Little Pearl Harbor: Surprise Attack with a Twist

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Attack at Bari

My father, William Kelly, was involved in a remarkable incident during his five years of service in World War II. Drafted into the army at the beginning of 1941, he was assigned to the 26th General Hospital and trained as a surgical assistant. His outfit participated in the invasion of North Africa at the end of 1942. They crossed the Mediterranean in November 1943 and were waiting for their equipment to arrive so they could begin operations in Bari, near the heel of Italy.

The port, captured by the British in September, was a source of supply for the allied armies fighting their way up the Italian peninsula. Liberty ships brought supplies from Africa and directly from America, everything from food and tents to tanks, ammunition, and aviation fuel.

Bari was thought to be beyond the reach of German aircraft, which had been beaten back by Royal Air Force fighter planes. In fact, a British general had announced that he “would regard it as a personal affront and insult if the Luftwaffe should attempt any significant action in this area.” So confident were the brass that they ordered searchlights trained on the thirty Liberty ships crowding the wharfs so that the unloading could continue through the night.

But at 7:35 p.m. on December 2, 1943, German bombers came screaming overhead, dropping explosives and incendiaries down the stacks of the massed American ships. The attack was precise and relentless. In less than half an hour, the enemy sank seventeen ships and killed a thousand American and British servicemen. An oil slick turned the harbor into a sheet of flame. Press reports referred to the surprise attack as “a little Pearl Harbor.”

As medics began an all-out effort to treat the many wounded, a mysterious pattern developed. Beginning the day after the attack, men who had few obvious injuries began to die—fourteen servicemen died suddenly during the first two days. Others developed symptoms that left doctors puzzled. Some complained of intense thirst and a burning sensation. Many broke out in fluid-filled blisters. Their eyes swelled shut. Civilians with similar symptoms began turning up at army hospitals.

An army physician, Lieutenant Colonel Stewart Alexander, flew in from Algiers a few days after the attack. The twenty-seven-year-old doctor, trained in chemical warfare medicine, quickly suspected that the men had been affected by sulfur mustard. The blistering agent had been used widely in World War I before chemical weapons were outlawed. The Germans were known to be experimenting with new forms of the substance.

Had the enemy resorted to poison gas bombs? It was a critical question. President Franklin Roosevelt had publicly sworn to retaliate in kind if Hitler made any such move.

After meticulously gathering and analyzing data, including the location of each patient during the raid, Alexander concluded that the poisoning was indeed the result of sulfur mustard. The evidence suggested that the substance had spread from a single area.

The source of the poison was soon pinned down. Divers brought up fractured hundred-pound gas bombs from the bottom of Bari harbor. They were all American made. Much later, it was revealed that some two thousand such bombs had been shipped aboard the Liberty ship SS John Harvey to be stockpiled in Italy.

Alexander’s report was immediately classified. Although higher-ups had known the source of the symptoms of servicemen and civilians, they had not dared release the information that could have facilitated their treatment. They were afraid that if word leaked it might induce the Germans to launch a preemptive attack with poison gas.

This secrecy endured for decades. The U.S. government neither informed nor compensated the victims who suffered chronic ailments from the sulfur mustard. None of those who witnessed the event, including my father, knew what had really happened until many years later.

One less obvious symptom of the poisoning became clear to Dr. Alexander. The men affected experienced dangerously low levels of white-blood cells. The mustard compound affected their lymph nodes and bone marrow, suppressing the production of the cells.

Alexander was aware of an experiment at Yale in 1942 that had used a mustard-type chemical to treat cancer. He wondered if a similar strategy could cure leukemia, a childhood cancer that resulted in an uncontrolled profusion of white blood cells. As a result of his careful study of the Bari incident, researchers into the question could tap a rich source of real-world data.

After the war, Alexander wanted only to settle down as a general practitioner in New Jersey. However, his superior, Colonel Cornelius “Dusty” Rhoads, chief of the Medical Division of the Chemical Warfare Service, returned to his civilian position as the head of a cancer treatment facility in New York City. Inspired by the information gained from the Bari tragedy, he convinced General Motors chairman, Alfred P. Sloan, and the company’s chief engineer, Charles Kettering, to bankroll a research effort.

In 1952, a medicine called mercaptopurine, derived from mustard gas, was used at the Sloan Kettering Institute to achieve remissions in more than half of children suffering from acute leukemia. The treatment, highly controversial at first, became known as chemotherapy. It was destined to serve as a crucial weapon in the war on cancer.