The Great Halifax Explosion Read online

  His sense of humor had resurfaced, too, though with a darker edge, as manifest in his description of the “rather novel way in which the Germans provided a couple of fine meals for our artillery.” The Germans had launched a shell intended for them but hit a canal instead, killing about a hundred fish. When they floated to the surface, the “Tommies” dived in to pick them up, and a feast of fresh fish followed.

  If Barss’s humor was returning, his anger toward the unenlisted back home was growing. “I can tell you the army is surely a place for straight talk and when you write of such fellows as Brent Eagles and others who are such lazy slackers I just wish I could have about ten minutes talk with them and if I wouldn’t make their ears burn I’d be mighty surprised. However I didn’t expect much better of him. He always impressed me as being decidedly superficial.”

  Given Barss’s views of those who remained at home, it’s not surprising he thought even less of the Americans’ decision to remain neutral, an entire nation of able-bodied men all sitting out the Great War.

  Sergeant Barss spent Christmas, 1915, in the trenches. There would be no “Christmas truce” with carols and soccer matches that year, but he did find time to get a letter off shortly into the new year, January 3, 1916. He composed this on small sheets of Bank of Montreal letterhead, almost illegibly, and some pages are missing. But perhaps all of that can be explained by its address: Ypres, site of some of the worst carnage the world had ever seen.

  After listing some of the gifts they received for Christmas, including plum puddings, cigarettes, and extra rum rations, plus a parcel from Eileen, the girlfriend who seems to have outlasted all the others, Barss added that they were now “very near Ypres.” He reported that “the Germans are still shelling that place [but] I don’t know why, for it is now about deserted and pretty well a mass of ruins. I was up there one day with Lyster, and we got there just as they started shelling and had to go down into a cellar until it was over. My what a place and what stories. . . .”

  When some fellows from Nova Scotia tracked him down, Barss wrote, “You ought to have heard what those boys had to say about Brent Eagles and all the other husky fit good for nothings hanging around home.

  “It was almost worth while coming out here to find how many friends I have.”

  He was wise to savor these moments.

  By January 1916, the endless butchery, and the daily fear that accompanied it, had started to wear on him. On January 25, 1916, his commanding officer demoted him from sergeant to “the permanent grade of Corporal for Neglect of Duty whilst NCO [Non-Commissioned Officer] on watch.” It’s not clear why, though his family guesses that Barss, a skilled boxer, might have gotten into a scrap.

  If Barss’s morale had been slipping before, getting demoted was not likely to improve his disposition.

  Chapter 8

  Halifax Harbour

  Halifax Harbour had been strategically important since the day Cornwallis claimed it for the Crown, but never more so than during the Great War. Getting food and medical and military supplies to the civilians and soldiers around the world all depended on Halifax’s 1,000-foot-wide channel—the world’s bottleneck—being managed efficiently, carefully, and safely.

  But no one could foresee that in 1905, nine years before Archduke Ferdinand took his fateful ride through Sarajevo. To cut costs, the British withdrew their army garrison and abandoned the Royal Navy Dockyard in Halifax. To a town founded as a military base, this was a kick in the gut. Not only did Halifax lose the panache of the fancy uniforms and grand balls that came with hosting the Royal Navy but it also lost the big military contracts that came with it—contracts that had fueled the city’s growth since the American Revolutionary War.

  The withdrawal also threw Canada into a national debate: should the country establish its own navy? Most English Canadians thought they should so that they could focus on protecting Canadian fishing boats and fishing rights off the coast. Those were not high priorities for the Royal Navy, which had more pressing responsibilities around the globe. But many French-Canadians feared forming their own navy would leave them obligated to support Great Britain’s wars around the world. How much would building Canada’s own navy cost, and would it be worth it?

  After a few years of hand-wringing, Canada decided to take another small step toward independence and create the Royal Canadian Navy (RCN) in 1910. The good news is that it didn’t cost much, but that was due to the bad news: it wasn’t worth much either. At its inception, the RCN consisted of a ragtag fleet of fishing boats and two beat-up cruisers from the Royal Navy. (Even their prefix, His Majesty’s Canadian Ship (HMCS), reflected Canada’s murky status somewhere between colony and sovereign nation.) The HMCS Rainbow was already nineteen years old and would be turned into scrap by 1920, and the HMCS Niobe, built in 1898, would run aground off Cape Sable, Nova Scotia, in 1911, which robbed her of her seaworthiness.

  Instead of scrapping Niobe, however, the RCN permanently moored her on the Halifax side of the Narrows, where she officially served as a depot ship, and unofficially as the 450-foot “Hotel Niobe,” big enough to house and feed a thousand sailors and conduct training classes and communications. Niobe was undeniably useful, but nobody confused her with HMS Highflyer. Throw in the RCN’s lack of officers, which required the RCN to fill positions with retired Royal Navy personnel, and it’s easy to understand why the RCN was called the “Tin-Pot Navy.”

  But after Great Britain declared war on Germany, things changed in Halifax in ways both intended and not.

  A Canadian merchant mariner named Francis R. Rudolf had served ably as Halifax’s harbormaster, but when the Great War started, his authority was soon challenged. Shortly after war broke out, the British Royal Naval Reserve called up 30,000 officers, including Francis Evan Wyatt, who went by Evan. Wyatt received orders to report to Halifax Harbour, where he served on HMCS Niobe.

  Born on September 23, 1877, in Southsea, England, a resort town at the southern tip of the Isle, at age thirteen Evan Wyatt enrolled as a Queen’s Scholar at the fabled Westminster School. Founded in 1179, the school has produced Ben Jonson, John Locke, Christopher Wren, and seven British prime ministers. Young Wyatt knew he didn’t want to pursue a career in letters or laws, so before turning seventeen he joined the Royal Naval Reserve (RNR). He rose steadily through the ranks until 1907, when he retired from the RNR to work for the United Fruit Company, parent company of Chiquita Banana, where he directed the company’s large fleet of ships to South America to pick up the fruit, then around the world to sell it.

  Wyatt’s stint in the private sector ended as soon as the Great War began. Just four months into his tenure on Niobe, he was promoted to lieutenant-commander. Eager for more, he sent a letter to the Royal Canadian Navy’s vice admiral Charles Edmund Kingsmill in Ottawa, listing his qualifications as “Master of Mail and Passenger steamers since 1904, expert Navigator and Pilot, thorough business man and fluent French scholar.” Such self-promotion was uncommon in 1915, but it had the desired effect.

  On September 15, 1915, the Admiralty appointed Wyatt the chief examining officer (CXO) of Halifax Harbour, a position far more important than it might sound. The CXO worked out of an office on Niobe, which included the RCN’s Examination Service. When a ship wanted to enter Halifax Harbour, she stopped first at McNab’s Island near the mouth of the harbor, where examiners on small boats would board the ship, confirm her identity, cargo, and purpose, and then send the information to the CXO’s office on Niobe. If everything checked out, the ship would be allowed past the antisubmarine gates, and the examiner would tell the ship’s captain where to anchor, usually in Bedford Basin.

  Thus, during the war, the CXO’s office essentially served as the gatekeeper for Halifax Harbour, supplanting the role of harbormaster. To make Harbourmaster Francis Rudolf’s superfluousness obvious to all, the navy refused to supply him with as much as a boat. From that point forward, all meaningful responsibility for the harbor’s smooth functioning ultimately came
to rest on the shoulders of CXO F. Evan Wyatt.

  Wyatt, who stood a strapping five eleven and weighed a lean 180 pounds, performed so well in his role as CXO that by January 1916, now Admiral Kingsmill wrote the secretary of the Admiralty in London that Wyatt “has carried out his duties in a zealous and able manner” and recommended Wyatt be promoted to commander. The promotion came through. At age thirty-six, Wyatt was the commander and CXO of one of the Allies’ most important bases.

  Wyatt focused on ensuring the safe, civilized flow of boat traffic by enforcing conventional nautical laws and regulations, but that wasn’t easy during the Great War, which frequently rendered the unreasonable reasonable. Risks that would be unacceptable in pursuit of commerce suddenly became tolerable when placed against daily casualty lists, which could run into five figures on a given day.

  Before the Great War, for example, Harbourmaster Rudolf ordered all ships carrying munitions or explosives to anchor at George’s Island, just outside the harbor, where the second antisubmarine gate was located. There they were to unload their dangerous cargo during daylight hours only onto smaller ships, which carried the cargo to shore in a series of safer loads. Any ship carrying munitions had to fly a red munitions flag, and while it was in motion all other ships in the harbor were required to stop moving.

  But what seems wise in peacetime often looks foolish under the exigencies of war. With German U-boats likely lurking outside Halifax Harbour, raising a red munitions flag over an Allied ship’s explosive cargo could be tantamount to suicide. Eliminating the red flag requirement, however, effectively rendered pointless the rule ordering other ships in the harbor to a dead stop while the munitions ship was in motion, since only a few people in the harbor would know if a ship was carrying dangerous cargo without a red flag in the first place. It was often necessary in wartime to permit more of one risk to reduce another, greater one, and this seemed a rational trade-off, with the overwhelming demand for men and materials overseas set against the spotless record of Halifax Harbour during war and peace.

  The British Admiralty kept some of Harbourmaster Rudolf’s rules, however, including the edict that all oceangoing vessels be assigned a harbor pilot at McNab’s Island to steer through the harbor safely. Wyatt’s bosses were pleased to see more ships, filled with more cargo, munitions, and soldiers, heading out of Halifax Harbour to Europe than ever before.

  All of these changes put a greater burden on Wyatt to ensure the harbor’s safety. His exposure was compounded by the lack of enough local licensed harbor pilots who could guide the ships through the tricky Narrows. Given the eightfold increase of cargo during the war, the need to increase the number of harbor pilots was obvious. But by 1917 the harbor still had only fourteen pilots on duty, partly because the pilots liked it that way. The pilots’ coveted civil-servant posts were the products of local patronage, not merit or military rank. They could earn as much as $1,000 a month, extraordinary money when soldiers like Ernest Barss were earning $33 a month to risk their lives overseas. When the RCN proposed greatly expanding the number of licensed harbor pilots, the current pilots forcefully rejected the plan because they were none too eager to see their windfall diluted.

  The Royal Canadian Navy in Ottawa ultimately didn’t feel it was worth the hassle to interfere with the local patronage system, partly because Halifax had never suffered any serious accidents. But this left CXO Wyatt in a vulnerable position, ostensibly in charge of a band of pilots who had little incentive to listen to him. Thus, due to the RCN’s decision to overlook risk to avoid controversy, Halifax Harbour suffered from a cloudy chain of command among the Royal Canadian Navy, the British Royal Navy, and the harbor pilots.

  Wyatt was stuck with what he had: often insubordinate harbor pilots who did not feel compelled to communicate their ships’ cargo and movements, creating a dysfunctional system. When spring arrived in 1917, Wyatt discovered another problem: the crucial task of communicating these daily ship movements by telephone by the Pilotage Office to his Examination Office had been left in the hands of a fifteen-year-old clerk, Edward Beazley.

  Wyatt tried to rectify the situation by clearly restating the requirement that all pilots report all ship movements to his office. A few weeks later, Beazley complained that his orders to the CXO’s office were not being recorded, and worse, the people answering were in the habit of laughing at him. Beazley soon stopped calling in his reports of ship movements to the CXO’s office altogether—but failed to tell the pilotage secretary of this fact.

  While all wars require assuming more risk, this constituted one clear case where the rewards could not be justified. Given the increasingly dangerous conditions in Halifax Harbour, starting with the spotty communications from the harbor pilots, Wyatt felt compelled to warn his superiors in three letters to his commanding officer, Captain Superintendent E. H. Martin.

  In his third letter, Wyatt wrote, “It is not possible to regulate the traffic in the harbor, and it is submitted that I cannot in this regard accept the responsibility for any accident occurring.”

  Wyatt’s superior officers had bigger things to worry about than the troubles of rush-hour traffic in Halifax Harbour, which were relegated to the bottom of the world’s mounting problems.

  Wyatt’s warnings went unheeded.

  Chapter 9

  “It Can’t Be Any Worse”

  1916

  After more than half a year on the front lines, Ernest Barss was straining to maintain his original confidence and conviction. In three letters to his parents from mid-February to March 1, 1916, the long hours, lack of sleep, and demoralizing trench warfare were all starting to take their toll.

  On February 15, 1916, Barss wrote, “We are going in again after four days so-called rest in huts right up close to the line and have been so busy on fatigue parties every day that I haven’t had a minute to write. . . . Then when we come out I expect to go on leave. I tell you it hasn’t come any too soon for I must confess that I have been feeling rather off color lately and fed up with everything. But I think that my eight days in England will put new ‘pep’ into me.”

  He noted that his twenty-fourth birthday, on February 27, 1916, should fall during his leave in England.

  Barss wrote again, this time from Lacne, Belgium. His long-awaited leave had already been pushed back, but he wrote that he hoped to go on leave a week later, the following Sunday, “and you can’t absolutely imagine how I am looking forward to it.”

  After his descriptions of lousy winter weather and sleepless nights, he mentioned the latest casualties with about the same level of ennui. “The only real worry was their snipers who were certainly active and extremely accurate. They started out by getting our brigadier who certainly was a fine old chap. They shot him twice. Once in the shoulder and once in the arm. Then they picked off our machine gun officer and then killed five of the men. They were all shot in the head.”

  While Barss was surprisingly candid with his parents, perhaps to a fault, he left a few things out of his correspondence. On February 21, 1916, Barss had guard duty, which put him in charge of sixty soldiers assigned to guard sixteen Allied soldiers who had committed minor infractions like insubordination and returning late from leave. Barss’s problem wasn’t the prisoners but the guards, a group of fellow Canadians who liked to hang out at the quarterhouse before their shifts began, drinking smuggled liquor and starting fights.

  Knowing this, the officer of the day, a stickler no one seemed to like, warned Barss that he would return to inspect the guards at 1:00 a.m. As the witching hour approached, Barss ordered the sixteen drunkest guards to swap uniforms and places with the sixteen prisoners. When the officer of the day returned for his 1:00 a.m. inspection, he was initially impressed by the quiet, professional decorum of the guards, until he figured out what Barss had done. Two days later, on February 23, 1916, Barss was “Severely Reprimanded for Slackness whilst N.C.O. i/c [in charge] of the Quarter-Guard in the field.” Perhaps for this reason, his long-sought leave was
not just postponed but canceled.

  Barss wrote his parents again on March 1, two days after his twenty-fourth birthday. He does his best to remain positive for his parents, yet probably belies more of his fears than he intended, all but saying good-bye to them and Eileen for good.

  March 1, 1916

  Dear Father & Mother: -

  This is a very different letter from that I intended writing you tonight. We are all packed up ready to move out at a moment’s notice and although I don’t think we will be called out for an hour or two yet we are sure to go up I think. The artillery has been going at it furiously all day and doesn’t show any signs of abating and I guess it’s the real thing this time.

  If nothing happens I will send a card at once so you wouldn’t have any worry. If anything should happen I just wanted to tell you both once more how much I love you and want you to remember that you are very near my heart tonight.

  I guess that’s about all. Please give my love to the other relatives.

  Oh yes, in case you should get any news please wire Eileen & let her know. But I don’t really think anything will & want you to think that too. My heart is full of love for you both. —Ernest.

  p.s. I am enclosing some little flowers I picked in a garden of a ruined house & thought of you so I picked them.

  J.E.B.

  While Halifax was pumping all it had into the British war effort, few of its consequences were coming back to the Haligonians, except those who received letters from the front lines or casualties quietly returned on ships.

  Barss’s superiors canceled his leave the next week, too, and the next, and the next, while the fighting in Ypres got hotter and hotter. Because “matters were getting so lively,” he started to worry that he “should not get away at all,” and would die in Belgium shortly after his twenty-fourth birthday.