Disaster at Bari

New York: The Macmillan Company, 1971. First Edition. Hard Cover. Near Fine/Very Good. 11x8x1. First edition. Jacket flap price-clipped. 1971 Hard Cover. xii, 301 pp. Only account of the top secret chemical weapon spill. In late November, 1943, Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, commander in chief of the German troops in Italy, desperately sought a means of slowing the advance of the British Eighth Army and the organization of Doolittle's Fifteenth Air Force. His goal--a paralyzing air strike at a strategic target. But where? A Luftwaffe reconnaissance pilot had reported the harbor of Bari--the port for incoming supplies and men--congested with Allied ships. Among the ships that awaited unloading in the crowded Bari harbor was the American merchantman John Harvey. She carried a top-secret cargo--one hundred tons of mustard gas. When the Luftwaffe struck the night of December 2, the John Harvey exploded, spewing her deadly contents over both town and harbor. There were no survivors to tell what she carried. The bombing at Bari was the worst Allied shipping disaster except for Pearl Harbor. Seventeen ships were totally destroyed and eight others badly damaged. More than one thousand military personnel and an even larger number of civilians lost their lives as a result of the air raid. But the real horror of the event--one of the best kept secrets of World War II--was the unleashing of the poison gas. Says Glenn B. Infield, who has spent years unearthing the facts of the tragedy, "The men struggling in the harbor waters, the civilians enveloped in the deadly clouds of smoke, and the rescuers working on the docks were all unaware of the presences of the mustard. Many of them died still not knowing about it. Others were blinded or burned. Hospital personnel treated the survivors for shock and exposure, not realizing that they had been subjected to a chemical agent. It wasn't until many of the patients died without obvious cause that an investigation was launched and the true reason for the deaths learned."--jacket