At precisely 10:18 pm on July 17,
1944 an Army Air Force pilot flying at 9,000 feet saw pieces of white hot metal, some as large as a house, fly straight up past him. The plane was not flying over a war zone. It was cruising
above the San Francisco Bay area
directly above Port Chicago on the southern
banks of Suisun Bay. The plane
and its crew narrowly avoided becoming additional casualties in the worst
domestic loss of
life and property in America during
World War II. Below them a pier with two ships, a railroad locomotive, and more than 350 men—80% of them Black U.S. Navy ammunition loaders were
virtually vaporized in an explosion equal to the power of 2,000 tons of TNT—the equivalent of a small atomic weapon.
Port Chicago, about 30 miles north
of San Francisco, was a busy place. To keep up with munitions demand in the Pacific
Theater, it was developed into a munitions facility when the Naval
Ammunition Depot at Mare Island
could not fully supply the war effort. By the summer of 1944, expansion of the Port Chicago facility
allowed for loading two ships at once around the clock.
Locomotives brought trainloads of munitions—everything
from small arms ammunition, to Naval ordinance, to aircraft bombs of all sizes—to the dockside, each box car crammed to capacity with explosives. The trains waited on sidings separated by concrete blast walls for safety until
they were ready to roll onto the pier. There were berths
for two cargo ships, one on each side.
The box cars were unloaded by hand by all-Black gangs of ammunition loaders under the direct supervision
of Black petty officers and largely inexperienced white junior officers. Separate
gangs worked transferring the munitions to the two docked ships, hoisted aboard in cargo nets
by winch and crane. Loading operations
continued in shifts around the clock. It
took an average of four days labor to
fill each ship, but with more
ships in the bay awaiting a berth, the men were driven to speed up operations both by aggressive
petty officers and by offers of rewards in speed loading
competition. Corners were cut.
The use of exclusively Black labor
gangs for ammunition loading and other dangerous and unpleasant duties was a product of a culture of rigid segregation in the
Navy. Historically Blacks had
served in all enlisted capacities
and on shipboard from the birth of the Navy through World
War I. In some eras, particularly under
sail, they often represent up to 25%
of personnel on some ships. Then Jim
Crow went to sea. In the ‘20’s Blacks were limited to duties as cooks, messmates, and stewards. Old time seamen were “allowed” to remain until retirement, but in fact most were forced out before that by hostile officers and crews. Then attempts were made to replace even the cooks and stewards
with Filipinos.
After Pearl Harbor the enormous
manpower needs of the Navy made it
reluctantly return to recruiting Blacks. They used Ships Cook Dorie Miller who won
the Navy Cross for manning a machine gun against attacking
Japanese planes that day as a poster
boy for recruitment in Black
neighborhoods. But except for mess duty and servile functions, they were still generally restricted from sea duty and confined to general service ashore in segregated units under white officers.
The Navy had a system for sorting sailors by fitness ratings
based on intelligence tests, education, physical fitness, psychological
evaluation, age, and discipline records. Blacks assigned duty as ammunition
handlers were drawn from a pool of the bottom 60% of recruits and The Navy’s General
Classification Test (GCT)
results for the enlisted men at Port Chicago averaged 31, putting them in the lowest twelfth of the Navy. Supervising petty officers there also had
below average ratings on average because the best and most effective ones were quickly transferred to other duties. The Navy would later use the excuse that this
“substandard” force was incompetent and irresponsible. Even if true, it begs the question of why the Navy enforced a system that purposefully selected
just such men for the dangerous duty.
On the day of the explosion two
ships were docked. The Liberty ship, SS E.A. Bryan, after four
days of loading, had about 4,600 tons of ammunition and explosives on board,
about 40% of its capacity. A gang with men 98 was loading her. On the
other side of the dock the Victory ship SS
Quinault Victory preparing its maiden
voyage was being rigged to receive cargo by a 102 man gang,
but one which was made up largely of new and inexperienced men.
The Bryan already had on board or being loaded 1,000-pound bombs in No. 3
hold, 40 mm shells in No. 5 hold and fragmentation cluster bombs in No.
4 hold, 650 lb. Incendiary bombs— with live fuses installed—were
being loaded carefully one at a time into No.
1 hold—a hold with a winch brake
that had recently been inoperative and may still have been so. A boxcar delivery containing a new airborne anti-submarine depth charge,
the Mark 47 armed with 252 lbs. of torpex explosives, was being loaded
into No. 2 hold. The torpex charges
were more sensitive than TNT
to external shock and container dents.
Also, on the dock were on three parallel rail spurs,
were a steam locomotive and sixteen rail cars holding about 430 short tons of explosives.
In addition to the loading crews a
total of 67 officers and crew of the
two ships were at their stations,
and various support personnel were
present including the three-man civilian
train crew and a Marine sentry,
nine supervising Navy officers, and 29 armed guards watched over the
procedure. A Coast Guard fire barge
with a crew of five was also docked
at the pier.
Several
ships and boats stood near-by in the
harbor and the port facilities teemed with other men on duty even this late at night.
At shortly after 10:15 witnesses ashore recalled hearing a “metallic sound and rending timbers, such as made by a falling boom.” That was
followed by an explosion on the pier
and a flash fire. Five to seven seconds later a huge explosion engulfed the pier. From an enormous
fireball rose a mushroom shaped cloud that eventually
reached 30,000 feet. The shock wave leveled buildings near the
pier and sent a mini-tidal wave 30 feet high rolling across the bay. Concussion
from the blast shattered windows in a radius of several miles and it could be felt in
San Francisco. Seismographs at the University of California at Berkeley
recorded the two shock waves traveling through the ground, determining the second, larger event to be equivalent
to an earthquake measuring 3.4 on the Richter Scale.
Shrapnel-like
debris was scattered over a wide area
and more that had been blasted high into the air including large burning parts,
continued to fall for some time. Every boat and ship in the harbor sustained some damage as did most of the buildings of the port.
The E. A. Bryan was virtually
vaporized. Very little of its wreckage was ever found indicating that the explosion centered on or next to her. The Quinalt
Victory was lifted clear out of the water by the blast, turned around and broken into pieces and the largest piece which remained was a 65-foot section of the keel, its propeller attached, which protruded
from the bay at low tide, 1,000 feet from its
original position. The 12 ton locomotive on the pier was also
atomized.
All 320 of the men on duty at the pier died instantly, and 390
civilians and military personnel were injured, many seriously. Among the dead were all five Coast Guard
personnel posted aboard the fire barge. Blacks accounted 202 dead and 233 injured, which was 15% of all African-American naval casualties during World War II.
Survivors
ashore, many of them injured themselves and including men from other loading gangs, rushed
to the pier where they struggled to
contain the fire and then
began the grim search for bodies. There were none to be found, at least intact. One of the Black searchers later recalled:
I was there the next morning. We went back to the dock. Man,
it was awful; that was a sight. You’d see a shoe with a foot in it, and then
you’d remember how you’d joked about who was gonna be the first one out of the
hold. You’d see a head floating across the water—just the head—or an arm.
Bodies... just awful.
200 Back sailors volunteered to remain at the base and help
with the clean-up operation. The rest, at least those not hospitalized,
but including many wounded, were temporarily
transferred elsewhere.
Given the total devastation and lack of surviving witnesses, a Navy investigation could
never determine an
exact cause of the disaster,
although the possibility of a faulty boom on the Bryan was suspected by some.
So was careless handling by
the loaders. Investigators dismissed the possibility that poor training and leadership, speed-ups, and the notorious speed
loading contests could have contributed.
The Navy asked Congress to give each victim’s family $5,000. Representative John E. Rankin (D-Mississippi)
insisted the amount be reduced to $2,000 when he learned most
of the dead were Black.
By August the surviving Port Chicago
ammunition loaders, augmented by new and largely untrained recruits, were transferred to the large Mares Island facility. Because of embarrassing publicity, a new
system was put in place of rotating between segregated Black and white gangs for around-the-clock loading
duty. On August 8 when men from the Port
Chicago unit were ordered to the USS Sangay with naval mines and other munitions 328 men said they were afraid and that they would not load munitions under the same officers and
conditions as before. The mass
work stoppage would have been called
a strike if the workers had been civilians.
But the Navy had another word for it—mutiny.
After refusing for two days 258 men were arrested and confined to a brig barge designed to
accommodate 75. On August 11 they
were marched to a field where they
were lectured on their duty by Admiral Carleton H. Wright, who threatened them with execution by firing squad for mutiny in time of war. The men were told to separate themselves into groups—those who would promise
to obey orders, and those who would
not. Led by Seaman First Class Joseph Randolph “Joe” Small a group of 44 refused
to obey every order. They were marched back to the brig. The next day six more sailors refused to report to duty and were also arrested.
During August all 258 men—those who
agreed to obey future orders and those who refused—were closely interrogated by Navy officers in an attempt to discover the “ring leaders.” Many men were coerced into signing statements drafted by the officers that did not correspond to their actual accounts. Others
refused to sign anything. All 250
were brought before court martial and convicted of disobeying orders. They suffered three months loss of pay, reduction in
rank where applicable, and those not held as witnesses or defendants in the upcoming mutiny trial were split into smaller groups and shipped out to various places in the Pacific
Theater where they were assigned to
menial duties like policing
cigarette butts at island bases. When they concluded their tours, they were all given bad conduct discharges which precluded them from ever receiving
veterans’ benefits.
The fate of the so-called Port Chicago 50 was worse.
A court martial trial for mutiny and conspiracy to disobey
orders began at the Marine base at
Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay on September 14. All 50 men pled not guilty. A lengthy and acrimonious trial
attracted national attention. Thurgood
Marshall, Chief Counsel for the National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People (NAACP), sat in on the proceedings, interviewed
the defendants, and consulted with defense lawyers. In well
publicized press conferences, he insisted
that the men had been improperly charged with mutiny and
conspiracy when at most each might be
guilty of individual
insubordination, and then broadly
attacked the Navy’s system of segregated job assignments and the shoddy training and safety procedures of the service.
On October 24, Admiral Osterhaus and the other
six members of the court deliberated for 80 minutes and found all 50 defendants
guilty of mutiny. Each man
was reduced in rank to Seaman Apprentice and sentenced to 15 years of hard labor
to be followed by dishonorable discharge.
The men were held under guard while
their sentences were passed to Admiral Wright for review. On November 15,
Wright reduced the sentences for 40 of the men: 24
were given 12 years, 11 were
given 10 years and the five youngest sailors were given eight-year sentences. The full 15-year sentences remained in place
for ten of the men including Joe
Small and another alleged “ringleader” Ollie
Green. In late November, the 50 men
were transferred to the Federal
Correctional Institution on Terminal
Island in San Pedro Bay near the
Port of Los Angeles.
The convictions and harsh sentences caused an uproar in the Black community. Naval enlistments plummeted. Marshall and the NAACP planed a massive public campaign in support of an appeal effort. Petitions began to circulate,
collecting thousands of names of citizens who demanded a reversal of the mutiny verdict. Protest
meetings were held and powerful
people in sympathy to the cause were asked
to bring pressure to bear, not the least of who was Eleanor
Roosevelt who sent Navy Secretary
James Forrestal a copy of NAACPs Mutiny pamphlet in April 1945,
asking him to take special care in this case. The Secretary ordered Admiral Wright to reconvene the court martial with instructions to disregard the hearsay testimony. Admiral Osterhaus once again called the court
to session for deliberation and on June 12 the court reaffirmed each of the
mutiny convictions and sentences. Admiral Wright stuck by his reduced
sentences.
After the
War
ended in August, the Navy Department reduced
each man’s sentence by one year. This did
not appease continued public outcry. In an October report to the Secretary, Captain
Harold Stassen, future Governor of
Minnesota and perennial Republican
presidential candidate, recommended that the Navy reduce the sentences to just
two years for men with good conduct
records and three years for the rest,
with credit for time served.
Ob January 6, 1946 the Navy
announced that 47 of the 50 men were
being released. They were paroled
to active duty aboard Navy vessels in the Pacific Theater, where the
men were assigned menial duties associated
with post-war base details. Two of the 50 prisoners remained in the prison hospital for additional months recuperating from injuries, and one was not released because of a bad conduct record.
But the bitter after taste lingered. The Navy suffered
a string of embarrassing incidents caused by its segregationist policies and poor
treatment of Black sailors. It finally
pushed the Navy into reluctantly ending segregation in units and by assignment. It took well into the post-war
years, before the new policy was fully
implemented.
As for Port Chicago, it was rebuilt and returned to service. Atomic
weapons were shipped from there for post-war testing in the South Pacific. It shipped tons of munitions to Korea, Vietnam,
Persian Gulf, Iraq, and Afghanistan Wars. Since the
Vietnam War the railroad lines leading
to the docks have been the frequent
site of protests and civil disobedience. In response the Navy has annexed much of the City of Port Chicago and built a virtual fortress with high walls that severed a major coastal highway.
And, if you are ever allowed to visit, somewhere near ground zero of the explosion is the Port Chicago Naval Magazine National Memorial was dedicated in 1994 to the lives lost in the explosion.
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