A Day of the First Foreign Terror Attack on American Soil, 1916
You Are There - Graphic History Series
You Are There… Graphic History Series.
Historical Backdrop
In the summer of 1916, the United States was officially neutral, but its factories and ports were fueling the Allied war effort against Imperial Germany. Black Tom Island, a mile-long pier complex jutting from the Jersey City waterfront beside the Statue of Liberty, was the largest munitions transit point in the country — at any given moment it held millions of pounds of TNT, dynamite, black powder, and artillery shells bound for British, French, and Russian troops. German military intelligence had built a sabotage network across the Eastern Seaboard, and on the night of July 29–30, 1916, agents Lothar Witzke, Kurt Jahnke, and their Slovak-American collaborator Michael Kristoff slipped onto the depot. Our subject is Daniel O’Connor, age 28, a Lehigh Valley Railroad night watchman, the second-generation Irish son of a Jersey City longshoreman, married, with a baby girl at home on Pacific Avenue. Tonight he is walking the Black Tom rail yards on the 11 PM to 7 AM shift — and tonight, the war will come to him.
11:42 PM — Lehigh Valley Railroad Pier, Black Tom Terminal, Jersey City, NJ
You wake up a railroad watchman in Jersey City — you end the day a witness to the first foreign terror attack on American soil. You walk the wooden planks between the freight cars, lantern swinging in your right hand. The harbor smells of creosote, coal smoke, and brackish water. A breeze carries the faint clang of a buoy bell from the Hudson. Two-thousand crates of shrapnel shells sit stacked under tarpaulins to your left. You check your pocket watch by lantern light, nod to a Pinkerton man passing in the other direction, and tap your nightstick once against a boxcar marked DUPONT — the wood echoes hollow.
12:38 AM — Guard Shack, Black Tom Pier
You sit on a stool inside the small wooden guard shack, pouring black coffee from a tin pot into a chipped enamel mug. A moth circles the kerosene lamp on the table. You unwrap waxed paper from a corned beef sandwich your wife Mary made before your shift. The shack walls are papered with timetables, a calendar from McManus’s Saloon, and a yellowed photograph of you and Mary on your wedding day. You hear the distant whistle of a tug pulling barges in the slip.
1:47 AM — Walking Patrol, North End of Black Tom Pier
You spot orange flickering between two boxcars and your stomach drops. Small fires — three of them — set among the crates. You blow your brass whistle three sharp blasts, drop your sandwich wrapper, and run toward the nearest fire pail. Two of the night watchmen ahead of you are already trying to smother flames with burlap sacks. You smell kerosene. You smell something wrong. Someone shouts “GET THE HELL OFF THE PIER!”
2:08 AM — 200 Yards from the Pier, Knocked into the Hudson Mud Flats
