Black Tom Island - a man-made island named after a "dark-skinned fisherman" who lived there - stood next to Liberty Island in New York City Harbor. It was the site of a rock of the same name which had proved costly to the shipping industry, so engineers used literal New York City trash to build up an island around the rock. By 1880, it was a 25-acre plot of land with a causeway and railroad to turn Black Tom Island into an important piece of New York City's economy. In an 11-year period from 1905 to 1916, the Lehigh Valley Railroad - which ran from Buffalo, through eastern Pennsylvania, then on into New York - used more trash to expand Black Tom Island before it was annexed by Jersey City. There was a mile-long pier with a depot and storage warehouses that also served as a munitions (military weapons and whatnot) depot.
Tensions between the United States and Germany were rising...over Mexico. When Francisco Madero took power of Mexico in 1911, the United States approved. When Madero was assassinated in 1913, Victoriano Huerta took power. The US opposed Huerta, but Germany supported him basically to get a naval base out of the deal. Things escalated when the United States shelled Veracruz to stop a delivery of German weapons to Huerta, and had just simmered down between Germany and the United States when Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo, sparking World War 1.
Weird things started happening in the United States. A DuPont powder factory exploded in Pompton Lakes, New Jersey in August 1914 - just weeks after Franz Ferdinand's assassination. Two months later a bomb went off at the Detwiller and Street fireworks factory in Jersey City, killing four. The Roebling Works, an important cable factory in Trenton, burned down in January 1915. Boats were found sabotaged. But who was behind it?
Problematic as it seems now, American munitions companies could sell their stuff to whoever they wanted. However, as World War I erupted across Europe, the United Kingdom ran a blockade across the Atlantic in an attempt to cripple Germany. Despite the United States' official position of neutrality (Germany was the second-largest source of immigrants to the United States) in 1914, the US would only sell munitions to the Allied Powers of the United Kingdom, France, and Russia (it wasn't the Soviet Union until a few years later), mainly because the Allies were willing to pay, and the United States was in debt prior to World War 1 and out of debt by the end of it.
The Germans complained because how you gonna be neutral and then sell tons of weapons and ammunitions to only one side of a war? The United States shrugged their shoulders because cash ruled everything around them. The collective shoulder shrug of the United States was a direct cause of Germany issuing in February 1915 "unrestricted submarine warfare" against any ship - neutrals included - who were sailing to Great Britain. Germany placed a warning in American newspapers telling them that, if they sailed for Great Britain, they were at risk. Around the same time, Germany confirmed its previous authorization for military attaché in Washington - Franz Von Papen - to begin sabotage operations against "every kind of factory supplying munitions of war." Von Papen had served in the German Embassy in Mexico during the revolution, and spent most of his time forging documents for Germans in America to get through the blockade back to Germany. He also spent some time working with activists from India in California to acquire American weapons for a possible revolution. But Von Papen was a trained diplomat, not a spy, and he couldn't get much of anything done.
The Canadian-Pacific Railroad crosses the St. Croix River at Vanceboro, Maine and St. Croix, New Brunswick. On February 2, 1915 Werner Horn, an officer in the German Reserves was ordered from his job managing a coffee plantation in Guatemala to go to Maine and help sabotage the bridge, which was being used to transport food and supplies to St. John, New Brunswick, bound for the Allied front, and other bridges on the Maine-New Brunswick border. The saboteurs met up in Portland, Maine and decided that due to the cold (30-below temperatures) and wind, the plan should be scrapped. Horn didn't make it to that conspirator meeting and, instead of bailing like everyone else, he checked into a Vanceboro hotel on February 1 before taking a briefcase filled with dynamite to the bridge. He waited for hours in the cold before placing the suitcase on the Canadian side of the bridge and lighting the fuse with his cigar. The bomb did enough damage to blow out windows in both Vanceboro and St. Croix and when the German returned to his hotel, suffering from frostbite, the police had already been called. Horn surrendered in his uniform so as not to be accused of being a spy - a capital offense. The bridge was out of commission for about a day, Horn spent 30 days in jail. A reporter asked Horn how much he was paid, to which he responded in a heavy accent, "I did not blow up the bridge for money. I am a soldier, not a mercenary. I acted for the good of the Fatherland!" Horn snitched on Von Papen real quick.
In May 1915, the Lusitania was torpedoed and sank in 15 minutes off the coast of Ireland (I highly recommend Erik Larsen's "Dead Wake" on this subject). That German attack on the Lusitania, a passenger ship secretly modified to deliver war materials, killed 1,195 people including 128 Americans and re-heightened tensions between Germany and the United States. The United States' government, thanks to diplomatic immunity, could not arrest Von Papen and instead requested that Von Papen be recalled, to which Germany acquiesced. (Von Papen would later go on to naively assume he could hold power and keep the newly-formed Nazi Party in check, thus facilitating the rise of Adolf Hitler).
Germany replaced Von Papen in April 1915 with Capt. Franz Von Rintelen, an English-speaking aristocratic naval captain with a Swiss passport and a ton of dirty tricks up his sleeve, ordered to carry out a coordinated sabotage operation in the United States. He knew about as much about clandestine operations as Von Papen did, but had some creativity about him and decided to go all-in on it because, as a member of the New York Yacht Club, he knew Manhattan society. Dude had five aliases. Von Rintelen got his funding directly from Berlin and operated independently. Before departing for the United States, Von Rintelen told Admiral Alfred Von Tirpitz, "I'll buy what I can and blow up what I can't."
Germany was still trading with the United States, and Von Rintelen used the 80-ish German ships hanging out in New York harbor as a new network of problems for the United States. One of the ships' workrooms became a bomb factory. Von Rintelen convinced a German chemist in New Jersey to build cigar-shaped firebombs and allegedly used Irish dockworkers to place them on ships bound for Europe. The "pencil bombs," as they were known, could be timed to detonate days after their placement on the ships.
At this time the United States didn't have much of a national intelligence service. Though the Secret Service was founded in 1865, they were basically told to just watch the president and...counterfeiters. That changed a bit in 1915. The Secret Service didn't find Von Rintelen, but they did manage to steal a briefcase from a New York City streetcar in July belonging to German Interior Minister Heinrich Albert. In the briefcase, the Secret Service found documents related to the sabotage of American munitions plants, as well as documentation related to what is now known as the Great Phenol Plot.
Phenol is a major precursor compound in organic chemistry that could be used to make the salicylic acid used to make aspirin, as well as picric acid - a highly-explosive compound. Thomas Edison also used phenol to make his "Diamond Disc" phonograph records. By the time World War 1 was underway, Great Britain was using phenol almost exclusively for the war effort, severely reducing the amount available for export. Supply-and-demand rules went into effect and the price of phenol skyrocketed. German manufacturer Bayer had to drastically cut production of aspirin right at the time that the patent for aspirin was expiring. Bayer was undergoing a rebranding in advance of the expectation of expiration, and they were not happy about the supply chain. Counterfeiters, Canadian manufacturers, and smugglers tried to make up the demand for phenol, but it wasn't enough. Thomas Edison built a factory in Pennsylvania to produce it. Hugo Schweitzer, a Bayer employee-turned-agent for the German Interior Ministry, set up a front where he bought as much phenol as he possibly could from Edison to send on to Germany. When Edison found out what was happening, he tried to cover it up, but that only made it worse when the New York World - an anti-German newspaper - ran an explosive (haha) story on the plot. Edison tried to make amends and repair the damage to his reputation when it came out that he had basically supplied the German government with enough phenol to produce 4.5 million pounds of explosives.
Von Rintelen was recalled to Berlin. A decoded message tipped off the British on his way through the English Channel, and he got detained. The Swiss passport threw them off for a bit, but he was quick to chirp that he was an enemy officer. By late 1915 Von Papen got expelled from the United States. When his ship was detained he claimed diplomatic immunity, which the British interpreted as not extending to his luggage, where they found a whole handful of incriminating documents. The British shared these documents with the United States, hoping to nudge them towards joining the war against Germany. Von Rintelen was arrested and spent three years in a jail in Atlanta.
Next problem: Once the US expelled those "diplomats," they didn't know where to continue the investigation. The NYPD had to take the case and had a hard time working with New Jersey authorities and any other agency tasked with figuring out just what, exactly, was happening. Eventually, they realized that, in order to catch German saboteurs, you needed German-speaking friendlies. After spending countless nights in dockside bars, the ship bombings largely stopped.
There were about 2,000,000 pounds of ammunition - three-quarters of the total American munitions output - stored at Black Tom Island, including 100,000 pounds of TNT and 417 fuses on a barge docked there, all waiting to get shipped to the Allied front. The barge with all the TNT was there so as not to have to pay a $25 fee in New York City.
Just after midnight on July 30, 1916 guards noticed small fires on Pier 7. Some took off, fearing an explosion, others called the Jersey City Fire Department. At 2:08am, it exploded. Just over 30 minutes later there was a second, smaller explosion. The first explosion was absolutely massive, lifting Jersey City Fire Chief Roger Boyle out of his boots and into the air, the result of a detonation wave that traveled 24,000 feet per second. A police driver told the New York Times:
The things were red-hot when they fell, and we had a lively time keeping out of their way. All at once, everything turned black. The last thing I knew, I was lifted up and thrown away. When I came to, it was raining steel and bricks and shells and shrapnel.
Fragments from the explosion lodged in the Statue of Liberty, shrapnel popping the rivets on the statue's extended right arm, and the torch has been closed to the public ever since. Over a mile away, the clock tower of the Jersey Journal building was hit by debris, stopping its clock at 2:12am. The blast was felt as far as Philadelphia - 90 miles away. Windows were broken as far as 25 miles away. The stained-glass windows at St. Patrick's Cathedral in Jersey City were shattered. The explosion cracked the wall of the Jersey City City Hall. It shook the Brooklyn Bridge. The blast shook the PATH system under the river connecting Jersey City and lower Manhattan. Cemeteries in Jersey City had tombstones knocked over, and vaults "jolted askew."
People in Maryland woke up thinking it was an earthquake, which is understandable considering that the explosion registered between a 5.0 and a 5.5 on the Richter scale. For comparison, when the North Tower of the World Trade Center collapsed on 9/11, it registered as a 2.3. Immigrants awaiting processing at Ellis Island had to be evacuated. Debris rained down for two hours. Fort Wood, which was on Liberty Island, had a 4" thick door at its main entrance wrenched off its hinges. The next morning, when the smoke literally cleared, four people were killed (including a 10-week old baby who had been thrown from his crib). Damage was estimated at $20 million, nearly half a billion dollars today. adjusting for inflation.
Attention turned to the cause of the explosion itself. Was it just an unfortunate accident, or was there something more sinister to suspect? At the scene, there was only confusion. Three Lehigh Valley Railroad Company officials were arrested for manslaughter. Two guards who had lit oil-burning smudge pots to keep mosquitos away were questioned for hours by officials trying to determine if the smudge pots were the cause of the explosions. Figuring that the pots were too far away to have been the cause, the incident was initially designated as an accident.
But all of these "accidents" started to fit a pattern. Count Johann Von Bernstorff was a longtime German diplomat, and was appointed as German Ambassador to the United States in 1908. Raised in London, Von Bernstorff spoke fluent English and was married to Jeanne Luckemeyer, an American raised in French private schools. Days after Franz Ferdinand was killed, Von Bernstorff was recalled to Berlin and inducted into the German intelligence service. He returned with $150 million from the German government to spend on his disruption/terror campaign.
Why didn't Wilson raise hell? 1916 was an election year, and his campaign slogan for crying out loud was "He Kept Us Out Of War." You can't go to war if your whole campaign is "He Kept Us Out Of War." In March 1916 a German U-Boat torpedoed the French passenger steamer Sussex in the English Channel, apparently thinking that it was a British ship laying underwater mines, killing 50. On April 19, 1916 Wilson addressed Congress, saying that if Germany didn't immediately stop unrestricted submarine warfare, the United States would sever diplomatic relations. U.S. Ambassador to Germany James W. Gerard spoke to Kaiser Wilhelm on May 1 to complain about Germany's penchant for treating any ship around Great Britain as fair game. Kaiser Wilhelm complained about the United States supplying Germany's enemies with munitions. In the end Kaiser Wilhelm didn't want to risk adding the United States to Germany's list of official enemies and three days later, and six months before the election, the United States and Germany agreed to the Sussex Pledge, in which Germany agreed to stop the unrestricted submarine warfare. War was averted, for now, but Gerard was skeptical that the Germans would hold up their end of the Sussex Pledge, writing a letter to the State Department that Germany would resume unrestricted submarine warfare by Fall 1916 at the earliest, and January/February 1917 at the latest.
In April 1916 the United States indicted Von Papen and Von Rintelen for their involvement in a plot to blow up Canada's Welland Canal, a major shipping lane near Niagara Falls. Assistant US District Attorney Roger B. Wood noted that it was a break in precedent to indict a foreign diplomat but said:
I suppose he was immune so long as he was military attaché, but he is not the military attaché now. We are breaking a precedent, no doubt, for I do not know of any similar instance where a man in Von Papen's position has been indicted in this country. However, I do not see where there is any reason why he should be protected after he ceases to hold the position that made him immune from arrest.
The charges against Von Papen were dropped when he became Chancellor of Germany in 1932. He was forced to resign a year later in favor of Adolf Hitler.
Out of about 18 million votes cast in the 1916 election, which was basically a referendum on the neutrality of the United States, Wilson won by about 600,000 votes - a 50.01-46.78 popular vote margin. The Electoral College count was 277-254, the 5th-narrowest Electoral College margin in US history.
Michael Kristoff, a 23-year old Slovak immigrant with relatives in nearby Bayonne, New Jersey was suspected in the Black Tom Island explosion, with documentation that he set the initial fires for $500 along with two Germans - Lothat Witzke and Kurt Jahnke. Kristoff died in a Staten Island hospital in 1928.
Theodore Wozniak went to work on January 11, 1917 at the Canadian Car & Foundry plant at the edge of the Meadowlands in Kingsland, New Jersey cleaning empty artillery shells using gasoline-soaked rags. This was his job. When a fire broke out among a pile of rags next to Wozniak, he tried to put it out using a clear liquid. Wozniak's boss found this suspicious - company policy was to put out fires with buckets of sand. The fire spread, thanks to the liquid and high winds. Soon the entire plant was engulfed in flames, the home of stockpiles of dynamite, TNT, and about half a million artillery shells. When the factory exploded, the ground shook from Yonkers to Staten Island. You could see the black cloud in midtown Manhattan. Wozniak also had a second job, getting paid $40/week from Frederick Hinsch, a German spymaster with a network of spies and saboteurs along the East Coast. Amazingly, no one out of the 1,400 people working at the plant that day was killed. Many literally slid up the frozen Hackensack River to safety in Secaucus.
President Wilson's chief aide sent him a memo, warning him of an impending German offensive, "Mr. President, you have to worry that bridges are going to be blown up, skyscrapers are going to be attacked, and the New York City subways are going to be filled with 'germs.'"
German Foreign Minister Arthur Zimmermann sent a telegram to Heinrich Von Eckhardt, Germany's Minister to Mexico. The telegram told Von Eckhardt to offer the territory the United States gained in the Mexican-American War (which was shady as all get out) in exchange for helping Germany in World War 1. The Zimmermann Telegram was intercepted by the British and released on March 1, 1917. Four days later Woodrow Wilson was inaugurated for his 2nd term as president. It would have been three days later, but March 4 - Inauguration Day for presidents prior to the ratification of the 25th Amendment, was on a Sunday, so Wilson was privately sworn in by Chief Justice Edward White and his public inauguration was the day after. When Gerard's prediction proved correct - Germany announced the resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare on January 31, 1917 - combined with the emergence of the Zimmermann Telegram, Wilson could no longer justify keeping America out of war.
Days after the United States declared war on Germany, yet another unexplained fire destroyed the Hercules Powder Company in Eddystone, Pennsylvania, killing over one hundred workers - most of them women and children. Theodore Wozniak, seemingly responsible for the fire in Kingsland, was working as a grocery store clerk in Manhattan's Lower East Side when he was arrested in 1942. The German government never claimed responsibility for any of the reportedly 43 attacks on American factories between 1915-1917. Why did the attacks essentially end in 1917? The U.S. had declared war in April by June Congress passed the Espionage Act, a sweeping "re-adjustment" of civil liberties in wartime, but did give legal basis to deport German agents and agitators.
In 1921 Werner Horn - the lone ranger of the Vanceboro bridge plot - who had been sentenced to ten years in a New Brunswick prison, was deported to Germany. Classified as "insane," he actually was in the advanced stages of syphilis. That same year the Lehigh Valley Railroad - owners of Black Tom Island - brought charges of sabotage against the German government under the 1921 Treaty of Berlin. In 1939 the German-American Mixed Claims Commission ruled that Germany was, in fact, responsible for the sabotage at Black Tom Island and was ordered to pay $50 million in restitution. Of course, Hitler was just about to invade Poland, so that was the least of his concerns.
Johann Von Bernstorff died in exile in Geneva in 1939. By 1940, Franz Von Rintelen had rescinded his allegiance to the Nazi regime in order to help Great Britain, but admitted in an interview with the New York Times to having a network of 3,000 agents working for him in the United States during World War 1. In 1953 Germany agreed to pay $50 million to the United States and made its last payment in 1979.
Despite a long list of various accidents and explosions, the Black Tom Island explosion is considered to be the first terrorist attack on U.S. soil, one of the largest non-nuclear explosions to have ever occurred.
