Secrets will Out but not necessarily be Publicised

Ships on fire in Bari Harbour

In the middle section of Patsy, the  first novel of ‘The Land of Broken Promises,  Patsy is stationed in Bari, Italy.

While gathering material for this section of the book  in the 1990s I came across references to mustard gas mixed with oil that had been responsible for the deaths of so many merchant seamen following the disastrous air raid of  Dec 2^nd 1943, known as ‘Little Pearl Harbour’.  I assumed it was still a great secret because none of the British ex-servicemen I knew, who had been in Italy at the time, had any inkling that mustard gas had been involved.

The U.S. Liberty ship ‘John Harvey’ had carried a secret cargo of liquid sulphur mustard, When that ship was destroyed in the 1943 air raid, sulfur mustard spilt into waters already contaminated by oil from other damaged vessels. Sailors,  who had jumped into the water from  burning ships, were covered with the oil which proved an ideal solvent.

Other sulfur mustard evaporated and, mingling with clouds of smoke, blew overland containating Italian civilians.

Allied High Command tried to conceal the disaster, fearing the Germans would believe  the Allies intended to use chemical weapons,  but there were too many witnesses, and in February 1944, the U.S. Chiefs of Staff statement owned up to the accident adding that the U.S. wouldn’t use chemical weapons unless the enemy did so first.

 Winston Churchill, however, ordered all mustard gas deaths to be listed as ‘burns due to enemy action’.

U.S. records of the attack on Bari were declassified in 1959, but no one took much notice until an American author, Glenn B. Infield, published ‘Disaster at Bari’ in 1967.  Even so it wasn’t until 1986 that the British government finally admitted that survivors of the Bari raid had been exposed to poison gas and upgraded their pension payments.

Despite all that no one I spoke to in the 1990s knew that people in the Bari air raid had died of mustard gas poisoning.