The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944 (The Liberation Trilogy) by Rick Atkinson
Past the bey’s palace and the Roman aqueduct they drove, then turned southwest to follow the lush Medjerda River valley. Eisenhower narrated with fluency and passion: how British and American troops exactly a year earlier had pushed across the Tunisian outback and down this valley to Djedeïda, where they could even see the minarets of Tunis; how Kesselring’s troops stiffened—right here, at Point 186—and drove the Allies back up the valley in pitched, heartbreaking winter battles at Tébourba and Medjez-el-Bab and Longstop Hill; how Rommel attacked in the south, lunging through Kasserine Pass and nearly reaching the vast supply depot at Tébessa; how the Allies gathered themselves in the spring to eventually encircle the Axis bridgehead at Tunis and Bizerte, where callow American troops redeemed themselves at Mateur and Hill 609, right over there.
They stopped for lunch in a eucalyptus brake on the north bank of the Medjerda. MPs formed a wide cordon, elbow to elbow, with their backs to the picnickers. Was it possible, Roosevelt wondered, that U.S. and German tanks had fought across the now lost battlefield at Zama, where Scipio Africanus smashed Hannibal to close the Second Punic War in 202 B.C.? Eisenhower could not say with certainty, but near the picnic grove once stood ancient Utica; here in 46 B.C., according to Plutarch, Cato the Younger revolted against Julius Caesar in defense of republican ideals, reading Plato’s “On the Soul” as Caesar’s troops closed in, then falling on his own sword to remain “the only free and undefeated man” in greater Rome. As the president finished his sandwich, Eisenhower wandered off to inspect a burnt-out tank. “Ike,” Roosevelt said when he returned, “if, one year ago, you had offered to bet that on this day the president of the United States would be having his lunch on a Tunisian roadside, what odds could you have demanded?”
Late that night the presidential party lifted off for Cairo from El Aouina airfield in Tunis. Scant mention had been made of Italy. “Eisenhower showed no signs of worry about the success of the Italian operation…for which many of us did not think he had sufficient force,” wrote Admiral William D. Leahy, chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Even less was said about the OVERLORD command, although, after several glasses of sherry, King asserted that Marshall would get the job and that Eisenhower would return to Washington as Army chief of staff. Roosevelt seemed to regard Eisenhower as a more formidable figure than the tentative young commander he had last met in Casablanca ten months earlier. But the president as usual remained cheerful and opaque, offering only the cryptic observation that “it is dangerous to monkey with a winning team.”
A few days later, Eisenhower wrote Mamie, “The eternal pound, pound, pound seems a burden, but when it once ceases it is possible that many of us will be nigh unto nervous wrecks, and wholly unfit for normal life.” As if adding a postscript to himself, he observed, “I know I’m a changed person. No one could be through what I’ve seen and not be different from what he was at the beginning.”
Evidently no discussion at La Marsa had been devoted to a curious development in the Italian campaign, in which both Roosevelt and Eisenhower had a hand and which now played out in the Adriatic seaport of Bari.
Few cities in Italy had escaped war’s havoc with greater panache than flat-roofed, white-walled Bari. Once an embarkation point for Crusaders headed east, it had been destroyed by William the Bad, restored by William the Good, and enhanced by the arrival of the bones of St. Nicholas—Father Christmas—which were stolen in Asia Minor by Bari seamen in the eleventh century. It was said that St. Francis’s devotion to chastity had been tested in Bari by a comely temptress whose advances were repelled when the holy man heaved a brazier of hot coals at her. Horace called the town “fish-famous,” and stalls of clams, sea urchins, cuttlefish, and oysters still lined the breakwater, where fisherman smacked dead octopuses on the rocks to tenderize them. Peddlers wheeled their barrows through Bari’s serpentine alleys, selling amulets against the evil eye, while toothless pilgrims at the basilica sought Nicholas’s intercession. Netturbini with handcarts swept the gutters of garbage heaved overnight from upper windows. Unlike that of Naples, Bari’s “agile and ingenious criminal class consisted chiefly of small boys,” wrote a British officer and novelist named Evelyn Waugh. Bari’s newest landmark was the Bambino Sports Stadium, built by Mussolini as a reward for producing more male babies than any comparable city in Italy.
Liberating Tommies had been greeted with flowers and speeches, although a British major reported that by the time Montgomery arrived in an open jeep few of the city’s quarter million souls “came to see him for by then the novelty had worn off.” Shops still offered silk stockings for four shillings, and Allied soldiers, when not gawking at the sculpted fauns and nymphs at the opera house, prowled through a PX stocked with Palmolive soap and Hershey bars. The large port, enclosed by a mole of cyclopean blocks weighing 350 tons each, had been captured in good condition, and a thousand stevedores now labored around the clock.
They had much to unload. With Naples reviving slowly, Bari provided the main supply port for Eighth Army as well as for the Allied air forces now building four dozen fields at Foggia and elsewhere. To bring heavy bombers to Foggia required shipping comparable to that needed to move two Army divisions; keeping those planes flying would take a supply effort equal to the entire Eighth Army’s. To floor a single all-weather airstrip against mud, for example, took five thousand tons of perforated steel planking. On December 1, the newly created Fifteenth Air Force opened its headquarters in Bari. The commander, a former professional bantamweight boxer who also held both a doctorate in aeronautical engineering and the Medal of Honor, Major General James H. Doolittle, moved into a plush first-floor office on the waterfront, in the former headquarters of the Italian air force.
Doolittle’s job was to augment the bombing of strategic targets, such as German aircraft plants and oil facilities, now under way by British and American squadrons based in Britain. Doolittle had claimed that flying weather in Italy would be almost twice as good as that in the United Kingdom, a proposition sorely tested by the cancellation due to inclemency of roughly half his bombing missions in November. Still, Allied pilots now owned the Italian skies. German long-range bombers had flown only eight times in Italy since mid-October, including four attacks on Naples in November. Nearly three-quarters of all Luftwaffe fighters had retreated to Germany, and the Allied pummeling of enemy airfields had become so intense that the raids were known as Reich Party Days.
So cocky were Allied air commanders that on the afternoon of Thursday, December 2, Air Vice Marshal Arthur Coningham assured reporters, “I would regard it as a personal affront and insult if the Luftwaffe should attempt any significant action in this area.”
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 all
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 ni
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.