The Kingsland (NJ) Explosion and Fire - Prelude
The Canadian Car and Foundry Company was based in Montreal, Canada and in early 1915 the company signed a contract with Russia for $83,000,000 to supply artillery shells for the Russian army. Because they didn’t have enough capacity at their Canadian plants for this contract and all their other war work, the company built an assembly plant in Kingsland, (now Lyndhurst) New Jersey.
The plant opened in the spring of 1916 and by early 1917 had 38 buildings on the site, all surrounded by a six-foot high chain-link fence topped with barbed wire. All the employees entered and exited the plant through a single gate and searches were common. Explosives, shell casings, shell warheads, and fuses were shipped to the plant and assembled there and ultimately loaded on transports in New York harbor and shipped to Russia. By 1917 the plant could produce upwards of 3,000,000 shells per month.
Because of the security at the plant, Hinsch and Herrmann (two German spies based in Baltimore; they were also believed to be involved in the Black Tom Island explosion the previous summer) decided they needed operatives inside the plant itself. Hinsch had met a man named Carl Thummel, a German national who had emigrated to the United States in 1902. Using the name Charles Thorne, he had joined the U.S. Coast Guard in 1913; shortly after that he met Hinsch in Baltimore and they became friends. Thorne resigned from the Coast Guard in May 1916 and Hinsch began using him as a courier, sending him back and forth to England several times during the summer of 1916. In September 1916, Paul Hilken (head of the German spy network in Baltimore) arranged for Thorne to get a job as an assistant employment manager at the Canadian Car & Foundry plant in Kingsland. Thorne was responsible for hiring men who would be assembling shells and hired a number of men sent to him by Hinsch.
One of these men was Theodore Wozniak, an Austrian national. Wozniak was hired in December 1916. He met regularly with Fred Herrmann who was paying him for information on the Kingsland plant. Herrmann also gave Wozniak several pencil bombs. (chemical explosives hidden inside cast iron pipes with a copper plug between them. The thickness of the plug acted as a timer for the acid on one side. When the acid finally ate through the plug, the bomb would ignite.)
Wozniak’s job in Building 30 of the plant was to clean out newly arrived shell casings. The cleaning was a multi-step process, involving wiping out the shell casing, cleaning a coating of grease applied to the casing before shipping using rags soaked in gasoline and denatured alcohol, and then drying off the shell casings. There were forty-eight benches lined up side-by-side in Building 30 and the gasoline soaked rags piled up during a workers shift. Hermann and Wozniak continued to meet regularly through December 1916 and into January 1917 (to be continued).
