Gas-Defense Items Shipped Overseas From June 1917 to November

Souret Thli table appeari in Annual Report of the Director, CWS 1919, p. 51, and in Crowell, Americtfs 

The British, who maintained a chemical proving ground at Porton, England, contributed the services of Maj. H. R. LeSueur, who helped lay out the grounds and organize the tests.  

The Ordnance Department started construction of a proving ground at Edgewood near the shell filling plant in January 1918. A month later the department stopped work at Edgewood because it was felt that the location was not sufficiently isolated and started anew in the pine forests near Lakehurst, N.J. 

With the coming of peace in November 1918, the industrial and collegiate laboratories assisting the CWS dropped war projects and returned to their normal scientific research. At American University the volume of research subsided as the staff of more than twelve hundred technical men, among whom were many of the finest chemists in the United States, dwindled away until only a handful were left. The dismemberment of the service proceeded so rapidly that by 30 June 1919, 97 percent of its military personnel had been demobilized. In a short time the CWS would have disappeared completely had not Congress on 11 July 1919 ordered the War Department to retain the service as an independent branch of the Army for another year. Under the National Defense Act of 1920 the CWS became a permanent branch of the Army.  

There was little else that the CWS could have done at this time even had it desired. The government had returned American University to the trustees, and the Research Division of the CWS was busy preparing new laboratories at Edgewood Arsenal and transferring equipment and records. CWS scientists, uncertain of their future, were not disposed to remain, so that between 1 July and 1 November 1919 there was only an average of eighteen technical men to keep the work alive.  

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Table 2—Gas-Defense Items Shipped Overseas From June 1917 to November 1918...

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