The Detrick complex grew rapidly, eventually encompassing more than 245 structures, including a hospital, firehouse, theater and library. By August 1945, the base held nearly 250 Army officers and 1,457 enlisted Army personnel, 87 naval officers and 475 enlisted naval personnel, and nine civilians.

Subscribe Today

• Did you enjoy our article?
• Read more in American History magazine
• Subscribe online and save nearly 40%!!!
 

The facility’s heart was the 50,605-square-foot hangar housing the two plants that made anthrax and botulinum toxins. The larger plant had a 10,000-gallon fermenter and two 3,700-gallon fermenters. Baldwin had been as good as his word: He could indeed produce large quantities of biological agents. Camp personnel also tried to develop munitions that could spread biological agents but with limited success. They ended up using the bombs that the British had developed.

Another side of Camp Detrick’s work was the development of vaccines and toxoids (a weaker version of a toxin that stimulates defensive measures in the body) to protect against a biological attack. Scientists did find a means to mass-produce a toxoid to protect against botulinum, and by the summer of 1944, they had produced and stored more than 4,000 gallons, a sufficient amount to protect a large number troops. But the means of protecting against many other biological agents remained undiscovered by war’s end.

Security and safety were major concerns at Camp Detrick. Fences, towers and floodlights ringed the site, while guards armed with machine guns patrolled the premises. Scientists working in the laboratories kept loaded .45-caliber pistols close by and lived in barracks within the restricted military environment of the camp.

Baldwin was especially proud of the operation’s safety arrangements. Detrick researchers, in fact, created innovations that became standards in later lab work. Buildings were divided into clean areas, for offices and changing rooms, and hot areas, with airlocks connecting the two sides. Blowers maintained negative air pressure that ensured toxins remained in the hot areas; contaminated air was sterilized with an air incinerator. Vaccines, toxoids, immune sera, penicillin and streptomycin along with leakproof masks helped protect those working with the microorganisms. The carcasses of animals killed during tests — a total of 658,039, including sheep, ferrets, cats, pigs, white mice and guinea pigs — were sterilized with steam in an autoclave, then burned in an incinerator.

One British scientist complained that the safety precautions were excessive. As Ed Regis reported in his book, The Biology of Doom, Baldwin responded: I’m not really worried about whether you get killed or not. If you do, we’ll feel sorry about it and we’ll take a couple of hours off and we’ll go to the funeral and we’ll come home and go to work again. But if we get organisms out into the air and Farmer Jones’ cows over here get anthrax and they die, we’ll have a Congressional investigation that will probably shut down the whole post. So I really am not as much interested in you as I am in protecting the community.

Despite the safety efforts, at least four men died during the years of the project. William Boyles, a 46-year-old microbiologist, died of anthrax on November 25, 1951, and Joel Willard, 53, an electrician, died of anthrax on July 5, 1958, after he entered an infected area to change a lightbulb. A primate infected with the Machupo virus killed animal caretaker Albert Nickel, 53. And a young Army lieutenant died in 1944 when a pump exploded. In 1946, the Army reported that 60 cases had required treatment as a result of accidental exposure to biological agents. But Baldwin pointed out that none of the incidents occurred at a pilot plant, which he said confirmed his statement that you could create the organisms at least as safely there as you could in a lab.

While Camp Detrick remained the center of the research project, Baldwin also needed a site to conduct outdoor tests. In January 1943, he selected Horn Island in the Gulf of Mexico as the testing site for bombs loaded with biological agents. An army of technicians descended on the island to turn it into a testing facility, building 144 structures and a narrow-gauge railroad to transport animals from corrals to the test area. But then the Detrick team learned that for most of the year prevailing winds blew toward the nearby shores of Alabama and Mississippi. As a result, they never tested bacteria on the island, though they did conduct open-air testing of toxins, including botulinum. They also conducted tests at Granite Peak, a 250-square-mile area near the Dugway Proving Ground in Utah, activated in June 1944.

Help HistoryNet by bookmarking to