My father was a World War II veteran, qualifying me as a baby boomer. Coming of age in the 1970s, WW II didn’t seem all that far back in my rearview mirror, especially since my father shared his war stories with us.
I’m fascinated by documentaries on the Second World War, especially those about Adolph Hitler’s rise to power and how he managed to brainwash an entire country. What Hitler did to Jews during the Holocaust is one of history’s greatest tragedies. Sadly, there are plenty of tragedies associated with the war. One in particular recently grabbed my attention, simply because I was not aware of it until now.
The U.S. Navy’s Port Chicago ammunition depot was located about 40 miles northeast of San Francisco. There, Black sailors who’d been trained for combat roles were instead assigned to loading munitions ships. They worked in segregated units under the supervision of white officers who placed bets on teams of munitions loaders — on who could load the most bombs the fastest.
The sailors worked grueling shifts around the clock, loading hundreds of tons of bombs and shells from railroad box cars onto Navy ships bound for the South Pacific. Bombs needing to be loaded were wedged so snugly into the boxcars that it took Herculean effort to loosen and “safely” load them. But, apparently, the Navy didn’t place much emphasis on safety, not when it came to the Black sailors. The longshore union had warned the Navy that a catastrophe was inevitable. They were right.
Just past 10 p.m. on July 17, 1944, the San Francisco Bay area was rocked by two massive explosions spaced only seconds apart. Those who lived nearby thought they were experiencing another San Francisco earthquake. Sailors, asleep in their barracks, were startled awake, believing it was a repeat of Pearl Harbor, a surprise Japanese attack. But on that summer night, there was no earthquake, no enemy attack.
It was the largest manmade explosion in history to date, killing 320 men, including 202 Black sailors. Two ships, the SS Quinault Victory and SS E.A. Bryan, were fully loaded with their payload of bombs when the explosions took place. The force was so powerful that the Quinault Victory was lifted out of the water and spun around before being shattered into pieces. Only fragments of the second ship remained.
In the explosion’s aftermath, white officers were given hardship leaves. Black survivors, meanwhile, were ordered to clean up the decimated base, which included the remains of fellow sailors — men they’d known or who’d been their friends. Only 51 barely recognizable bodies were recovered. The explosions were the worst home front disaster of World War II.
The search for survivors quickly turned into one of recovery. One sailor, Freddie Meeks, who participated in the gruesome effort, described the horrors he witnessed. He spoke of filling baskets with human body parts, as the smell of charred human flesh lingered in the air.
Black sailors at Port Chicago had, on numerous occasions, voiced their safety concerns to higher-ups in the Navy. In the 1940s, it should not surprise that the segregation that permeated American society carried over into the military. Segregated from white sailors, Blacks were assigned the dangerous task of handling tons of explosives on a daily basis. They were provided no specialized training. It was just a job to be done.
Black sailors learned to operate much of the machinery involved in loading the bombs by watching the white soldiers, who had been properly trained. Working in their segregated units, under the order and supervision of white officers, they described themselves as working on what felt like a “chain gang,” “mule team” or “slave outfit.”
Alarmed by their dangerous working conditions, Black sailors wrote to a local attorney warning of the decline in morale among the men: “We, the Negro sailors of the Naval Enlisted Barracks of Port Chicago, California, are waiting for a new deal. Will we wait in vain?” It appears they did.
Less than a week after the explosion, the Navy’s investigation of the tragedy began. Over the course of the month-long investigation, 125 witnesses were called; among them were only five Black witnesses. Blame was deflected from the Navy’s own prioritization of output over safety and instead was focused on the Black enlisted sailors. Of course the Black sailors who died at Port Chicago could not defend themselves.
Most of the Black sailors who survived the explosions were transferred to the Naval barracks in Vallejo, California. There, they would be assigned duty, once again, loading ships with bombs under the direction of some of the same officers they’d taken orders from at Port Chicago. When the day came for them to begin performing the same jobs loading bombs and again, without proper safety instruction, the majority of them refused to report for duty. They were warned of severe penalties for their refusal to return to work. Two-hundred-fifty Black soldiers were imprisoned on a barge and held under guard for three days.
While held in detention, the sailors remained cooperative and avoided getting into trouble with the guards. They viewed their protest as a work stoppage but the Navy called it mutiny. The Black sailors, though, saw mutiny as a crime that would have had to take place onboard a ship, on the high seas. Their assumptions would prove costly.
Marched from the ship under armed guard to a baseball field, the sailors were told by Admiral Carleton Wright, in no uncertain terms, “I want to remind you that mutinous conduct in the time of war carries a death sentence. The hazards of facing a firing squad are far greater than the hazards of handling ammunition.”
Wright’s observation is gasp-inducing. Less than a month earlier, these sailors had witnessed hundreds of their fellow seamen, their friends, literally blown to bits. Two hundred of the sailors, torn between duty and their desire to live, returned to loading the ammunition. Fifty others did not. They came to be known as the Port Chicago 50. Charged with conspiring to create a mutiny, they were locked up, interrogated, and faced lengthy prison sentences, or even execution.
After a military trial, the Port Chicago 50 were convicted and sentenced to 15 years in prison. Appeals by the NAACP and then first lady Eleanor Roosevelt were unsuccessful. Not until after the war were they released for time served and reassigned to duty.
President Harry Truman’s 1948 executive order desegregating the military had its roots in what happened at Port Chicago, and the subsequent punishment of the Black sailors involved. In the early 1990s, Congress took another look at the case and, in 1994, created the Port Chicago Naval Magazine Memorial, which is now part of the National Park System.
Freddie Meeks, besides having taken part in retrieving the remains of his fellow seamen back in 1944, was one of the last surviving members of the Port Chicago 50. Unjustly ashamed, he’d kept his imprisonment for “mutiny” secret from even his own children. Meeks returned for the dedication of the memorial in 1994. It was his first time there since the explosion and, according to his son, it was “a very emotional time for him.”
Meeks was pardoned by President Bill Clinton a full 55 years after being court-martialed for refusing to work following the cataclysmic explosion at Port Chicago.
Meeks’ son said President Clinton couldn’t possibly have understood, when he signed the pardon, what it meant for his father. “You could see the emotional state he was in — the tears — after it was granted. It was more than just a piece of paper exonerating him.”
Freddie Meeks of the Port Chicago 50 died in 2003 at age 83. Never forget.
Elijah Jones is a proud Hattiesburg native who enjoys writing. Email him at edjhubtown@aol.com.
