“Second-Class Citizens Fighting in a First-Class War”: The Deadly Munitions Explosion and Its Immediate Aftershocks

 

The Naval Ammunition Depot at Port Chicago, California—located 36 miles from San Francisco—was the site where munitions bound for the Pacific Theater arrived by train from Hawthorne, Nevada. The location was ideal as it was remote, sparsely populated, served by two railway lines, and far from industrial activities. Upon arrival at Port Chicago, munitions bound for the Pacific remained in boxcars protected by concrete barriers before moving on to the pier where stevedores, dockworkers tasked primarily with loading and unloading cargo from ships, loaded them into seagoing vessels.[2] The ammunition depot, oftentimes called the Port Chicago Naval Magazine, was never intended for “storage, supply, manufacturing, inspection, or repair.” The primary responsibility of the facility was the facilitation of cargo transfer from loaded railway cars to ships or barges.[3]
 
The personnel detail tasked with stevedoring consisted of loading divisions of approximately 100 men. Likely to reduce personnel congestion on the pier, these divisions were subdivided into five platoons with each platoon loading one storage hatch. These platoons divided further into squads under the supervision of a petty officer or “leading man.” The physical transfer of munitions required one squad of stevedores to take the cargo out of the boxcars, place it under the ship’s booms, hoist it on board the ship, and stow the cargo in the holds. Each division had designated checkers, winch men, hatch tenders, and carpenter’s mates for dunnage. Details lasted eight hours with a one-hour break for meals for three consecutive days. After three days, they had a day of barracks’ duty. In short, stevedores at Port Chicago loaded cargo for six of eight days. On average, ordnance battalions achieved an average loading rate of 16,400 pounds per hatch per hour.[4]
 

On 17 July 1944, the Liberty Ship SS E. A. Bryan was moored to the inland side of a pier parallel to the shoreline of Suisun Bay with a second Victory Ship, SS Quinault Victory, occupied the other side of the same pier. That night, ninety-eight enlisted men were loading E. A. Bryan with MK-7 incendiary cluster munitions, 550-lb. depth (torpex) charges, 100-lb MK-4 fragmentation clusters, and 40-mm and 20-mm ammunition (Tables 1 and 2). Of the 429 tons of cargo on the pier that night, over 150 tons contained incendiaries or explosives.
 
Table 1. Boxcar Tonnage Spotted for E. A. Bryan

M-7 Incendiary Clusters	2  30-ton cars, about 1 empty	30 tons
MK-47 (350-lb.60 Bombs	2  97-ton cars, half unloaded	51 tons
M-4 (100-lb.) Fragmentation Clusters	2  93-ton cars, half unloaded	43 tons
20-mm Shells	1 car	50 tons
40-mm Shells		2 tons
TOTAL		176 Tons

 
Table 2. Boxcar Tonnage Spotted for Quinault Victory

MK-33 (1000-lb.) Bombs	2 cars	106 tons
MK-65 (1000-lb.) Bombs	2 cars	88 tons
5”/38 A.A.C. Projectiles	1 car	59 tons
TOTAL		253 tons

“Factual Detail Prior to Explosion” in Records of Proceedings of a Court of Inquiry Convened at the U.S. Naval Magazine, Port Chicago, California, 21 July 1944, RG 181: Records of Navy Installations Command, Navy Regions, Naval Districts, and Shore Establishments, 12th Naval District Commandant’s Office, General Correspondence Series, National Archives and Records Administration, San Bruno, CA [reprinted on the NHHC’s website].
 
Loading divisions of primarily Black stevedores worked around the clock, rotating on and off duty every eight hours. As a transit site, not a storage site, the ammunition depot was active twenty-four hours a day.[5] According to the Navy’s investigation report, division officers regularly complained that the loading rate set by the commanding officer—“10 tons per hatch per hour”—was “too high.” Ordnance battalions, nevertheless, averaged an impressive 8.2 tons per hatch per hour.[6] In a personal written reminiscence, Seaman First Class Joseph Randolph Small confirmed that Lieutenant Ernest Delucchi, the commander of Division Four in Barracks B, “had to prove he could get maximum work out of a crew of black sailors under impossible conditions” in order “to get his gold bars.”[7]
 
To achieve the ten tons-per-hatch per hour loading quota set by Captain Merrill T. Kinne, the commanding officer of the Port Chicago Naval Ammunition Depot, loading officers likely prioritized speed and efficiency over safety. According to historian Robert L. Allen, these junior officers were further motivated by illicit monetary gain, as they wagered among themselves over which division would load the most cargo by the end of any given shift. The enlisted stevedores were aware of these bets and knew when to speed up or reduce their loading speeds if and when a senior officer appeared.[8] Small described any given workday with “the shavetail louies [newly-minted lieutenants] always underfoot, the inspectors always yelling to show their authority, the bombs bouncing off the hull of the ship as they rolled down the ramp from the boxcar door across the dock, stopped short of falling into the bay by the ship onto which they would eventually be loaded. And most of all the race. We were always in competition to see which division could load the most ammunition in one eight-hour shift.”[9] The final report from the investigation of the explosion cited “the constantly expanding activities of the Naval Ammunition depot” at Port Chicago “were hampered until very recently by a lack of trained officers.” Many, the report continued, “learned by practical experience.” The loading platforms on which the stevedores worked were congested, sometimes overtaxed, when cargo was loaded into two ships simultaneously.[10] As a winch operator, Small relied upon hand “signals from the time the net dropped below the rail until the time it came back into [his] field of vision.” A Black sailor nicknamed Hoppy provided direction. When he rubbed his palms together slowly, he meant slow movement. Moving the index finger faster meant more power. The closing of his left fist indicated full stop.[11]
 

At 10:17 pm on 17 July 1944, the earth in and around Port Chicago shook Bay Area residents out of their restful midsummer slumber. Professor Perry Byerly of the University of California at Berkeley confirmed an increase of what appeared to be seismic activity at the time of the explosion that lasted for three minutes. A barograph located in the weather station atop Mt. Tamalpais recorded changes in barometric pressure some fifty miles from the site.[12] The Oakland Tribune reported that an unnamed naval aviator forced his aircraft to 10,000 feet altitude “to escape flame and debris shot into the sky above Port Chicago by the force of last night’s munition ship explosion.”[13] Due to the intensity of the searing heat and shrapnel from detonating munitions, all persons on the pier adjacent to E. A. Bryan perished. The ship itself incinerated. The final report described the largest explosion as “an ascending, boiling, billowing, mushrooming mass of burning gases” with smaller independent explosions from individual munitions igniting midair. The force of the blast tore through the unloaded Quinault Victory to pieces, the remains of her hull scattered across the Suisin Bay.
 

Injuries sustained by survivors ranged from superficial lacerations to compound fractures to the loss of one eye. In the days following, naval personnel and volunteers from around the Bay scoured the area retrieving human remains. Three officers and 197 enlisted personnel of the U.S. Navy and U.S. Navy Reserve, three enlisted Coast Guard and Coast Guard Reserve personnel, two civilian employees of the U.S. Navy, and sixty-four Merchant Marines were on the pier at the time of the explosion. Of that number, the remains of twenty-eight could not be identified. The death toll rose to 320, making the explosion at Port Chicago the worst home front disaster of its time, and, according to the National Park Service, accounted for fifteen percent of all African American deaths in World War II.[14] The incident’s cause remains undetermined. Authors of the final report, however, speculated “rough or careless handling” as the second of six “probable causes” they listed in order of likelihood, the first being the “presence of a supersensitive element which was detonated in the course of handling.”[15]
 

Within weeks of the explosion, the remaining ordnance battalion personnel initially assigned to Port Chicago were transferred to Mare Island Naval Weapons Station where they were to continue ordnance loading duties. On the morning of August 9, 1944, over 300 Black stevedores refused to load munitions aboard USS Sangay (AE-10). When the commandant of the 12th Naval District explained the importance and necessity of their work, most returned to their duties. Threats of pay deductions, elimination of lifelong and postwar benefits, court-martial, imprisonment, and—as the United States was under a declaration of war—execution did not deter the forty-four stevedores who remained resolute. Six more would join their number in what the Black press later identified a work stoppage or labor strike. Those who returned to loading munitions after the initial stoppage had their pay deducted.[16] For the remaining “Port Chicago 50,” imprisonment and court martial awaited.