Halifax Explosion - Investigation

Investigation

Many people in Halifax at first believed the explosion to be a German attack. Even after, during rescue efforts, that fear still existed. Blackout laws were rigidly applied, hampering some efforts.

The newspaper Halifax Herald was noteworthy in continuing to propagate this belief for some time, for example reporting that Germans had mocked victims of the Explosion. When Johan Johansen, the Norwegian helmsman of the Imo, sought treatment at the American relief hospital for his injuries, doctors confined him and reported to the police that he was German and behaving suspiciously. Johansen was arrested and a search turned up a letter on his person, supposedly written in German, proving him a spy. Later it turned out that the letter was actually written in Norwegian. Most of the German survivors in Halifax were rounded up and imprisoned. Eventually the fear dissipated as the real cause of the explosion became known, although the suspicion that Johansen had something to do with the explosion persisted for some time.

A judicial inquiry into the collision began at the Halifax Court House within days of the explosion. The Inquiry's report in January 1918 blamed Mont-Blanc's captain, Aimé Le Medec; pilot Francis Mackey; and Frederick Wyatt, the Royal Canadian Navy officer in charge of harbour movements, for navigational errors that led to the explosion. Following the Inquiry, all three were charged with manslaughter. However the charges against Le Medec and Mackey were deemed excessive and dropped, leaving only Wyatt to face a trial where he was acquitted by the jury. A subsequent appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada in May 1919 determined that Mont-Blanc and Imo were equally to blame for errors that led to the collision.