NEW YORK (1010 WINS) -- 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.
PHOTO: Headline from the Jersey Journal July 31, 1916 reporting on the Black Tom Explosion.
Courtesy, Liberty State Park
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.
Evidence pointed to German sabotage, and some historians regard it as the first major terrorist attack on the United States by a foreign party, 85 years before the destruction of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001.
Marked today by a plaque in a corner of New Jersey's Liberty State Park, the blast site lies less than two miles from lower Manhattan, within sight of where the twin towers were brought down by terrorist hijackers on 9/11.
No comparable explosion would occur on American soil until World War II, when the Port Chicago naval arsenal on San Francisco Bay blew up accidentally on July 17, 1944, killing some 200 sailors. Almost a year to the day later, on July 16, 1945, the first atomic bomb was tested at the Trinity site in New Mexico.
Black Tom was one of several World War I conspiracies that have been given little attention over the last 90 years.
A 1989 book, ``Sabotage at Black Tom: Imperial Germany's Secret War in America, 1914-1917,'' by former Washington Post reporter Jules Witcover, details various plots that also included infecting horses bound for war duty with deadly anthrax. ``Black Tom was the centerpiece of everything that was done,'' Witcover said in an interview.
In 1916, the United States was still officially neutral but supported the Allies, led by Britain, against the Central Powers, Germany, Austria-Hungary and Turkey. That Berlin had been barred from buying American munitions was a further reason for its agents to engage in sabotage.
``There was no question about Black Tom being an act of terror, and I believe the Germans were responsible, their spy network was based here in Hudson County, but the case has never truly been solved,'' said Gomez, a historian and founder of Jersey City's landmarks conservancy. ``I think the real answers are still in Germany.''
Black Tom, the name supposedly came from a fisherman who once lived there, was an especially ripe target, isolated at the end of a mile-long rail causeway and accessible by water. According to Witcover's book, investigators found security was lax and company officials had violated time limits and other rules for storing explosives.
It was perhaps miraculous that only seven people were killed, among them a barge captain, two policemen and a child tossed from a crib in Jersey City. Black powder, TNT and ammunition continued to ``cook off'' through the dawn and into daylight.
At the Statue of Liberty, some 2,000 feet northeast of Black Tom, damage to the torch prompted its being closed to the public after 30 years. Farther north, iron beams bent by the explosive forces are still visible at Jersey City's century-old Central Railroad Terminal, Gomez said.
The rippling shockwaves blew out windows of Manhattan skyscrapers, cracked a wall at Jersey City's city hall and stopped the tower clock at the local newspaper, The Jersey Journal, at 2:12 a.m.
A recent study theorized that Black Tom would have measured 5.5 on the Richter Scale, had the earthquake rating system then existed, the equivalent of a moderate temblor, but more than 30 times greater than the collapse of the World Trade Center's north tower, which registered 2.3 at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Palisades, N.Y.
At first, the blast was blamed on sparks from smudge pots that guards at Black Tom had lit to keep mosquitoes away, but suspicion soon focused on German espionage activities.
Investigators uncovered a spy ring involving Berlin's ambassador to Washington, but some members of the group eluded discovery and carried out the Black Tom plot, apparently using incendiary ``pencil bombs'' to ignite the munitions stores.
The suspects fled the country after being identified through a secret message, written in lemon juice and visible only when held over a flame. Tracked to Latin America, agent Lothar Witzke told investigators that he and fellow spy Kurt Jahnke had triggered the blast, then nearly drowned in the waves it generated.
Although no one was ever convicted, a postwar claims commission spent 17 years weighing demands by the Lehigh Valley Railroad, which owned the island, and other companies for reparations by Germany. In 1939, on the cusp of World War II, the commission found Germany liable for $95 million in damages. The then-Nazi regime refused to pay and it was not until 1979 that the case was finally settled.
The accusations of skullduggery devastated Jersey City's once-thriving German community, says Gomez, but ``a lot of stained-glass makers, including the Germans, had big business replacing church windows.''
One such window, at Our Lady of Czestowchowa Catholic church, memorializes the victims of Black Tom, in Polish.
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