The Day of Battle (49 page)

As Coningham issued this challenge to the Fates, berth number 29 on the outer mole of Bari harbor was occupied by an ordinary Liberty ship, S.S.
John Harvey.
She had arrived four days earlier in a convoy of nine merchantmen, after an odyssey that began in Baltimore and included stops at Norfolk, Oran, and Augusta. Only her secret cargo was unusual: 1,350 tons of bombs filled with a toxin known to chemists as dichlorethyl sulfide and to Army chemical warfare specialists as HS, but more commonly called mustard gas. Several military port officials knew of
John Harvey
’s lading, but other ships with medical supplies and conventional munitions took precedence, and she remained unloaded, nearly hull to hull with fourteen other vessels moored at the Molo Nuovo. German torpedo boats infested
the Adriatic, and investigators later concluded that “the ship was at the time in as safe a place as could be found.”

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.