparent that an increase could not be obtained at that time and that any further urging would only cause irritation. The matter was therefore dropped until a more auspicious time should arrive. This arrived the next spring when the first German projector attack against United States troops produced severe casualties, exactly as had been forecasted by the Gas Service. About the middle of March, 1918, an increase from two battalions to six battalions (eighteen companies) was authorized. A further increase to three regiments of six battalions each (a total of fifty-four companies) was authorized early in September, 1918, after the very great value of gas troops had been demonstrated in the fight from the Marne to the Vesle in July.