The Sabotage of Black Tom
Lothar Witzke and the brazen destruction of Black Tom munitions depot during World War I.
of the War Department and Special Staffs, 1860–1952, Enemy Activities, Black Tom explosion, burning
barges being cut loose from the docks at Black Tom, New Jersey, National Archives Identifier 31478108) (source: Agent of the Iron Cross: The Race to Capture German Saboteur-Assassin Lothar Witzke during World War I by Bill Mills)
At ten o’clock on the evening of Saturday, July 29, 1916, Black Tom was a “dead yard.” Hours earlier, the locomotives had been uncoupled from the freight cars and returned to the mainland. The depot workmen had also departed to prepare for a restful Sunday at home. There was nothing to arouse the interest of the security officers as they made occasional rounds beneath the waning moon. All was still, and a gentle breeze was blowing in from the southwest. Standing at rest in the peaceful yard were eleven railroad cars filled with high explosives, seventeen cars of artillery shells, three cars of nitrocellulose, one car of TNT, and two cars of detonating fuzes. At the northernmost pier, ten barges full of high explosives rocked gently with the tide against their mooring lines. Altogether, 2,368,803 pounds of volatile explosives lay waiting at the terminal, practically unguarded.
In the upper bay, a rowboat bearing Kurt Jahnke and Lothar Witzke drew ever closer to the lonely depot. Witzke was a skilled oarsman from years of rowing boats on the Baltic as a naval cadet, and his powerful frame effortlessly propelled the craft across the dark water. With the dim outline of the Statue of Liberty as a marker, the two saboteurs headed for their objective at the outer edge of the promontory: Pier 7 and the Johnson 17. A spy on the island had revealed that Theodore Johnson’s barge number 17 was loaded with one hundred thousand pounds of TNT and 417 cases of artillery fuzes — a giant time bomb capable of causing massive damage if detonated. Jahnke scanned the darkened pier while protecting a compact wooden box that held their precious supply of glass “pencils” wrapped in gauze.
Developed by Abteilung III B, the intelligence department of the German General Staff, and manufactured at a small factory in Karlsruhe, the glass pencils were a new type of incendiary that made Dr. Scheele’s lead pipe bomb incendiaries look primitive in comparison. The incendiary pencil was a concealable glass tube about the width of a wooden pencil, drawn to a near point at one end and open at the other. The body of the tube was divided into two chambers with a narrow capillary hole at the center. The chamber at the pointed end was filled with sulfuric acid and then closed by melting the glass tip to seal the opening. The chamber on the other end was filled with a mixture of two-thirds potassium chloride and one-third powdered sugar, and closed with a stopper. When it was time for the device to be used, the pointed tip would be snapped off, the stopper removed, and the tube placed upright near flammable material. Gravity would draw the acid through the capillary opening, and it would combine with the powder mixture. Thirty-five minutes later, the glass pencil would burst in a whitehot flame that would destroy the glass tube, leaving no evidence.
Around midnight the saboteurs reached the pier and secured the rowboat. Moving swiftly and silently, they boarded the eighty-foot-long Johnson 17 and started planting the incendiaries among the piled cases of TNT and detonating fuzes. Few words were spoken as they snapped the tip off one incendiary pencil after another and set them into position. When they were done, the mooring lines that held the barge to the pier were cast into the water, and the Johnson 17 drifted slowly away from the dock.
Now nothing could prevent the holocaust that was to come.
Somewhere in the darkened yard a third saboteur was at work. Crouched in a freight car packed with explosives, Michael Kristoff, a mentally unstable Austrian immigrant, was also placing incendiaries. The year before, Kristoff had been hired as an errand boy at twenty dollars a week by Frederick Hinsch, a former North German Lloyd steamship captain who turned to organizing sabotage operations after his freighter was interned. Kristoff had since graduated to bigger things. Hinsch offered him a sizable payment to walk across the land passage to Black Tom and plant incendiary pencils in the munitions cars. Kristoff knew Hinsch by his alias “Graentnor” and had limited knowledge of the sabotage plan. If the unstable youth was apprehended while setting fire to one of the freight cars (which was likely), he would be the perfect fall guy, diverting the security guards’ attention from the activity underway at Pier 7.
Jahnke and Witzke hurried back to the rowboat. The naval cadet brought the small craft around and began rowing toward the Statue of Liberty at a ferocious pace with strong, heavy strokes. The boat surged forward across the calm water while Jahnke’s attention remained focused on the mass of land behind them.
At 12:45 a.m., a Dougherty watchman named Barton Scott spotted a fire burning in one of the freight cars. A fire alarm was sounded, and the security detail fled the depot in terror. On nearby Bedloe’s Island, a witness noticed a second fire flare up on a barge near the end of the pier. The two fires grew in intensity for over an hour, and then at 2:08 a.m. the Johnson 17 exploded with an earthquake-level blast.
Out on the open water, Jahnke and Witzke saw the brilliant flash of the explosion and were instantly struck by the massive shock wave from fifty tons of TNT being detonated. Like the flicker of a silent movie frame, the rowboat heeled to the side and nearly swamped, with bay water rushing over the gunwale. Jahnke was thrown overboard, and Witzke had to move quickly to pull him back into the boat. Both of the agents were rendered almost senseless by the blast. Struggling against the heavy waves that followed the initial shock wave, after hours of rowing they managed to reach landfall before dawn.
Black Tom. Total damages were estimated at $20 million. (NARA, RG165, Records of the War Department
and Special Staffs, 1860–1952, Enemy Activities, scene after explosion at Black Tom, New Jersey,
National Archives Identifier 31478104) (source: Agent of the Iron Cross: The Race to Capture German Saboteur-Assassin Lothar Witzke during World War I by Bill Mills)
The explosion of the Johnson 17 was felt as far away as Lancaster, Pennsylvania, 158 miles distant. Thousands of plate-glass windows throughout Manhattan and Brooklyn were shattered by the blast, showering the streets and sidewalks with shards of glass. At 2:40 a.m., a second tremendous explosion occurred when the munitions in the burning freight car detonated. The skyline turned red as “car after car and barge after barge ignited.” Shells and debris rained in every direction. The Ellis Island immigration station and the Statue of Liberty were bombarded with shrapnel. A thunderous barrage of exploding ammunition continued unabated for eight hours, and wreckage was still burning with shells popping off a day later.
Miraculously only five people were killed in the blast; one of the dead was a ten-week-old baby named Arthur Tossen who was thrown from his crib. The total damages were estimated to be $20 million, which included $5 million worth of ammunition that was destroyed, as well as eighty-five railroad cars, twenty-one storage warehouses, six piers, and four barges. The disruption caused to the Allied war effort was immeasurable.
The smoke had not cleared over the ruins before an investigation began to determine the cause of the Black Tom disaster. It was quickly established that the fire which set off the conflagration began on the Johnson 17, but no evidence was found of sabotage. Jahnke and Witzke had disappeared without a trace, and even Michael Kristoff managed to return to the mainland without being spotted. The investigators decided that the combustion had been initiated by natural causes and that the subsequent explosions were the result of barges loaded with high explosives being allowed to remain at the piers overnight in violation of New Jersey state law and city ordinances. Executives of the Lehigh Railroad, the National Storage Warehouse Company, and Johnson Lighterage (which owned the Johnson 17) were placed under arrest and charged with manslaughter.
Lawyers working for the owners of the ruined terminal and munitions would hunt for the real culprits behind the disaster for over twenty years. In the late 1920s, when Witzke and Jahnke fell under suspicion, the legal investigators were chagrined to discover that both had ready alibis. Witzke had applied for American citizenship in San Francisco five days before the depot blew up, and the records of the Morse Patrol showed that a man using the name “Jahnke” had worked in San Francisco on July 12, 15, 16, 29, and 30, 1916. Not until 1939 would an intergovernmental war claims commission declare that Black Tom had been sabotaged by German agents.
None of the perpetrators would ever stand trial for the destruction of Black Tom.
(aka Luther Witzke, aka Lather Witcke), RG129, Records of the Bureau of Prisons, 1870–2009, Series
Inmate Case Files, 7/31/1895–11/5/1957) (source: Agent of the Iron Cross: The Race to Capture German Saboteur-Assassin Lothar Witzke during World War I by Bill Mills)
This excerpt is from Agent of the Iron Cross: The Race to Capture German Saboteur-Assassin Lothar Witzke during World War I by Bill Mills, published by Rowman & Littlefield, October 2023. Used with permission of the author.
