No Axis chemical stockpiles had been discovered in North Africa, and AFHQ believed that gas warfare by Germany “appears unlikely” except “at a critical moment of the war, when such a course might be expected to be decisive.” But Eisenhower wondered whether that moment was approaching. Relying on Italian intelligence, he had warned Marshall in late August that Berlin had “threatened that if Italy turned against Germany gas would be used against the country and the most terrible vengeance would be exacted” as a lesson to other wobbly allies. Churchill also sounded the alarm in a note to Roosevelt. Fifth Army prisoner interrogations suggested intensified German preparations for chemical combat, and rumors circulated of a new, egregiously potent gas. “Many soldiers in the German army say, ‘Adolf will turn to gas when there is no other way out,’” a Fifth Army memo noted in mid-October. Nineteen plants in Germany were suspected of making poisonous gases, with others scattered across occupied Europe.
Twenty-eight different gases had caused more than a million casualties in World War I, beginning with a German chlorine attack at Ypres in April 1915. Hitler himself had been temporarily blinded by British mustard; a liquid that emitted vapor at room temperature, mustard blistered exposed skin and attacked eyes and airways. No commander in 1943 could be cavalier about a manifest threat by Germany to use gas. Spurred by resurgent concerns in the Mediterranean, Roosevelt in August publicly warned Berlin of “full and swift retaliation in kind.” Allied policy had long authorized large chemical depots near Oran and elsewhere; when mustard stocks were moved by convoy in Africa, MPs sat in the truck beds “in order to report any poison gas leaks, thus avoiding danger to the native population.”
Now, to ensure a capacity for “swift retaliation,” AFHQ and the War Department had secretly agreed to finish stockpiling a forty-five-day chemical reserve in the Mediterranean, including more than 200,000 gas bombs. (How the Germans would be deterred if the deterrent remained secret was never adequately explained.) With White House concurrence, a substantial cache would be stored in forward dumps at Foggia, beginning with the consignment that sat in John Harvey’s hold as the sun set on Thursday evening.
Several thousand Allied servicemen and Italian spectators sat in the oval Bambino Stadium near Bari’s train station as a baseball scrimmage between two quartermaster squads entered the late innings under the lights. Moviegoers filled several theaters around town; the Porto Vecchio was showing Sergeant York, with Gary Cooper. In the British mess on the Molo San Nicola, a female vocalist crooned to homesick officers sipping gin. Italian women drew water from corner fountains in the old city, or laid fresh pasta on wire tables to dry. Lights also burned atop port cranes and along the jetties: another convoy had arrived at 5:30 P.M., bringing to forty the number of ships in the harbor, and stevedores manned their winches and bale hooks. Merchant mariners finished supper or lay in their bunks, writing letters and reading. Sailors aboard the S.S. Louis Hennepin broke out a cribbage board. In his spacious waterfront office, Jimmy Doolittle leafed through reports from a recent bombing mission to Solingen; hearing airplanes overhead, he assumed they were more C-47s bringing additional men and matériel to Bari. It was 7:20 P.M.
The first two Luftwaffe raiders dumped cardboard boxes full of tiny foil strips. Known as Window to the Allies and Duppel to the Germans, the foil was intended to deflect and dissipate radar signals. The tactic confused Allied searchlight radars but was otherwise wasted: the main early-warning radar dish, on a theater roof in Via Victor Emmanuel, had been broken for days. British fighters, sent up on routine patrol at dusk, had already landed without incident. Ultra intercepts had revealed German reconnaissance interest in Bari, but no one guessed that Kesselring and his Luftwaffe subordinates had orchestrated a large raid on the harbor to slow both Eighth Army and the buildup at Foggia. “Risks such as were accepted in the port of Bari on this occasion must result in damage proportional to the risk taken,” Eisenhower’s air chief would tell him three weeks later. To avoid fratricide, a senior British officer had insisted that naval gunners not fire until fired upon.
That moment soon arrived. Guided by the harbor lights and their own hissing flares, twenty Ju-88 bombers roared in at barely 150 feet. A few tracer streams climbed toward the flares above the harbor, but gunners blinded by the glare were reduced to firing by earshot at the marauding planes. The first bombs fell near the Via Abate Gimma in central Bari. Explosions around the Hotel Corona killed civilians and Allied soldiers alike. A woman screamed, “Non voglio morire!”—I don’t want to die—but many died. Near the Piazza Mercantile a house collapsed on a mother and her six sons. Baseball fans stampeded for the stadium exits. The door to Doolittle’s office blew in and the windows disintegrated. Dusting himself off as bombs began to detonate in the flare-silvered harbor, Doolittle told another officer, “We’re taking a pasting.”
Much worse was to come. Bombs severed an oil pipeline on the petroleum quay. Burning fuel spewed across the harbor and down the moles, chasing stevedores into the sea. The Joseph Wheeler took a direct hit that blew open her starboard side and killed all forty-one crewmen. An explosion carried away half the John Bascom’s bridge, blowing shoes from sailors’ feet and watches from their wrists. Bascom’s cargo of hospital equipment and gasoline ignited, burning away her stern lines so that she drifted into the John L. Motley, carrying five thousand tons of ammunition and already holed by a bomb through the number 5 hatch. Engulfed in flame, Motley smacked against a seawall and exploded, killing sixty-four of her sailors and catapaulting shards of flaming metal over the docks. The blast caved in the burning Bascom’s port side—“The ship did not have a chance to survive,” a crewman noted—and generated a wave that swept over the breakwater, tossing seamen who had climbed from the sea into the water again.
A bomb detonated belowdecks on the British freighter Fort Athabaska, killing all but ten of fifty-six crewmen. The Liberty ship Samuel J. Tilden caught a bomb in the engine room before being strafed by both a German plane and by errant antiaircraft fire from shore; a British torpedo boat soon sank the drifting freighter to prevent her from setting other vessels ablaze. Two bombs hit the Polish freighter Lwów, sweeping her decks with fire. Half an hour after the raid began, the last German raider emptied his bomb rack and headed north. “The whole harbor was aflame,” the seaman Warren Bradenstein reported, “with burning on the surface of the water, and ships were on fire and exploding.”
Among those burning vessels was the John Harvey, at berth number 29 with her secret cargo. Shortly after Motley blew up, Harvey detonated with even greater violence, killing her master and seventy-seven crewmen. A fountain of flame spurted a thousand feet into the night sky, showering the harbor with burning debris, including hatch covers, ruptured bomb casings, and a derrick, which punctured another ship’s deck like a javelin. The blast ripped apart the freighter Testbank, killing seventy crewmen, and blew hatches from their frames aboard U.S.S. Aroostook, carrying nineteen thousand barrels of 100-octane aviation fuel. Windows shattered seven miles away, including those in Alexander’s headquarters, and tiles tumbled from Bari roofs. A searing wind tore across the port—“I felt as if I were bursting and burning inside,” recalled George Southern, a young officer standing on H.M.S. Zetland’s forecastle—followed by another tidal wave that rolled the length of the harbor, sweeping flotsam along the jetties and soaking men with seawater now contaminated by dichlorethyl sulfide. A sailor on H.M.S. Vulcan described “hundreds of chaps desperately swimming and floundering, screaming and shouting for help.” To another sailor, “It seemed as if the entire world was burning.”
Horrors filled the town. Civilians were crushed in a stampede to an air raid shelter; others drowned when ruptured pipes flooded another shelter after shattered masonry blocked the exits. A young girl pinned in the rubble next to her dead parents was freed only after a surgeon amputated her arm. Soldiers had been attending evening services in a Protestant church when bombs blew the chapel’s front wall into the street, toppling the pulpit and splintering pews;
gathering their wits, the men belted out, “If this be it, dear Lord, we will come to you singing.” Dead merchant mariners and Italian port workers lay along the seawall or floated facedown in the scummy water. Screams carried across the harbor, mingled with pleas for help and the odd snatch of a hymn. Fire trapped sixty men on the east jetty until a plucky Norwegian lifeboat crew ferried them to safety at eleven P.M. Burning hulks glowed weirdly through the steam and smoke that cloaked the harbor. Explosions shook the Molo Nuovo through the night. Watching from the soot-stained waterfront, Will Lang of Life scribbled in his notebook, “Many little tongues of flame like forest fires…There goes Monty’s ammunition.”
Seventeen ships had been sunk, with eight others badly damaged. Not since Pearl Harbor had a sneak attack inflicted such damage on an Allied port. Medics darted along the quays, passing out morphine syrettes and cigarettes. Lang jotted down another observation: “There are a lot of men dying out there.”
More deaths would follow, odd and inexplicable deaths. Perhaps the first clue came from a sailor who asked, “Since when would American ships carry garlic to Italy?” Others also noticed the odor, so characteristic of mustard gas. H.M.S. Brindisi took aboard dozens of oil-coated refugees and by early Friday morning inflamed eyes and vomiting were epidemic in the sickbay and on the quarterdeck. Bistra picked up thirty survivors and headed to Taranto; within hours the entire crew was nearly blind and only with great difficulty managed to moor the ship after she made port.
Casualties flooded military hospitals around Bari, including sailors still wearing their lifebelts but with both legs missing. “Ambulances screamed into hospital all night long,” a nurse told her diary. Many with superficial injuries were wrapped in blankets and diverted to the Auxiliary Seaman’s Home in their oily clothes. One chief surgeon admitted to being “considerably puzzled by the extremely shocked condition of the patients with negligible surgical injuries.”
By dawn, the wards were full of men unable to open their eyes, “all in pain and requiring urgent treatment.” Surgeons were mystified to also find themselves operating with streaming eyes. Many patients presented thready pulses, low blood pressure, and lethargy, yet plasma did little to revive them. “No treatment that we had to offer amounted to a darn,” a doctor wrote. The first skin blisters appeared Friday morning, “as big as balloons and heavy with fluid,” in one nurse’s description. Hundreds of patients were classified with “dermatitis N.Y.D.”—not yet diagnosed.
A Royal Navy surgeon at the port on Thursday night reported rumors of poison gas, but in the chaos his account failed to reach hospital authorities. With John Harvey at the bottom of Bari harbor and the ship’s company dead, few knew of her cargo. Those who did met at 2:15 P.M. on Friday in a conference of six British and American officers; they agreed that “in order to maintain secrecy, no general warning was to be given now.” A ton of bleach would be dumped to disinfect the breakwater at berth number 29 and signs would be posted: “Danger—Fumes.”
The first mustard death occurred eighteen hours after the attack, and others soon followed, each “as dramatic as it was unpredictable,” according to an Army doctor dispatched from Algiers. “Individuals that appeared in rather good condition…within a matter of minutes would become moribund and die.” The cellar of the 98th General Hospital became a morgue; hopeless cases were moved to the so-called Death Ward, including a doomed mariner who kept shouting, “Did you hear that bloody bang?” The passing of Seaman Phillip H. Stone was typical: admitted to the 98th General without visible injuries but drenched by oily seawater, he developed blisters a few hours later and by nine o’clock Saturday morning was unconscious, with “respirations gasping.” At 3:30 P.M. he regained consciousness, asked for water, and “abruptly died.” An autopsy revealed “dusky skin” and “epidermis easily dislodged,” a badly swollen penis, black lips, and lungs with “a peculiar rubberlike consistency.” Seaman Stone was eighteen.
By noon on Friday, physicians were reasonably certain that “dermatitis N.Y.D.,” with symptoms ranging from bronzed skin to massive blisters, in fact resulted from exposure to mustard gas. Men who believed they were permanently blind eventually had their lids pried open until the “patient convinced himself that he could in fact see.” But the damage was done. Simple measures that would have saved lives—stripping the exposed patients and bathing them—were not adopted until hundreds had spent hours inhaling toxic fumes from their own contaminated clothes.
More than 1,000 Allied servicemen were killed or went missing at Bari. Military hospitals documented at least 617 confirmed mustard casualties, including 83 Allied deaths, but investigators acknowledged “many others for whom no records can be traced.” Comparable numbers of Italian civilians died; the precise figure remained uncertain, in part because Italian doctors never knew what they were facing. “With no treatment,” one account later concluded, “the Italians suffered alone and died alone.” Bodies bobbed to the surface of Bari harbor for days, many gnawed by crabs. Covered with a Union Jack and hauled away by truck, they were laid head to toe in trench graves.
News of the raid was heavily censored. “For purposes of secrecy all these cases have been diagnosed N.Y.D. dermatitis,” an AFHQ memo noted on December 8. In Algiers, public acknowledgment of an enemy air attack at Bari manifested haiku-like brevity: “Damage was done. There were a number of casualties.” The Washington Post in mid-December disclosed the “costliest sneak attack since Pearl Harbor,” but no mention of gas was published. When reporters asked Henry L. Stimson, the secretary of war, whether Allied defenses at Bari had been lax, he snapped, “No! I will not comment on this thing.” A British general on Eisenhower’s staff wrote a colleague in London, “There is no one person who can be hanged in the affair.”
Rumors spread that the Germans had used gas, but a chemical warfare expert sent to Bari from Algiers concluded in late December that the mustard aboard John Harvey was to blame, a finding affirmed in March 1944 by a secret investigative board appointed by Eisenhower. The commander-in-chief preferred prevarication: in his postwar memoir, he acknowledged shipping mustard to Bari but asserted that “the wind was offshore and the escaping gas caused no casualties.” Churchill directed that British records be purged of mustard references, and all burns suffered on December 2 were to be attributed “to enemy action.”
The extent of the catastrophe stayed hidden for years. Declassified in 1959, the episode remained obscure until 1967, when the U.S. Naval Institute published a scholarly article in its Proceedings, followed by a book on the subject in 1971 by Glenn B. Infield. British officers long denied knowledge of Harvey’s cargo, but The Times of London reported in 1986 that six hundred British seamen contaminated at Bari would receive backdated war pensions following an official admission that they had been gassed. Curiously, autopsies at Bari provided a vital breakthrough in modern chemotherapy when researchers recognized that mustard gas had attacked white blood cells and lymph tissue. Two pharmacists recruited by the U.S. government demonstrated shortly after the war, first in mice and then with human tumors, that a variant of the gas could treat cancers of the lymph glands, such as Hodgkin’s disease.
In Bari, in December 1943, there was only misery. Thousands of refugees trudged from the city with bundles on their heads, tethered goats trotting behind. The port would remain closed for weeks, and not until February 1944 did full operations resume. The half-hour attack destroyed 38,000 tons of cargo, including vast medical stocks and 10,000 tons of steel planking needed for airfields.
Allied secrecy may have duped the public, but the enemy was not fooled. “I see you boys are getting gassed by your own poison gas,” Axis Sally cooed. The Hermann Göring Division and other units intensified their chemical training. A memo from the high command warned: “The Allies could begin the gas war tomorrow.”
6. WINTER
The Archangel Michael, Here and Everywhere
SINCE its founding in the eleventh century, San Pietro Infine had grown accustomed to calam
ity. Earthquakes, invaders, brigands, and the great migration to America in the 1880s had annealed the village; its fourteen hundred souls were hardy, fatalistic, and devout. Nestled amid wild figs and cactus on the southern flank of Monte Sammucro, overlooking the bucolic landscape soon to be known as Purple Heart Valley, San Pietro for centuries had eked out an existence from olives and stramma, a local hemp twisted into baskets and mats. In recent years obligatory Fascist slogans had been slathered on the walls along the steep cobblestoned paths—“Straight Ahead with Mussolini”—but life under the Duce was much as life had always been: Friday market in the Piazza San Nicola; women filling their water jugs from the sycamore-shaded fontana; prayers in the village church, where men and women came to God through separate doors beneath the carved inscription, “St. Michael Archangel always remember us, here and everywhere.”
Then war came. One evening shortly after Italy’s capitulation, a German patrol arrived to requisition all vehicles and firearms. Only four families in San Pietro possessed an automobile, but when one owner protested he was told, “Do you prefer we take your car or your son?” Soldiers dug trenches and strung barbed wire. Palazzo Brunetti, the most stylish house in town, became a command post. The smell of boiled pork and potatoes wafted from the windows, and men in coal-scuttle helmets stood with binoculars at the upper casements, watching Highway 6 where it snaked through the Mignano Gap between Monte Rotondo and Monte Lungo, barely a mile away.
On October 1, the day Naples fell, the Germans had requisitioned all donkeys and mules, and ordered every San Pietran male between fifteen and forty-five to muster in the little piazza above the fontana. Two hundred were press-ganged and forced to haul munitions or dig fortifications along the Bernhardt Line, which now angled past San Pietro and up Monte Sammucro. Several hundred others fled into the mountains to shelter in caves or highland hamlets. One night in late October the village priest, Don Aristide Masia, a middle-aged man with wire-rimmed glasses and a downturned mouth, vanished from his sickbed. It was said that the Gestapo had taken him away, but the only trace ever found was Don Aristide’s black cloak, snagged like a shadow in a tree branch below the town.
The Liberation Trilogy Box Set Page 132