The December 2, 1943 Air Raid on the Italian port of Bari was not just a disaster for the allies, but an embarrassment whose full details were hidden for more than a decade.
The unsung heroes of the naval war in the Western theater weren’t the city class casemate ironclads, but a much larger and more active fleet of more than seventy, much smaller, lightly armored vessels. The “Tinclads” of the US Civil War deserve to be remembered.