“The tragic truth is that when the Luftwaffe bombed the Harvey, they bombed our mustard gas shells. We poisoned, in effect, our own men… Even worse is that the nurses, in wrapping the sailors in blankets, unwittingly trapped the mustard and oil mixture from the harbor water close to their skin, allowing the men to marinate in the poison.”
Radiolab · Ideas & Essays · October 2026
On stage at a live Radiolab show, historian Jennet Conant tells the story of the World War II German air raid on the harbor at Bari, where an American ship was secretly carrying sulfur mustard bombs. The disaster was covered up, but she goes on to explain how what was learned from it helped pave the way for chemotherapy.
Transcript
a diver that he had ordered to search the harbor floor, find fractured shells. The shells are not from a German bomb, which always has a yellow cross, but an M47 100-pound American sulfur mustard bomb.
This is the great secret.
This is the great secret. So, the tragic truth is that when the Luftwaffe bombed the Harvey, they bombed our mustard gas shells. We poisoned, in effect, our own men. So, it's a tragic wartime accident. Even worse is that the nurses in wrapping the sailors in blankets, they unwittingly trapped the mustard and oil mixture from the harbor water close to their skin, allowing the men to marinate in the poison. So, many more died than they needed to, hence the secrecy, the official cover-up, the need for denials. Bari could not have happened. There was no mustard gas accident. Nobody could discuss it because the Germans could not find out. So, you just
cover it up. But then, what comes out of that?
Well, the thing is, Alexander, by some crazy coincidence, was probably one of the few doctors in the world that had studied the effects of mustard on laboratory animals. And he had seen something really striking. So, he doesn't want all these men to die in vain. So, he starts ordering autopsies…
Interesting. Okay, so he like he basically has a strange, horrible human experiment in which he can just pull all these results from. He's
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