The Captain Who Stayed on the Burning Ship

At about 8:00 on the morning of Wednesday, 16 April 1947, longshoremen unloading the French Liberty ship SS Grandcamp at Pier O in Texas City, Texas, noticed smoke coming from the No. 4 hold. The hold contained, on top of a mixed cargo of farm machinery and binder twine, approximately 2,300 tons of ammonium nitrate fertilizer in paper bags, en route to French farmers reconstructing post-war agriculture.

The longshoremen reported the smoke. The ship’s chief officer, Henry Baumgartner, ordered the hold opened to investigate. When the hatch came off, a cloud of orange-yellow smoke rose into the morning air. The chief officer ordered a jug of water; the water made no difference. He ordered seawater pumped in from the ship’s fire hoses; the order was overruled by Captain Charles de Guillebon, who reasoned that flooding the hold with seawater would ruin not just the burning bags but the entire shipment. De Guillebon ordered the hatch closed, the cargo’s surface covered with tarpaulins, and steam piped in from the boilers to smother the fire.

The Texas City Volunteer Fire Department arrived at the dock at 8:30. They added their hoses to the steam line. By 9:00 the fire had been burning for at least an hour and possibly two; the smoke was now thick and acrid; the steel of the upper deck was visibly buckling from the heat below; and the entire dock area, including the railroad cars on the adjacent siding, had become hot to the touch.

The Grandcamp exploded at 9:12 a.m.

The blast was heard 240 kilometers away in Port Arthur. The pressure wave knocked down houses three kilometers inland in Galveston, on the other side of the bay. A column of smoke rose 600 meters. A 2-ton anchor was thrown 2 kilometers and embedded itself in a parking lot. The pier and everyone on it ceased to exist. The entire dock was lifted bodily out of the water and dropped back as wreckage. The Monsanto chemical plant adjacent to the pier was flattened, killing 145 of its 450 employees instantly. A small Cessna airplane, flying over the harbor at the moment of the explosion to take pictures of the burning ship, was thrown out of the sky.

Captain de Guillebon was on the bridge of his ship when it exploded. So was every other officer.

What was in the hold

Ammonium nitrate fertilizer is now understood to be one of the most dangerous bulk cargoes in industrial use. It is mildly explosive on its own; if heated, it becomes catastrophically explosive; if heated in confinement, it produces blast effects comparable to military high explosives. The same chemical compound was used in the World War II bombing-decoy programs in England, in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, in the 2013 West Texas fertilizer plant explosion, and in the 2020 Beirut port explosion that killed 218 people.

In April 1947 this was not yet common knowledge. The ammonium nitrate aboard the Grandcamp was a US-manufactured wartime grade, produced for explosives use during the war and reformulated, somewhat carelessly, for fertilizer use after the war. The reformulation involved coating each grain with about 0.75 percent petroleum-based wax to prevent the granules from clumping. Wax is flammable. The bags were paper. The hold was unventilated.

Nobody — not the dockworkers, not the captain, not the Coast Guard observer who looked into the hold at 8:30 and reported “an orange glow,” not the fire chief who arrived at 8:45 with hand pumps and pickaxes — understood what they were standing on. The Texas City fire chief, Henry J. Baumgartner (a different Baumgartner from the chief officer aboard the ship), died at 9:12 with his hand on a fire hose.

What followed

The Grandcamp’s explosion ignited a second ship at the next pier, the SS High Flyer, which contained 961 tons of ammonium nitrate and 2,000 tons of sulfur. The High Flyer’s crew abandoned ship immediately; tugboats tried to tow her out of the harbor but failed; she burned for sixteen hours and exploded at 1:10 a.m. on Thursday, 17 April, with a blast comparable to the first. The second explosion caused additional damage but few additional casualties, because most of the surviving population of the area had already evacuated.

The final death toll, established by the Coast Guard board of inquiry six months later, was 581. Of these:

• 27 were members of the Texas City Volunteer Fire Department, out of a total department strength of 28. The single survivor was a firefighter who had been off-shift that morning.
• 145 were employees of the Monsanto chemical plant.
• 32 were crewmembers of the Grandcamp, including Captain de Guillebon and all his officers.
• 7 were schoolchildren killed when the windows of Danforth Elementary School, half a kilometer from the dock, blew in.
• The remainder were dockworkers, longshoremen, civilian observers, residents of the housing district adjacent to the docks, and unidentified visitors. Approximately 100 of the dead were never identified, their bodies either unrecognizable or never recovered. They are interred together in a mass grave at Texas City Memorial Park, under a single granite slab.

It remains the deadliest industrial accident in United States history. The combined explosion was, until the Trinity test of July 1945 and the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the largest non-nuclear blast on US soil. Compared with the Halifax explosion of 1917 — which was about three to four times as powerful — Texas City killed slightly fewer people, partly because the city was smaller and partly because Halifax’s blast wave traveled in a single hemispherical pulse while Texas City’s energy was, due to the geometry of the pier, partly absorbed by the water.

The captain

Charles de Guillebon was 47, a French naval reserve officer turned merchant captain, the son of a Breton seafaring family. He had been captain of the Grandcamp for less than a year. He was married, with three children, in Brest. His body was never recovered. There is a memorial to him in the cemetery of his parish in Plogonnec, Finistère, but the grave is symbolic. His wife wore mourning until her own death in 1973.

His decision not to flood the hold has been argued about by ship-safety historians for seventy years. The flooding would almost certainly have stopped the explosion; it would also have ruined the cargo, contaminated the harbor, and damaged his ship. He chose to fight the fire. He stayed on the bridge to direct the firefighting. He died at his post.

The Texas City memorial, a wall of bronze plaques at the foot of the old Pier O site, lists the dead alphabetically. De Guillebon is between “Demarest, R.” and “DeWalt, J.” His listing reads simply: Charles de Guillebon, Master, SS Grandcamp, of France, 47.

His ship’s anchor is still where it landed on 16 April 1947. The parking lot it embedded itself in is now a small park, with a low concrete fence around the anchor and a plaque. The plaque does not mention that the parking lot was, on the morning of the explosion, full of cars. The owners of the cars came back later. The cars were gone.