The newer seamen had never seen such a concentration of ordnance, and the sight left them uneasy. Even the old hands on the dock, who had been at the depot since its early days in late 1942, were stunned to see so many railroad cars waiting to be unloaded. Some half-joked that if there was a fire, there was enough ordnance sitting on the tracks to make a small island disappear into dust.
By 8:30 p.m., the pier was lit up like a carnival, and cluster lights, attached to poles, flooded the cargo hatches. Lieutenant Ringquist was on the dock. He had been keeping an eye on both the Bryan and the Quinault for the last two hours, watching to make sure the winches were running properly. At 8:45, accompanied by Lieutenant Commander Holman, he boarded the Quinault and examined her No. 2, No. 3, and No. 4 holds. Satisfied that the Quinault was ready for loading, he moved back over to the Bryan forty-five minutes later. After “peering down into her holds,” where the 3rd Division had been working since 4:00 p.m., moving and hoisting large loads of 40-mm shells and incendiary, aerial, cluster, and armor-piercing bombs, he had brief conversations with Lieutenants White and Blackman and then returned to the dock office. Twenty minutes later, Captain Kinne checked in on the Quinault. Holman assured him that the ship was in tip-top shape and would be ready to take on ordnance by 11:00 p.m. Loading on the Bryan, he said, was going smoothly. Ten minutes later, Kinne and Holman drove to the officers’ quarters to turn in for the night, leaving the operation in Ringquist’s capable hands.
Back on the pier, Ringquist pointed out to one of the loading officers on duty that the Quinault’s propeller (“the screw”) was turning over and informed him that it would have to be stopped before loading began. After giving the Bryan a quick once-over, he left the dock at 10:15 p.m., intending to go to the dock office to talk with Lieutenant Bob White. When he saw the base station wagon making its regular rounds, he changed his mind and asked the driver to take him to the administration building. His change of heart undoubtedly saved his life.
CHAPTER 34
End of the World
Ten o’clock was lights-out, and Percy Robinson was lying in his top bunk with his hands under his head, staring out one of the big bay windows at a sky bright with stars. He was feeling good about himself for almost the first time since coming to Port Chicago. As part of his training program he had been assigned to a number of ships as a backup winch driver, but as of Monday, July 17, he was a full-fledged winchman. It was the kind of skill that one day might allow him to return to Chicago and make a good living down on the lakefront docks. He would not have to wander the streets of the Black Belt selling produce or peddling bootleg whiskey or running numbers.
Earlier in the day, he and a handful of other seamen had boarded the A. E. Bryan to watch the crew top off the No. 1 hold, paying particular attention to the winchman on duty as he picked up, swung, and lowered loads of incendiary cluster bombs down into the hold. He was filled with excitement. No longer would he have to slave in the hold of a ship. After leaving the Bryan, he and his closest buddies—the Hawks—gathered at the recreation hall, only recently opened, with its lunchroom, bowling alley, gymnasium, swimming pool, exercise room, and movie theater. Together they toasted Percy’s good fortune with a beer.
Sammie Boykin, too, was lying in his bunk, trying not to think about the night ahead of him. His Division No. 1, and the 2nd Division, had the graveyard shift, midnight to 8:00 a.m. He had been working night and day as long as he could remember, running the winches at the depot, then grabbing forklift jobs for extra money at the Crockett Sugar Plant, the Shell Oil Refinery, the Del Monte Cannery in Oakland, and the Avon Refinery.
Robert Edwards had been reading in his bunk for much of the night. When he first arrived at Port Chicago in May, all he wanted to do was to see “Frisco.” Having grown up in Brooklyn, New York, he was no stranger to big cities, but San Francisco held a special spot in his imagination as a kind of melting pot where Chinese-Americans, black Americans, and whites, too, lived in relative harmony. But one day on Sutter Street, his imagined paradise turned ugly when he ran into six white sailors looking for trouble. “Ah,” the ringleader said as Edwards approached, “look at that nigger there in the Navy. Let’s teach him a lesson.” Edwards was pintsized, barely five feet six, a petty officer with a good head on his shoulders who could type and file. He was no fighter, especially when he knew that the odds were stacked against him. So he bolted. Even after he no longer heard their shouts or the thumping of their feet on the pavement, he sprinted until his chest heaved and his legs felt as if they would give out. When he stopped, he made himself a promise—he would steer clear of San Francisco.
Robert Routh had arrived at Port Chicago from Mare Island just three months before. A callow nineteen-year-old who was still treating his pimply face with cream, he had to admit that things were looking up for him. When he shipped out of Mare Island, he was told that in ninety days he would get an increase in rank, and in early August would be up for leave. On the night of July 17 he could have gone to Oakland or Berkeley or San Francisco, but instead he stayed behind to wash clothes, write a few letters, and save money. At 10:15 that night, not long after taps sounded, he climbed into his top bunk.
Dewhitt Jamison had just lain back in his bed, when an explosion rocked the depot. Seconds later came another, more massive one, and then a series of sharp cracks like blasts from a machine gun. Shortly before 10:19 p.m., seismograph machines at the University of California, Berkeley, forty miles away, registered two tremors, seven seconds apart, with the force of a small earthquake. The second blast lifted Jamison out of his bed and smashed him against the ceiling. When he hit the floor, the barracks building crumbled down on top of him.
“Lie flat and don’t move!” he yelled out. “Don’t move!” Then he covered his head with his hands. Minutes later he opened his eyes and discovered that the building was gone. The ceiling and walls had collapsed. All that remained was the floor. Pieces of wood, hot steel, and glass fragments hissed through the air.
Jamison got up, yanked a piece of wood out of his side, and walked past what had been the front door of the barracks onto the grass. A nauseating chemical stench assaulted him. The first person he saw was Captain Kinne. “What was it?” he asked.
Kinne shook his head. “I don’t know. I think the ships blew up.” As Jamison and the captain walked in the direction of the pier, Kinne noticed a fire burning near the railroad tracks close to town. When he saw that the bachelor officers’ quarters building was still standing, for a moment he hoped that a boxcar of explosives had detonated on the tracks outside the magazine. Then he heard someone say, “There’s nothing left.”
Lieutenant Glen Ringquist was en route to the administration building when he heard a terrible crash and a “breaking of timbers.” Realizing that the second sound was probably made as the Bryan’s fifty-ton jumbo boom toppled over, he jumped out of the car that only a few minutes earlier had picked him up at the pier and ran back in the direction of the waterfront, fearing the worst. He did not have to wait long before he saw a flash of color followed by a violent discharge as the entire Bryan, with its 4,379 tons of ammunition and explosives, blew. A column of smoke and fire shot thousands of feet into the air, producing a brilliant flame that rose even higher. Then red-hot fragments, chunks of molten steel, and body parts cartwheeled through the sky.
An Army Air Force plane flying at 9,000 feet from Oakland to Sacramento was over Port Chicago. The frightened copilot noted that from above it looked as if the depot blew in one colossal explosion. He saw a ring of fire three miles in diameter burst from the ground. It seemed to shoot straight up. As it rose, garage-sized chunks of metal tore past the plane. Seconds later the pilot felt a concussion, as if one of the slabs of metal had collided with the aircraft.
At the Roe Island lighthouse, one and a half miles away from the depot, on the opposite side of Suisun Bay, the explosion smashed every window. As the lighthouse shook violently, the keeper dashed up to the second floor while his wife atten
ded to two of their children below. From the second floor, he saw the giant red cloud across the bay, and the thirty-foot tidal wave filled with diesel fuel, ammonium nitrate, hydrochloric acid, and potassium chlorate, on a collision course with the lighthouse. He grabbed their baby and ran downstairs.
Lieutenant Ringquist jumped back into the car and drove toward the barracks. Electricity to the depot had been lost, and men were running through the dark. Exiting the car, Ringquist instructed his driver to turn on his high beams, and then the lieutenant flicked on the lights of the trucks that had survived the blast. When a civilian from Port Chicago asked if he could help, Ringquist told him to rush back to town and alert Mare Island, the Twelfth Naval District, and the Army and to tell them that the depot needed lights, water, and medical assistance.
• • •
Lying in his bunk, Joe Small was dozing off when he heard the first and smaller of the two blasts. He had little time to make sense of it or to react. The second one demolished the building. Small was thrown to the floor. He had had enough sense to grab his mattress and cling to it. When he saw a funnel cloud of thick, black smoke surging into the sky, he knew that what he and so many of the seamen had feared for so long had finally become a reality.
Just a few bunks down from Small, Percy Robinson saw a flash and the stars disappear and the sky light up as if it were a cloudless summer day. Moments later he felt a tremendous explosion. The shock wave sucked the air out of the room, and pressed down on his chest and lungs until he could not breathe. Then he heard another roar, an apocalyptic howl. The second of the two blasts felt as if the earth were splitting apart. It lifted him out of his bed and threw him to the floor. While everyone around was screaming, Percy lay on the ground too stunned to move. It felt like someone was drilling into his skull. The first voice he heard was Joe Small’s. “Where’s Percy? Is Percy okay?” Then he heard someone else yell, “The upper deck is going to fall!” and he scrambled to his feet and ran out the barracks door.
Outside he saw an officer shouting, “It’s the ships! It’s the ships!”
Men were rushing around aimlessly. Joe Small, who was now outside, spotted a man whose feet were covered in blood and gave him his shoes. Another man had a gaping cut that ran the length of his arm. Small knew he had to stop the bleeding, and applied a tourniquet to it.
Percy Robinson heard Small calling for volunteers for rescue duty and ran up to him, but Small did not recognize him. When he realized who it was under the tattered clothes and blood, he ordered Robinson to get aboard an ambulance that was taking men to Camp Stoneman.
Claude Ellington had been on the docks just hours before. When the pier blew, he was standing by the clothesline. The next thing he knew he was lying in the dirt, uncertain of where the ground ended and the sky began. When he got back to his feet, his first thought was to get the hell off the base before it exploded again. But then he heard one of the lieutenants say, “West of the dock, a lot of people are hurt down there.” So instead of fleeing, Ellington ran toward the pier.
When Robert Routh heard the first explosion, his initial thought was that the Japanese had staged another sneak attack. Seconds later he heard a larger blast, like hundreds of railroad cars roaring into a station. Every window exploded, and glass flew through the barracks like tiny missiles, cutting and slashing everything in its path. He felt a searing pain and then his eyes went dark. I’m blinded, he thought. He called out for someone to take him to sick bay. Then he heard a seaman yell that sick bay had been destroyed.
George Booth was standing beside his lower bunk. The explosion ripped through the air with hurricane-force winds (the San Francisco Chronicle reported winds of 150 mph) and blew him through what had been the back wall of the barracks. He ended up outside, pressed against a Cyclone fence. His first reaction was to run, but then he noticed that the stars seemed to be falling from the sky. He thought that he was experiencing the end of the world, Judgment Day.
Getting up, he ran to a jeep and turned the key. He was scared, and all he wanted to do was to get away from the noise and the tumbling sky. Then he realized pieces of glass and red-hot fragments of metal were raining down on him. Leaving the base he thought, I’m gonna get the hell out of here. I’m gonna drive home to Detroit.
When he had made it halfway to Pittsburg, he pulled over to the side of the road, turned off the key, and tried to calm himself. Minutes later he was racing back to Port Chicago.
The explosion had finally happened as some of Booth’s buddies had been telling him it would. As the editor of the depot paper, he had ignored Port Chicago’s dark side, instead writing lighthearted and encouraging stories, telling the seamen to keep their spirits up, and to remember the importance of their role: they were the men behind the men who were doing the fighting, he wrote, reiterating what Lieutenant Delucchi had told him and his group from Great Lakes when they first arrived at Port Chicago. Booth had no intention of rocking the boat. Lieutenant Delucchi had promised him that he could go to Hampton University to learn a trade.
Booth had been back at the depot for just a few minutes, helping out with the wounded, when Army vehicles from Camp Stoneman began arriving, lighting up the night with their headlights. Then, for the first time, he saw the destruction. Much of the depot no longer existed. The mess hall and his beloved recreation building, which was as big as a city block, were gone.
At the revetment area, which had been built to prevent an explosion on the pier from igniting the hundreds of boxcars waiting to be unloaded, a fire had broken out. By the time five Port Chicago seamen arrived, it had enveloped two cars. Black smoke coughed out of the doors. Recognizing the danger of a chain-reaction explosion, the men grabbed water hoses and fought to keep the fire from spreading.
In the town of Port Chicago, one mile from the pier, Morris Rich and his buddy, armed guards from the Quinault Victory who were in town on liberty passes, were thrown from their restaurant booth and against the far wall. Like Routh, Rich’s first reaction was that the Japanese were bombing. Worried that the ceiling might fall, Rich crawled under a table. Pieces of steel and wood flew through the air. By the time Rich made it outside, injured people lay in the street. Some wandered aimlessly with wet handkerchiefs pressed to their mouths, their eyes wide open as if frozen in shock. Then he noticed that he had a piece of shrapnel embedded in his nose and another in his leg.
After a wall buckled and the roof threatened to cave in, people poured out of the adjacent theater, some screaming and crying. When they reached the outdoors, they were accosted by a tower of fire and smoke rising from the river.
Rich and his buddy helped to load the injured into cars and then made their way back to the depot. The town looked as though it had been the scene of a pitched battle. Hundreds of homes and businesses were damaged or destroyed, and none had light or water or heat. Undetonated bombs and smoldering debris from the ships and pier lay scattered in the streets. Where the Santa Fe depot had stood lay a pile of rubble. When Rich and his buddy reached Port Chicago’s main gate and were stopped by a Marine guard, Rich realized that his shirt and pants were wet with blood, his own, and that he needed medical attention. The guard pointed them in the direction of what once had been a barracks hall. Men lay on the ground moaning. Others, with perforated eardrums, grabbed at the sides of their heads. A few looked as if they had been chewed up by a threshing machine.
Spencer Sikes, who, the first time he ever saw a net of bombs feared he would never again lay eyes on his family, was in a movie theater in Berkeley. At 10:18 he heard a boom that sent tremors through the building. Everyone assumed that it was one of the Bay Area’s frequent small-scale earthquakes. Later an announcer came on the intercom: “All military personnel at Port Chicago, please report back immediately.” After dropping off his date at home, he took a streetcar to the San Pablo Greyhound station. Soldiers and sailors milled about, wondering what had happened. Someone mentioned the dreaded word “sabotage.” Then Sikes heard someone say that Port Chic
ago had blown up and everyone was dead.
He and some other seamen caught a bus as far as Concord. There, almost twenty miles from Port Chicago, he saw debris scattered in the streets. An emergency call went out for all medical workers, and Sikes caught a ride to the base with a doctor and his wife, a nurse. By the time he arrived, the Salvation Army had already set up lights and a triage unit. Sikes could not believe his eyes—much of the base had been wiped out. Then he saw men wandering about with blood dripping from their heads, feet, arms, and hands. The more seriously wounded, he learned, were being taken to the Navy hospital in Vallejo.
The night was a blur. Seamen and officers alike organized teams to treat and carry the wounded. Relief organizations delivered blood plasma, morphine, chlorinated water, and blankets. Ambulances, trucks, cars, and even a Greyhound bus were brought in to transport the injured to Pittsburg’s Camp Stoneman Army Hospital for medical attention. The army arrived with diesel generators and searchlights. Soldiers were summoned to protect government property and to guard against looting in town. One group patrolled the area in an armored car with an antitank gun mounted in back.
The following day, Inez White sent a telegram to her husband’s brother alerting him that Bob—Lieutenant Bob White, who was in the dock office at the time of the explosion—had been declared missing and that she was awaiting official notification. While some men searched for bodies to put into coffins, Spencer Sikes was assigned to a detail that was ordered down to the river to look for body parts. It was a grim task. He would never forget what he saw that day: severed heads bobbing in the water; bodies charred beyond recognition and others swollen with tissue gas; a bloody hand; a shoe with a foot in it. One of the rescue teams discovered a civilian carpenter nearly dead under a pile of rubble in what had once been one of the depot’s machine shops. The carpenter had been working in the shop, using a band saw, when the ships exploded. The saw landed on top of him, slicing him from his left eye down his back and arm, lopping off a portion of his ear.
The Color of War Page 30
