"The sound of the blast was unearthly, and the tremor was felt 100 miles away in Philadelphia. The night sky over New York Harbor turned orange. From Bayonne to Brooklyn and beyond, people were jolted from bed as windows shattered within a radius of 25 miles.
The Statue of Liberty, holding high its torch less than a mile from the epicenter, was damaged by a rain of red-hot shards of steel. On nearby Ellis Island, frightened immigrants were hastily evacuated to Manhattan.
Ground zero itself - a small island called Black Tom - all but disappeared, "as if an atomic bomb fell on it," says historian John Gomez.
It was 2:08 a.m. on Sunday, July 30, 1916, when what was then the largest explosion ever in the United States erupted. It destroyed an estimated 2,000 tons of munitions parked in freight cars and pierside barges, awaiting transfer to ships destined for Britain and ultimately, the World War I battlefields of France."
All of the evidence pointed to German saboteurs. Such destruction was never forgotten and indeed was used as one of the reasons to inter Japanese-Americans when the next World War came along. When I was a kid they were STILL finding tunnels dug by German spies during WWI, let alone II, and we'll never know how many naturalized Germans fought us from the cozy confines of our very own borders. Today of course it's quite different. Our enemies from within call themselves the Mainstream Media, and The Democratic Underground, so there's no claiming ignorance this time around.
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