The Great Halifax Explosion: A World War I Story of Treachery, Tragedy, and Extraordinary Heroism

Written by John U. Bacon

Narrated by Johnny Heller

From New York Times bestselling author John U. Bacon, a gripping narrative history of the largest manmade detonation prior to Hiroshima: in 1917 a ship laden with the most explosives ever packed on a vessel sailed out of Brooklyn’s harbor for the battlegrounds of World War I; when it stopped in Halifax, Nova Scotia, an extraordinary disaster awaited. . . .

On Monday, December 3, 1917, the French freighter SS Mont-Blanc set sail from Brooklyn carrying the largest cache of explosives ever loaded onto a ship, including 2,300 tons of picric acid, an unstable, poisonous chemical more powerful than TNT. The U.S. had just recently entered World War I, and the ordnance was bound for the battlefields of France, to help the Allies break the grueling stalemate that had protracted the fighting for nearly four demoralizing years. The explosives were so dangerous that Captain Aimé Le Medec took unprecedented safety measures, including banning the crew from smoking, lighting matches, or even touching a drop of liquor.

Sailing north, the Mont-Blanc faced deadly danger, enduring a terrifying snowstorm off the coast of Maine and evading stealthy enemy U-boats hunting the waters of the Atlantic. But it was in Nova Scotia that an extraordinary disaster awaited. As the Mont-Blanc waited to dock in Halifax, it was struck by a Norwegian relief ship, the Imo, charging out of port. A small fire on the freighter’s deck caused by the impact ignited the explosives below, resulting in a horrific blast that, in one fifteenth of a second, leveled 325 acres of Halifax—killing more than 1,000 people and wounding 9,000 more.

In this definitive account, Bacon combines research and eyewitness accounts to re-create the tragedy and its aftermath, including the international effort to rebuild the devastated port city. As he brings to light one of the most dramatic incidents of the twentieth century, Bacon explores the long shadow this first ""weapon of mass destruction"" would cast on the future of nuclear warfare— crucial insights and understanding relevant to us today.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Nov 7, 2017
• ISBN: 9780062695758

John U. Bacon

John U. Bacon is the author of the national bestseller The Great Halifax Explosion and five bestselling books about college football, including Three and Out, Fourth and Long, Endzone, and Bo’s Lasting Lessons, co-authored with Michigan coach Bo Schembechler. A former feature writer for the Detroit News, his writing has been recognized three times in The Best American Sports Writing series. He appears often on NPR and national television, including ESPN’s 2019 documentary series on college football. He has taught at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism and the University of Michigan. A popular public speaker, he lives in Ann Arbor with his wife and son.

Reviews for The Great Halifax Explosion

[Laurie Scott · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A well written book easy to listen to and very interesting

[Ženija Minka · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The audiobook is highly enjoyable both because of the narrator and the interesting subject matter.

[mapg.genie · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

At the end of the book, Mr. Bacon wrote: "For their part, few Americans have heard of the explosion." So true! I may have read the phrase "Halifax explosion" at some point, perhaps as I was planning a car trip from Midwestern United States to the Canadian Maritime Provinces. At any rate, in a bookstore in Lunenburg before visiting Halifax, I found and purchased this book, basically, without good reason, just because I might be interested. The next day my husband and I visited the awesome Maritime Museum of the Atlantic in Halifax, where we learned more about the tragedy, but nothing in the detail of this book.

Men from Canada had been fighting and many dying in the Great War trenches in Europe, and men and supplies were constantly being shipped in and out of the Halifax Harbor, the most active East Coast Canadian harbor. On December 6, 1917 one ship leaving the harbor collided with an arriving ship which happened to be carrying a very volatile, enormous load of munitions. The result was an explosion that leveled a large section of the town, resulting in the bloodiest man-made disaster in the world at that time, killing more than two thousand people.

Mr. Bacon brought the reader into the scene with historical background, then combined descriptions of the accident with the human element of victim and survivor stories, leaving no details unturned and creating this captivating, page-turner.

[castlelass · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Outstanding non-fiction about a disastrous explosion in Halifax in 1917. On December 6, 1917, the freighter Mont-Blanc arrived in Halifax Harbor, Nova Scotia, laden with six million pounds of explosives destined for the trenches of the Great War in France. The Mont-Blanc collided with the Imo, resulting in a fire, which eventually caused the explosives to detonate, devastating the surrounding area. It was, at the time, the most powerful blast ever unleashed, until eclipsed by the atomic bomb at Hiroshima. John U. Bacon tells the story of how this disaster occurred and what happened in its aftermath. It is a story of almost unbelievable heroism and people rising to the occasion by altruistically helping each other through the tragedy.

The author employs several techniques which bring the story to life. First, he follows the lives of several people who were impacted by the event. I cared about these people and hoped they made it through the blast. Second, he tells the history of United States-Canadian relations, which have not always been as cordial as they are now. Third, he outlines an almost a minute-by-minute reconstruction of the circumstances leading to the explosion. Taken together, they make for riveting reading.

Once he lays the foundation for the events that would cause the explosion, Bacon turns to a mini-biography of Joseph Barrs, who volunteered for the Canadian army in World War I. He was injured severely in battle and spent six months in a body cast, returning to the Halifax area struggling to walk and suffering from what we would now call post-traumatic stress disorder. He feels he has lost his direction in life, and the way in which he rediscovers a sense of purpose is directly related to the actions taken in response to the Halifax explosion. I found this a very powerful way to tell the story of how the explosion connects to what was happening with the Great War overseas and felt invested in his plight.

The author paints a vivid picture of what was occurring in the city at the time, a seemingly ordinary day, with men working, children on their way to school, families eating breakfast. People were curious about the burning ship and were coming down to the pier to watch, unaware of its dangerous cargo. The author tells many individual stories of what happened to the people and how the community responded, eventually receiving assistance from many places, including Boston, where they had an emergency preparedness plan already established. Just when you think circumstances can’t get much worse for the people of Halifax, they do. In the wake of the explosion, a massive tsunami is generated. The next day, as people were attempting to recover survivors, the city is hit with the worst blizzard in a decade.

This story deserves to be more well-known than it is, and I very much enjoyed learning about it. My only quibbles with the book, and they are minor, is that the author sometimes includes superfluous or repetitive information and I would have liked to hear more about what the captain and crew faced afterward. Overall, I found this book fascinating and highly recommend it to anyone interested in World War I, the history of man-made disasters, or stories of tragic events that bring out the best of human nature.

[sarahlh-41506 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This was an interesting book to read during COVID-19. It's a stark, richly detailed look at a horrible tragedy that ripped apart a community and city, and it is also the story of how human beings from all different walks of life came together in the aftermath to do the right thing and save lives. It is both heartbreaking and life affirming, and maybe it is also one of the stories the world really needs to read right now.

(It is also, FYI, a pretty thorough look at the explosion, including vivid descriptions of injuries and death, so be aware of that!)

When life was at its bleakest and bloodiest for Halifax during World War I, humanity showed its better nature and brought compassion and charity to those who needed it the most. May we all learn something from the Haligonians who saw their neighbors in need and selflessly did the right thing, day after day.

[othemts · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

As a Bostonian, we hear about the Great Halifax Explosion every year when the Province of Nova Scotia delivers a giant Christmas tree to Boston Common.  The annual gift symbolizes the gratitude they have for the people of Massachusetts being among the first to respond with relief after the devastating explosion of December 5, 1917.  Bacon's work is a comprehensive history of Halifax during the first World War, the explosion, and its aftermath. 

Bacon does a great job of finding the stories of the people who lived in the Richmond neighborhood of Halifax that was flattened by the blast.  Many of them had come to work in the port's bustling economy, and some served in the military in Europe. Bacon also breaks down the many errors that lead to French munitions ship SS Mont Blanc colliding with Norwegian charter ship SS Imo, many of them exacerbated by wartime conditions. For example, in peacetime a ship carrying explosives flew a red flag as a warning but this was discontinued as it made ships a target for German u-boats.

Bacon also tells stories of the day of the explosion for dozens of Haligonians.  Some of them contain graphic detail such as the man who survived by landing on something soft only to discover it was a pile of human corpses.  But Bacon chiefly recognizes the heroism and self-sacrifice of many individuals and groups who helped in relief efforts and performed small acts of kindness.  This includes the great support that came from the United States and Bacon marks this response as changing the relationship between the two countries from one of hostility to one of amity.  

The explosion remains to this day the largest human-made accidental blast in history.

[librarycin · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

On Dec. 5, 1917, two ships collided in the Halifax Harbour. One of them was loaded down with explosives, meant to head to Europe for the war effort. Instead, with the collision, a good chunk of Halifax and neighbouring Richmond were wiped out in an instant, along with a couple thousand (likely a low estimate) people, and more thousands injured.

This was very well researched. It does include some discussion of the war, and a soldier from Nova Scotia who ended up helping out after the disaster, as he was back home after being severely injured. Also includes a detailed account of the ships and crew involved in the collision, as well as tidbits of time of some of the civilians on shore who were affected (lost family members, lost homes, injuries...).

[hardlyhardy · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I first heard about the Halifax explosion during a visit to Halifax in the 1990s. Why, I wondered, had I never heard of it before? In the United States we knew about the Chicago fire, the San Franscisco earthquake and the Johnstown flood, but just a few miles up the coast from Boston was the largest manmade explosion in history until the Hiroshima A-bomb, and I had heard nothing about it.

The 100th anniversary of explosion in 2017 resulted in two books on the subject, one of them “The Great Halifax Explosion” by John U. Bacon. Reading Bacon's book makes me wonder even more how an explosion that leveled most of a city could be remembered by so few people south of the Canadian border.

Two major factors led to the explosion: the First World War and carelessness. The explosion might just as easily have blown away a big chunk of New York City, for that is where the ship, the Mont-Blanc, was filled to the brim with explosives and ignitors. Crew members were forbidden to smoke or even to carry matches. Even a sudden bump could have set off an explosion.

Yet the disaster, which now seems all but inevitable, didn't occur until the ship was entering Halifax harbor on Dec. 6, 1917. It was intended as the last stop before the Mont-Blanc headed for the war in Europe. Had it been peacetime there would have been no need for a ship to be full of explosives, but if it had been, that ship would have had a red flag to alert other ships to stay clear. But they didn't want to alert any submarines or saboteurs that might be hanging about. So the Mont-Blanc looked no different than any other ship entering Halifax's near-perfect harbor.

The problem was there was another ship, the Imo, going the other way in the wrong lane at excessive speed. Its captain expected the Mont-Blanc to get out of its way, but the Mont-Blanc's captain didn't want to risk a sudden shift of its dangerous cargo. This game of chicken led to the collision.

Surprisingly the explosion did not occur immediately, but there was an immediate fire. The crew of the Mont-Blanc, knowing the danger, abandoned ship and got as far away as possible. Most survived, though officers were held accountable afterward. Others in the harbor, including those aboard the Imo and those responsible for fighting fires in the harbor, moved in the opposite direction. Many people stood around the harbor to watch the ship burn.

The explosion killed nearly two thousand people and destroyed much of the city. Two days later a blizzard struck, burying the ruins under 16 inches of snow. Bacon is at his best detailing the extend of the damage to humans and to their property. Many survivors lost their eyes to the broken glass that flew at high speed from virtually every window in Halifax. Many children were left orphans; many parents were left childless.

Yet somehow over the century most Americans forgot about this disaster. The city of Halifax, however, has not forgotten the help they received from Americans at the time. Every December they still send the people of Boston a large Christmas tree to say thank you.

[whiskey3pa · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

6 million pounds of explosives loaded onto one ship with some avgas thrown on board to fill out the space. The careless way that this load was managed on nearly every level is boggling. The story of what happened to Halifax is impressive. A disaster of a fairly unique nature visited upon the city. This particular book does a serviceable job telling the story, but it is awkward at times.

[n.w.moors-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

On December 6, 1917, two ships, the Belgian supply ship Mont-Blanc and the Norwegian ship Imo collided in the harbor in Halifax, Nova Scotia. The resulting explosion was the most powerful manmade explosion on a human population excepting Nagasaki and Hiroshima, a force of 2.9 kilotons of TNT. Over 3,000 people lost their lives, and many more were wounded. Huge swathes of the city were flattened, reduced to rubble and burying survivors beneath the destruction.
Mr. Bacon's wonderful book was recommended to me by my two sisters and my brother-in-law (his grandfather Ernest Barss is one of the people mentioned in the book). It is an amazing story of resilience and courage as well as the willingness of many to help the survivors. Boston, Massachusetts sent trains and boats filled with supplies and personnel to help; as a result, Halifax has every year since sent a Christmas tree to be erected in that city.
A blizzard came in the day after the explosion and just made it even harder for the survivors and those trying to help them. It was a truly astounding event and I'm surprised how little I knew about it. The book mentions how cruise boats today will visit the cemetery where Titanic victims are buried, but nothing is told to them about the Halifax Explosion. That was certainly my experience several years ago when I visited that lovely city. But I guess this book gives me a reason to go back and visit with new eyes.
The author has a very comfortable writing style with a good eye for the small details that enhance the story. His narrative doesn't take away from the horror of the event but also addresses the acts of courage that took place. This is probably best exemplified by this quote from the book:
"Tragedy comes quick and loud, while the small acts of decency that follow come slowly and quietly."

[ewhatley_3 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I very seldom read non-fiction but I was not familiar with this incident and the book had such good reviews, I was anxious to read it. The story is told from the perspective of people who survived. It's written chronologically so it gives the prelude, the collision, the explosion and the aftermath of this horrific incident. The detail given of the moment of the explosion gave me chills. An excellent, well-written book.