| Raid on Bari |
| by Stanley Scislowski
Perth Regt, 5th CDN ARMD DIV, 1943-1945 |
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| Part II - The Attack |
| To escape detection, the German squadrons based at airfields in the north of Italy flew only feet above the water in a bearing straight down the full length of the Adriatic. At a point directly east of the city, they swung sharply right and bore in at maximum speed. Shortly before they came in sight of the city they climbed steeply to bombing altitude. The raid was on! |
| At landfall, the planes threw down a string of chandelier flares instantly lighting up the city and harbour in a bright, flickering glare. Those who happened to be out on the streets or on the open decks of their ships stood transfixed as they watched the flares floating almost imperceptibly towards the rooftops of the buildings along the waterfront. Within seconds the ack-ack guns of the one battery in the city, along with the guns aboard the merchant ships opened up on the raiders undetectable up in the darkness beyond the blinding brilliance of the flares. Converging streams of tracers rose into the sky, increasing in volume until by all appearances no plane caught in the basket-weave of fire would long survive. Then down came the bombs, the first one missing the harbour, crashing instead into the old section of the city. Bari was in for a bad night, but no one at that instant could imagine just how bad it would be. |
| A Bad Night Ahead |
| Fires broke out in several places, adding more light for the pilots sweeping in over the the packed shipping moored at dockside and anchored out in the harbour. With more light on the target, the bomb-aimers in the nose compartments of their planes were able to correct their aim and began to ‘walk’ their bombs across the harbour choked with ships, hitting one vessel after another. The first ship hit was the JOSEPH WHEELER. Seconds later the JOHN L. MOTLEY shuddered under the hammer blow of a 200 kg bomb crashing through the number five hatch. With the Wheeler now burning fiercely, the JOHN BASCOM anchored next to it made an effort to pull away. Aboard the Wheeler was a highly flammable cargo of aviation gas and aerial bombs. Escape, however, was out of the question. Two other ammo-laden ships had drifted into its exit path. And then when the stern lines burned away, the Bascom began to drift towards the furiously blazing Motley. Bascom’s skipper gave the order to abandon ship. No sooner had it been given when four bombs struck the ship from fore to aft. |
| Everywhere ships were on fire. There was even fire on the water. Flaming patches of oil and other debris floated shoreward threatening to engulf several lifeboats filled with survivors from the stricken ships. Many of these survivors were already suffering from burns and other injuries, but they paddled with all the energy they could still muster to escape the fiery death closing in on them. |
| Not far away at Berth 29, a fierce fire broke out near the stern of the JOHN HARVEY, a ship that carried as part of its cargo a hundred tons of mustard gas bombs. All around it other ships were burning. The crew of the Harvey fought bravely to extinguish, or at least contain the blaze, but it soon became obvious they were fighting a losing battle. Moments later, the gallant efforts by the crew and the chemical technicians to douse the flames ended in a titanic blast that literally blew the ship to pieces and vaporized the brave men. |
| The Big Blast and It's Repercussions |
| All across the harbour, on ships, on the shore, and on the waterfront streets people were picked up bodily by the tremendous pressure-wave and hurled about like so many rag dolls. Huge, twisted sheets of boiler-plate, smaller metal fragments, parts of machinery, fixtures, wood, and whatever else was in or on the freighter shot out in a wide arc and rained on the other ships in the harbour. How the tanker, U.S.S. Pumper escaped obliteration even though she was no more than a long stone’s throw away from the disintegrating Harvey, was nothing short of a miracle. The monstrous blast passed right over the tanker, flinging the wreckage onto other ships farther out in the harbour. One little Yugoslavian vessel simply disappeared. |
| Streams of casualties soon began arriving at the hospitals in the city putting a severe strain on emergency treatment services. Army medical teams worked throughout the night and well into the next day patching up the seriously burned and the injured, alleviating their intense pain with shots of morphine. Meanwhile out on the flame-lit streets close by the waterfront, both in the old and the new sections of the city a screaming and wailing mass of humanity stampeded away from the site of the disaster. |
| In the hospitals the doctors eventually became aware of the fact that the usual treatment for shock and burns didn’t seem to be working on many of the victims. They had no way of knowing, however, that these particular cases had been exposed to the toxic effects of vaporized mustard gas or had been in direct contact with the poison as they swam through mustard-impregnated oil. |
| The suppurating burns, as the doctors so thought they were looking at, had not been caused by the heat of flames but by the blistering action of the mustard compound. If they had known the cause, it is without a doubt they would have applied the recommended treatment and thus saved many lives. The unfortunate and tragic result of their ignorance of what caused the burns was the sudden and unexplained deaths which occurred over the course of the next several days. One minute a patient would appear to be recovering nicely, and in the next, he’d be gone. |
| In the ugly game of war however, there were times when secrecy of information required rigid enforcement even when it meant that in some cases many lives must be sacrificed to protect the greater scheme of things. In this case had the medical people been informed that they were dealing with the effects of mustard gas they undoubtedly would have been able to save many lives. Also undoubtedly, word would have leaked out to the enemy that the Allies had stores of poison-gas in the theatre, which would have made for a tremendous propaganda victory for the Germans. But the real danger lay in the fact that it might have provoked the enemy into bringing into play their own arsenal of chemical agents far more deadlier than mustard, namely the nerve gases for which there was no known antidote. For this reason alone Churchill immediately clamped a tight lid on the affair, and it wasn’t until about five years after the war that articles describing what happened at Bari appeared in magazines in England and the U.S. From these articles it was learned that 17 ships had been either destroyed or sunk, with thousands killed or dead of their wounds. and many more thousands suffering severe burns and other injuries. |
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