The Codebreakers: The True Story of the Secret Intelligence Team That Changed the Course of the First World War by James Wyllie & Michael McKinley

Author:James Wyllie & Michael McKinley [Wyllie, James & McKinley, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Non-Fiction, Espionage, Codebreakers, World War I
ISBN: 9781473501461
Google: f7WdBAAAQBAJ
Amazon: 0091957729
Goodreads: 24891889
Publisher: Ebury Press
Published: 2015-06-03T23:00:00+00:00

Workers sort munitions at the Black Tom depot in New York City’s harbour

Miraculously, given the number of men who worked in the warehouses and on the barges of the principal munitions depot in the American northeast, as well as the hundreds of those who squatted on Black Tom, and given the titanic force of the blast, only five people were officially listed as killed, one of them Arthur Tosson, a ten-week-old infant who lived three miles from Black Tom and was thrown from his crib, later dying of shock. Another was Jersey City Patrolman James Daugherty, a 28-year-old cop who arrived on the scene with his partner just after the second explosion. Shrapnel punctured Daugherty’s jugular vein, and he was dead by the time he reached hospital. Cornelius Leyden, chief of the private railroad police force, was killed, as was the captain of the Johnson 17 barge. The body of an unidentified man was also washed up; he was thought to be a nightwatchman.

On 4 August, the New York Times reported that a New York Sun reporter, 25-year-old Lloyd Wilson, had died of a chill he caught while covering the story on Black Tom Island, and on the 9th, the paper’s obituary section announced the death of 27-year-old Mary McGovern, a Jersey City public school teacher, who succumbed to injuries from the explosion. Nearly 100 people were injured, and many more may have died, given the number of undocumented people who were known to have lived on the island.

The physical damage to Black Tom, in terms of lost buildings, infrastructure and goods, was estimated to be $20 million, or more than $450 million today. The first impulse was to call the incident a disaster, and blame the owners and operators of the depot. On Sunday evening, less than 24 hours after the explosions, Jersey City police arrested the superintendent of the National Dock and Storage Company, owners of the pier on Black Tom, as well as the agent for the Lehigh Valley Railroad. The owner of the barge company turned himself in, and the next day arrest warrants went out for the bosses of the Lehigh Valley and Central railroads. All of them were arrested for manslaughter, the initial perception being one of negligence rather than sabotage.

It took the media to focus attention on the possibility of enemy sabotage. On 31 July, the New York Times ran a piece reminding readers that there had been 42 explosions connected to munitions in the United States since the war began, and listed them all, as well as those that had occurred in Canada and Europe. On 10 August the paper reported that two Norwegians with pro-German sympathies and drawings of a ‘fast submarine’ had been arrested in connection with Black Tom. The path of enquiry among those looking into the explosion had shifted, according to the Times, with investigators now chasing down information suggesting that the attack on Black Tom ‘was the work of alien plotters, acting in this country in the interest of a foreign government’.

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