The Color of War

by James Campbell

  Unlike many of the white servicemen who had been transported cross-country by train, the Great Lakes men did not travel in a special sleeper car. It was a troop train, grimy, slow-moving, and crowded with men and cargo. Nevertheless, once Boykin heard via the grapevine that they would be going to California, he was giddy at the prospect of traveling across the West. Back in Alabama, he had been an avid reader of Zane Grey’s Western novels, and soon he would see a world that previously he could only imagine. He would search the wide-open plains for cowboys on cattle drives, buffaloes, ranches, sagebrush, and lone horsemen riding the fences.

  In Raton, New Mexico, the train stopped and the men debarked, looking forward to Coca-Colas and a good meal at the Fred Harvey Restaurant. A small contingent of Marine guards also left the train. The waitstaff welcomed the white Marine guards with smiles. When Boykin and his fellow black sailors tried to enter, however, the head steward informed them that the restaurant did not serve Negroes.

  The men were hot and hungry, and as their grumbling grew louder, a white officer stepped forward. He informed the manager that his men were members of the United States Navy, its first black sailors. He also told him that these men had traveled for thousands of miles, and now they were hoping to get a good meal. Persuaded, the manager let the black sailors in to eat.

  Despite their experience in Raton, as the train rolled across the mountains of northern New Mexico, the black seamen were filled with dreams. The troop train arrived at the town of Port Chicago at midnight. Trains were always going to and from Port Chicago. Sounding their horns and clanking slowly over the steel rails, they were as common as the briny wind off Suisun Bay. The sleeping townspeople paid no attention. Later, when they realized that the depot was bringing in hundreds of black stevedores, their indifference turned to displeasure.

  Boykin looked out his window, straining his eyes. A fog had settled over the area. Hard as he tried, he could see nothing more than the outline of buildings. When an officer yelled, “Fall out, fall out!” he struggled out of his seat and tumbled out of the train with the rest of the men. Soon the officer screamed, “Fall in, goddammit, I said fall in!”

  Fall in! Fall out! Boykin thought. That’s the military. Always someone roaring at the top of his lungs and using God’s name in vain. The men were tired, stiff, and slow to respond, and the officer worked himself into a lather. He boomed again, “I said fall in!” When the men finally lined up in formation a junior officer shouted roll call. The next thing Boykin knew, he was marching through the gray night, unaware of where he was or where he was going. In the distance, lights flickered faintly. The pungent scent of the sea filled his nose and lungs. It smelled almost like home, like rich Alabama bottomland.

  After a mile or so, Boykin and the others stood outside the Port Chicago Naval Ammunition Depot. Marine guards with dogs were posted at the gates. Once they entered the base, the officers showed the hundred or so men to their barracks. Some slept while others, too unsettled to sleep, talked until the dawn light brightened the room. That morning, white sailors, billeted on the barracks’ second floor, discovered the black men below them. Angered that they were boarding in the same building, some of the white sailors shouted racial epithets. When they spotted a few fair-skinned black men, they taunted them, “What are you white sailors doing with those niggers?” Tempers flared and men challenged one another.

  Fights would have broken out had officers not intervened. Later the base commander would move the whites into separate barracks. But for the moment, the officers marched the black men, still in their skivvies, to the parade ground. There they stood at attention while the base commander welcomed them and explained to them why they were there. They would be loading ships, a job that was critical to the war effort. The forces overseas needed bombs and ammunition. Without them, Americans would be eating rice and drinking sake and bowing to the Emperor of Japan.

  Claude Ellington knew immediately that he had gotten a raw deal. When he decided to sign up, he’d left a good job as a fireman with the Georgia Railroad Company in Augusta. In downtown Augusta an enthusiastic recruiter had told him that the Navy was changing. Blacks could be seamen; they could do more than shine shoes, polish silver, and serve officers. To top it off, he told Ellington that because of his experience he could enter as a fireman first class and might end up working in the engine room of one of the big transpacific ships. The recruiter might have believed what he was saying, but more than likely he was aware that he had either exaggerated or deliberately lied about Ellington’s opportunities. This was not unusual. Early on, recruiters were urged by the Navy to help it meet its numbers, especially among Southern blacks who the Navy thought might be more accepting of second-class status.

  At Great Lakes, Ellington quickly discovered the reality of his situation. Although a Port Chicago seaman could make the jump from seaman second class to seaman first class, real promotional opportunities were nonexistent. The pay, too, was paltry—just twenty-one dollars a month. Even black women who had migrated to California in the wake of the Fair Employment Act were making more money in the Bay Area defense industries.

  A few days later, a personnel officer told Ellington that he would have to take a demotion to fireman third class. If initially he had high hopes of doing something meaningful in the Navy, Ellington’s prospects now looked grim. Instead of firing boilers aboard a destroyer, he would be hardly better off than a Georgia sharecropper.

  CHAPTER 10

  Bombs for the Black Boys

  In 1847, Army and Navy engineers, searching for a location for a military base, reported favorably on a point they called “Seal Bluff” on the south shore of Suisin Bay, just upriver from Richmond, California. The military base, however, was never built.

  Following World War I, the Navy conducted a thorough assessment of its West Coast loading docks. Would it be able to meet the awesome needs of a Pacific fleet? The answer was no, and in 1927 the Navy began a search for a site for a modern facility on the West Coast, preferably in the San Francisco Bay area. That same year the Bureau of Yards and Docks recommended to the Board for the Development of Navy Yard Plans the building of a Bay Area depot capable of storing high explosives.

  Just prior to Pearl Harbor, the Navy recognized the urgency of the situation: its West Coast facilities could handle a portion of the ammunition manufactured at the Hawthorne Army Ammunition Depot in western Nevada, but not all of it. Shipping through commercial ports was too dangerous. So the Navy began a hurried acquisition and building program in the four-state region (Colorado, Utah, Nevada, and northern California) that made up its Twelfth Naval District. That effort led to a confidential report titled “Terminal Facilities for Shipment of Explosives—San Francisco Bay Area,” which, in turn, led to Port Chicago, California. After it was deemed by the commandant of the Twelfth District to be the ideal location for an ammunition depot, on December 10, 1941, the Navy reached a decision and, under the War Powers Act, took control of 640 acres of waterfront, just one mile north of the town of Port Chicago.

  Port Chicago had everything the Navy was looking for: calm, protected waters; a wide river channel that could accommodate deep-draft oceangoing ships; highways; and transcontinental rail lines (Southern Pacific and the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe) to facilitate the transport of munitions. Unlike Mare Island, which was the Navy’s largest shipping facility on the West Coast, the Port Chicago location was isolated from major population centers. Using his new authority to green-light construction projects financed by the 300-million-dollar public works fund of the Third Supplemental National Defense Appropriation Act, Frank Knox approved the undertaking. In early February 1942, the Navy began construction. Its plan was to make Port Chicago the only war-scale shipping point on the West Coast deliberately located and designed to minimize the dangers of an accidental explosion. Because it would operate under the auspices of the overburdened ammunition depot at Mare Island, Captain Nelson Goss, Mare Island’s commanding officer, supervised the const
ruction with the help of the Public Works Officer of the Twelfth Naval District.

  Building proceeded at an urgent pace. The channel and an approach basin were dredged as a precaution. Bulldozers dug at the camel-colored hills south of the town. Fleets of trucks, working around the clock, hauled dirt by the tons to the river to backfill the salt marsh and to construct huge pier-side bunkers that would one day protect ammo-laden boxcars. When the marsh was filled in, the Navy built a single pier with one dock out into the river channel. The pier, which would be used exclusively to ship ordnance, was five hundred feet long by seven feet wide with an inboard and outboard berth, each of which could accommodate the largest ammunition carriers in the Navy and three railroad tracks. By the time it opened in the late fall of 1942, the new facility had nine storage buildings, an administration building, a dispensary and ship’s service store, a machine shop, a combined fire pump house and electric shop, a boiler house, a commissary, a Marine barracks, a building that held the naval barracks, four more barracks with enough beds to accommodate more than nine hundred men, magazines for ordnance storage, and twenty-seven barricaded sidings capable of holding over two hundred railroad cars. The barricades were essential. With all the high explosives and projectiles that the Navy expected to ship through Port Chicago, the depot would be a powder keg. In the event of a blast, it was hoped that the barricades would protect against a chain-reaction detonation of hundreds of boxcars loaded with tens of thousands of tons of ordnance capable of doing the kind of damage that would make the Halifax, Nova Scotia, explosion of 1917 seem small. On December 6 of that year, a French cargo ship, filled with wartime explosives, collided with another vessel in the Halifax Harbor and detonated with the force of three kilotons of TNT, killing two thousand people and injuring another nine thousand.

  If being assigned to the Port Chicago Naval Ammunition Depot disappointed Boykin, Ellington, and the rest of the men from Great Lakes, they were equally disappointed with the town of Port Chicago itself. San Diego it was not. In 1940, one thousand people called it home. By the time the depot opened, it had grown, but still it was a speck of a town. In Port Chicago, people lived in modest houses, tended orderly gardens and lawns, kept their fences painted, and took pride in the fact they did not have to lock or latch their doors. Kids wandered freely from the candy store to the hills outside of town and to the fishing sloughs along the river. Although Contra Costa County was the epicenter for the sprawling Bay Area defense with its naval contracts and production facilities, for entertainment Port Chicago had little to offer the men at the depot. There were a few bars and small restaurants, a movie theater, a Legion Hall where people could go for drinks and dancing, Lichti’s Fountain for ice cream sundaes, and Peterson’s Pool Hall, which sold cigarettes and booze. But in the way of adult fun, especially for black men, Port Chicago might as well have been a ghost town. Though it was settled by successive waves of immigrants—first the Irish and English, then Scandinavians from the Midwest, then the Portuguese, and finally Italians—Port Chicago was not especially friendly to blacks. The men who did occasionally venture there never felt the threat of violence, but they never felt welcome either.

  To go elsewhere was anything but easy. To cover the forty miles between Port Chicago and San Francisco, the men could use passenger bus service. Public buses also went to Vallejo, Pittsburg, Antioch, Oakland, Sacramento, and other cities in the San Joaquin and Sacramento valleys. But the depot, at least early on, offered no liberty buses (the only base on the West Coast not to do so) to and from these places. It did provide what the black seamen called “horse cars” or “cattle trucks” because of their resemblance to trailers used to haul farm animals, but the seamen found these demeaning and uncomfortable and refused to use them. Instead, many hitchhiked. Often they traveled in groups for protection, which made getting rides difficult.

  Just eight miles from Port Chicago, Pittsburg was the closest liberty town. It was also home to a sizable black population. However, the town had one large drawback in the eyes of the Port Chicago men. It served as a major staging area for the U.S. Army. Pittsburg’s Camp Stoneman was the principal jumping-off point for American soldiers bound for the Pacific Theater. In other words, Pittsburg’s streets were often teeming with white American soldiers trying to get in a few last drinking bouts before being sent overseas, and sometimes that spelled trouble for the black sailors from Port Chicago. Although the line separating Pittsburg’s black and white neighborhoods could not have been more clear, young, inebriated white soldiers, spoiling for a fight, often wandered into the black section of town. The black sailors did their part to sow the seeds of conflict. Some openly courted the white wives of soldiers en route to the Pacific or soldiers assigned to Camp Stoneman.

  Sammie Boykin knew the town’s reputation, so he avoided it like the plague. He learned his lesson about San Francisco, too. Like many of his fellow sailors, he had high hopes for “Frisco.” But his experiences there disabused him of any quixotic notions about how Bay Area people might treat his kind. Usually when he entered a white establishment, the staff saw a black man rather than a sailor in a United States Navy uniform, and refused to serve him. Fortunately for Boykin, he had never cultivated a taste for liquor or women or confrontation. More often than not, he stayed behind, reading Westerns. Some of the other men at the base, however, were not gifted with Boykin’s prudence or temperament.

  No one, it seems, was happy to have the Port Chicago men in their midst—and no one less so than Captain Nelson Goss. Goss was a high-profile career naval officer, a Naval Academy graduate and a commander of two destroyers, the USS O’Brien and USS Wadsworth, during World War I, for which he won the coveted Navy Cross for courageous service in patrol and convoy escort duty. Between the wars he commanded a number of ships, performed shore duty assignments on both coasts, distinguished himself, and was promoted to captain. In 1938 he began his second tour as an inspector of ordnance, this time at Mare Island. In 1917 he had served in a similar position at the Watervliet Arsenal in West Troy, New York. Though he officially retired from the Navy in 1940, he stayed on active duty as commanding officer at Mare Island through the war.

  In his nearly five years at Mare Island, Goss had numerous run-ins with contract stevedores—largely white—and was determined not to use them at Port Chicago. They were too expensive, governed by union regulations regarding working conditions and overtime, too influenced by unscrupulous union leaders, socialistic in their sympathies, and untrustworthy. So, instead of using professional stevedores, as was the practice at most other Bay Area facilities, he explicitly requested white enlisted personnel to man the new Port Chicago installation. What Goss got was black seamen from Great Lakes.

  Though racism was prevalent among naval officers, Goss may have been more than a garden-variety bigot, and he made his displeasure clear. In his opinion, blacks were unmotivated, intellectually inferior workers, worse even than the contract stevedores. The Port Chicago crew, in his estimation, stood out in its inability. The seamen were of the “sullen, stupid type … taken from the lower strata of Negro recruits after the more intelligent ones had been shipped off to trade schools.” In his opinion, they would be lucky to do sixty percent of what a white worker could.

  Goss was aware of their scores on the Naval General Classification Test (NGCT) and he often referred to the tests to object to the quality of men he was receiving. According to him, they were clearly of “lower mental caliber.”

  Worse yet, Goss protested, was that the few blacks he considered intelligent were also the “worst trouble makers,” “subversives,” and easy prey for agitators and radicals. Black civil rights leaders, the newspapers that aired their allegedly militant racial views, and socialist union “agitators” were his bogeymen, smuggling in inflammatory propaganda and stirring up strife among the Port Chicago enlisted men and civilian workers alike. Nevertheless, he was convinced that the depot played an important role in a “desperate war” and would perform its duties despite
the shortcomings of its men. According to Goss, it was Port Chicago’s responsibility to “get the job done with the tools with which we are provided,” adding that the depot was “part of the Navy” and no one “should sit down and complain.”

  But complain he did. In a confidential letter to the Chief of Naval Personnel, dated 30 December 1942, Goss provided an assessment of those “tools” with which he had been provided. “These recruits,” he wrote, “arrive with what may be described as at least an attitude of alertness for any indication of discrimination against them, which I have never previously observed in long contact with members of the colored race in the Navy. They appear particularly impressed with the idea that they are enlisted in general service and not for any work which might be regarded or classed as menial (messman branch). Some of them also manifest an attitude of asserting equality (a sort of chip on their shoulder) which is not customarily observed among colored people except in regular Negro sections of some large northern cities.… They, of course, have the natural characteristics of Negroes. They will loaf or straggle if permitted. They are prone to act like sheep and they are easily excitable. They require considerably more care … than any enlisted man I have been associated with. They are quick to resent.… It is not always possible to avoid some discrimination against them, despite earnest efforts.… They really do not take kindly to an assignment of industrial work. They reiterate that they enlisted for combat service and many of them insist that they were led to believe they would receive general service assignments when they enlisted. They frequently inquire why they can’t have guns like the marines [depot guards].”