Chad Millman talks about his new book, Detonators: The Secret Plot to Destroy America and An Epic Hunt for Justice, about a 1916 terrorist attack in New York City with eerie parallels
An explosion that rocked lower Manhattan. Foreign terrorists. An American government that hadn’t connected the dots. 9/11? No, a different, long-forgotten incident that took place 90 years ago. In his new book Detonators: The Secret Plot to Destroy America and An Epic Hunt for Justice (Little, Brown), Chad Millman, 35, a senior editor at ESPN The Magazine, tells the gripping saga of foreign espionage on American soil in the days before World War I. Millman, who has also written two sports books, talked with TIME’s publishing reporter, Andrea Sachs:
This book is really off the sports beat. How did you come to write it?
I was tooling around the Internet, looking for ideas. I was on one of those on-this-date-in-history websites. I got up to July 30, 1916, and it was: "Terrorist Attack in New York Harbor Destroys Most of Downtown Manhattan." And I'm like, "Are you kidding me?" I hadn't heard anything about it.
So what happened on that date?
German saboteurs blew up the largest munitions depot in the country, which was housed in New York Harbor on a spit of land called Black Tom Island. The explosion was so big that it destroyed buildings all the way up to 42nd Street in Manhattan. It leveled almost all of Jersey City. It completely obliterated just about every boat and piece of land that was within a three-mile radius of it. As far away as Maryland, they thought they were having an earthquake, because the ground was shaking.
Why this particular maneuver?
All of these munitions were going to the British and French on the front lines. Those were the munitions that were killing the Germans. The Germans didn't have the money to buy these things, so they had to blow them up. That's how they were trying to win the war from this side.
Were there people killed?
Yes, six bodies were found. And there were countless people unaccounted for, because there were so many immigrants living in barges on the harbor.
What was the country's response to this?
That summer, President Wilson was campaigning vigorously for reelection, and his stump speech was, "I kept the country out of war.' There had been events leading up to this; there had been other explosions at munitions depots throughout the country. There had been reports in the two years leading up to the explosion that there were German spies planning to blow things up, and attack from within. Wilson just tried to ignore it for as long as he could. His response was, I want it to go away, because I want to run for office as a peaceful man. And then within a year of the election, we were at war. ...
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This book is really off the sports beat. How did you come to write it?
I was tooling around the Internet, looking for ideas. I was on one of those on-this-date-in-history websites. I got up to July 30, 1916, and it was: "Terrorist Attack in New York Harbor Destroys Most of Downtown Manhattan." And I'm like, "Are you kidding me?" I hadn't heard anything about it.
So what happened on that date?
German saboteurs blew up the largest munitions depot in the country, which was housed in New York Harbor on a spit of land called Black Tom Island. The explosion was so big that it destroyed buildings all the way up to 42nd Street in Manhattan. It leveled almost all of Jersey City. It completely obliterated just about every boat and piece of land that was within a three-mile radius of it. As far away as Maryland, they thought they were having an earthquake, because the ground was shaking.
Why this particular maneuver?
All of these munitions were going to the British and French on the front lines. Those were the munitions that were killing the Germans. The Germans didn't have the money to buy these things, so they had to blow them up. That's how they were trying to win the war from this side.
Were there people killed?
Yes, six bodies were found. And there were countless people unaccounted for, because there were so many immigrants living in barges on the harbor.
What was the country's response to this?
That summer, President Wilson was campaigning vigorously for reelection, and his stump speech was, "I kept the country out of war.' There had been events leading up to this; there had been other explosions at munitions depots throughout the country. There had been reports in the two years leading up to the explosion that there were German spies planning to blow things up, and attack from within. Wilson just tried to ignore it for as long as he could. His response was, I want it to go away, because I want to run for office as a peaceful man. And then within a year of the election, we were at war. ...