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An explosive look into the dawn of chemical warfare during World War I Powerful and gripping, Hellfire Boys tells the story of the young men who started a Manhattan Project-type program at American University in 1917. These soldiers and chemists worked on offensive and defensive gas measures: testing hastily made gas masks; observing the effects of mustard gas on goats, dogs, and even humans; and perfecting the ultimate weapon of mass destruction -- lewisite, which, as World War I raged, the United States planned to unleash on Germans using another new technology, planes.The book traces the actions of the ''Hellfire Battalion,'' a group of American engineers who were trained in gas warfare and sent to the front lines in France to launch multiple assaults against the Germans.