Shortly after midnight on July 31, 1916, an explosion shook the city of New York, audible as far away as Philadelphia. Over 1000 tons of ammunition and explosives had been set off near the island of Black Tom, near the Statue of Liberty.
The explosion carried the force of a 5.5-magnitude earthquake. Across New York, windows were shattered by the sound. Just months after a bomb had gone off in the U.S. Senate, the city faced its most severe terror attack yet, with ten dead and dozens injured. The Statue of Liberty suffered $100,000 in damage from the explosion and the shrapnel.
In the aftermath of the explosion, the first finger was pointed at the local security guards, who set small fires in “smudge pots” to ward away mosquitos. But investigations showed the unlikelihood of the fires reaching the ship. The idea that a transnational alliance of German spies, Irish nationalists and anti-colonial Indian rebels, could have been involved would have been stranger than fiction at the time.
But it took many years for the whole plot to be uncovered. Only in 1939 was enough evidence raised for the United States to win a settlement against Germany in the International Court of Justice – for $50 million. By then, it was clearly too late.
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