Harvest for War: Fruits, Nuts, Imperialism, and Gas Mask Production in the United States During World War I

• In Event: War and Environmental History

Abstract

During the short time the United States was formally in World War I government contractors manufactured just under 4 million gas masks. Essential for life in the trenches these masks required a very specific type of carbon source for filters to keep soldiers at the front alive. The sources of this carbon came from fruits and nuts that were collected from around the world. In addition, domestic canners had a unique opportunity to sell waste product to the Chemical Warfare Service in the form of fruit pits. Fruits or nuts such as coconuts (Cocos nucifera), corrozo nuts (Phytelephas seemanni), peaches (Prunus persica), apricots (Prunus armeniaca), and cherries (Prunus avium) were collected in large quantities and later processed in mass and transported to the main gas mask production facility in Astoria, Queens on New York Harbor. In early 1918 the Army had carbonization operations running in the Philippines, Nicaragua, and San Francisco.

While gas warfare would later personify for many the darkest and most sinister scientific legacy of the war, with 1.3 million gas casualties and more than 90,000 combat deaths, analysis of the procurement and processing of the various natural ingredients used for making gas mask filters opens an intriguing window in military environmental history. American military industrial activity during World War I from an environmental perspective takes us inside burdening new global commodity chains, and domestic waste streams from industrial canning. In 1917 American scientists and engineers were able to harness nature’s bounty for increasingly esoteric and very specific military research aims on an industrial scale that would have been impossible only a few years earlier. In addition, one can readily map many of the international sources for gas mask carbon onto United States imperialist expansion from the 1890s spanning ecosystems from the Canal Zone to the Philippines.

Author

• Gerard J. Fitzgerald, George Mason University