Every day Robinson checked the bulletin board where they posted assignments. One day he saw “Port Chicago Naval Ammunition Depot” next to his name. He had never heard of it before. He had always tried to project a worldly image, to exude cool and experience, but the truth was that before going to Great Lakes, the farthest he had ever strayed from home was for a high school sporting event in Gary, Indiana. Now he was headed for Port Chicago, California.
Robinson packed his seabag and waited for orders. A few days later he was on the parade ground drilling when an officer came up and said to the unit, “Follow me!” Robinson ran back to the barracks to get his bag. Minutes later he was aboard a truck bound for Union Station and the train that would carry him west.
On October 3, 1943, Lieutenant Ernest Delucchi met Robinson’s train at the station in Port Chicago, California. Delucchi had not been at Port Chicago Naval Ammunition Depot for more than a few months, but already he had cultivated an air of authority. He swaggered, chest out, like a prize rooster at a cockfight. After a number of years as a noncommissioned officer, he took the Port Chicago job, was sent to Annapolis for officers’ training, and was promptly promoted to lieutenant.
Percy Robinson did not pay much attention to Delucchi. He was too dumbfounded by the sight of Port Chicago. To him it looked like an Old West town out of the movies.
Suddenly Delucchi’s voice boomed. “Which one of you boys wants to unload the duffels?” he asked, emphasizing the word “boys.”
When no one else volunteered, Percy Robinson saw a dark-skinned black man volunteer. What the hell, George Booth thought. I’d better put my best foot forward. Booth was hoping for a new start. According to Detroit police, he had been one of the instigators of the Belle Isle riots, and had it not been for the Navy, he might still be in a jail.
The night he ended up in the riot wagon, he had been partying with his buddies and their girlfriends on Belle Isle, a Frederick Law Olmsted–designed island park in the Detroit River. It had been less a celebration than a chance to say good-bye. Booth would soon be leaving for Great Lakes.
At 982 acres, Belle Isle had always been a place where blacks and whites tolerated each other. But on the evening of June 20, not long after 10:00 p.m., Booth and his friends were leaving the island when they saw a large group of whites fighting a smaller group of blacks. They jumped out of their cars and dove in. Minutes later, dozens more joined in.
When the police showed up, Booth realized that they were in trouble. Booth was an unlikely agitator. He had grown up singing opera, was the president of the camera club in high school, and had decided not to play football because the game was too rough. All his life he had gotten along with whites. He fished with them and played sports with them on the sandlots and vacant fields.
The police began swinging their nightclubs, and Booth got cracked over the head. He felt a sudden wave of nausea and then blacked out. Regaining his senses, he found himself curled up in the back of one of the wagons. By early morning he and his buddies and dozens of other bruised and bloody young black men were sitting in a jail cell.
Meanwhile riots broke out across the city, fueled by rumors that whites had thrown a black woman and her baby off the Belle Isle Bridge. Enraged blacks stormed through a neighborhood, breaking windows and looting stores, while white rioters approached from the opposite direction, burning cars and plundering businesses. City police and state troopers were soon overwhelmed—six were shot and another seventy-five injured—and began firing indiscriminately into the rebellious black crowds. A white doctor, entering a black neighborhood on a house call, was pulled from his car and beaten to death.
When the Detroit mayor and Michigan’s governor begged the president to help, Roosevelt sent in federal troops. The troops restored peace two days later, but the NAACP, whom many accused of having instigated the violence, pointed out that three quarters of the people killed or injured or arrested were black. In his report on the riot, Thurgood Marshall claimed that an aggressive police force had set off the violence. “The trouble,” he wrote, “reached riot proportions because the police of Detroit once again enforced the law under an unequal hand. They used ‘persuasion’ rather than firm action with white rioters while against Negroes they used the ultimate in force.”
When two officers pulled George Booth out of the jail, cuffed him, and took him to court, Booth told the judge, “I’m in the Navy.” “Like heck you are,” the judge responded.
At that, a Navy officer—Booth’s sister Violet had gone down to the recruitment office to explain what had happened to her brother—stood up and asked to speak. When the judge granted him the right, the lieutenant said, “He’s government property, sir.” Although Booth did not especially like the lieutenant’s choice of words, he did not relish the idea of going back to jail or having a criminal record.
When he arrived at Great Lakes’ Camp Moffett, Booth wrote his sister Violet informing her that it was his intention to be “the best damn midshipman in the whole Navy.” He sang with the all-black Blue Jackets choir, minded his p’s and q’s, and tried to make good on a promise that he would never have the chance to keep.
When Booth finished throwing the seabags off the train and the men had them draped over their shoulders, Delucchi led the procession to the gates of the Port Chicago Naval Ammunition Depot. It was a far cry from the United States Naval Academy, where white midshipmen trained to be commissioned officers. All Booth saw was a chain-link fence, a parade ground, and a few buildings. Not even an outdoor basketball court, and not a destroyer, cruiser, or battleship in sight.
For the second time in less than an hour, Percy Robinson could not believe his eyes. If at some point he believed that he was destined for something important in the Navy, the sight of the depot relieved him of any illusions. The Port Chicago Naval Ammunition Depot looked like a prisoner-of-war camp.
The following morning, Lieutenant Delucchi assembled the men on the parade grounds. He told them that if they had any questions about what the U.S. Navy expected of them, to refer to their Bluejackets’ Manual, and told them, too, that they were at Port Chicago for only one reason—to load bombs onto ships. Then he said that they were the men behind the men who were doing the fighting. Without their work at Port Chicago, there would be no victory over the Japs.
After the brief pep talk, he announced the names of the petty officers and section leaders. Then he gave the men their assignments. The entire group would be assigned to Division 4, Barracks B. The men would be allowed to choose their bunks and footlockers. At this, some of the men shook their heads. This was the Navy’s version of freedom?
Delucchi then explained the depot’s setup. Division No. 4 and its 105 men would be divided into sections, and the sections would be further divided into five crews. All the crews would be split into a ship’s crew, which would work in the hold, and a dock crew, which would unload ammunition from the boxcars onto the dock. Before they began working he would choose the hatch tenders and the winchmen based on their military and civilian records. Experienced operators, he added, would train the winchmen, but with ordnance demands on the increase and more ships loading at Port Chicago, they would be expected to be up to speed as soon as possible.
At 6:00 a.m. on October 5, Division No. 4 fell out for roll call. Robinson noticed a vehicle pull up to the barracks. It was a large, gray sixteen-wheeler with a trailer, the kind they used for hauling cattle. Delucchi ordered the division to board. The men settled onto the benches inside, nearly sitting on each other’s laps in the cramped quarters. Others, who could not find enough bench space to squeeze into, leaned against the wall of the truck. Then someone closed the doors and locked them from the outside.
Ah, hell, man, Carl Tuggle thought, why you gotta do that? Even if we wanted, where in the hell we gonna run to? Tuggle kicked himself for not having joined the Army. Growing up in Cincinnati he had been a good student. He had done well, too, at Great Lakes, passing all the skill tests. He wanted to go to Aviation Mech
anics School, but had been denied a service school appointment. After making it through the recruit training program at Great Lakes, the Navy had him wandering the grounds of the camp, picking up cigarette butts. Now he was at Port Chicago, locked up like a Civil War–era slave.
The trailer was a claustrophobic’s nightmare, and George Booth found himself hyperventilating. For a moment he felt as if he was back again in the riot wagon. His head spun. That’s when the driver of the truck popped the clutch. The benches toppled over and the men were thrown to the floor and against the rear doors.
“Bastards,” someone seethed.
A few minutes later the truck wound its way through the ammunition bunkers and stopped, and Lieutenant Delucchi opened the doors.
“You boys okay?” he asked. Percy Robinson wondered if the lieutenant was mocking them, as he jumped out of the truck. Then, for the first time, he got a look at what the Navy had in store for him. A hulking Liberty ship was tied to the pier. Men in denim work suits were unloading crates of ammunition from boxcars onto a thump mat on the pier. A black crew leader explained what the men were doing. When he finished, Delucchi announced that it was time to move on into the hold of the ship. As Robinson walked up the gangplank, he realized that he did not even know what a hold was. After reaching the main deck, the men followed Delucchi down the steel hand ladder to the bottom deck. There they watched as a winchman lowered a bomb in a net. When the winchman brought the net all the way down, the section leader explained how to move and stack the bombs safely.
After the demonstration, the men climbed the hand ladder back to the ship’s main deck. Many of them breathed a sigh of relief. Dock work was definitely better than being stuck in the hold. At least on the dock a guy could feel the sun on his face and fill his lungs with good, clean air, even if it did smell of fish and brine.
Carl Tuggle could not shake the feeling that he had made a mistake. As he gazed back in the direction of the barracks, Port Chicago Naval Ammunition Depot looked to him like the most desolate place he had ever laid his eyes on.
CHAPTER 14
Whom Are We Fighting This Time?
As General Douglas MacArthur’s forces pushed up the coast of New Guinea, and Admiral Chester Nimitz, commander of the Pacific Fleet, made plans for the invasion of Tarawa, the Port Chicago Naval Ammunition Depot was becoming the principal loading port and storage point for ammunition and high explosives on the Pacific Coast. As Port Chicago assumed its new role, Captain Nelson Goss recognized that he was short of qualified officers. In response to a letter he had written the commandant of the Twelfth Naval District, he had received a number of Naval Reserve officers earlier in the year. Few of them, however, had any training in ordnance.
On September 29, 1943, Captain Goss acquired the one man who had the experience and know-how to run the fast-growing Port Chicago loading operation. Lieutenant Commander Alexander Holman had devoted three decades of his life to service in the Navy. Prior to coming to Port Chicago, he was stationed at the naval installation at Coco Solo, Panama, and before that he served as the executive officer of the USS Nitro, an ammunition ship. Before that, he worked on a number of naval vessels in connection with fire control.
Realizing that Port Chicago officers had to be “negro psychologists, ship riggers, safety engineers, professional stevedores, carpenters, and ordnancemen,” Lieutenant Commander Holman soon became discouraged by the situation. What’s more, he had little patience for, or interest in, training black seamen who did not want to be there in the first place for the critical work of “selective discharge.” Selective discharge or “combat loading” was a sophisticated procedure that required the kind of familiarity with ordnance that few of the black loaders or, for that matter, their white officer bosses possessed. It demanded a thorough cataloging of ammunition. Once loading began, the cargo had to be arranged aboard ship so that in battle whatever was needed could be accessed without having to unload what was not needed. In Holman’s opinion, Port Chicago’s black enlisted men lacked the intelligence to perform the job.
Perhaps Captain Goss recognized that no one man, regardless of his qualifications, could oversee Port Chicago’s round-the-clock loading demands, because not long after Lieutenant Commander Holman arrived, the captain was again appealing to the commandant. The depot, he complained, was still “desperately short of officers of any previous experience in ship loading,” especially as it geared up for significant expansion. Weeks later, Goss fired off another urgent memo. “Not enough officers on hand to identify and segregate ammunition,” he wrote. “Present deficiencies must be supplied at once.”
The captain was not overstating his case. As of early October, Port Chicago had 591 black enlisted men and thirty officers. Lieutenant Lee Cordiner, who had been at the depot longer than any of the other lieutenants, was certainly not a man he could rely on to build good relations with the black loaders. Cordiner had lost all standing in July after the death of the black seaman when he tried to prevent the men from entering the mess hall. Nor was he an experienced ordnance man. Prior to being attached to the magazine in late 1942, he had never worked with explosives.
Lieutenant James Tobin was not a man he could depend on, either. Tobin, who arrived at Port Chicago in January 1943, was put in charge of the 2nd Division. He had been an auditor in civilian life and had never handled projectiles or TNT, was unfamiliar with the regulations regarding the handling of dangerous ordnance, and had never worked with blacks. He judged them to be a very “emotional race” not given to “self-control and discipline.” In his estimation the Port Chicago men fell into two categories: the first group was unreliable; sometimes they “worked very hard” and sometimes they “shirked duty.” The second group was a thoroughly unhappy bunch. These were the men who had come to Port Chicago in late 1942, the ones whom recruiters had lured into the Navy with false promises of sea duty.
Lieutenant Ernest Delucchi had many of Tobin’s limitations. The black seamen disliked him. In their eyes he was a demagogue who, like Moses, believed that he had been chosen by God himself to pass down Port Chicago’s version of the Ten Commandments. He ran Division 4 like his own private domain, dispensing privileges and punishments as he saw fit. Most of the seamen thought he was a power-hungry prick.
There were other officers, of course, but Captain Goss seemed to lack faith in them, too. Writing again to the commandant of the Twelfth Naval District, he explained, “Many principal difficulties at Port Chicago have stemmed directly from inability to obtain an adequate nucleus of experienced and trained officer personnel.… It is decidedly dangerous to entrust the administration and control of large numbers of green (colored) enlisted men to inexperienced officers. The good name of the Navy, as well as the efficiency of these stations, is involved.”
By mid-October 1943, the depot was midway through loading the SS Otto Mears, which had moored into the starboard side of Pier No. 1 soon after the SS Anthony Revalle left the depot. The Anthony Revalle was bound for Hawaii, Samoa, and then the coast of Australia, from Sydney to Port Stephens and north to Brisbane. She carried bombs, ammunition, explosives, parachute flares, warheads, and torpedoes delivered by train from the Naval Ammunition Depot at Hawthorne, Nevada, and from a variety of other depots across the country.
The SS Otto Mears would carry a similar load, but in far larger quantities that included over eighty cars of ammunition, over forty cars of explosives, and ten cars of bombs, all destined for depots in Hawaii and Samoa. In the lead-up to the invasion of Tarawa, Port Chicago was being asked to do what prior to October would have been considered impossible. Loading the Otto Mears was easily the biggest challenge it had ever undertaken. On October 17, shortly after noon, and seven days after mooring, the vessel steamed down the Sacramento River, loaded to the gills, her gunwales barely out of the water.
The following day, the USS Rainier, another one of the Navy’s hardworking ammunition ships, moored at Pier No. 1 at Port Chicago. The Rainier had made her inaugural trip in Mar
ch 1941, delivering supplies and ammunition to Pearl Harbor. A year later she provided ammunition for the Dolittle Raid on Japan and the Battle of Midway. In late July 1942 she sailed to Fiji, where she supplied ships taking part in the assault on the Solomons. Barely a week later she set off for Noumea, New Caledonia, and stayed put during the early stages of the Guadalcanal campaign. Just over six months later she loaded for the first time at Port Chicago, and then set sail for Espiritu Santo and Efate Island in the New Hebrides, where she discharged a cargo of ammunition and torpedoes. In late August 1943 she returned to Port Chicago to pick up a large load of warheads, ammunition, and explosives bound for Oahu, Pearl Harbor, and Midway.
Sammie Boykin recognized the Rainier right off, knowing that her arrival spelled a week of hard work. The pace would be frenetic, and the division officers would lean on the men harder than ever.
Boykin worked the boxcars, a job he had come to dislike, but not because of the heavy lifting or because he had grown lazy. The truth was that he was scared, and not just because he was handling explosives. That summer he discovered racial slurs scrawled on the walls of the boxcars. Once he found a drawing of a bomb and underneath it the words “This is what’s going to happen to you.” Not long after, more boxcars arrived with images of exploding bombs and the message, “This is the niggers.” Sometimes he encountered Nazi insignia or notes signed allegedly by the KKK. What disturbed him most was that the boxcars were coming from naval and army ammunition depots. In other words, men with whom he was presumably helping to fight a war were making the threats. It shook him so badly that he began having nightmares. When the Port Chicago men retaliated, trading insults and challenges, he worried that the war of words would escalate to violence.
He took some consolation from the fact that it was Spencer Sikes’s job to inspect the railroad cars in their bunkers to see if they had been tampered with. Sikes was as conscientious as they came, and if he noticed anything suspicious he would certainly bring it to the attention of one of the lieutenants. If everything checked out, he would pull the serial number tags so that the officers knew which shipments had come in and which had not. But Boykin was also aware that when things got busy and there were dozens upon dozens of cars bringing in thousands of tons of ordnance for both transshipment and storage, the officers would push Sikes, and he might miss something. What if some bigoted ammunition depot employee wanted to do the Port Chicago men harm?
The Color of War Page 11
