1916 'Black Tom' explosions shook Jersey City to its core

90 Years Ago, New York harbor blew up

By: RICHARD PYLE (Sat, Jul/29/2006)

NEW YORK - The sound of the blast was unearthly, and the tremor was felt 100 miles away in Philadelphia. The night sky over New York Harbor turned orange. From Bayonne to Brooklyn and beyond, people were jolted from bed as windows shattered within a radius of 25 miles.

The Statue of Liberty, holding high its torch less than a mile from the epicenter, was damaged by a rain of red-hot shards of steel. On nearby Ellis Island, frightened immigrants were hastily evacuated to Manhattan.

Ground zero itself - a small island called Black Tom - all but disappeared, "as if an atomic bomb fell on it," says historian John Gomez.

It was 2:08 a.m. on Sunday, July 30, 1916, when what was then the largest explosion ever in the United States erupted. It destroyed an estimated 2,000 tons of munitions parked in freight cars and pierside barges, awaiting transfer to ships destined for Britain and ultimately, the World War I battlefields of France.

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Black Tom Island is now part of Liberty State Park.

Liberty State Park: Black Tom Explosion

A Terrorist Attack on the City,
85 Years Before Sept. 11

By Glenn C. Altschuler - New York Obsever

The Detonators: The Secret Plot to Destroy America and an Epic Hunt for Justice, by Chad Millman. Little, Brown, 330 pages, $24.99.

It can happen here. And according to Chad Millman’s The Detonators, it did—85 years before 9/11. After war broke out in Europe in 1914, the German government sought to prevent the United States, a neutral country, from delivering ammunition to the Allies. On Jan. 26, 1915, the Foreign Office sent a cable to German attach?s in North America authorizing acts of terrorism: “In United States sabotage can reach to all kinds of factories for war deliveries. Under no circumstances compromise Embassy.”

Within months, Franz von Papen, a military attach?, and Heinrich Albert, a commercial attach?, supplied fake passports, housing and money to a network of spies and terrorists, many of them American citizens. The Germans set up a bomb factory on the Frederick the Great, a battleship interned in New York Harbor. They set fires on merchant ships and in chemical and weapons factories across the country. A few miles from the White House, Anton Dilger, a former medical student, stockpiled a bacterium that causes anthrax. And on July 30, 1916, Michael Kristoff, Kurt Jahnke and Lothar Witzke bribed security guards to look the other way and blew up a munitions depot on Black Tom Island, a tiny spit of land in the New York Harbor. The explosion, which shook the ground in Maryland, decimated 13 warehouses on Black Tom, devastated Jersey City and destroyed property in Manhattan. Five people—plus vagrants sleeping on barges in the harbor—perished. Damage estimates approached $20 million (about $350 million in today’s money).

The saboteurs pulled off their dastardly deed with ease and initially escaped detection. Although the U.S. government had tapped the phones of German diplomats and recovered incriminating material from Heinrich Albert’s briefcase, the Office of Naval Intelligence, the Military Intelligence Division and the Secret Service were, Mr. Millman writes, “no more sophisticated than a small town sheriff’s office.” Investigators speculated that the Black Tom explosion had been caused by a fire, set to drive away mosquitoes, that had blazed out of control.

The story of the Black Tom conspiracy is little known, fascinating and timely. A former Sports Illustrated reporter and currently senior editor of ESPN the Magazine, Chad Millman tells it reasonably well. He’s less successful in reaching beyond the narrative to provide the historical context and explain Black Tom’s significance. Mr. Millman sheds little light on the recruitment of the saboteurs. How did von Papen, Albert and Paul Hilken (their Baltimore-based paymaster) identify the Black Tom detonators? Who approached whom? Did these men derive their view of the origins of World War I from the journalists on the payroll of Johann von Bernstorff, Germany’s ambassador to the United States? Were they paid for their work? Why were they willing to commit treason against the United States?

Nor does The Detonators address questions that Mr. Millman should have asked about the motives of the German government. Why risk bringing the United States into the conflict, especially if German diplomats were convinced, as Mr. Millman is, that President Woodrow Wilson clung “desperately” to his policy of neutrality until the Zimmermann note—a proposal by Germany of an alliance with Mexico—so inflamed public opinion in 1917 that he “had no choice” but to ask Congress for a declaration of war? Did the Germans believe in 1915 that American arms shipments might tip the balance in favor of the Allies? Or that America would enter the war eventually, no matter what the German government said or did? If so, why not try to vanquish England and France before the Yanks were ready to go over there? Or did the Foreign Office give the green light to sabotage because officials were confident that they could hide their involvement? Which they did—for quite a while.

The second half of The Detonators reveals how the Black Tom conspiracy was eventually exposed. A legal thriller, spanning two decades and three continents, the tale has more twists and turns than a colonoscopy. It began in 1922, when the United States and Germany established a Mixed Claims Commission to settle suits for damages arising out of the war. Two years later, after locating documents misfiled by the U.S. Bureau of Investigation (precursor to the F.B.I.) implicating Germany in sabotage, lawyers for the Lehigh Valley Railroad, which owned the buildings on Black Tom, filed a claim for $20 million.

The Germans stalled, stonewalled and lied. The cable sent in January 1915, they explained, was neither an order nor a command, but simply an observation that sabotage could occur. German officials swore that they had authorized no illegal activity. Without a “smoking gun” linking the German government directly to Black Tom, the Mixed Claims Commission ruled against the Lehigh Valley in 1930.

But then, in a stroke of serendipity—one of many in The Detonators—a message sent from Mexico City by one of the conspirators in 1917 surfaced. Written in a magazine in lemon juice so that it would disappear when dry, the message became readable again only after the heat of an iron was applied to the page. A handwriting expert verified that Fred Herrmann, an American citizen turned German spy, was the author. The Americans asked to reopen the case, only to have an even more eminent authority assert that the message had been written long after 1917. Owen Roberts, a justice on the United States Supreme Court and the umpire for the Mixed Claims Commission, denied the petition. But he left the door open for one more appeal.

In 1934, Dame Fortune smiled on America again. John J. McCloy, a lawyer for the Lehigh Valley and the hero of The Detonators, persuaded the Irish labor leader James Larkin to prepare an affidavit about German initiatives to disrupt the flow of supplies from the United States to the Allies, including the Black Tom plot. With Larkin ready to name names, the Nazis agreed to settle. They later reneged, but in 1939, Roberts found for the plaintiffs: $21 million in damages and $29 million in interest.

Better late than never, justice had been meted out—but the biggest beneficiary, Mr. Millman suggests, was John McCloy: The young lawyer for whom Black Tom had once been a black hole went on to become an Assistant Secretary of War, president of the World Bank and U.S. High Commissioner to Germany; in the latter stages of his career, he was widely known as “Head of the Establishment” in the United States.

A coda: During World War II, American policy makers drew the wrong lesson from Black Tom. Asked to assess threats to national security, advisors to President Roosevelt, including McCloy, recommended internment for Japanese-Americans living on the West Coast. As he issued the order, F.D.R. turned to McCloy and said, “We don’t want another Black Tom.” History has a way of repeating itself—sometimes, as The Detonators demonstrates, in acts of sabotage from within, and sometimes in an overreaction to threats real and imagined.

Glenn C. Altschuler is the Thomas and Dorothy Litwin Professor of American Studies at Cornell University.

That little strip of land called: Black Tom. In the late 50's through the 60's we used as a NUDE beach smoking& drinking and whatever. And we also caught "Limulus polyphemus" Also known as The "Horse Shoe Crab"
For many, the horseshoe crab is a childhood acquaintance, first introduced by a fierce-looking shell on a sandy beach with a tail that would sting. Well, if you were not careful you'd get a nasty cut or puncture wound on your foot.
The rumors were as the story your post explains about the Germans and there plan, etc..

The Detonators: The Secret Plot to Destroy America and an Epic Hunt for Justice
by Chad Millman

Tale of terrorism, espionage, and an epic struggle for justice in an America on the verge—sparked by a massive and mysterious explosion in New York Harbor in 1916.

In 1916, while the Allied and Central forces waged war in Europe, a group of German saboteurs blew up Black Tom Island, a spit of land in New York Harbor within earshot of downtown Manhattan. The subsequent hail of missiles and gunpowder devastated much of lower Manhattan and Jersey City. The attack—so massive that as far away as Maryland people could feel the ground shake—had been shockingly easy. America was littered with networks of German agents, hiding in full daylight, an enemy within plotting further, deadlier attacks. All the way up to the president, officials had known something like this could happen, and yet nothing had been done.

Twenty years later, the German government had still managed to evade responsibility for the crime—and probably would have continued to, were it not for the determination of three lawyers named McCloy, Peaslee, and Martin. These men—most crucially the young John McCloy—made it their mission to solve a mystery that began during the first World War and barely ended before the second. THE DETONATORS is a fascinating portrait of these men and their time, an era in which the rising American establishment engaged the world. It is also the dramatic love story of John and Ellen McCloy, and the first full accounting of a crime and a cover-up that resonates strongly in a post-9/11 America.

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From Publishers Weekly - Starred Review.
Millman tackles a fascinating but little-known episode in World War I history: the extensive plot by a network of German spies to wreak havoc in the U.S. Their one big success, he observes, was the massive explosion that blew up a spit of land in New York Harbor next to Liberty Island known as Black Tom, including an ammunition depot, and caused extensive damage throughout Manhattan and Jersey City, with reverberations felt as far south as Philadelphia. Millman has delved into the story deeply and with verve, basing much of this fast-paced, thrillerlike tale on affidavits, briefs, memos and letters from those involved in the plot and the long postwar effort to get to the bottom of it. Although the American government had plenty of clues about who was responsible, nothing of substance was done to solve the mystery until the early 1930s when three American lawyers"John McCloy, Amos Peaslee and Harold Martin"set out in earnest to investigate it. Millman's emphasis on the personal stories of the main characters involved in hatching the Black Tom plot and those who solved it makes for gripping reading.