Perham man trained troops on chemical, biological, and radiological warfare
By Bill Vossler
Seventy-one years ago, a drop of mustard gas was placed on the arm of 21-year-old George Kupferschmid, now 92 of Perham. “For one of our training sessions at Fort McClellan, Ala., we had to come forward while a drop of mustard gas from a needle was placed on our inner arm. It bubbled up quickly, making a blister an inch high, the size of a nickel, with some pain over a small area.”
That was his first introduction to chemical warfare, George said. “We were also shown some G agents, some of the most toxic chemical warfare nerve agents, which we used to stroke a drop across the eye of a goat. Within minutes, it went into convulsions, and died. Quite the experience. At that time our work was classified, and considered top secret, so we couldn’t talk about it.”
History
When George attended the land-grant University of Wisconsin in Madison starting in 1949, ROTC (Reserve Officers’ Training Corps) was required. “ROTC was my first military training, and looking back now it ended up shaping a great deal of my life. As a sophomore I was on the list to be drafted. But a ROTC instructor said our group would be eligible to go into advanced ROTC for two years, and upon graduation would become second lieutenants. That sounded pretty good, especially the $27 a month for those two years, so it was a good choice.”
As a junior, he was sent to basic training at Ft. Lewis, Washington. “The Korean Conflict had started, and we all thought we were going to Korea,” he said. “What we did at Fort Lewis is pretty much what basic Army people went through. Most anybody in the infantry or artillery would go through the same basic course. That was a beautiful place to be. In the morning you’d get up and see Mt. Rainier or St. Helens, but it was rough basic training. We had no time of our own for eight weeks.”
There he learned about booby traps. “A booby-trap is a battle of the minds. We heard from some World War II soldiers that an enemy soldier would leave binoculars or a pistol laying on the ground, thinking that souvenir hunter American soldiers would pick up that kind of thing. So we had to train our soldiers that items like that might be booby-trapped. Sometimes they could booby-trap the booby-trapped item.”
He added that doors were another area for booby traps. “We had to teach soldiers that a door could be booby-trapped if you pulled it open, or if you pushed it in. There were many neat tricks of the trade. You had to try to outguess what the enemy was doing.
“Further training included crawling under barbed wire with live bullets shooting over your head, pulling the pins on grenades and throwing them, driving big machines, like bulldozers, which I enjoyed, and all the detonation modalities that existed.”
Then there were land mines. “We were taught how to probe for them, detect them and remove them, and then post signs saying the way had been cleared of landmines or antipersonnel mines. Or our soldiers would move in front of the heavy equipment and look for suspicious diggings in the road, and generally how to be careful. Most landmines of the time were made of metal, so an ordinary metal detector could find them. Nowadays most of them are plastic or inorganic.”
At Fort Lewis, George also learned how Combat Engineers built bridges and floating rafts on pontoons so troops could cross rivers.
A New Direction
After finishing his last two years of college with a major in bacteriology, George expected to be sent to Korea. “But after my physical exam the Army said my eyes without glasses were below the standards for a Combat Officer, so I was assigned to a non-combat role,” he said. “It happened so fast, I didn’t know what to make of it.”
At that point those who failed the eye test were assigned to a tech service, “And for me that was the chemical corps because I had graduated as a bacteriologist.”
His next stop was Ft. McClellan in Alabama. “I was sent there in September of 1953 as a 2nd Lieutenant for Chemical Officer Training School for six months. We went through a training program and testing program with an emphasis on chemical, biological, and radiological warfare.”
The chemical training was triggered because the Germans were reported to have nerve agents in canisters on barges in the Rhine River. “That included those very dangerous G agents, so we were all concerned that future conflicts might include these kinds of things. It was quite an experience, because that’s when they showed us some of the agents, like mustard gas with a drop on the arm, or an agent that killed a goat within minutes. So if soldiers were sprayed with any of these gases, they were in big trouble. We were taught how to train soldiers what to do during an attack if they were sprayed with any chemical. We had to write up reports and whatever we did, the specifications and what we thought about it.”
One of those was tear gas. “The first training issue was exposing soldiers to tear gas. The soldiers had to run into a room filled with tear gas, with their arms up so they could touch the sill, then remove the gas mask from their bag, put it on, and clear it by blowing air out. Those who didn’t get the mask on in time would be mumbling and throwing up, but their sickness wasn’t permanent. That was a way to get their attention in a hurry.”
Next an airplane dropped tear gas on the soldiers. “They had to get their gas masks out and on not only so they wouldn’t suffer, but also so they could continue working as a unit.”
“I had to get exposed to tear gas too, but with some luck I always got my mask cleared and never sucked in any tear gas.”
George said lens inserts were made to slip into the gas masks for people who had glasses. “I’m not sure how long a gas mask would be good for, but those canisters of activated charcoal could be replaced.”
In February of 1954 George was assigned to the Edgewood Arsenal Army Chemical Center five miles North of Baltimore, near the Aberdeen Proving Grounds. “There we tore apart and evaluated German gas masks captured after World War II, and a lot of Russian gas masks. Eventually we also analyzed Chinese gas masks because they had been involved with North Korea, and saw how all of these masks had been made and what they used. We found out they were all generally the same, with a canister of activated charcoal.”
That information they took to Washington, D.C. “We took it to some temporary Pentagon intelligence buildings only an hour away, where we also got out equipment and shuttled reports back and forth.”
Much of the information was technical, George said. “Every Saturday I had to give a lecture in front of the troops of the chemical unit about the week’s work.”
So most of his time, George said, was trying to train ground troops. “First with chemical warfare like tear gas, then biological warfare like anthrax and typhoid, which was precautionary because we didn’t know what enemy countries might be using.”
Then with radiological dangers, teaching troops how to use Geiger counters and what to do in case of radiation. “We ran some field exercises to train the soldiers. We had to wear RAD badges which would monitor the radiation, and total the accumulated roentgens, if any, that we were exposed to, and they kept records of that. I think the amount of radiation that was allowable at the time would not be allowable today. At the end of any exercises we had to turn our RAD badges in to be read, so they kept a record of how many roentgens we had been exposed to.”
When he was diagnosed with prostate cancer many years later, the doctors saw how much exposure he had had, and wondered if that was the reason. “But there’s really no way to know,” George said.
He was discharged in the Summer of 1955 as a First Lieutenant, and did a series of interesting jobs afterwards.
One of those was in 1955 working at a Veterinary Lab in Wisconsin. “We made vaccine serums for rabies, coccidiosis, swine erysipelas, rabies, and distemper. You had to vaccinate so many white mice with a virulent strain of rabies, some of which had been vaccinated by us, and others who were not. We had to see that the ones without the vaccine died, but those that had been injected with the vaccine lived, which proved the efficiency of the vaccine. We also made a vaccine where we had to draw blood from horses.”
George worked with “a lot of animals, many autopsies harvesting lymph nodes from cats and dogs, and working with ferrets, which were tough to handle. We had to use big leather gloves when working with them. I was in quality control, and I enjoyed it, but with little chance to move up in a business like that, I thought I would try something else. Having worked for three months at that small company, I then decided to go to school on the GI Bill for Optometry. During those years we got a stipend of $130 a month if married and $30 more for our first child, as long as I was in approved academic credit.”
It’s ironic that George was kept out of Korea because of his eyes, considering he became a well-respected optometrist in Perham for 37 years.
He found out later that for him to get the Top Secret designation, the FBI ran extensive tests on him. “I found out they interviewed people I’d known, asking how long they’d known me, and other questions about me. Maybe they got a hold of one of my Boy Scout masters, neighbors, and teachers, I’d bet.”
He looks back and realizes how being an Eagle Scout helped him out in the service. “In the Scouts we had a lot of discipline and structure, which was helpful when I was in the military, so it’s interesting to think about how things from your youth can help you in the future.”