The Great Halifax Explosion

by John U. Bacon

  We do know why Ernest decided to become a doctor. Having taken part in both fighting and healing, Barss chose to spend the rest of his life practicing the latter.

  He threw a few things into a trunk and moved to Ann Arbor in 1919, sight unseen, where he took classes from 8:00 in the morning to 6:00 at night every weekday, and from 8:00 to 12:00 on Saturdays, just to qualify for medical school. He confessed to his aunt, “I felt pretty discouraged for a while but things are coming a little easier now and I hope to get through ok in everything.”

  On February 16, 1920, while Barss was working on his science prerequisites, and still trying to figure out how he would pay for it all, Uncle Andrew died, leaving Ernest the considerable sum of $10,000, or $128,000 in 2017 dollars, at a time when public university tuition cost a fraction of what it does today. His uncle’s final gift was his future.

  Barss knew he would lose his hard-earned progress relearning to walk if he quit pushing himself, so he made himself visit Michigan’s rudimentary skating rink, a building with three sides, to limp his way around the ice. He also sang in the First Congregational Church under the leadership of Lloyd C. Douglas, who would go on to write The Robe, which sold 2 million copies and became a movie starring Richard Burton.

  He was becoming a new man, with a new mission and a new name: Joe, because that’s what his professors read off roll call. We don’t know what happened to the loyal Eileen, but we do know that during his first semester at Michigan’s medical school, in the fall of 1920, he went on a blind double date that “neither of us wanted to go on,” recalled Helen Kolb, a Michigan undergraduate from Battle Creek. “But we had a wonderful time. I never thought anything serious would come of this date, as Joe had so far to go to become a doctor.”

  When Barss and a classmate, Bob Breakey, picked up their dates the next day to go to a football game, Barss brought Helen two big mums and a box of Whitman’s chocolates. The man seemed to have a plan, and “worked very hard to be invited to my home for Christmas,” she recalled. Although they both had other offers for the holiday, Barss won the invitation from her and dropped his others.

  Shortly after that invitation, Barss asked Helen to marry him. She said yes, but asked him to keep it between them until February, “so that if either of us wanted to get out of the deal, no one would be hurt.” Further, if Barss’s professors found out he was getting married, which med school students were forbidden to do, he could be expelled.

  “My father liked Joe & asked if he were a Republican or a Democrat,” Helen wrote. “He said he was a Canadian and voted for the man—Father said ‘If you ever live here and have anything or hope to have anything, you’ll be a Republican in self defense.’ ”

  Helen’s father also worried about relations between Canada and the United States and how they might affect their future. Their plans grew more complicated when Helen’s father and Joe’s mother both died during their engagement, which raised the question: should they move to Battle Creek to take care of her mother, or Nova Scotia to take care of his father? Either would require one of them to live in another country.

  They solved the problem by both becoming naturalized as dual citizens. If anything demonstrated the distance the two nations had traveled since the Halifax Explosion, it was the simple, small decision of Joseph Ernest Barss to become an American citizen, something he could not have conceived when he joined the British forces in 1915, grumbling about the Americans sitting it out.

  Because of the medical school’s strict rule against students marrying, one of Barss’s classmates had gotten married secretly and had to live in the intern quarters while his wife roomed with four women in town to keep it quiet. The administrators nonetheless made an exception for Barss due to his unusual maturity. The couple wed in 1922 and had a son, Joseph Andrew, in 1923, and a daughter, Elizabeth, in 1927.

  Even while Barss was busy starting a family and finishing his medical education in peaceful Ann Arbor, he was still occasionally haunted by the Great War. Like most veterans who’d seen combat, Barss was a stoic man who rarely talked of the epic battles in which he had fought. But early in their marriage, Helen was startled to discover that this otherwise poised man would get choked up whenever he heard bagpipes, as it was bagpipers who led his unit into the trenches and back out, with the soldiers carrying the writhing victims of shells, gas, and bayonets behind them. Helen noticed he would drop to the ground whenever he heard a whistle or a loud bang, a survival instinct he had learned in the awful days when enemy shells were dropping all around him.

  Through the steady support of his family, his friends, and his own strong spirit, Barss was gradually able to let his memories of war recede and the simple pleasures of civilian life to take their place.

  According to the box scores of Michigan’s “informal team,” Barss officiated many of the club’s hockey games in 1922. Perhaps it was his desire to return to a normal lifestyle and have some fun again that motivated him to find time in his already overburdened schedule for such a trivial pursuit. It’s easy to imagine the lightheartedness Barss must have felt as he became reacquainted with the happiness a hockey game could bring. And having gotten a taste, he wanted more.

  To get more, however, Michigan needed a varsity ice hockey program—something the club players had asked for and been denied three times over the previous decade. When the Great War broke out, Michigan sponsored only five varsity teams: baseball, football, track, tennis, and basketball.

  Barss paid a visit to Michigan’s legendary football coach and athletic director, Fielding Yost, to ask if he could start a varsity hockey team. Yost, a native of West Virginia, didn’t know much about hockey, but he knew a good coach when he saw one. Yost agreed, on one condition: Barss had to become the program’s first coach.

  Barss consented, but that required permission from the medical school, because the professors knew the academic burden of a medical school student was more than most could handle. Once again, the medical school made an exception for Barss, which meant he had to “rush home from classes, eat dinner, have a taxi waiting, go to the rink and coach, return by a little after nine and study for the next day’s classes until midnight,” Helen recalled. Because the rink lacked artificial ice—or a fourth wall—the team was at the mercy of the weather. “The tin roof [on the rink] caused him some trouble because we had to live by the weather report and temperature.”

  Barss attached a thermometer outside their bedroom window, which Helen Barss checked every morning. If it was too warm to skate on the Coliseum’s outdoor rink, she simply rolled over and let her young husband steal a golden hour of sleep until he had to wake up for class. But if it was cold enough for the team to practice, Helen would stir her bone-tired husband out of bed to get him to the rink on time. After everything he’d seen in France and Halifax, however, Barss was not likely to complain about a little fatigue.

  Barss retired after the 1927 season, his fifth, with a 26–21–4 record (.553), two league titles, and a degree from the University of Michigan School of Medicine. Dr. Barss moved his young family to Riverside, Illinois, where he eventually became chief of surgery at the Hines Veterans Hospital in Chicago before setting up a private practice in Oak Park, Illinois, Ernest Hemingway’s hometown. The Michigan hockey program he started has since won an NCAA record nine national titles.

  “He sure gave me a good upbringing, in terms of character and honesty,” Barss’s son said. “He was absolutely true-blue. He was very aware of what was right and what was wrong. My dad was a helluva guy.”

  In 1966, at age 74, Dr. Barss took his wife, Helen, his son, and his grandson Joe back to Nova Scotia. In Wolfville, he showed them where he had learned to skate, where he went to college, and where he sold Victory Bonds. “I remember him saying the only things that had really changed in Wolfville were a new supermarket and paved streets,” his grandson Joe recalls. In Halifax, he showed them where he had recuperated, where Mont-Blanc had blown up, and where he’d helped victims at Camp Hill Hospital
.

  But he didn’t tell them how he had left Acadia University a confident young man with no sense of purpose, returned from the Great War a broken man searching for one, and went to Halifax for three long days, where he found it.

  Chapter 43

  The Lasting Impact

  The great Halifax explosion set in motion ripples we still feel today, including advances in international relations, medicine, and weaponry.

  While the disaster and the Americans’ response to it created no formal policy between the two nations, any talk of Americans annexing Canada stopped after the explosion. The benevolent approach of Massachusetts Governor McCall toward Canada was carried on by his lieutenant governor, a man named Calvin Coolidge, when he became president. U.S. presidents and Canadian Prime Ministers have maintained close relations ever since, with only minor trade disputes marring an otherwise perfect record of cooperation and respect, demonstrated by the world’s longest undefended border.

  The enduring peace between them has been mutually beneficial, too. Although the United States entered World War II two years after Canada did, they fought side by side for four years, including storming the beaches at Normandy together—a product not just of the Americans’ help after the Halifax Explosion but of the year and a half they spent fighting the Great War together.

  If you asked the average American who their nation’s biggest trading partner is, you might hear China, Japan, Germany, or Mexico. But the correct answer is Canada, by a long shot, and for many years.

  One of the first Boston doctors to arrive in Halifax after the blast, Dr. William E. Ladd, headed a Boston Red Cross contingent of twenty-two doctors, sixty-nine nurses, and fourteen civilians, plus enough equipment and supplies to set up a temporary 560-bed hospital at Saint Mary’s College. They stayed for almost a month, not leaving until January 5, 1918. Before they did, the views of the Red Cross on disaster relief and Dr. Ladd’s on medicine had changed significantly. The Red Cross decided to specialize in disaster response, while Dr. Ladd’s experience working with burned children in Halifax sparked insights into pediatric surgery.

  Upon Dr. Ladd’s return to Boston, the Boston Children’s Hospital designated two beds for his practice. From this modest beginning, Dr. Ladd built North America’s preeminent pediatric surgery ward. Dr. Ladd’s pioneering work is credited with elevating pediatric surgery as a separate discipline in the Western Hemisphere. When Dr. Ladd died in 1967, at eighty-six, he was considered the father of pediatric surgery, and still is.

  In 1924, Canada’s legislature decided the nation should stop driving on the left side of the street just because the British did. This simple change helped promote trade and tourism with the Americans. The pitch was straightforward: “We drive your way. Come North to Eat, Drink, and Drive.”

  It worked on Babe Ruth, who loved going to Nova Scotia to hunt, fish, drink, drive—and more. In 1919, the former Red Sox star pitcher became the New York Yankees’ star hitter, drawing so many fans that Yankee Stadium, “the House that Ruth Built,” was constructed to accommodate them.

  The Canadian identity continued to develop, but slowly. In the 1920s, Canada opened official diplomatic relations with the United States, and replaced the Union Jack with its own Red Ensign, which featured the Union Jack in the corner. In 1946, Canadian children like my mother assembled in their school gyms to hear their principals tell them that, as of that day, they were no longer British subjects but Canadian citizens, with their own passports. In 1965, Canada officially adopted its own flag, the Maple Leaf, which was actually intended only as a rudimentary prototype but has served Canada for more than half a century. Finally, in 1982, Canada received its full independence from the United Kingdom, which had continued to make laws for Canada until then.

  Since 1917, there have been two constants: an unquestioned, mutually beneficial peace between the United States and Canada, and Canadians’ insistence that they’re not Americans. How do you tell the difference between a Canadian and an American? You say there is none, and watch the American nod, while the Canadian objects, albeit politely.

  Halifax’s identity has also evolved, and largely for the better. While it has never regained its status as Canada’s preeminent city, it has secured its niche as Canada’s East Coast gem, the Atlantic’s answer to Vancouver. In 1995, Halifax hosted the G-7 Summit, and in 2003, the World Junior Hockey Championship—a major event in every hockey-playing country but the United States.

  The local economy is still dependent on shipping and tourism. Halifax remains the largest naval base in Canada, home to some twenty warships and three submarines, with a new, $30 billion contract to build more. Dozens of cruise ships visit the harbor each year, many of them carrying American southerners following the path of Zachary Taylor Wood. They find the old seaside town just as charming as he did.

  Instead of drifting back into another long sleepwalk, Halifax has been accelerating, spending $11.5 million in 1955 to build its first bridge across the channel, another $31 million to build the second, right over the Narrows, and another $207 million in 2015 to raise the first bridge a few meters so container ships could get all the way to a dock in Bedford Basin. The city has spent $350 million to build a boardwalk along the bay and $57 million for a shiny new library downtown, an architectural centerpiece CNN judged to be the ninth most beautiful library in the world.

  If anything, Halifax is moving too quickly to hold on to its unique history. The harbor is still home to the HMCS Arcadia, which survived the explosion, the Great War, and World War II, but in 1965, city leaders decided to bulldoze Africville, leaving a park today. “Not our shining moment,” one resident told me. Four years later, a ship carrying thirty-two Volvos arrived so badly damaged by the trip that the company decided to dump them into Bedford Basin, where all thirty-two remain on the bottom, lined up as if parked in an underwater lot.

  Almost no one calls the North Halifax neighborhood “Richmond” anymore, much to the chagrin of Halifax’s older citizens, but historians are trying to bring it back. Most refer to it as “the North End,” one of Halifax’s most desirable addresses, which now features a cute little street of markets in the middle, with cafés and restaurants named Morsels, Hamachi, and, yes, Starbucks.

  The neighborhood can now boast a street named Vincent, for Vincent Coleman, who also has a building named after him. In 1985, a moving monument to the explosion, its victims, and its heroes was erected on top of Fort Needham Memorial Park, with a bell and a sightline that runs right down the street to the former location of Pier 6. But, rather incredibly, in 2007, the Halifax government permitted Irving Oil, long the most powerful corporation in the Maritimes, to build a ship-manufacturing facility directly on top of ground zero, so when you look from Fort Needham straight down Richmond street now, you see a gigantic white metal building with the Irving logo on the side.

  To an outsider, this smacks not only of a soulless erasing of that monumental event but an economically ill-advised one. Purely out of fiscal self-interest, it would seem to make sense for the city to build the Irving plant elsewhere and preserve one of its most important tourist destinations—a compelling reason for the 4,000 tourists who disgorge from each of those cruise ships twice a day to head to North Halifax to learn about one of the most remarkable days in the history of North America. Instead, the tourists head to the Fairview Cemetery to see the gravestones of Titanic victims, to the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic to see its display of Titanic artifacts, and to the re-creation of Titanic’s grand staircase in the casino next door—skipping past the explosion casualties in the cemetery, the excellent displays about the disaster in the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic, and ground zero itself, which is now marked by the Irving colossus.

  The passage of time naturally dulls memories, obscuring events that were vivid to our parents and grandparents. The Great War has been pushed aside by World War II, the Halifax Explosion has been eclipsed by Hiroshima, and 9/11 seems to obscure everything that came before it. This
is not only to be expected but is in many ways healthy. To maintain a slavish devotion to the past is not merely morbid but also counterproductive, something the survivors themselves realized when it came time to focus on their futures. But it’s still surprising that the Halifax schools, which used to devote a full month to the subject, have whittled that down to a few days. For their part, few Americans have heard of the explosion.

  We generally spend far more time dwelling on disasters than on triumphs, on villains than on heroes. But we’d be wise not to let the example of Halifax fade so far into the past, or we’d be denying ourselves one of the greatest expressions of humanity at its finest. If it’s true that our character is revealed when we think no one is watching, then December 1917 provides a monthlong case study of a people who passed that test in a thousand different ways—a ringing display of the better angels of our nature.

  If the Halifax Explosion’s legacy has been largely neglected by the local government and schools, let alone the world at large, its spirit can be found in the wake of 9/11, when the FAA grounded all planes for a week, and Canadians welcomed 10,000 stranded passengers from forty-two planes in Gander, Newfoundland. And it can still be found among those dedicated souls who have worked to keep the memory of Halifax alive, lest these tragic victims die twice.

  In 1996, author Blair Beed was giving a tour of Halifax, with emphasis on the explosion. One of his guests, Henry Handly, was ninety-five years old. Late in the tour, the alert but quiet man finally spoke up, telling Beed that he had been a sixteen-year-old boy in Salem, Massachusetts, when Mont-Blanc blew up. He remembered venturing out with his Boy Scout troop to collect money and supplies for the relief of Halifax.

  Seventy-nine years later, he fulfilled his dream of visiting the city he helped save.