Worse Than War: The Halifax Explosion

Steve Pitt is a Toronto-based freelance writer and an award-winning journalist. He has written many young adult and children's books, including Day of the Flying Fox: The True Story of World War II Pilot Charley Fox.

The Halifax Explosion, according to this book’s back-cover blurb, was
“the world’s most powerful man made explosion until the atomic
bomb.” It happened in Canada’s largest seaport, in 1917, and the
resulting human and material loss has never been equalled in this
country. The authors go to great lengths to explain how the two ships
that caused the explosion—the Imo and the Mont Blanc—came to collide
in the crowded harbor. Sutow’s text combines solid research with an
accessible style. She also includes dozens of well-chosen illustrations
to drive home the extent of the disaster.

This is a good “quick fact” book for a young reader seeking to
understand the immediate cause and effect of the Halifax Explosion. What
it lacks is any comparative analysis to help the same young reader
understand what such an event indicates about the world he or she lives
in today. The Halifax Explosion provided Canadians with a spectacular
but thankfully singular taste of modern warfare. The most powerful photo
in the book depicts 20 coffins awaiting burial in a snowy yard. The
caption merely reads “Unidentified dead,” but nine of those coffins
are child- and infant-sized. Apart from the old-fashioned clothes, it is
a scene right out of today’s newscasts—but Sutow fails to draw the
parallel. She also misses the fact that the explosion was an industrial
accident, not an act of war; thus, the Halifax Explosion has as much in
common with Chernobyl and Bhopal as it does with Hiroshima.

The same young people who read this book will likely remember 1991,
when Canadian ships once again sailed from Halifax harbor to wage war in
a distant land. They might also remember a train wreck, in December
1992, that forced a whole town in western Canada to spend its Christmas
in emergency shelters, as did the Haligonians of 1917. Sutow has written
an adequate history book; with a little imagination, it could have been
much more.