6
JULY 28�AUGUST 4, 2021
FROM THE SHELF
CHECKING OUT THE
WORLD OF BOOKS
‘Hellfire Boys’: An intriguing read
about ‘world’s deadliest weapons’
By Jayson Jacoby
Go! Magazine
S
guish their work by examining some
smaller piece — a single battle, for
instance, or the experience of one
division during the confl ict.
I tend to prefer this sort of book,
as I’ve read (and indeed, own) a
couple comprehensive histories.
I was, then, intrigued when I saw,
in the recently arrived nonfi ction
section at the Baker County Library,
Theo Emery’s 2017 book, “Hellfi re
Boys: The Birth of the U.S. Chemical
Warfare Service and the Race for
the World’s Deadliest Weapons.”
“Deadliest weapons” is a term
likely to entice people to pluck the
book from the shelf even if they’re
not war history afi cionados.
The use of poison gas — most
notably chlorine, phosgene and
mustard gas — is, along with the
machine gun, barbed wire and
artillery bombardments, an ele-
ment that more than a century later
remains emblematic of the First
World War.
Any competent history of the
confl ict — and probably even most
incompetent ones — will mention,
ome events have been probed
so thoroughly by historians
that it seems to me no author could
discover anything compelling to
write about them.
Compelling, in this case, being
a synonym for something readers
haven’t already come across in half
a dozen other books.
The First World War is a fi ne
example of the phenomenon.
Besides being one of the defi n-
ing episodes of the 20th century,
the war has the not minor disad-
vantage of being awfully old. Given
that the war ended almost 103
years ago, at least three genera-
tions of historians have had a go at
plumbing this epochal period. To
understand its popularity you need
only peruse the military history
section at a library or bookstore.
Although the occasional general
history of the war is published to
this day, for many decades most
historians have sought to distin-
t
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i
d
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however briefl y, the gas attacks.
It’s a weapon which, in perhaps the
only way, makes the First World War
more barbaric than the Second.
Emery’s dense book, as
its name implies, focuses on
America’s gas program during its
relatively brief involvement in the
war (the U.S. declared war in April
1917, less than a year and a half
before the war ended, and Ameri-
can soldiers fought in large num-
bers for only about six months,
in 1918).
It was an enlightening read — in
a very dark way.
I was surprised to learn not only
how committed the U.S. was to
using gas weapons, but also how
closely the military worked with
civilian chemists to develop the
titular “deadliest weapons.”
From Emery’s research, it
seems that if you were a distin-
guished American chemist in 1917
or 1918, the best way to advance
your career wasn’t to devise ways
to help improve people’s lives, but
to fi gure out how to end them.
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