H Was for Halifax Then

THE TOWN THAT DIED (192 pp.)--Michael J. Bird--Putnam ($3.95).

A mushroom-shaped cloud with a massive fireball rose 12,000 ft. in the air. In the city beneath, buildings of all sizes and materials were flattened to a charred plain. It was impossible to tell where streets had been. People vanished without a trace. Others became black fleshless bones protruding from ruins. This happened not in 1945 but in 1917--in Halifax, N.S. It was the largest man-made explosion before Hiroshima.

The French freighter Mont Blanc, en route from New York to Bordeaux, entered the Halifax roadstead on the morning of Dec. 6. The Mont Blanc was only a 3,000-tonner, but its cargo was something more than mere ammunition. Every usable square foot of cargo space was crammed with raw explosives--200 tons of TNT and 2,300 tons of lyddite, which is more powerful than TNT. On deck, reeking like an Esso station, were 35 tons of benzole in drums stacked three high.

Sizzling Waves. A Norwegian freighter, the Imo, was coming the other way through the Halifax Narrows that morning. The two ships went into a clumsy dance like people trying to pass on a sidewalk. When they ultimately collided, the Norwegian ship gashed the bows of the Mont Blanc and broke open some of the benzole drums. The fluid ran out over the deck and poured down into the hold. The Norwegian ship disengaged, and, as steel scraped steel, sparks ignited the benzole. The Mont Blanc blazed fire for a full 25 minutes before the explosion. The French crew abandoned ship. The Mont Blanc drifted across the harbor, nuzzled against a pier and set fire to it. People with minutes to live watched from harborside and rooftops. The crew of a tug mounted the Mont Blanc's decks to secure a hawser. The ship was so hot that the waters lapping it sizzled. Then it exploded.

Tragic Anecdotes. The explosion shot a half-ton piece of the Mont Blanc's anchor two miles through the air. It pulled a sailor off the deck of a nearby merchantman, and tossed him up to the top of a hill half a mile away. Somehow he lived. It tore rocks up from the bottom of the harbor and sent them raining from on high. It sucked up so much water that divers working 22 ft. down elsewhere in the harbor suddenly found themselves standing chest-deep and wallowing for their lives before the onrush of a tidal wave that was felt for miles out to sea.

During the fire and confusion of the aftermath, the horror was so intense that countless tragedies became mere anecdotes. Some were unspeakable: "Both his eye sockets were empty and from one of them there dangled an eyeball that tapped against his cheek when he moved." A doctor, unable to stand the carnage, hanged himself. A living man, lying paralyzed and glassy-eyed under a sheet in a temporary morgue, stared helplessly up into strange faces that peered, paused and said, "No, that's not him." More than 3,000 people died and about 10,000 more were injured, many blinded, disfigured and maimed.

Author Michael Bird's research, according to Haligonians who survived the disaster, is accurate and well compiled. Among the various articles and reminiscences that have been written about the great Halifax explosion, this is probably the best.

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