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One of the (many) things that troubled me about the book was its sub-title: "A World War One Story of Treachery, Tragedy and Extraordinary Heroism".
Most of that is right ... but where is the treachery? That's a pretty strong word to use without good cause. While people initially and understandably thought that Germans might have been to blame, Bacon doesn't pursue this, so unless he thinks the members of the crew of the Mont Blanc were displaying treachery (which they were not, given that it means a deliberate act of betrayal or sabotage), such a dramatic word is completely inappropriate. It's one of the reasons I referred earlier to the book as tabloid journalism.
Janet Kitz however does give some interesting information which suggests at least a possibility of a deliberate act of sabotage by the helmsman of the Imo, even involving the murder of the captain and the pilot in order to carry this out.
However, it was never properly investigated, and one question would have to be how the very limited knowledge of the Mont Blanc's cargo could have been known, unless that knowledge was relayed from New York.
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