The Color of War

by James Campbell

  No one was less excited to see the Rainier than George Booth. In the two weeks since he had arrived at Port Chicago, he had been working nonstop. He had only had one twelve-hour liberty pass, and on that outing he only made it as far as Pittsburg. What he wanted more than anything else was to see “Frisco.”

  Like Boykin, George Booth worked the boxcars as a carpenter striker. Lieutenant Delucchi told him that being assigned to a car crew was his reward for volunteering to take the seabags off the train. Booth never figured out if Delucchi had given him a job that no one else wanted, or if the lieutenant had done right by him. Whatever the case, Booth never paid much attention to the racial slurs.

  Besides, being a carpenter striker was dangerous enough without worrying about some racist asshole at one of the ammunition depots. Using an eight-pound sledgehammer and a pinch bar, his job was to break out the wood braces, or dunnage, holding the ordnance in place. Swinging a sledgehammer around bombs was a scary thing. Regardless of how careful he was, sometimes he and the other carpenter strikers missed the wood braces and hit something that could blow them to kingdom come.

  Perhaps Delucchi had suckered him into the job, but that was okay as far as Booth was concerned, because the lieutenant also granted him access to the library. Booth took full advantage of the privilege, using it to study first aid, and referring to the library’s dictionary when writing his female friends. Letters at Port Chicago were status symbols. The “big man” of the barracks was always the guy who received the most letters at mail call. The competition allowed Percy Robinson to use his DuSable High School education and establish an energetic business helping other Port Chicago men write to women from whom they hoped to receive letters back.

  But with the Rainier in the harbor, and the USS Shasta and the SS Alcoa Planter expected in a few days, no one would have time for writing letters, especially Percy Robinson. As crew boss of Hold No. 1, he worked the graveyard shift on the Rainier from eleven at night until nine the next morning.

  On the evening of October 18, a petty officer assembled the division for roll call and then turned it over to Lieutenant Delucchi, who announced that on the Rainier he wanted no fighting, no slacking, and no sleeping. The Rainier was going directly to the front. When Delucchi dismissed them, Robinson thought, He may be short and pudgy, but that man thinks he’s God.

  Some of the guys had not even bothered to assemble for roll call. They were the ones already angling for a Section Eight discharge for being mentally unfit. One fella from Detroit walked around saying, “I gotta have pussy. I can’t live without pussy.” Robinson may not have liked Port Chicago, but he was too proud to grovel for a Section Eight.

  Down at the dock, the Rainier was tied off and its holds were lit up like movie stages. As Hold No. 1’s boss, Robinson knew that his group—“the Hawks”—which was made up of two guys from Youngstown, Ohio, another from Cleveland, and one from Philadelphia, could be relied upon to work hard. It was the others that worried him. A few of the guys would slough off any chance they got. One thing he was grateful for was the consistently dry weather. It got chilly at night, but nothing was worse than rain. It made the projectiles wet and slippery and almost impossible to handle.

  After all his men had climbed down into the hold, Robinson motioned to the signalman. Minutes later the winchmen lowered a metal box of armor-piercing projectiles onto the floor. Each projectile was painted black with white markings, weighed nearly 130 pounds, was packed with a burster charge of Dunnite (ammonium picrate), and was slathered in grease to prevent rusting. The Navy used the armor-piercing shells to bring down planes and bombard enemy bunkers. The shell would penetrate the structure and a fuze would trigger the Dunnite.

  Robinson’s men knew the drill. They formed a line from the metal box to the bulkhead. The strongest among them—a heavily muscled member of Robinson’s “Hawks”—squatted like a deadlifter and pulled the projectile from the box. Still crouching, he let it roll back into his arms. Then he rose slowly until he was standing and handed it to the next guy, who cradled it and carefully passed it on to the next. Robinson was at the end of the line. When the projectile reached him, he straightened his back as he had learned to do on the Mears. His boxing training had taught him balance, and he did not waver as he bent his knees and lowered his buttocks to the floor. When he was down as low as he could get, he uncradled his arms and opened his hands and the projectile rolled forward. For a second or two it rested on his knees. When he leaned forward, the projectile fell almost silently to the floor of the hold. That was the key, Robinson thought, discipline. If a guy kept his form, he could lower the projectile without banging it all to hell. Once the projectile was on the deck, he pushed it into position and a carpenter’s mate inserted pegs to keep it from rolling.

  At 4:00 a.m., the men were allowed to return to the chow hall for coffee and a sandwich. Their jumpsuits were covered in sweat and grease. “How many more days of this?” they thought. “How long can we keep this up?”

  Seven more days was the answer. On October 25, one week after she had arrived, the USS Rainier unmoored and left Pier No. 1 at 1:20 in the afternoon. If that evening any of the ammunition handlers thought that a happy Lieutenant Delucchi would hand out twenty-four-hour liberty passes, they were mistaken. Delucchi did not want any of his men coming back too hungover to work. Perhaps when the Alcoa Planter and the Shasta left the depot, the men would get a break.

  War demands being what they were, the amounts of cargo coming into and going out of Port Chicago had reached “astronomical figures” and the depot was firing on all cylinders twenty-four hours a day. When Coast Guard observers assigned to Port Chicago to enforce safety regulations objected to a number of common Port Chicago practices, including the rolling, skidding, and dropping of bombs, and suggested alternatives that Goss deemed impractical, the irritated captain pressed to have the observers removed.

  In late October, Goss met with the Port of San Francisco’s director, Coast Guard Captain Milton Davis, under whose jurisdiction Port Chicago fell. Concerned about safety lapses, Davis urged Goss to bring on experienced contract stevedores. “Conditions are bad up there [referring to Port Chicago],” he warned Goss. “You’ve got to do something about it.… Something’s going to happen, and you’ll be responsible for it.”

  CHAPTER 15

  Waiting for War

  “Well, bite my ass!” After its 3,000-mile train trip, when the 23rd Marine Regiment arrived at Camp Pendleton, outside of Oceanside, California, no one in the regiment could believe his good fortune. Compared to New River, North Carolina, Camp Pendleton’s digs were impressive: a brand-new barracks with large heads, a king-size PX, a slop chute, a soda fountain, and even an indoor movie theater. They were going to enjoy being pampered West Coast Marines.

  As H Company’s newest clerk, Robert Graf, the upstate New York honor student, took care of his buddies. Because the drinking age in many of the Los Angeles hotspots was twenty-one, Graf falsified the birthdates on their liberty cards, making sure they could enter any big-city drinking establishment they wanted to. No one appreciated his efforts more than his good buddy Bill More. The company’s Huck Finn, More had a way of sniffing out fun and adventure, like Graf’s old Ballston Spa buddy, Jimmy Haskell. “Damn the torpedoes,” he would say when he left the base. “Full steam ahead!”

  After a time, though, Graf grew sick and tired of being a clerk. Although his buddies encouraged him to stay put—they worried that the new clerk might be an officious stickler—Graf decided he wanted to be a runner like Bill More and his other good friend Dick Crerar. According to Crerar, it had its benefits: since a runner carried important messages from one field headquarters to another, a guy could enjoy being outdoors and still always have access to the inside news.

  Just weeks after leaving the comfort of the office, Graf was already questioning his decision. He had been assigned to Second Lieutenant Carl Roth, who was always on the move, darting up and down the sun-baked hills and trampin
g through the tangled ravines. Graf’s job was to move with him, to act as scout, sounding board, and messenger. By day they covered dozens of miles, and at night, as the temperature plunged, they slept under shelter halves and rough woven blankets.

  In November 1943, after weeks in the field, machine-gun and mortar classes, and a November 10 celebration honoring the 168th birthday of the Marine Corps, the 23rd Marine’s 2nd Battalion was loaded onto trucks and shipped forty miles south to the Navy base in San Diego for two weeks of sea maneuvers. Just weeks later they were at it again, descending nets on the sides of the troopships into new amphibious tractors. As the coxswains circled and the amtracs made a beeline for shore, destroyers fired their five-inch guns. When the time came for a real invasion, the hope was that none of the Marines would flinch at the sound. Once on dry land, the men rolled out of the amphibious boats and ran like maniacs in their shin-high boondockers, slipping and stumbling in the soft sand. Riflemen moved forward as artillery units set up behind them. As the teamwork got better, tanks joined them and planes screamed overhead, searching for the colored oilcloth panels that the riflemen had laid out to highlight their positions.

  Christmas 1943 arrived, and Lieutenant Roth informed the company that it would be doing guard duty. The men groaned, but Bill More somehow managed to finagle seventy-two-hour passes for both himself and Graf. While the others were stuck behind on base, they were going to Tinseltown!

  On their first night in Los Angeles, More and Graf ran into three others from Company H who had also received liberty passes. Sergeant Gordon Duff, Corporal Charlie Hill, and Corporal Steve Jabo were veterans of Guadalcanal and had the campaign ribbons to prove it. In a bar just off Pershing Square, More and Graf drank scotch and sodas and peppered the three survivors with questions. Unlike a lot of their buddies from the ’Canal, the three veterans had been spared the carnage of Tarawa, where a portion of the first wave of Marines came in on deep-draft Higgins boats that slammed into the coral and stopped. Men were forced to wade five hundred yards through chest-deep water into withering Japanese fire. Soon blood stained the surf red. Now, however, as Duff, Hill, and Jabo talked of another tour, their stories grew grim.

  After leaving the Guadalcanal veterans, Graf and More proceeded to drink themselves silly. The following morning they made their way to downtown Hollywood for more alcohol and perhaps a weekend fling. Two days later they returned to Camp Pendleton spilling over with stories of voluptuous women, and with crippling hangovers.

  By fall 1943, having just finished Combat Training School at Camp Elliott, just outside of San Diego, Carl Matthews, the small but spirited Texan, was assigned to Company G, 23rd Regiment, 4th Marine Division, at Camp Pendleton. There he met the fellow Marine who would become his inseparable sidekick, Richard Freeby, a free spirit from Quannah, Texas. Named for Quannah Parker, the last Comanche chief, the town was situated in the Texas Panhandle on the Oklahoma border, north of where Matthews grew up. Freeby was raised by an uncle and aunt after his parents died and, eager for a life of adventure, joined the Marines not long after graduating from high school. The Texans realized that they had a lot in common and immediately took to each other. It was a rare occasion when they were not together.

  It did not take long for platoon leader Sergeant Jack Campbell to dub the two friends the “Gold Dust Twins” after the popular early-1900s vaudeville act. The name stuck.

  For the Gold Dust Twins, liberty came infrequently. Instead the 23rd Marines trained hard. In places like Aliso Beach and Las Pulgas, Windmill Canyons and Chappo Flats, Matthews and Freeby were undergoing the same training as Graf, rigorous combat instruction that intensified once the rifle companies began coordinated training with artillery battalions and tank groups. By the end of the year, all that was left for the Gold Dust Twins was to pass their high-dive test.

  Designed to teach them how to abandon a sinking ship in case of an at-sea emergency, the high-dive test was an essential part of Marine Corps training. A company of men would assemble at the swimming pool, and there each one learned how to jump from a twenty-foot platform feet first into the water, with one hand covering his crotch and the other protecting his chin and face. Upon hitting the water and coming to the surface, each man would take off his trousers, tie knots in the bottom of each leg, and fill the pants with air, fashioning a kind of crude flotation device.

  The jump filled Matthews with dread. He was a boy from the flat-lands of Texas and had never jumped off anything higher than a riverbank. Meanwhile, Freeby loved heights. He loved to dive, but if the Marine instructors just wanted him to jump, he could do that, too.

  Freeby’s group went first, while Matthews looked on, trying to summon the courage he would need when his turn came. When Freeby exited the pool, he looked at Matthews. “Hell, it was fun,” he said.

  “All right,” Matthews responded. “Then you can have my turn, too.”

  So while Matthews left the pool area, Freeby jumped for his new friend. The instructor had no idea that the Gold Dust Twins had put one over on him.

  Late that autumn, the Gold Dust Twins met their new platoon leader, Lieutenant James Stanley Leary Jr. Leary was a kid, barely older than Matthews. At first the new lieutenant kept his distance. Not until night maneuvers, sitting in front of a fire, did the men get a sense of who Lieutenant Leary really was. What eventually endeared him to his men was that he was not a show-off. He, too, was learning and he was willing to admit it. If he had a question, he would go to Sergeant Jack Campbell, who knew more about the Marine Corps than just about anyone alive. As Stanley Leary’s runner, Matthews would grow closer to him than anyone in the platoon. He would come to love and trust the lieutenant from Ashokie, North Carolina, with the deep Piedmont drawl.

  CHAPTER 16

  Broken Promises

  In late 1943 the Marines prepared to invade Bougainville in the northern Solomon Islands and geared up for the assault on Tarawa, while Allied forces prepared to bomb Japan’s main South Pacific base at Rabaul, on the island of New Britain, off the coast of New Guinea. Meanwhile, the tonnage moving in and out of Port Chicago reached heights never dreamed of. In just six months the depot had tripled its output. In October the seamen loaded 22,000 tons of ordnance, and 26,500 tons in November. The question on everyone’s mind was how long Port Chicago could keep up such a brutal pace before something happened. The black seamen were handling warheads, projectiles, and bombs, which they knew little about, and risking their lives. It was as if the Navy, which had forbidden them to fight, refused to acknowledge just how dangerous their job was.

  Finally a group of seamen decided to act, drafting a letter and sending it to the black Berkeley attorney Walter Gordon (Gordon, in turn, passed it on to the NAACP in New York). The gist of the letter was this: the patriotic black seamen of Port Chicago were happy to serve their country, but they wanted a chance to prove themselves capable of fighting. They wanted the Navy to reconsider its policy against integrating fleet vessels. The letter ended with a heartfelt appeal. “We the Negro sailors,” it said, “of the Naval Enlisted Barracks of Port Chicago, California, are waiting for a new deal. Will we wait in vain?”

  While they hoped for a reply, a tragedy rocked Port Chicago. One night a number of off-duty loaders were shooting craps in the barracks. The games were rarely for high stakes; the men simply did not make enough money. However, the gambling was always lively and sometimes, if someone managed to smuggle alcohol onto the base (only three-two beer was sold on base), it would be fueled by cheap booze. On this occasion one of the players, who had just lost, refused to pay up. Shots were fired. Those who had gathered to watch the game scattered. The man who had objected to paying his debt lay in a pool of blood, with three bullets in his abdomen.

  An alarmed Inez White, who, four months earlier, had written about the drowning of the black seaman, related the details of the event to her husband’s parents in a letter dated November 23, 1943. “I don’t know yet what they’re going to do with the fellow [the gunm
an],” she wrote. “There’ll be a Court Martial of course and Bob said maybe a firing squad.”

  The killing hung like a pall over the depot. Most of the seamen, understanding that the division officers would use the incident to clamp down and deny them liberty, were sullen and contrary. More and more, Port Chicago had the feel of a prison work camp. Even the tenacious Percy Robinson was contemplating requesting a transfer.

  To make matters worse, the sailors who had written the letter had heard nothing from either the NAACP or the Navy, despite the fact that in 1943 the Navy was once again considering the wisdom of assigning blacks to the fleet in proportion to their distribution in the general population—one black sailor to every ten white sailors. A “situation memorandum,” circulating throughout the Bureau of Naval Personnel, suggested including “Negroes in small numbers in the crews of larger combatant ships.” According to the authors of the memo, this small concession to integration offered the best solution to the “problem of absorbing such large numbers of Negroes” and was “the only means by which any appreciable reduction can be made in the high percentage of Negroes that will be concentrated in all shore activities.” As it was, black base companies, waiting to be assigned to duty in the Pacific, were sitting idle on the West Coast. White servicemen being sent into battle could not help but notice. Why were blacks not spilling their blood in the service of their country?