ABOVE: The 1943 bombing
of Bari
WIKIMEDIA, PD-ITALIA
On December 2, 1943, a German air raid on Allied ships in the port of Bari, Italy, hit the US Navy’s SS John Harvey. As ships in the harbor sank, men threw themselves into water poisoned by the Harvey’s secret cargo: 2,000 mustard gas bombs.
Sailors were drenched in liquid mustard gas, or sulfur mustard, which floated in a foot-thick layer on the water. People had never been so immersed in mustard gas, says Susan Smith, a historian of medicine at the University of Alberta and author of Toxic Exposures, which traces the intertwined histories of mustard gas in war and chemotherapy. Of the roughly 600 people treated for exposure to sulfur mustard at the harbor, 83 died. Some of the sulfur mustard that spilled from the John Harvey vaporized, producing a toxic cloud that wafted over Bari, exposing a further 250,000 people and ...
