The Great Halifax Explosion

by John U. Bacon

  The British intercepted the telegram, decoded it, and informed the Americans. Although Mexico was unlikely to take Zimmerman up on his offer, the telegram provided President Wilson with the rationale he needed to persuade his nation to enter the war, which the United States officially did on April 6, 1917.

  As of that date, no major world power remained neutral, making it a truly global war. The decision also made the United States and Canada official allies for the very first time in their history—if in name only.

  Of course, the Americans would only make a difference if they bothered to show up. In the spring of 1917, the iconic poster depicting Uncle Sam declaring “I WANT YOU!” was created to lure America’s young men into the war. But six weeks after declaring war the United States military had recruited only 73,000 volunteers. That forced President Wilson to propose a draft for able-bodied men from age twenty-one to thirty-one, which became law on May 18, 2017. But even that didn’t have the intended effect. The United States was home to 23 million men between those ages, but 3 million who registered never reported, and 3.5 million never bothered to register at all. With only paper records sitting in D.C., the draft offices had few means of tracking down the violators.

  Americans had always sought to stay out of Europe’s wars, and felt no loyalty to the crown. Further, by 1917 it was easier to see the endless slaughter the war was producing. This forced President Wilson to sign another bill into law: “Work or fight,” which made it mandatory for draft-eligible men to demonstrate that they were performing work vital to the war cause, or they would be drafted into the army. Baseball was not exempt. By mid-December 1917, no fewer than eleven Boston Red Sox players had been lost to the war—the most of any team in baseball—which encouraged their star left-handed pitcher, Babe Ruth, to give hitting a try.

  By the summer of 1917, even Canada no longer had enough young volunteers to maintain its troop levels. This prompted the Canadian Parliament to pass the Military Service Act of August 29, 1917, which gave the prime minister the power to draft soldiers if he thought it necessary.

  That triggered the next question: Who would be the prime minister to decide this? With this urgent question in the balance, the federal election to be held on December 17, 1917, became a referendum on the “Conscription Crisis.” The current prime minister, Robert Borden, who had gained office when the 1911 Reciprocity proposal went down, was fiercely pro-war, like most of his fellow Haligonians. If he won reelection in 1917, he promised to approve conscription nationwide.

  But the man Borden had unseated in 1911, French-Canadian Wilfrid Laurier, promised that if he won the 1917 election, he would drop the draft, which pleased most French-Canadians and growing numbers of those weary of the war. If Laurier returned to power, Canada’s role in the Great War would likely wind down, with or without an Allied victory.

  The lines were drawn. Expecting a close battle, Prime Minister Borden, a fierce political fighter, tried to tilt the election by allowing soldiers overseas to vote, but not conscientious objectors at home. The way the war was going, the election would depend partly on how much people at home really knew about what was happening there.

  “One of the reasons that war has remained tolerable to civilian populations is they don’t know most of what goes on,” former PBS news anchor and native Haligonian Robert MacNeil wrote. “It was particularly true in the First World War, when the nature and quantities of casualties were so horrifying, and when censorship was not only very repressive but the press an . . . often willing cheerleader for the war effort.”

  MacNeil liked to shock American audiences with this fact: in World War I, Canada lost 60,000 young men, from a total population of 7 million. If the United States had lost a similar ratio in Vietnam, it wouldn’t have lost 58,000 men but 1.7 million—or almost thirty times more.

  “The First World War left indelible scars on the Canadian psyche,” MacNeil wrote, “but it did not tear this country apart as Vietnam did America, with much smaller losses, because people at home knew very little of the reality and were fed, for the most part, jingoistic, uplifting accounts.”

  One German soldier named Manfred von Richtofen, better known as the Red Baron, found the public’s habit of romanticizing warfare absurd. “I am in wretched spirits after every aerial combat,” he wrote in his autobiography. “I believe that [the war] is not as the people at home imagine it, with a hurrah and a roar; it is very serious, very grim.”

  In the spring of 1917, Barss spent three months recuperating at the Pine Hill Military Convalescent Home in Halifax, where the Canadian doctors repeated what the English doctors had told Barss overseas: he was not likely to walk normally again—crushing news for a lifelong athlete. The same man whose ankles had been so strong before the war that he didn’t need to lace up his skates was now being told he would never walk again without a cane, or severe pain.

  Barss decided to ignore the doctors’ prognosis. He forced himself to walk every day with his new cane, regardless of the weather or how he felt. His walks were slow, clumsy, and agonizing, but essential for his morale. He needed to believe that he was getting better, and that he would not be crippled the rest of his life.

  Making his way down Citadel Hill to the waterfront, he could see how much Halifax had changed in just a few years. The harbor was crowded with ships, the streets were filled with sailors and soldiers, and civilians with strange accents were scurrying to keep up with the demands of Halifax’s wartime economy, and automobiles were everywhere. The town was throbbing with a restless energy Barss had never felt in Halifax before.

  Limping through the hospital and the town also allowed him to converse with the doctors, nurses, and orderlies at the facility, people who knew more about the war’s realities than most, and with townspeople in the barbershops, restaurants, and city parks. The contrast between the macabre business of killing Germans and seeing his friends killed from bullets, shells, and gas and the romantic and naïve notions of the people on the home front, he found alarming and frustrating. Like most veterans who had seen combat, Barss quickly gave up trying to explain what was really happening “over there.”

  After three months at Pine Hill, Barss’s doctors allowed him to go back to his parents’ house in Wolfville. There, he kept up his daily walks, knowing that if he stopped, his half-healed leg would never recover. People in his small town eagerly welcomed him back as a war hero, but Barss found the ignorance of the war even greater in his small town.

  And yet, Barss remained fiercely patriotic and fervently pro-war. He took a position as county secretary for Victory Loans—war bonds—which required him to walk all over Wolfville with his cane if he wanted to meet his sales goals. He also took a position as the military representative of the local exemption tribunals, where recruits made their cases for avoiding the trenches and Barss and his panel ruled on them.

  The national election for prime minister and other posts was scheduled to come up in 1916, but the government postponed it due to the war. Rescheduled for December 17, 1917, it was already shaping up to be what historian Michael Bliss described as “the most bitter election in Canadian history,” with Prime Minister Borden’s conservative government pushing for conscription, and former prime minister Wilfrid Laurier’s Liberal Party pushing against it. Thus, it was called the “Khaki election,” since the principle issue at stake was Canada’s role in the Great War.

  Barss wrote to his American uncle Andrew Townson in Rochester, New York, that the election was, “keeping the country stirred up. We have never had a crisis such as this in the history of Canada where the mere representatives count for so little and the issue for so much.”

  Barss added that “If the Laurier party should get in, standing as it does for a policy by which Canada would do no more for the war . . . then I for one don’t want to stay in Canada or say that I am a Canadian any more. That is how strongly we feel about it down here.”

  As determined as Ernest Barss was to support the war effort, he was more determ
ined to walk again.

  PART IV

  A DANGEROUS DANCE

  Chapter 12

  Two Ships

  Fall 1917

  In April 1917 alone, 15,000 troops, equivalent to a quarter of Halifax’s population, boarded ships in Halifax Harbour heading for Europe.

  But the more ships that left Halifax, the more chances the U-boats had to find them. That was the sole purpose of the U-boats’ existence, after all, for which everything else was sacrificed, including speed, power, and comfort. During the Great War, possibly the only place on earth more miserable than a flooded trench near Ypres was inside a German U-boat, where twenty-five to fifty crewmen packed themselves inside a steel tube that typically measured about 230 feet long and 20 feet wide, and stayed in there, for three weeks to six months.

  The vessels were equipped with one toilet and no shower. Bathing, washing, and shaving were banned to save precious fresh water. Each sailor was given only one extra pair of underwear and socks, with no change of uniform and no laundry.

  The loaves of bread they ate grew white fungus so quickly in the humid confines that crews called them “rabbits.” The scenery never changed, the odor of everything grew worse daily, claustrophobia had to be constantly suppressed, and almost half the 360 U-boats ended up on the ocean floor, taking 5,000 crewmen down with them. They called them “iron caskets” for a reason.

  Life in a U-boat had only one justification: finding an Allied ship and blowing it up. And they were good at it, sinking so many that the U-boats alone threatened to turn the tide of war. The Red Baron and his eighty combat victories in the sky pale in comparison to legendary U-boat captain Lothar von Arnauld de la Perière and his 194 sunken ships.

  By 1917, the U-boats had sunk an estimated 3,000 Allied ships, forcing the British to try the convoy system. When it actually worked, they quickly made the practice standard operating procedure. Typically, thirty or more ships would gather in Bedford Basin, sheltered and safe. When they got the order, they would head out single file through the Narrows and past McNab’s Island to the head of the harbor, where they would meet an escort of powerful destroyers and quick gunboats—the perfect combination to transform the U-boats from the hunters to the hunted.

  But to Noble Driscoll, the advent of the convoy system just meant more ships to watch. Whenever a group of ships started its journey out of Bedford Basin, Noble would shout, “A convoy is coming!” and urge everyone to come to their home’s back windows, or out into the backyard if the convoy was big enough to warrant the extra attention. Usually his parents and siblings would indulge him for a few minutes, then return to what they were doing, leaving Noble by himself to memorize all the details he could to tell his friends at Richmond School.

  While the Haligonians watched the big ships come and go, and Barss was back in Wolfville working “tooth and nail” to get the vote out for Prime Minister Borden’s government and the conscription program it supported, Mont-Blanc was chugging up the coast, burrowing through the deep waves kicked up by a coastal storm and weighed down with 6 million pounds of high explosives to attack German soldiers. The waves crashed across the deck night and day, splashing the crew with salt water and making them fear for their lives every time their bow smacked into another wave.

  The Imo, coming across the Atlantic from Rotterdam, Holland, was riding high and fast with nothing but ballast in her holds. Launched in 1889 when the White Star Line had christened a new steamer the SS Runic, she measured 430 feet long, a third longer than a football field, and 44 feet wide, a good-size all-purpose boat for transatlantic shipping. The ship was sold twice before the Norwegian Southern Pacific Whaling Company bought it in 1912 and renamed it Imo. In 1917, the Belgian Relief Commission chartered the ship to haul supplies from North America to Europe.

  In theory, neutral ships could cross the ocean with impunity, but that theory was little consolation after a U-boat sent your ship to the bottom of the ocean. The company painted BELGIAN RELIEF in huge red letters on a white background on Imo’s side, so no one could claim they didn’t know what the ship was hauling. Whether this actually helped ward off German U-boats or the Imo was simply running on luck was impossible to know, but it had crossed the Atlantic unescorted several times without incident, at a decent 12 knots, or 14 miles per hour.

  Imo was operated by a crew of thirty-nine men from around the world, including Norwegians, Swedes, Danes, a Dutchman, and a French-Canadian. Their captain, Haakon From, was a native of Sandefjord, Norway, a town of 2,000 in 1870, when From was born there. He became a whaler at twenty-two and spent all his years at sea, the last twelve as a captain. He was fluent in English, had traveled twice to Antarctica, and had sailed in and out of Halifax twice the previous summer. While this hardly qualified him as an expert navigator of the Narrows, it certainly gave him more familiarity and confidence than the captain of the White Star Line’s RMS Atlantic had in 1873, before her disoriented helmsmen crashed into the shore.

  Now forty-seven, Captain From was generally considered an even-keeled, good-natured man, but an incident earlier that year suggested he was not always so sunny and calm. After Captain From had led Imo to Philadelphia to unload a shipment of grain, he hired a company to repair her boiler and engine room. When Schmaal Engineering Works completed the repairs for $9,000—a hefty $183,000 today—Captain From refused to pay them or even to explain why. When Schmaal’s lawyer left the ship to file a lawsuit, “Captain From acted like a maniac,” Gustav Schmaal recalled. “When I entered his cabin, he glared at me like a man out of his mind and snarled like a beast. Raising his big fists, he brought them down on my head, knocking me to the floor. Then, cursing horribly, he picked me up bodily and hurled me through the door of the cabin. As soon as I regained my feet, I ran for my life!”

  Captain From pulled Imo out of port and hurried down the Delaware River to make his escape. Schmaal and his attorney chased the ship by train and tugboat, finally catching Imo in Wilmington, Delaware, where authorities made Captain From pay up, plus penalties, which more than doubled the expense. The best Captain From’s attorney could do by way of explanation was this: “The Imo’s captain was intensely anti-German.” Apparently, he was also prone to violent outbursts.

  Mont-Blanc had already changed hands a few times when a Frenchman bought her in 1906 and used her as an ore carrier for almost a decade, giving her the “barest maintenance” to do her job. On December 28, 1915, the Compagnie Generale Transatlantique (CGT), also known as the French Line, purchased the ship, renamed it Mont-Blanc, and added guns fore and aft to make her suitable for use during the war. Mont-Blanc might have been on the smaller side, slow, and in subpar condition, but in the later years of the war, the French Line figured just about any piece of metal that could float would be in high demand. They guessed right: the French Admiralty hired her immediately, sending Mont-Blanc across the Atlantic several times without incident.

  In October 1917, the French Line turned Mont-Blanc over to Captain Aimé Joseph Marie Le Médec, who was born on December 8, 1878, in the tiny seaside town of Penerf, Morbihan, in the northwest corner of France, almost directly across the Atlantic from Nova Scotia. Of his thirty-eight years, he’d spent fully twenty-two of them at sea, and half of those with the Compagnie Generale Transatlantique. He had earned a reputation as a competent if not spectacular skipper and a stickler for the rules.

  Le Médec had achieved his rank of captain just two years earlier, as a wartime promotion, but he had never captained Mont-Blanc before. His two previous ships had been smaller, suitable for conventional commercial shipping, and he had never helmed a munitions ship either, let alone one weighed down with 6 million pounds of high explosives.

  That might have been alarming before the war, but in the conflict’s fourth year, the normal rules no longer applied. And so Le Médec finished his first trip on Mont-Blanc from Bordeaux, France, to New York Harbor on November 9, 1917. For security reasons, the British Admiralty did not inform Mont-Blanc what it would be
loading, but Mont-Blanc’s crewmen took note when the authorities instructed them to bypass their usual slip, and dock in Gravesend Bay in Brooklyn instead, then gave the shipwrights detailed plans to cover every inch of metal in the holds with wood, cloth, tar, and rubber, and to secure it all with copper nails. If any crewman still harbored doubts about the volatility of the cargo to come, his questions were answered with the arrival of the rotating band of police officers that surrounded the ship for three weeks while stevedores loaded boxes and barrels into the hermetically sealed holds.

  What made Mont-Blanc’s cargo so dangerous?

  All explosives require two components: a fuel and an “oxidizer,” usually oxygen. How destructive an explosive is depends largely on how quickly those two combine.

  With “low explosives,” like propane, gasoline, and gunpowder, it’s necessary to add oxygen to ignite them and keep them burning. If a fire runs out of oxygen, it dies. Another factor is speed. The rate of the chemical reaction, or decomposition, of low explosives is less than the speed of sound, or 767 miles per hour.

  In contrast, a “high explosive” combines the fuel and the oxidant in a single molecule, making each one a self-contained bomb, with everything it needs to create the explosion. To ignite, a high explosive usually requires only extreme heat or a solid bump. Once started, the dominoes fall very quickly, ripping through the explosive material faster than the speed of sound.

  When detonated, a high explosive produces a flash of light, a sonic boom, incredible heat from the rapid chemical decomposition, and immense pressure caused by the instantaneous production of gas and the expansion of hot air, creating the kind of airwave associated with nuclear weapons. A high explosive releases these forces in spectacular fashion, and that is what makes them so dangerous.