INDIA: Fire in Bombay

The disaster in Bombay began April 14 with two shattering explosions in the harbor. Next evening Japanese-controlled Radio Saigon broadcast a detailed, running account. Not until last week did British-Indian censors permit correspondents to send the story. It was still news.

Disaster arrived in an 8,000-ton, Canadian-built Liberty ship. Swarms of dockers began unloading her cargo of scrap metal, timber, 708 bales of cotton, $4,293,500 in gold bullion, 300 tons of high explosive (TNT, amatol) in little black canisters. Fire interrupted their work.

“Abandon Ship.” The fire started among the cotton bales. But the fire grew. At 4 p.m. the smoke suddenly changed from brown to milky white and a shaft of orange flame shot high into the air. The ship’s bridge melted, her crazed masts toppled overside. The fire brigade chief ordered “abandon ship,” swiftly followed his men onto the dock. At 4:07 the first explosion came.

A 4,000-ton ship moored near by jumped onto a wharf. Another tossed her anchor into her neighbor’s rigging. Everything on the dock, including seven fire engines, disappeared. A mile away a householder saw every window in his home shatter at once, found a 28-lb. gold -bar (worth $27,700) on his veranda. An officer staggered, blackened and bleeding, into the Taj Mahal Hotel muttering, “the air—full of arms and legs and heads —horrible—horrible!”

Number Two. Fires sprang up everywhere. Smoke turned the afternoon into night. Police, firemen, troops poured in to fight fire and panic. Just 30 minutes after the first explosion, a second created still more havoc. Fire threatened to engulf a city of 1,500,000. U.S., British, Indian troops fought flames for five days. As they rushed from one danger spot to another, the Americans sang Deep in the Heart of Texas. Sappers demolished hundreds of buildings to check the fire.

At the end, the official count stood: 360 dead, 1,815 injured. Floating bits of human bodies dotted the harbor; the real toll may never be known. At least 50,000 were homeless. Insurance claims were $150,000,000, kept climbing.

Probable cause: spontaneous combustion. There was no sign of sabotage.