The Town That Died: The True Story of the Greatest Man-Made Explosion Before Hiroshima--A Chronicle of the Halifax Disaster

by Michael J. Bird

Book Overview

A fact filled account of the greatest disaster to befall a Canadian city. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0770060153
• ISBN13: 9780770060152
• Release Date: January 1967
• Publisher: McGraw-Hill Ryerson
• Length: 192 Pages
• Weight: 0.61 lbs.

Customer Reviews

"Looks like the end of the whole bloody world, don't it?"

The Town That Died was first published in 1962 and covered the explosion of the French freighter Mont Blanc on December 6, 1917 that nearly obliterated the Canadian town of Halifax. The Mont Blanc was a "floating munitions dump" carrying an incredibly large amount of explosive material to aid the allied armies during the First World War. The freighter collided with the Norwegian ship Imo on their way through the Narrows (a mile long, 500-yard wide channel connecting Bedford Basin with Halifax Harbor). The Mont Blanc caught fire and within 20 minutes or so (the book is not specific on this point) the ship blew up in, what the Michael Bird states in his book's subtitle, "the world's greatest man-made explosion before Hiroshima." Bird uses many primary sources including interviews, journals, and letters from survivors as well as those involved at the harbor and in rescue efforts including official reports of naval lieutenants and records of the investigation that followed. Bird follows the events of December 6, 1917 and its aftermath through the eyes of several survivors including a young woman who worked at a nearby factory, a junior at the nearby naval college, and a girl who would lose her entire family as well as her father, who was not in Halifax at the time, who presumed she had died with the others. Sometimes, especially at the beginning, Bird skips very abruptly to each of the stories which makes it a little difficult to follow at times, but the stories become more familiar towards the end. Bird does an excellent job detailing the events that took place on the Mont Blanc and the Imo right up to and immediately following the collision. Bird also gives a vivid description of the explosion itself with information on how rocks from the seabed were scooped up and hurled down and that a ½ ton shank from an anchor was flung two miles, how earth tremors caused church bells to swing sixty miles away, and "the enormous, mutated mushroom" that appeared foreshadowing another tremendous explosion nearly thirty years later. The human images of the tragedy are also very moving, especially the horrible sight the factory worker encountered when she saw a soldier who lost the center of his mouth and both eyes with one dangling down from his empty eye socket and tapping against his cheek (p. 122). The book is 187 pages organized into nine chapters and a very brief epilogue. My copy has three sections of b & w photos. The first three chapters cover the events leading up to the collision, chapter 4 details the collision itself, chapter 5 covers the explosion, chapter six is made up almost entirely of reports from lieutenants on rescue efforts followed by brief background information provided by the author, while chapter 7 continues the stories of the survivors and includes a letter written the day after the explosion. An interview in the Halifax Herald with a naval officer, who was in San Francisco during the 1906 earthquake, giving advice on how to de