Port Chicago

On July 17, 1944, one of the biggest disasters in naval history occurred in California at a place called Port Chicago. Now why they would name a place in California “Port Chicago,” is a matter of speculation. It could be that they just didn’t want to name it after a place in California where it was located… or did they intentionally name it after one of the largest population centers of African Americans in the United States? I mean was it just a coincidence that the majority of people stationed there were African Americans? Well I ain’t going to get into that because I have run out of high blood pressure medicine and I don’t feel like playing they mind games today. Lets just accept that they didn’t name it after the estuary, Suisun Bay, where it was located and try to refrain from the name calling… like so and so.. Anywho, as I said it was the site of one of the biggest naval disaster in American history and resulted in the deaths of over 200 black sailors and injured another 250. The scale of the accident was such that the total number of people killed at Port Chicago represented 15% of all African Americans killed during all of WWII! So what happened there that resulted in that many people’s deaths? It exploded. Port Chicago was a Navy Munitions Depot…

I Gotta Do What!!!

So the African American enlisted men who ranked in the top 30% of naval testing were given non labor positions like administrative and clerical assignments The rest were treated as field (you know the word). The year was 1944 and the service was no different from the civilian population in terms of racism. There were just as many racist white officers as there were racist in the civilian population. Anyway, these were the men who were assigned duty at Port Chicago. Their test scores averaged 31 which was at the bottom 12 percent of all those tested and their job was to load the ships with munitions that were bound for the Pacific theatre of war.
White Officer (WO): “Boy take that box of hand grenades and climb up there and stack it on top of them 20 crates of torpedo’s and dynamite… here.. take this rabbit foot and tie it around yo neck… aww what the hell… here… take the whole rabbit…. but wait until after I leave…”
Okay I am exaggerating, but it was no question that the white officers viewed their men as nothing short of slave labor. We will get into that aspect a little later. Neither the men nor their officers had any formal training in the handling of munitions and explosives. A lot of their loading of this dangerous material involved the use of mechanical devices such as cranes and pulleys. These machines were often in disrepair and when they broke down they would use substitute parts instead of using original parts to fix them.
Sailor: Suh, we are not going to be able to get them pallets of TNT loaded in the hold tonight because the pulley is broken.
WO: “By gawd boy, Ima need you to take yo belt off and tie it to that pulley and get my TNT loaded! you probably won’t need yo belt anyways… now I can’t find my box of rabbit feets… but here’s a picture of the last supper… get that TNT loaded!! … I’ll be right back!”
Yep… anywho, there was a reason that they wanted those munitions loaded at any cost and as fast as possible… but it had nothing to due with the war in the Pacific.

No They Didn’t…

Junior WO: “You know something Lieutenant, I sent one of them boys to fetch me a newspaper all the way on the other side of the base and he got there and back in only ten minutes.”
Other WO: “Outstanding!! Did you smile and give him a atta boy?”
WO: “No… I gave him 500 pushups because he bought me back a Jet Magazine with a picture of Jack Johnson riding in a Cadillac with a white woman on the cover… anyways I got an idea…”
And from that moment on the fate of many hundreds had been decided. You see his idea was to bet on who’s company could load the explosives the fastest. Yep, not only were the men expected to use broken down to equipment with little training, but in addition they would have to load that material in competition with one another. The men were aware that the junior officers were betting betting on the hundred men crews and were told to slow down when a senior officer walked by. Normally the men were expected to load around 4 tons of munitions per hour, but under the junior officers scheme, they were loading up to 8 tons per hour. At this frantic pace, it was decided that the men should be given a little training and a couple of formal classes were planned and when I say a little training.. I mean a little…
WO: “Have a seat men… This is a picture of a Super Duper X10 Annihilator 300lb Whirlwind Class A Destroyer Torpedo.. if you drop it, every watermelon and Popeyes within a fifty miles will be blown to bits!!… Dismissed!!” So yeah it wasn’t much training and the men were not tested to see if they retained the information. On the night of July 17, 1944 it all came to a head… someone dropped it.
So besides the Super Duper bomb and the other thousands of tons of munitions and explosives that were in port, a ship called the E A Bryan was docked there. It was carrying over 5000 barrels of  heavy fuel oil for its intended trip across the Pacific to the war zone. After four days of around the clock loading, an additional 4500 tons of explosives had been loaded into its cargo hold… and even then it was only 40 percent full. The night of the explosion, the ship was further loaded with cluster bombs that had their fuzes installed. Before we go on, some of you might think that I may have misspelled the word fuzes, but it is spelled with a “z” when you are talking about explosives and not with a “s”. Anywho… not only did they load those cluster bombs on that ship, but they also loaded a boxcar full of Mark 47 Anti- submarine depth charges each loaded with 252 pounds of torpex. Now if you even sneeze at torpex, you can count on the fact that five seconds later you’ll be standing the Upper Room… well some pieces of you will be standing there… that stuff was nothing to play with. Oh yeah.. one more thing.. on the docks there were 16 more rail cars that held 340 tons of explosives and a ship that although was not loaded with explosives, had a partial load of fuel oil that witnesses say was letting off the smell of a flammable gas. Anywho.. all told there was around 2000 tons of explosives just on the pier the night of the explosion, not counting what was already loaded on the ships. At 10:18pm witnesses say they heard what sounded like a crane falling. A few seconds later they heard a deafening explosion as the explosives on the E A Bryan detonated followed by the explosives on the pier. An Army Air Forces pilot flying in the area reported that the fireball was 3 miles in diameter. That’s a little less than half the size of Washington DC. Put another way… just the fireball would have extended from the Capitol, pass the White House.. and into Foggy Bottom. We are not even talking about the blast radius which would have caused severe damage to Georgetown. Going from north to south, just the fireball would have been large enough to extend from the White House to the Veterans Hospital on North Capitol Street, with the blast radius reaching farther still. Folks this was a huge explosion!! All 320 men on duty at the pier died instantly with two thirds being African American.

Fool Me Once…

The inquiry could not pin down an exact cause of the explosion, although it was mutually agreed that it was probably human error. The remaining soldiers were sent to other locations while the cleanup went on. So this is where part two of the story begins. After the cleanup, the men were sent back to base to resume loading the explosives aboard ships bound for the war in the Pacific and that’s when the fight started. This episode of the Port Chicago Explosion is known as the “Port Chicago Mutiny.” They refuse orders to resume loading the ships under the same circumstances that brought about the explosion. The story goes like this. The men were called to attention outside their barracks and formed a line. The officer in charged marched them up the street and at the corner gave the order to turn left, but instead of turning left half of the men stopped and refused to go any further. Turning left meant that they were heading to the docks. Now if you know anything about the service, you know that disobeying an order was a very serious matter. It was even more serious if you was a black service man refusing to obey an order given to you by a white officer.. cause now you done gone and did sumpin!!
WO: “Boy did you hear me!! I said column LEFT!!”
Black Sailor: “No suh..”
WO: “N-word are you refusing a dee-reck order!! Boy I’ll have y’all shot if I don’t see 98 asses walking toward dem docks in the next 2 seconds!!” (About 17 sailors continued to the docks after the officer threatened them. The rest stood firm.)
Black Sailor: Suh, I’d rather be in a lions den and jump out a turkey’s azz drenched in Sweet Rays BBQ sauce.. rather than go back down there…
Of course that wasn’t going to stand like that. The rest of the men were immediately arrested and sent to the brig. Sometime later they were assembled and addressed by an Admiral Wright who told them:
“Men I know you scared cause there ain’t nothing down on them docks left of dem boys but burnt up Afro combs and Popeye chicken buckets… but I’m here to tell you it’s a lot more safer down there on them docks loading explosives than it is in front of a firing squad…”
Okay he didn’t say anything about afro combs and chicken buckets… but he did say it was safer than being in front of a firing squad. Yep he was right though.. you see disobeying a direct order in times of war was a crime punishable by death. Well when you put it that way… that got some of the people to thinking. About half of the men agreed to obey the order to load explosives on the docks. They were separated from the other men and escorted to the docks. The remaining men were sent back to the brig to face court martial for disobeying a direct order in time of war. There were fifty of them.

The Port Chicago 50

The exact charge was.. “Making a mutiny “with a deliberate purpose and intent to override superior military authority”. Mutiny in time of war was a hanging offense or in their case meant facing a firing squad. So the trial focused on two things.. One was if the officers had given the men a direct order and two was it a conspiracy. It had to be a conspiracy to be a mutiny. The answer to these question was yes and no… You see if an officer comes up to a group of men and say’s, ” Men I want you to charge up that hill into that machine gun fire and throw these coconuts at the enemy,” well that’s not really a direct order. Its normally not questioned and each man assumes it is a direct order, but if a man says “You must be out of your $###@!! mind.. I’m not going up there with no coconut!!,” well then the officer can say, “I’m giving you a direct order soldier!! Grab a coconut and go up that %$$#!! hill!!” That’s what makes the difference between a general order and a direct order. So there is that and then the mutiny charge.. so basically the mutiny charge is like the lynching charge. In order for a person to be charged with a lynching, there has to be two or more people. Although there were 50 men accused of mutiny, you have to prove they conspired with each other. That was a hard thing to do, although they tried. During the court martial it was revealed that the prosecutors tried to sway some of the men into testifying that they collaborated while in the brig, on the promise that the charges would be dropped against them and they would be set free. Now these men were indeed born one day, but it wasn’t yesterday. There was nothing that prevented the prosecutors from going back on their word once the court martial was complete and lining the traitors up with the other men in front of a firing squad… and two even if the men were sent back to duty, they would have to face the wrath of the other African American soldiers, some of whom carried the longest razor blades you ever saw. You didn’t think they was going to put them with the white soldiers did you? Them boys would have been found in back of some black honky tonk with their pants pull down and a pair of womens panties near them… with witnesses saying… probably shot by some jealous husband.. they heard a bang and then saw somebody drive off into the dark of the night… end of story. Anyway they all were convicted and sentenced to 15 years of hard labor.

Can You Help A Brother Out Thurgood

Jailer: Boy.. you gonna be in here with me for 15 long years… and when I leave and go home.. well boy every darkie that’s disrespectful to me.. Ima take it out on you… like yesterday when one looked me right in the eyeball… that’s gonna come down on you today boy… now I want you to crawl on yo hands and knees to the middle of the yard… and if I even see a shadow.. you going to spend the next 10 days in it all the way up to yo scrawny liddle black neck…!!! Now Git!!
Black Sailor: Lawd he got me.. he got me real good… he holding them… and he said he ain’t gonna let them go for 15 years.. Lawd I just wanna….
Jailer: Did you say sumpin boy? GET TO CRAWLIN!!!
Yep it was going to be a hard 15 years for them men.. save for one thing, or should I say person, Thurgood Marshall. During and after the conviction Marshall went to work setting up a number of press conferences. As a member of the NAACP he was allowed to sit in on the proceeding but could not take an official role in the military trial. After hearing a few of the men defend themselves and speaking with their defense counsel, he let the nation know that these men were being tried for mutiny instead of individual insubordination, which did not carry the death penalty. He then began asking questions about their working conditions and saying that the judge overseeing the case was prejudiced. He also pointed out that the 50 men who were being court martialed had not been significantly different from the other men who refused to load ammunition. Those men were just shipped off to other duties. (We are going to come back to these men in a bit.) Anywho, after the conviction Marshall got each of the convicted mens permission to take their grievances to Washington and to the Secretary of the Navy, James Forrestal. Thurgood hit him with.. “Why were only blacks assigned the task of loading munitions, why they had they not been trained for that task, why they were forced to compete for speed, why were they were not given survivor’s leaves, and why they had not been allowed to rise in rank.” Forrestal gave Marshall the two step and Marshall then wrote one of “those articles”in the widely read “Crisis,” magazine. Blacks and whites read the NAACP’s Crisis magazine. I mean that article was so hot they had to dunk the magazine in water before they sold it you. He tore Forrestal’s ask me no question UP!! The court was reconvened by order of the Naval Secretary, but the verdict remained the same.. 15 hard years. There was one difference in the second trial, but it made for all the difference.

Thank You Lawd.

The difference in the second trial was that the Navy said the convictions were a deterrent for others who would engage in disobeying an order during war time. After the surrender of Japan and the cessation of hostilities, the Navy was no longer able to justify such severe sentences as a warning to other potentially dissident servicemen and labor battalions. In September 1945, the Navy shortened each of the men’s sentences by one year. A month later Captain Harold Stassen 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. Finally, on January 6, 1946, the Navy announced that 47 of the 50 men were being released. These 47 were paroled to active duty aboard Navy vessels in the Pacific Theater, where the men were assigned menial duties associated with post-war base detail. After their tours had ended the 47 men were given a General Discharges, under honorable conditions. Remember the men that eventually caved in and were escorted off the field to be assigned other duties after talking to the Admiral? Each of those men were given a bad conduct discharge which meant the loss of all their veterans’ benefits. So that’s the story of Port Chicago. I hope you enjoyed it and will come back for more from Hill1News.

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