The Great Halifax Explosion Read online

  Map

  This map was produced by the Royal Society of Canada as part of their detailed scientific report on the Halifax Explosion. Mont-Blanc sailed toward the Narrows, while Imo traveled in the opposite direction, veering toward the left (port) side. When the ships collided, Mont-Blanc’s crew abandoned ship, and the smoking vessel drifted west into Pier 6, where it exploded. Note: the map’s orientation is such that the bottom-right corner points north. (Royal Society of Canada)

  Dedication

  To the memory of Wally and Helen Graham,

  my beloved Canadian grandparents,

  who first told me this remarkable story,

  and the good people of Halifax

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Map

  Dedication

  PART I: A FORGOTTEN STORY Chapter 1 A Century of Gratitude

  Chapter 2 Under Cover of Darkness

  PART II: O CANADA Chapter 3 “Why Aren’t We Americans?”

  Chapter 4 Waking Up Just in Time

  PART III: THE GREAT WAR Chapter 5 As Near to Hell

  Chapter 6 Halifax at War

  Chapter 7 Life and Death on the Western Front

  Chapter 8 Halifax Harbour

  Chapter 9 “It Can’t Be Any Worse”

  Chapter 10 “The City’s Newer Part”

  Chapter 11 Wounded Inside and Out

  PART IV: A DANGEROUS DANCE Chapter 12 Two Ships

  Chapter 13 December 5, 1917

  Chapter 14 A Game of Chicken

  Chapter 15 “Look to Your Boats!”

  Chapter 16 Box 83

  Chapter 17 “Oh, Something Awful Is Going to Happen”

  PART V: 9:04:35 A.M. Chapter 18 One-Fifteenth of a Second

  Chapter 19 Parting the Sea

  Chapter 20 Blown Away

  Chapter 21 They’re All Gone

  Chapter 22 The Panic

  PART VI: HELP Chapter 23 No Time to Explain

  Chapter 24 Ready to Go the Limit

  Chapter 25 A Steady Stream of Victims

  Chapter 26 Blizzard

  Chapter 27 Lost and Found

  Chapter 28 The Last Stop

  Chapter 29 The Yanks Are Coming

  Chapter 30 A Working Sabbath

  Chapter 31 “It’s Me, Barbara!”

  Chapter 32 Small Gifts

  Chapter 33 A Toast to Allies

  PART VII: REBUILDING Chapter 34 The Missing and the Dead

  Chapter 35 The Inquiry

  Chapter 36 Christmas, 1917

  Chapter 37 Orphans

  Chapter 38 “Don’t Stare”

  Chapter 39 The Trials

  Chapter 40 The Wholesome Discord of a Thousand Saws

  PART VIII: FACING THE FUTURE Chapter 41 New Lives

  Chapter 42 The Accidental Doctor

  Chapter 43 The Lasting Impact

  Chapter 44 The Reunion

  Acknowledgments

  Bibliography

  Source Notes

  Index

  Photos Section

  About the Author

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  PART I

  A FORGOTTEN STORY

  Chapter 1

  A Century of Gratitude

  On Thursday, December 1, 2016, the people of Boston slogged through a drizzly day with temperatures in the 40s—neither fall nor winter, the kind of cold that gets deep in your bones and stays there.

  At 8:00 p.m., 15,000 hearty souls left their warm, dry offices and homes to crowd around the stage in the center of Boston Common, the nation’s oldest city park, dating back to 1634. They were waiting for the mayor of Boston, the premier of Nova Scotia, the Canadian Mounted Police, and Santa Claus himself to turn on the 15,000 lights draped on a forty-seven-foot white spruce Christmas tree, a perfect specimen, and brighten the dark, foggy gloom. When the crowd finished counting down, the people backstage flipped the switch and set off fireworks, and the crowd cheering as though relief had been delivered.

  Every year the Nova Scotia Department of Natural Resources sends scouts across the province to locate the best tree. They found the 2016 winner in Sydney, Nova Scotia, but it was unusual because it came from public lands, instead of being donated by private citizens who compete for the honor of having their tree selected. After a tree-cutting ceremony, they load it onto a big flatbed truck, strap it down, and ship it to Halifax for a send-off parade. There they pin a provincial flag on both sides so fellow travelers along the three-day, 660-mile journey to Boston know where it came from. The tree even comes with a band of dignitaries, including an official town crier and its own Facebook fan page, and twitter account, @TreeforBoston.

  All this costs the citizens of Halifax about $180,000 to continue a tradition that started in 1918—and they do it enthusiastically. As one Nova Scotian said, “Why do we have to stop saying ‘Thank you!’?”

  What did Boston’s ancestors do to inspire contemporary Haligonians to keep thanking them a century later?

  The answer to that question harkens back to World War I, which introduced submarines, tanks, and airplanes; ended empires in Russia, Turkey, Austria, and Germany; and created a new world order. It lies in a forgotten disaster that occurred on Thursday, December 6, 1917, in Halifax—the most destructive man-made explosion until Hiroshima, one that blew out windows 50 miles away, rendered 25,000 people homeless in an instant, wounded 9,000 more, often horrifically, and killed 2,000, most of them in a flash. It lies in hundreds of Bostonians rushing to help before the people of Halifax even asked—a response so overwhelming that it helped transform these two countries from adversaries to allies.

  Ultimately, it lies in a split second that brought out the best of both nations.

  Chapter 2

  Under Cover of Darkness

  On November 9, 1917, with the Great War building to its horrendous crescendo, the French freighter Mont-Blanc docked at Gravesend Bay in Brooklyn, New York. Although the United States had joined the Allied forces a few months before, American troops were only just starting to fill the trenches of France, while Vladimir Lenin’s Bolshevik Revolution had toppled the Russian government two days earlier. The next day Lenin had promised his countrymen they would soon be dropping out of the most destructive war the world had ever seen. This presented Germany with its best chance to break the grueling three-year standoff on the Western Front, and it was therefore of paramount importance that the Allied powers send munitions and men in greater numbers than ever before to prevent the Germans from breaking through.

  The United States had remained neutral until April 6, 1917, but American manufacturers, shipping companies, and ports had been doing brisk business since the war broke out in 1914, selling the British, French, and other Allied powers supplies, weapons, and explosives. Tons of exports poured out every day from Gravesend Bay, squeezed in between Bensonhurst and Coney Island.

  Mont-Blanc, built in 1899, was not among the most impressive vessels crossing the sea. She measured 320 feet long and 47 feet wide, fairly standard for a transatlantic vessel, and she wasn’t the oldest ship on the seas, but her best days were definitely behind her. She was slow, with a top speed of about 12 miles per hour—roughly one-third the speed of Lusitania—with a long history of bare-minimum maintenance. Sensing opportunity when the war started, the French Line bought her in 1915, fixed her up enough to transport supplies from North America to Europe, and turned her into a moneymaker.

  But she would be asked to do more. In 1917, German U-boats had been sinking military and merchant ships by the hundreds each month, forcing the Allied Powers to use any ships still afloat on increasingly dangerous missions.

  The p
revious month, the French Line put Mont-Blanc in the hands of Captain Aimé Joseph Marie Le Médec, thirty-eight. At five foot three and 125 pounds, Le Médec was not physically imposing, but he knew how to carry himself like a captain, an impression buttressed by his regal bearing and carefully groomed jet-black beard. His highly disciplined, “by the book” approach was not initially well received by his thirty-six-man crew and four officers on their first transatlantic journey, but by the time they reached New York, he had earned their respect and trust.

  When Mont-Blanc pulled into Gravesend Bay, Le Médec and his crew had no idea what cargo they might be picking up. During the Great War it could be almost anything, and the premium on security precluded advance notice. But they started getting hints before the cargo could be loaded onto the creaky Mont-Blanc. Shipwrights at Gravesend Bay attached custom-made wooden linings and magazines to the inside of the steel hull to keep the cargo as tightly packed, hermetically sealed, and immobile as possible, because high explosives are so sensitive that a good jolt can set them off. The shipwrights worked around the clock for two days to secure the partitions with copper nails because copper doesn’t spark when struck. They were told a single spark could send them all skyward.

  Finally, on November 25, 1917, the stevedores started loading the cargo under the protection of local police surrounding the ship. The stevedores so feared accidentally blowing up the volatile cargo—and the ship, the docks, and themselves with it—that they fastened canvas covers over their boots to keep their soles from sparking against the steel deck.

  When a French government agent finally told Captain Le Médec what they were loading on his ship, it was a most unpleasant surprise: Mont-Blanc would be carrying almost nothing but high explosives back to Bordeaux, France. Le Médec normally exuded the calm confidence expected of a captain, but his face belied his alarm. If the U-boats’ success forced the Allies to squeeze more from their remaining ships, it had the same effect on the Allies’ captains. Le Médec had earned a record as a competent helmsman, but he’d never captained a ship as big as Mont-Blanc, nor had he ever carried high explosives. But in the conflict’s fourth year, the normal rules no longer applied. The French government had directed its New York agent to buy munitions and explosives in such unprecedented quantities that they needed forty to fifty ships every two weeks to deliver the ammunition overseas. That required using ships that would ordinarily be too unwieldy, beat up, or slow for such a mission—and captains unfamiliar with the cargo to ship them.

  Le Médec and Mont-Blanc were being asked to carry one of the largest caches of high explosives ever loaded onto a ship: 62 tons of gun cotton, similar to dynamite; 246 tons of a new and particularly combustible airplane fuel called benzol, packed in 494 thin steel drums and stacked three and four barrels high; 250 tons of TNT; and 2,366 tons of picric acid, a notoriously unstable and poisonous chemical more powerful than its cousin, TNT, which was used to make shells, the Great War’s principle weapon. They had unwittingly brought together the perfect mixture of catalysts to get a fire started, plenty of fuel to keep it going, and a massive load of high explosives, most invented since the American Civil War, to finish the job. Fully loaded, the touchy cargo alone weighed almost 3,000 tons, or 6 million pounds—about thirteen times the weight of the Statue of Liberty. This was the Great War’s version of the Arsenal of Democracy, packed barrel to barrel and crate to crate, with slabs of plywood between them. The total value of the cargo was $3 million, or about $72 million in current U.S. dollars. Whatever the flaws in their plan, the authorities who concocted Mont-Blanc’s mission could not be accused of playing small.

  Before leaving Gravesend Bay, Captain Le Médec met with the British Admiralty’s senior naval officer, Commander Coates, whose office had jurisdiction over Allied shipping. He didn’t expect Le Médec to like his mission, and probably didn’t care if he didn’t. In the course of the Great War, how many soldiers and sailors were thrilled to receive their assignments? Captain Le Médec had no authority to which he could appeal, and the cargo waiting for him in Gravesend Bay wouldn’t do anyone any good sitting on the docks—except perhaps an observant German submarine captain looking to make a name for himself by blowing up a sizable swath of Brooklyn.

  By the time Commander Coates met with Captain Le Médec in late November 1917, 70 million military personnel were entering their fourth year of demoralizing trench warfare, a form of combat designed for defense. This created stalemates, which produced endless slaughter. Multiplying the misery, technology had advanced unevenly, creating efficient new ways to tear men apart but not to put them back together. The Great War had already claimed 9 million soldiers and 7 million civilians, with no end in sight. Mont-Blanc’s cargo was part of the desperate attempt to prevent the Germans from exploiting their long-awaited chance to break the stalemate, and win the war. The fearful absurdity of the ship’s freight was matched by the insanity of the war it was intended to support.

  It was now up to Mont-Blanc’s captain and crew to deliver all this to Bordeaux, France, where it would be weaponized to kill as many German soldiers as possible. All French ships during the war prohibited alcohol on board, but Captain Le Médec added a ban on smoking, or even carrying a single match in a shirt pocket, a policy reinforced by posters displayed throughout the ship, to leave nothing to chance.

  If they could get Mont-Blanc safely out of Gravesend Bay without a mistake and avoid underwater mines, they would face even greater dangers: the notoriously rough North Atlantic, and German U-boats. These little submarines were far cheaper and quicker to build than destroyers and required only twenty-five to fifty men to operate, allowing the Germans to put 360 on the high seas during the Great War. They excelled at their job: sneaking up on big Allied ships and literally blowing them out of the water. There were enough of them out there, hunting thousands of vessels, to become a force of fear throughout the Atlantic—even for opulent civilian ocean liners like Lusitania, which a U-boat sank in 1915, killing 1,198 of the 1,959 aboard, including 128 Americans, a fact that almost drew the United States into the war in its second year.

  Lusitania was only one of a few thousand ships the U-boats claimed during the Great War, including a few within sight of New York City, a campaign that cost some 15,000 Allied lives. The Germans sunk almost half of those ships in 1917 alone, costing some 15,000 lives.

  The British realized they could not keep sending their ships across the sea just to watch the U-boats send them to the ocean’s floor. They would lose the war if they did. After trying a handful of failed strategies, they went to their last resort: a convoy, which they feared was a foolhardy scheme that would only make it that much easier for the U-boats to pick off a cluster of ships at once.

  They anxiously sent their first convoy on July 10, 1917, out of Halifax Harbour. When the entire convoy made it safely to Europe, the British figured out why: in the vast expanse of the ocean, a close-knit convoy of ships was almost as difficult for a U-boat to find as a single ship, yet each successful convoy delivered a few dozen more ships safely to shore. Throw in the convoy’s ability to counterattack U-boats, and the game changed almost overnight. The British quickly adopted the practice for most of their major transatlantic trips, with great success.

  Convoys typically consisted of a dozen or more merchant ships and a troopship or two carrying arms and soldiers in the middle of the circle, protected by a cruiser, six destroyers, armed trawlers, and torpedo boats that could detect submarines moving underwater—all designed to exploit the U-boats’ weakness: they were surprisingly slow. If a convoy spotted a U-boat, it had a decent chance of getting the German crew in its crosshairs and doing to them what they were doing to Allied ships. The convoys became even more effective when the Allies started using airplanes to spot the subs. In just a few months, the convoys made the U-boats as scared of the big ships as the big ships were of the U-boats and dramatically reduced the advantage the U-boats had given the Germans.

  But the convoys worked only if
you could join one. When the Mont-Blanc approached her December 1 departure date, Captain Le Médec met again with Commander Coates to discuss Mont-Blanc’s route to France. Coates asked Captain Le Médec if the freighter could make 200 miles a day, or an average of 7.25 knots (about 8 mph), which would put the ship into Bordeaux in about eighteen days. Le Médec answered honestly that, having never carried such a heavy load before, he wasn’t sure, but he thought perhaps they could in fine weather. Both of them knew, however, that no ship was likely to see fine weather on the treacherous North Atlantic for eighteen straight days.

  Commander Coates then gave Captain Le Médec more bad news, as calmly as a blackjack dealer sweeps up your cards after you’ve busted: Le Médec’s ship was too slow to keep up with the convoys Coates had leaving New York, so he ordered Captain Le Médec to sail some 700 miles up the East Coast to Halifax, Nova Scotia, the biggest natural port in North America, and the center of Allied shipping on the western side of the Atlantic. There, Coates said, Captain Le Médec might be able to join a convoy sailing to Bordeaux. Once in Halifax, Le Médec would also receive a sealed envelope. If he fell behind the convoy to Europe, Le Médec was instructed to open the envelope to reveal his secret route to Bordeaux—a route Mont-Blanc would have to navigate by herself.

  To give Mont-Blanc a fighting chance against the U-boats, the French Line had equipped her with a 90mm cannon (or “gun”) pointing forward, and a 95mm gun in the stern. But the comfort those offered was nothing compared to the protection a convoy of Allied ships would provide.

  Mont-Blanc pulled out of Gravesend Bay for Halifax an hour before midnight on Saturday, December 1, 1917—the same night the British cruiser HMS (His Majesty’s Ship) Highflyer, one of the most famous ships in the British fleet, sailed into Halifax Harbour to a hero’s welcome. Just days after the war started in 1914, Highflyer had captured a ship carrying German soldiers and £500,000 of gold, then followed that up a few weeks later by sinking an armed German merchant cruiser off the coast of Africa. The British government awarded Highflyer’s crew £2,680—or almost a quarter million in today’s U.S. dollars. The British boys on board suddenly had fame, wealth, and health, a rare combination during the Great War. Highflyer’s success made news across the ocean, giving a needed boost to morale after some early setbacks. Highflyer updated her fame by leading the Allies’ first convoy that summer out of Halifax, a great success that dramatically shifted the balance of power on the seas. It seemed Highflyer could do it all, and her crew was celebrated accordingly.