World War II bombs destroyed a New Mexico town in 1944…

Now before you jump to conclusions and assume there was a secret Japanese or German bombing attack in New Mexico that you had never heard about before, read on.

I recently wrote about a town in New Mexico I’d never heard of before — Omega — whose location appeared on a national television show earlier this summer because of potential flooding. Well now I’ve come across another New Mexico town I’d never heard about before — Tolar.

Tolar was a stop on the Santa Fe Railway in eastern New Mexico west of Clovis. It had the misfortune of being literally blasted out of existence on Nov. 30, 1944 — not from a Nazi or Japanese bomber, but by a Santa Fe Railway train loaded with munitions, fuel oil, aircraft engines and other supplies for the American war effort in the Pacific. And fortunately, there was only one death reported in the blast.

The explosion was triggered by an overheated bearing (called a hot box) on the axle of a tank car carrying fuel oil. When the axle broke, 37 of the train’s cars derailed and a resulting fire from the hot box ignited the fuel oil. The burning fuel oil then spread to other cars on the train, including ones carrying 160 500-pound bombs (enough to load four B-29 bombers). The burning fuel triggered the bombs’ fuses.

The resulting explosion was immense. It could be heard as far away as Clovis and 60 miles away at Muleshoe in the Texas panhandle.

An axle from one of the cars smashed through the roof of the town’s only general store. A complete aircraft engine was found one mile away from the site of the explosion. Virtually all buildings in Tolar, including homes, the post office and depot, were leveled by the blast and multiple vehicles were destroyed. The one casualty, Jess Brown, was killed when a piece of shrapnel struck him in the head. His wife later received a financial settlement from the Santa Fe Railway for his accidental death. Many of the people who lived in the small town were likely saved that day because they had traveled out of the community of various errands.

A story about the blast was recently posted on You Tube by a person identifying himself as Lance Geiger, “The History Guy,” and suggested Tolar was “the only town in American to have been destroyed because of World War II.”

In my opinion, that statement is a bit of a stretch. However, an article by writer Alabam Sumner in the Dec. 1, 1944 edition of the Clovis News-Journal was a bit more reflective of the event.

“Indirectly bringing the war into our own front yards … the explosion on the Santa Fe tracks at Tolar Thursday gave folks a small idea of what the majority of the world’s nations are now undergoing as an outcome of this, the second world war,” Sumner wrote.

So concerned were military authorities that a couple of P-40 fighter planes from a nearby airfield in Fort Sumner were dispatched for a fly-over to investigate. A subsequent investigation by the FBI concluded that there was no sabotage to the train that caused the explosion, and that it was basically just an “industrial accident.”

According to a source on Wikipedia, news about the huge blast apparently influenced leaders working on the Manhattan Project, which developed the first atomic bomb at Los Alamos. The authorities concluded they could fool the public about the real reason for the huge explosion on July 16, 1945 in south central New Mexico by claiming it was an accidental detonation at a munitions dump near the Alamogordo air base.

In November of 2014, the New Mexico Department of Transportation erected a roadside sign at mile marker 244 on U.S. 60 commemorating the explosion. The location is about two miles east of what was the town of Tolar.

The final nail in the coffin of Tolar occurred in 1946 when its post office (apparently reconstructed after the original one was leveled in the blast) was closed.