Why is SS John Harvey Still Leaking Into Italy's Bari Harbor

In the harbor of Bari, on the southern coast of Italy, a United States Liberty ship has been leaking mustard gas into the seabed for eighty two years.

The SS John Harvey arrived in Bari on the twenty eighth of November nineteen forty three carrying two thousand M47A1 mustard gas bombs. Her cargo was authorized personally by Franklin Roosevelt as a retaliation stockpile, in case the Germans used chemical weapons first. Nobody at the port was told what she carried. Four days later, on the evening of the second of December, a hundred and five Luftwaffe Junkers bombers attacked the harbor in what survivors later called the second Pearl Harbor. The John Harvey was hit and broke apart. She went down with her entire crew, and her cargo went with her.

Today she sits in nine metres of water on the floor of the inner harbor, a hundred metres from the breakwater of one of the largest cities in southern Italy. The mustard gas is still inside her holds. Italian fishermen still pull up bomb casings in their nets. The Italian Navy still treats the wreck as a hazard site. And the bay still produces a slow chemical signature every time the tides shift the seabed.

The United States kept the cargo classified for sixteen years. Britain kept it classified for forty three. By the time the records came out, the doctor who first diagnosed mustard exposure on the dying survivors had already used his autopsy notes to invent the first chemotherapy treatment for cancer.

In this video I look at how the John Harvey came to be loaded with chemical weapons, how the Allied command lied to the dying men in the Bari hospitals about what had poisoned them, and why the wreck has been left on the seabed for over eight decades.

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Information in this video comes from the following sources:
SS John Harvey — Wikipedia
The Air Raid on Bari — US Naval History and Heritage Command
Disaster at Bari — Glenn B. Infield
Mustard Gas at Bari Harbor — US Department of Veterans Affairs
The Bari Incident: A Forgotten Episode of the Second World War — Smithsonian Magazine
Allied Chemical Warfare Stockpile World War II — US Army Chemical Corps Historical Studies
Lt Col Stewart F. Alexander Papers — Office of Medical History, US Army
Operation Bertram Luftwaffe Raid on Bari — Imperial War Museum
Bari 1943: Hitler's Last Victory — Steven O'Brien
Marina Militare Bari Harbor Survey Reports — Italian Navy

#ShipWreck #NavalHistory #WW2 #BariHarbor #ChemicalWeapons

Видео Why is SS John Harvey Still Leaking Into Italy's Bari Harbor канала Silent Fleet