Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, July 4, 1993 TAG: 9307060188
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By Carolyn Click/Staff writer
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
If they were scared, they masked it with macho, smoking unfiltered cigarettes and dancing the night away to the silky tunes of Duke Ellington.
At least that's the way it seems from the vantage of 50 years.
The world was on fire with war and they were preparing to enter the belly of the beast. If there was palpable excitement in the air, there was also spine-tingling fear, loneliness and boredom.
The passage of 50 years has made it seem as if the world moved in lockstep against a common enemy. These veterans of World War II represent perhaps the last time Americans truly saw themselves as unified, as unabashedly patriotic.
Years later, after Korea and Vietnam had muddled American foreign policy and soured many on the prospect of a just and noble war, the 1940s seemed almost dreamlike and innocent.
That innocence, that unquestioned belief in the authority of government, was demonstrated no more eloquently than in the mustard gas and Lewisite experiments of the mid-1940s.
America was fearful that Germany and Japan would turn deadly chemical weapons on the Allies. And so the government sent young men inside gas-filled chambers to determine how best to outfit them for protection in the fields.
Now those men, many entering their eighth decade, are asking the government to compensate them for injuries suffered in those chambers, wounds suffered silently, patriotically, for 50 years.
Charles Dyke remembers how he lined up inside the test chamber, one of 10 men in a row, and waited for the gas.
He recalls little about the interior of the chamber, whether it was cramped or spacious or if it carried the pungent scent of the sulfur mustard, know as mustard gas.
But he recognizes it from old Navy photographs, the gray cinderblock walls, the porthole windows and the pipe that ran from floor to ceiling and then bent to the right and spewed the gas through a rectangular-shaped exhaust.
He remembers thinking it was nothing, an hour's tedious duty, that would get him a week's leave and time enough to visit his new wife and 10-month-old son half a continent away.
It was the winter of 1943 and America was at war. He was 19 and already a veteran of the African invasion and he figured it was safe enough, back home on American soil in Bainbridge, Md., to volunteer for a test his Navy superiors had said "wasn't going to bother us a bit."
He wore a gas mask and protective clothing except for a wide swath of material that had been cut away from his shirt front, exposing his belly directly to the gas. He stayed inside the gas chamber for one hour in a test that simulated tropical conditions.
He doesn't remember if the door was locked from the outside because no one tried to get out. No one fainted. No one asked if the gas was toxic, if there would be side effects.
"Being 19 years old and thinking about going home - I figured you could pinch your finger for that long and maybe I could put up with it," said Dyke.
It is exactly 50 years later and he is retired on a lovely hillside in Grayson County, but he remembers what it felt like to be young and yearning for home.
He began to burn and blister on his stomach only hours after he left the chamber, a sensation so painful that he went to see two medics who shook their heads in surprise and suggested he was "one in a thousand" and sent him on his way.
He kept his mouth shut, and got on the train bound for Logansport, Ind., where his wife, Eunice, a child herself at 18, waited for him.
He had told her only that he was sick and had taken part in some test, so she was not prepared when he took off his shirt and revealed his ugly, red, swollen belly, skin that looked like "raw meat" that had been scalded.
"I can remember what he was like, and what he looked like, like it was yesterday," said Eunice Dyke.
He was supposed to keep the test a secret but he went to a doctor anyway, a World War I veteran, who was appalled that the U.S. government was subjecting its men to a gas that had wreaked so much havoc on the European battlefields two decades earlier.
But the salve the doctor gave him worked and he spent his 10-day leave propped up in an easy chair wearing oversized pajama bottoms until he healed.
And then he forgot about it.
He never, not for a moment, he says, connected his hour in the chamber with the chronic stomach distress he developed shortly after his discharge from service. Years later, when he was diagnosed with a stomach ulcer, and underwent operations to repair a hiatal hernia and ruptured esophagus, he chalked it up to stress, the daily tensions of a career police officer.
That is, until two years ago, when he and his wife watched a "60 Minutes" segment on the mustard gas experiments and Eunice turned to him and said, "For crying out loud, that's just the stuff you've had for years and years."
That television broadcast opened a Pandora's box of questions for World War II veterans like Dyke, who for years have suffered chronic, sometimes debilitating illnesses and never knew why.
For two decades veterans have pressed the government for answers about the secret mustard-gas testing. But it took an outside advisory panel earlier this year to articulate just what the government had done in the name of war.
"There can be no question that some veterans, who served our country with honor and at great personal cost, were mistreated twice - first, in the secret testing and second, by the official denials that lasted for decades," an Institute of Medicine committee report commissioned by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs said in January. The institute is an arm of the National Academy of Sciences.
With the flurry of media attention, with the testimony of 70-something men reciting their wartime recollections, the VA and the Defense Department finally lifted the curtain on a secret that had been carefully guarded for 50 years. The VA has pledged to compensate the veterans whose illnesses can be proved to be linked to exposure to mustard gas.
No one, not even the men who were involved in the tests, questioned the intent of the experiments carried out during wartime. In fact, all were sworn to secrecy and some were threatened with court martial if they told anyone.
Although never realized, the threat of a chemical attack by Germany or Japan was real. The memories of World War I gas horrors were fresh in the military's mind. And so the Defense Department's Chemical Warfare Service was revitalized and charged with finding ways to protect soldiers in case of massive gas attacks.
But none of the soldiers recruited for the tests were ever warned of the tissue and inhalation injuries that result from exposure to mustard gas and another poisonous gas called Lewisite. Lewisite, an arsenic-laden compound developed in World War I, often was mixed with sulfur mustard.
More than 60,000 men eventually took part in the tests, although the Department of Veterans Affairs says about 4,000 were involved in the most serious, comprehensive experiments. Many were told they were testing "summer clothing."
Some reported being taken by bus to the chambers at the Naval Research Laboratory in Anacostia, Md. Others were tested in chambers at Bainbridge and the Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland, in Alabama, Louisiana, Illinois, North Carolina, San Jose Island in the Panama Canal Zone, Utah and Florida.
Some had no more than tiny drops of liquid gas placed on their arms; others were required to enter gas chambers and remove articles of clothing or their gas masks to gauge the devastation of the gas on raw skin.
The men were sworn to secrecy, and even when complications arose - when men fainted inside the chamber and had to be carried out - there was no public outcry. Some carried the secret to their deathbeds, their military records never showing what they had endured.
"That is what I am so bitter about," said Clarence Davis, a 68-year-old Navy veteran from Woodlawn in Carroll County. "That they did not follow up."
He is a soft-spoken man with a kind, open face and even when he speaks of his bitterness, his tone is temperate.
Davis was the youngest of 12 children raised on Coal Creek and the last of four boys in his family to head off to war. He was inducted into the Navy in September 1943 on his 19th birthday.
His first stop was the Navy Hospital Corps School at Bainbridge, Md. It was there he signed up for the weeklong test at the Navy lab, counting on the seven-day pass that had enticed his fellow colleagues.
"I guess we would go through fire to get another week home," said Davis. "You didn't even think about the danger."
Within six to eight weeks of taking the tests, Davis succumbed to double pneumonia, pleurisy and sinus problems. He was hospitalized for a month.
"We thought he was going to die," said his wife, Louise, who as a plucky 18-year-old had followed her then-boyfriend to Maryland, working in a defense plant to earn a living while staying with Clarence's first cousin and wife.
Later, in Japan, he contracted yellow jaundice. For years he has been plagued with stomach ailments, sinus problems and headaches. He underwent gallbladder surgery 16 years ago.
At the time, he said, "I just assumed it was another day of following orders." But now he believes his medical troubles are linked to the gas exposure.
"I feel like the whole thing has weakened my system," said Davis, a retired postmaster and father of two.
Just recently, the VA set up an appointment for Davis to get a comprehensive physical at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Salem. Davis hopes this will speed processing of his disability benefit claim.
But it is still not easy to win approval. Dyke, who retired on disability after 26 years with the Marion, Ohio, Police Department, has been turned down twice.
"We have reached this decision because stomach ulcer, hiatal hernia and ruptured esophagus are not shown to have developed during your active military service and are not recognized as chronic long term effects of exposure to mustard gas," according to a Jan. 19 letter.
In 1991, The VA, under pressure from veterans and Congress, identified seven diseases linked to mustard gas and Lewisite exposure for which veterans could be compensated: laryngitis, chronic bronchitis, emphysema, asthma, corneal opacities, chronic conjunctivitis and keratitis.
The Institute of Medicine report this year recommended that list be expanded to include 12 disorders, including skin cancers, leukemia, some sexual dysfunctions and psychological maladies. But the report found insufficient evidence to link gastrointestinal or cardiovascular disease to mustard gas exposure.
The VA has begun the regulatory process to determine if the list should be expanded to include four of those disorders - respiratory cancers, skin cancer, leukemia and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease - and should reach a conclusion this fall, said Donna St. John, a VA spokeswoman in Washington.
As of late May, 450 men had filed for disability benefits based on mustard gas exposure; 67 have been granted some compensation under existing regulations, said St. John.
Earlier this year, Secretary of Veteran Affairs Jesse Brown even spoke of compensating families of veterans who died from illnesses related to the poison gases.
The VA, spurred by the committee, also has begun a comprehensive search for the men who were part of the tests. The Defense Department was ordered to declassify research records, including personnel logs and collect information on the experiments by July 31.
But as months go by, Earl Martin of Bedford County wonders if the goodwill gestures are coming too late for veterans who are now old and sick.
"You see, nothing was in my records," he said.
For years, the Bedford County native has been plagued by respiratory problems, headaches and blurry vision. He has undergone operations on his vocal cords and in his right nasal passage and has had two cataract implants. His throat is constantly hoarse, even though he never smoked.
Off and on, Martin and his doctors puzzled over the origins of his maladies. His family medical histories offered few clues to his illnesses.
"After this came out, it all fell into place," he said.
Like the others, Martin has filed a disability claim. Because of his fixed income, he is also eligible for regular VA medical treatment. Over the last few years, he estimates he has spent more than 50 days as a patient at the Salem Va hospital because of his poor health.
Martin entered the military in June 1944, undergoing six weeks of basic training at Bainbridge. There, he was selected as one of 20 men in his unit to undergo gas tests at the Naval Research Laboratory.
"I think a seven-day leave was what talked me into it," the 71-year-old Martin recalls with a wry chuckle.
"We could have refused, but with the promise of a seven-day leave and the assurance it wouldn't harm us in any way. . . . I would have given my my right arm for seven days home."
For three consecutive days, one hour at a time, Martin stood in the gas chamber, sometimes in front of a window where Navy doctors could examine his reddening skin through the glass. When he came out, he would sit or stand before whirring fans.
"I had burning eyes and nose and large blisters on the inside of both wrists which left large scars," he wrote in a two-page recollection. "I also started losing my hair."
On the fourth day, personnel placed four separate patches of gas on the inner side of his right arm, which still bare slight scars.
Martin then was released for his seven-day leave.
"They told us if we had to see a doctor to tell them it was sunburn," he said. "We were worse than guinea pigs."
Even after he returned from his adventures in the South Pacific to his native Bedford, after he married and had two children, he never revealed to his wife, Mary, want had happened to him until the secrecy oath was lifted in 1991.
In its attempt to unravel the long-term health effects of the mustard gas tests, the Institute of Medicine committee said it found "an atmosphere of lingering secrecy" that raised troubling ethical questions.
"Although the experiments began in a wartime climate of urgency and secrecy, it was clearly a mistake in this case to continue the secrecy after the conclusion of the war," the report stated.
"Follow-up of the exposed human subjects could have provided a wealth of information on the effects of these war gases and could have served as a basis for legitimate disability claims by injured subjects."
Like Martin, Glen Kirk, 71, of Giles County was circumspect about his days in the gas chamber.
He spent the war serving in a gas unit - the 93rd Medical Gas Treatment Battalion in Louisiana - dedicated to treating victims of mustard gas and other lung inhalants.
In addition to learning how to care for gas casualties, Kirk was recruited to test how men would react when exposed to the gases.
"I think we took our clothes off down to here," he said, pointing to his waist. "They took our arms and they took a pin and dipped it in mustard gas and then stuck it on the arm."
One arm was treated with salve, the other left untreated. "On the one where we didn't treat there was a big sore come up about the size of a 50-cent piece. That thing stayed on there a long time, until I got over in Europe," he said. "It itched and burned and it was pretty bad. I did have a scar for a long time but I can't see no scar now."
In other instances, officials would ask Kirk and the other recruits to enter the chambers and raise their gas masks a bit at a time, then take it off and walk out.
But for the 20-year-old enlistee, it was the tear gas, not the mustard gas, that incited the worst fears in him.
"I thought it was awful, I thought it was something that would kill us," he said. "They said it couldn't hurt you but it could be mixed with other gases. We were concerned about using the lung irritants."
The stories he tells are punctuated with short, dry coughs, the result he now believes of his exposure to the gases.
"I've had a throat problem for years and coughing too, and I've been to doctors but never found out much about it," he said. "They don't know why I have to cough all the time."
He went to the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Salem for a consultation but because he was not wounded during the war, he was not given priority for treatment. But he was urged to file a claim with the regional VA office.
Kirk, a country boy who grew up in the rural Trigg community outside Pearisburg, also got a seven-day pass for agreeing to enter the gas chambers. He put it to good use, marrying his childhood sweetheart, Opal, on that rushed furlough home.
It is one of his sweetest wartime memories, how they enlisted Opal's sister to vouch for the underage bride and forged her father's signature so the official in Pearisburg would grant them the license.
"She came off the 11-7 and I picked her up and we went down to her sister-in-law's house and she put her [wedding] clothes on and we went to see our preacher and got married."
A lifetime has been lived since that moment: two more years in the war five major battle campaigns, then a return home where he put in 44 years with the Hoechst-Celanese Corp. and raised five children with Opal and did a little farming on the side.
Each story is a little different, but it is that way for all the men of the World War II generation, including the ones who we now know risked their health, if not their lives, in the gas chambers.
They are old now, longtime fathers and grandfathers, and maybe a little sentimental. And they speak of those years almost as if they were recalling a dream.
"It was quite an experience," said Davis, who wore the uniform of three services - Navy, Army and Marines - and witnessed the invasion of Okinawa before he was mustered out with $100 in pay and $135 in bus fare to get from California back home.
"You sometimes wonder how you got through it."
He is standing by his door, by a small American flag placed carefully in the door frame.
They all call themselves patriots and they will fly the flag today and maybe attend a July 4th parade and recite the Pledge of Allegiance.
Their patriotism is not now, nor will it ever be, contingent on what the government does or does not do to finally make good on a wartime mistake.
"If I'm due it, I'd like to have it," said Kirk. "All I can do is wait. That's what the Army always told you to do. Line up and wait."
by CNB