New York Harbor and the Vicious Circle of the Winter of 1917–1918

Authors

  • Gerard Fitzgerald George Mason University, USA

Abstract

Beginning in December 1917, and continuing through late February 1918, New York Harbor, a key hub of logistical support for the Allied war effort on the Western Front during World War I, was paralyzed by a seemingly unending series of ice storms and blizzards. The unique design of the harbor, and the problematic interface between rail traffic and the loading of goods on board merchant vessels through barges and lighters combined into a meteorological and environmental disaster until the storm front finally ceased. Military-environmental analysis of this event provides a new understanding of the war effort in the United States.

Author Biography

Gerard Fitzgerald, George Mason University, USA

Gerard J. Fitzgerald, PhD, is a visiting scholar in the Department of History and Art History at George Mason University. This essay comes from his larger book project, The Nature of War: An Environmental History of Industrialization in the United States During World War I, 1898–1920. He largely researched this article at the Linda Hall Library in Kansas City, Missouri, where he was a fellow in 2018. He recently published “The Chemist’s War: Edgewood Arsenal, the First World War, and the Birth of a Militarized Environment,” in Environmental Histories of the First World War, edited by Richard P. Tucker et al. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018.)

Boats in an ice-filled New York harbor.

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Published

2020-04-30

Issue

2020

Section

Spring

License

Copyright (c) 2020 CC BY 4.0 Gerard Fitzgerald

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.