Seventy-five years ago today World War II raged across Europe and the Pacific and two liberty ships sat side-by-side at a pier at the Port Chicago munitions depot on the shore of Suisun Bay. The SS Quinault Victory sat with empty cargo holds having arrived at the docks that day after taking on fuel at the Shell refinery in Martinez. The other side of the pier, however, was a hive of activity as Navy personnel worked furiously to load the SS E.A. Bryan with explosives bound for the Pacific theater.
At 10:18pm an ominous sound rent the din of loading. “A metallic sound and rending timbers, such as made by a falling boom,” one survivor reported. An small explosion followed, and then, seconds later the SS E.A. Bryan vaporized as the munitions detonated causing a fireball hurled flaming scrap over 12,000 feet into the air. A seismograph at UC Berkeley 20 miles away registered the blast as a 3.2 magnitude earthquake, and the explosion was felt as far away as San Jose and Santa Rosa. Debris was reported to have fallen in towns ten or more miles away. The blast picked up the enormous SS Quinault Victory and tossed it into the bay where it landed 500 feet away upside down and facing the opposite direction.
All 320 men on the pier died instantly. Of those deaths, nearly two-thirds were African-Americans.
This is what happened 75 years ago today and, sadly, has been largely forgotten. What led up to the explosion and what followed changed the military, race-relations, and the nation.
The site of the explosion is now the Port Chicago Naval Magazine National Memorial. You can visit the quiet memorial on the shore, but it’s not easy. Or popular: overseen by the National Park Service, only 653 people visited the memorial in 2018 making it the fifth least-visited place in the National Park system. By contrast, the roadless Bering Land Bridge National Preserve in the desolate western edge of Alaska logged three times as many visitors in 2018 (though, a “nearby” park, the Aniakchak National Monument and Preserve way out on the Aleutian peninsula came in as the least visited place with only 100 visitors). I was lucky (and tenacious) enough to be one of those 653 visitors.
The lack of visitation isn’t wholly owing to lack of remembrance. The monument is on the grounds of the still-active Concord Naval Weapons Station. Visiting begins with inquiring about when you can visit as swaths of the calendar are blocked out due to maneuvers on the base. I made my appointment two months ahead of time, in January, only to be called back in February and told that date would have to be rescheduled due to base schedule changes; I could come in May or later that week. I moved around my work schedule and took February 23rd off. Oh, and you don’t park anywhere near the memorial or base. No, the tour begins in Martinez at the John Muir House (National Historical Site, almost 47,000 visitors last year) with a brief video describing the conditions leading up to the explosion, the explosion itself, and the tumultuous aftermath. Then you’re loaded into a van and shuttled to the site with a brief stop at the base’s visitor center to register your visit. If that’s not enough of a reminder that you’re visit is being monitored, when we got out of the van our ranger pointed down the shore past a razor-wire topped fence to a new pier with a container crane and instructed us to avoid taking any pictures that include that active pier because your camera (or phone) could be confiscated by base security at the end of the trip – he’d seen it happen.
But immediately after, the gravity monument itself takes over. Burnt stubs of timber still peak out of the water as if standing sentry, the only remains of the pier. There are interpretive plaques explaining what we’d already seen in the video. The names of the men who died are listed. There is a hunk of quarter-inch plate steel blasted from the Bryan and crumpled like tissue paper. There are replicas of some of the shells the men were loading at the time of the explosion. An American flag flaps in the shifting winds. Above all, it is quiet. The sounds of work at the Navel Weapons Station seem far away. You hear the waves. Birds. The wind through the few trees on the site. It is a solemn place.
In the aftermath of the explosion, while the destruction was still being sorted through, the Navy sought to get back to work – there was, after all, still a war going on. Several of the remaining divisions of sea sailors were relocated to Mare Island, and on August 8, just three weeks after the explosion, they were ordered to load the USS Sangay. They refused. Conditions – which were abysmal and extremely dangerous – hadn’t changed. The 328 men were still justifiably shaken and resolved not to put themselves back into a situation that killed their friends and comrades. After their (white) superiors upbraided them about their “duty” and the potential consequences of their actions, 70 agreed to go to work. The remaining 258 They were arrested on charges of mutiny. They were moved onto an make-shift prison barge off shore built to hold 75 men. Eventually 50 men, were charged with disobeying orders and making a mutiny “with a deliberate purpose and intent to override superior military authority”. Because the US was at war, they were facing a death penalty.
The trial of the “Port Chicago 50”, as they had become known, shared headline space in newspapers with the ongoing war overseas. The proceedings were held on Treasure Island. Future Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall represented the NAACP on the defense. In the end, all 50 were found guilty and sentences ranged from eight to 15 years of hard labor. The sentences were later reduced, and the men spent about a year and a half in prison.
Over the years efforts have been made to exonerate the men. They were working under egregious conditions, woefully under-trained and pushed past exhaustion to meet unattainable deadlines with harsh penalties for failure. Several of them men refused to work not out of safety concerns but because they were physically injured. Subsequent investigations showed just how racially biased their accusers were. And yet 75 years after the explosion that killed their friends, their memories are still besmirched by the convictions (none are still alive, the last survivor died a few years ago).
On July 12th, Congressman Mark DeSaulnie attached an amendment to the yearly National Defense Authorization Act (H.R. 2500) to exonerate the Port Chicago 50. The bill passed 220-197 and moves to the Senate.
Visiting the memorial may become easier as well. On July 2nd the Navy turned over 2,200 acres of the Concord Naval Weapons Station to the East Bay Regional Park District. I’ve been using the name “Concord Naval Weapons Station” but that’s not technically correct. The Concord Naval Weapons Station was technically closed. The active portions are split between the inland “Detachment of the Naval Weapons Station Seal Beach” (for now; this, too, is scheduled to be closed) and the tidal section is now known as “Military Ocean Terminal Concord” operated by the Army. It’s the inland area that is being turned over to eventually become housing, businesses, a college campus, as well as Concord Hills Regional Park , which will receive the lions share of the acreage. The National Park Service is also hoping to set up a dedicated interpretive center for the monument there, too, with permanent educational displays about the disaster and the Port Chicago 50.
For further reading I’d recommend starting with the surprisingly detailed Wikipedia entry. From there,
The Port Chicago Mutiny: The Story of the Largest Mass Mutiny Trial in U.S. Naval History by Robert L. Allen is considered the definitive text on the subject.
The Port Chicago 50: Disaster, Mutiny, and the Fight for Civil Rights by Steve Sheinkin focuses well on the aftermath, trial, and repercussions.
James Campbell’s The Color of War: How One Battle Broke Japan and Another Changed America sets the explosion against what he calls the decisive battle of the war in the pacific, the battle of Saipan – which also occurred in July 1944.
There are a number of pieces out this week discussing the 75th anniversary. This one from NBC Bay Area offers a nice interview with one of the sailors at Port Chicago that night.
