Indiana plant was asked to make anthrax bombs | Webb

Winston Churchill was scared.

By late 1944, Allied forces had grabbed control of World War II, but a terrifying thought still haunted the British prime minster.

What if, in a final desperate move, Adolf Hitler bombed the United Kingdom with biological weapons?

If that was going to happen, Churchill wanted something to retaliate with. So, he reached out to the American military with a very specific request. I want half-a-million bombs, he said. And I want them stuffed with anthrax.

President Franklin Roosevelt agreed to the request, and the military soon found a perfect place to possibly build those nightmarish weapons: six miles outside Terre Haute, Indiana, about two hours north of Evansville.

All this is relayed in “Poisoner in Chief,” a new book by Stephen Kinzer. The main subject of the book is Sidney Gottlieb, the mastermind behind the CIA’s infamous MK-Ultra experiments. But Kinzer dives into other secretive government operations as well, including a brief foray into work at the Vigo County Ordnance Plant.

The Indiana anthrax order became public in January 1987. Military officials denied the plant tucked along the Wabash River ever churned out anthrax bombs, and the Chicago Tribune talked with a former Vigo worker in '87 who said the plant never got beyond the “dry run” stage.

Kinzer also reports that the war ended before the plant produced any anthrax-tinged explosives.

Others, though, disputed that.

According to British intelligence reports cited by Barton Bernstein – the Stanford historian who unveiled the operation in the ’80s – the Vigo plant produced at least 5,000 bombs before being shut down.

Roosevelt chief of staff William Leahy said making anthrax-riddled bombs “would violate every Christian ethic I have ever heard of, and all of the known laws of war,” Kinzer reported.

And, depending on who you ask, it almost happened 100 miles from Evansville. 

More:Report: Evansville soldier's death 'could have been avoided'

True crime:Accused of double murder, an Evansville World War II veteran vanished in 1954 | Webb

Munitions plant

Before the anthrax, Vigo was just another ammunition factory.

Efforts to feed the war machine blossomed all over the country. Evansville’s economy boomed thanks to operations such as Republic Aviation, where workers produced thousands of P-47 Thunderbolts.

The U.S. Army built the Vigo ordnance plant in 1942 to make detonators and primers for TNT. And the man who oversaw it all was an Evansville native and admiral named James C. Vickery.

According to an Evansville Courier article from 1943, Vickery managed a staff that was 85 percent women.

To handle the sensitive explosives, workers had to strip off their street clothes and don special uniforms and shoes. They were barred from carrying matches, lighters or even mechanical pencils – anything that could cause a spark and set off calamity.

Business rollicked for a while, but by April 1943 production had slowed. Workers were laid off and Vickery was transferred.

That’s when Ira Baldwin swept in. The Indiana native and University of Wisconsin bacteriologist had recently nabbed a gig as scientific director of the Army’s Biological Warfare Laboratories. He got the job after he convinced the military he could build a hermetically sealed tank safe enough to produce swimming-pools-worth of deadly chemical agents, Kinzer reported.

The U.S. had just fielded Churchill’s order, and they needed a place that was ready to produce bomblets without much preparation.

A shuttered munitions factory was the perfect solution.

In “Factories of Death,” a 2002 book by Sheldon Harris, the operation was described as minimal, working at only 10 percent capacity. But even at that lackadaisical pace, the plant still could have reportedly rolled out 500,000 four-pound anthrax bombs per month.

According to Harris, the plant produced more than 8,000 pounds of a non-toxic anthrax stand-in for testing purposes, and by March 1945, the plant was primed for the real thing.

“We got down to the dry-run stage,” the Rev. Joseph Hedding, a former Vigo worker told the Tribune in 1987.

He didn’t believe the factory ever got around to making real bombs, though. If it had, the relaxed security around the joint would have tightened up really quick.

“There was never any anthrax produced there,” he said. “But they were getting ready to.”

The Axis powers were unraveling by then, however, and when the U.S. unleashed two atomic bombs on Japan that August, the supposed “need” for anthrax bombs dissipated.

History:Evansville German immigrants spied on, threatened with arrest during World War I | Webb

More:Evansville World War II veteran flew 118 combat missions. On Monday, he took flight again

'Let's not talk about it now'

Terre Haute wasn’t thrilled when the plant’s past became public 32 years ago.

The mayor groused, and residents who called in to a radio station were angrier about an outsider meddling in their history than anything else.

“The attitude is, ‘We did what we had to do. We didn’t ask any questions. Let’s not talk about it now,’” WBOW news director Charles Edwards told the Tribune.

Pfizer bought the plant in 1948 but kept all the old military hardware stashed in squat buildings nearby. In the 1990s, the U.S. government inspected the area and spent thousands to clean up any possible contaminants. 

Pfizer closed their own plant in 2008, ripping more than 700 jobs out of the city.

But earlier this year, the Vigo County Redevelopment Commission finalized a deal to sell a slice of the land to Saturn Petcare. They’ll make dog food on the revamped property.

More:Appeals court: Prosecutor too late to amend charge for man accused in fatal crash

Contact columnist Jon Webb at jon.webb@courierpress.com