When Germany Bombed & Closed the Statue of Liberty, and refused to pay the settlement
World War Wednesday
For two years, Germany waged a secret war against the most powerful industrial economy on earth. Few have heard this story.
On July 30, 1916, the US was neutral, and, just as during the Napoleonic Wars, American businessmen used neutrality to sell to everyone. It was legal, ethical, and completely above board. The United States was not at war, so American producers had no obligation to favor one side or the other in the First World War. Money from one European colonizing empire was just as good as money from another.
However, in practice, Americans could only do business with the Allies of Britain, because the Royal Navy blockaded the North Sea route into the Baltic and stopped the Mediterranean at Gibraltar and Suez. Germany could seethe for all Americans cared, as they were not the cause of the German inability to buy goods.
However, the German warlords were quickly shedding notions of honorable conduct, and they decided that terrorism and sabotage were the answer. In April 1915, the German government sent agents to America with orders to disrupt shipments to the Entente Powers.
They recruited Germans who had been stranded in America by the outbreak of the war in 1914, and from the German immigrant community.
In the summer of 1916, their eyes turned to Black Tom Island, a 25-acre artificial peninsula jutting out into Upper New York Bay in Jersey City, New Jersey, located just across from Liberty Island.
Black Tom was set up to get goods from rail to ship in New York Bay. As the USA was supplying munitions to the Russians, French, and British, there was a lot of explosive material waiting to be loaded and shipped off to battlefields from France to the Caucasus. Germany wanted it stopped, even if it meant attacking a neutral and powerful America.
Count Johann Heinrich von Bernstorff, German Ambassador to the United States, masterminded the plot from the embassy in Washington, backed up by Captain Franz von Rintelen of German naval intelligence.
Later in 1915, Rintelen was captured by the British when he attempted to return home to Germany to discuss further plans against the Americans. While some German diplomats were expelled as Americans, tipped off by the British, discovered they were up to shady business, Rintelen’s fellow agents continued their work, especially in New York. They had a secret weapon: the pencil bomb.
The Pencil Bomb was a small device about the size of a cigar that had one purpose: to start an undetected and delayed severe fire that would devastate after the perpetrator could get away from the scene. They could plan how long before the fire would start, and the fire would burn so hot it melted the evidence away, leaving the victims to contemplate an apparently tragic accident.
Three German agents infiltrated the facility at Black Tom in the early morning of July 30, 1916. They left several pencil bombs and then absconded on foot and by water.
Minutes later, night watchmen noticed the fires and moved into action, but there were too many. As the flames spread toward cars containing high explosives, they fled, calling the Jersey City Fire Department. However, when the firemen got there around 1:20 AM, it was already an inferno. Minor detonations of the small-arms ammunition were going off, and the firefighters could not get their hose lines close enough to engage and suppress the conflagration. Then, just after 2:00 AM, Johnson Barge No. 17’s around 100,000 pounds (45 metric tons) of TNT blew up. Then, over the next hour, the adjoining warehouses containing more war munitions detonated one after the other.
Two Million Pounds of TNT, artillery shells, black powder, and dynamite exploded.
Debris hit the Statue of Liberty and shook Manhattan. Glass windows shattered for miles. Sleeping residents of New York and New Jersey were hurled from their beds, and the blast was heard as far as Philadelphia and parts of Maryland. Experts estimate the force of the shockwave was equivalent to a 5.0 to 5.5 earthquake on the Richter scale.
The railroad police chief, a patrolman, and a barge captain were killed.
Tragedy struck the Tosson family, asleep on their boat in the harbor, when the explosion’s force blew their newborn, ten-week-old Arthur, out of his crib, killing him.
The damage was estimated at around 20 million dollars, which would be half a billion dollars in today’s money. The pier infrastructure was totally destroyed; the explosion left a crater measuring 375 feet by 175 feet.
The Statue of Liberty was never the same.
The blast wave shifted components of the internal framework designed by the legendary Gustave Eiffel, popping rivets and straining the torch arm, while flying shrapnel pierced Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi’s iconic copper exterior along the skirt and torch.
And the Torch has been closed to the public ever since, never to reopen unto this day.
The American response was hampered by a lack of federal domestic counterintelligence infrastructure. Though Woodrow Wilson was an arrogant interventionist, he lacked the foresight to plan for securing American internal security to ensure true strategic autonomy. Federal agents were able to work with New York’s detectives, who swept into action with their experienced bomb squad, but the German plan was too well thought out. One of those responsible, Kurt Jahnke, later worked with Nazi intelligence, but was captured by the Soviets and executed after World War II. Another, Michael Kristoff, was interrogated but released with not enough evidence to hold him. The other agents were not caught—though some later confessed years later—and the US could not prove the Germans did it, though there was enough suspicion that American public opinion began to turn even more against Germany.
Yet without proof it was not enough for war.
Germany continued to act against the United States in secret until America declared war in April 1917.
The German-American Mixed Claims Commission of 1939 officially ruled that the German government was responsible for the sabotage at Black Tom and ordered that they pay reparations to the Americans.
Hitler refused.
The Americans destroyed his government six years later.
The new West German government agreed to pay in 1953.
For me, a big What If of history is if the Americans had proved German responsibility for the attack earlier. We would “remember Black Tom” like we remember Pearl Harbor, and the country would have been galvanized, seeking revenge on Germany. Would Woodrow Wilson have been defeated in the 1916 election due to anger over his failure to protect the country? And would American troops entering the war a year earlier have saved the Russian Empire from collapse and prevented the rise of Bolshevism and the horrors unleashed by Red Russia in the 20th century?
Perhaps.
But if you want to visit the torch of the Statue of Liberty you cannot, and you can blame Germany for that fact. As the FAQ National Park Service officially reads:
Is the torch open? The torch has been closed since the "Black Tom" explosion of July 30, 1916, which was one of the largest acts of sabotage to our nation prior to the event of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Many people think they've been there and confuse it with climbing a spiral staircase that ascends to the crown. National Park Service staff must climb a narrow 40ft. ladder in order to maintain the floodlights that light the torch. https://www.nps.gov/stli/planyourvisit/frequently-asked-questions-statue-of-liberty.htm