Makale başlığı (77): The Secret of Bari Harbor: John Harvey, Stewart Alexander and 2 December 1943

The Secret of Bari Harbor: John Harvey, Stewart Alexander and 2 December 1943

A ship loaded with a secret

At the end of 1943 Bari was one of the supply ports for the Allied armies advancing in Italy. According to the sources, about thirty Allied ships lay crowded in the harbor. On the evening of 2 December, around half past seven, German Ju 88 bombers attacked; the raid lasted about twenty minutes. The Allied command had not expected an attack on this port, and the press later called the event "a little Pearl Harbor." How many ships were lost differs between sources (see the fact-check box), but the loss was very large.

One of the ships in the harbor was the Liberty-type cargo ship John Harvey, which had arrived four days earlier. According to the accounts, it carried about 2,000 mustard-gas bombs of 100 pounds each. America had sent these bombs to the theater so that it could respond if Germany used chemical weapons; the destination was most likely Foggia. The bombs were not fused, but when the ship was hit it exploded, the casings broke, and the liquid inside mixed with the fuel oil on the surface of the harbor water.

The secret was as much the silence surrounding the cargo as the cargo itself. It is reported that harbor officials knew about the bombs but could not say so; a request to unload the ship with priority was turned down on grounds of secrecy. Because the risk of a chemical agent was not known, nobody warned those who had fallen into the water.

The casualties and a physician's blood counts

Allied Force Headquarters in Algiers sent a 29-year-old medical officer trained in chemical agents, Lieutenant Colonel Stewart F. Alexander, to Bari. Alexander arrived on 7 December. According to the figures reported, of 534 people admitted to Allied hospitals, 281 had symptoms consistent with mustard gas. Alexander concluded that the burns resulted from mustard mixed into the oil on the harbor surface; a 100-pound American bomb casing found by a diver pointed to the John Harvey as the source. He is also described as reaching the same conclusion by comparing the ships' positions with the severity of the casualties.

The observation that ties this piece to the series was a different one. Alexander saw a second wave of lost lives on the eighth and ninth days and recorded that white-cell counts, especially lymphocytes, were falling. He had seen this pattern in 1942 in rabbits given nitrogen mustard at Edgewood Arsenal. It is reported that this rabbit study began on 13 April 1942 and was reported on 30 June 1942. He sent his first findings to headquarters on 11 December; his preliminary report of 27 December was classified at once.

The interpretation of why this observation mattered is mine: J.D. was a single patient, and the physicians had chosen the dose. Bari, through a terrible accident, showed in many people, through counts followed over days, that the same agent suppressed blood cells and lymphoid tissue selectively. But it was not an experiment; the exposure came through skin and vapor, in unknown doses.

Bari did not start chemotherapy; it added a witness

In popular accounts Bari is the place where chemotherapy was born; one book's subtitle even presents the event as the secret disaster that "launched the War on Cancer." One historian who disputes this calls the story a "myth," and his main ground is timing: the first human trial at Yale had taken place about fifteen months before Bari, in 1942 (Day 115). So Bari cannot be the scene where the idea of treatment emerged; at most it added further human data to an idea that already existed.

Alexander's own story fits the motif of the "rejected pioneer." It is reported that after the 1942 rabbit study he proposed nitrogen mustard for lymphoma, and that the proposal was turned down as having "no contribution to the war effort." A paper he submitted after the war was rejected because scientists had already published similar results, and he also declined a post at Sloan Kettering. All this rests on a single secondary account; I have not read the primary documents.

Alexander's superior, Colonel Cornelius P. Rhoads, head of the Medical Division of the Chemical Warfare Service, was also director of the cancer hospital in New York. Rhoads is reported to have praised the report as "a landmark in the history of mustard poisoning." That in 1945 he persuaded Sloan and Kettering to support a cancer institute is the institutional leg of the link between wartime chemistry and civilian oncology. My interpretation: Bari's real function was not to discover an idea but to strengthen the hand of the institutions that believed in it.

What followed took the familiar path. The Yale results were published in 1946 (Day 115). Alexander's report appeared in 1947. Mechlorethamine was approved for cancer on 15 March 1949; that part is the subject of a separate piece. The lesson of this story divides in two: the same agent, in one planned scene (Yale) and one unplanned one (Bari), showed the same selective pressure on blood cells; but the price of the second was paid by hundreds of casualties whose names are mostly not remembered.

Bari and Turkey

I could not find a verified link between the Bari raid and the history of oncology in Turkey, so I do not construct one. The general inference is this: stories of how a chemical agent entered medicine reach countries and hospitals years later, through the published literature. The part of the series devoted to Turkey will trace this route with sources.

This piece is Day 116 of the "365 Days of Cancer History" series and recounts the 1943 Bari harbor incident as a historical event. It is a historical-popular account and not a recommendation for diagnosis or treatment. For your own health, consult your physician. The sources have been checked; details resting only on a secondary source are marked in the fact-check notes.