Tobin and his men reached the base an hour and a half later, whereupon Tobin was informed that there had been a “mass refusal of duty” by two other divisions. The lieutenant then lined up his division.
“Many from the other divisions have refused to obey orders,” he told them. “Refusal to obey orders in a time of war is a serious offense. You have been told that we came here to resume our regularly assigned duty of loading ships. I know some of you are afraid, but fear can be conquered. Fear is no excuse for disobeying orders. I am ordering you men to ‘turn to’ for the purpose of carrying out your regularly assigned duty of loading ships. Those men obeying this order, stand fast, those men refusing to obey this order, fall out!” Then he added, “All cowards, fall out!”
When half his division moved off to one side he addressed the group, reminding the men of the seriousness of their actions. Lieutenant Clement, the assistant division officer, recorded in a notebook the names of those who would not return to work. Many of them made it clear that although they did not wish to disobey an order, they were afraid of handling ammunition.
That night the men from Divisions 2, 4, and 8 who refused to load ammunition—258 out of a total 328—were declared “prisoners-at-large” and were marched under guard and confined to barracks aboard an old barge tied to the pier.
For Carl Tuggle, the Cincinnatian who came to the Great Lakes Naval Training Center with a dream of becoming an aviation mechanic, only to have that dream extinguished by the reality of Port Chicago, his objection to handling ammunition again was less about fear than disrespect. In the wake of the explosion he had hoped that perhaps the Navy would change the way it treated blacks. Now he realized that he was hoping for a miracle.
The barge was cramped and stifling, with three tiers of bunks, spaced no more than a foot apart. To Percy Robinson, one of those who refused to handle ammunition, the barge felt like a slave ship.
Nearly everyone aboard was scared, confused, and angry. Some wanted to go back to work, while others grabbed butter knives and forks to defend themselves in case things grew violent. The majority, though, felt that there was power in numbers and wanted to stick together.
On the morning of August 10, a fracas broke out between a guard and an enlisted man. As the day wore on, tempers flared and fights erupted. Joe Small tried to bring order to the barge and cohesion to the group, but it was no easy task. Things were growing increasingly volatile. Small foresaw the worst—the men might riot and guards might turn their rifles on them.
That night Small and a handful of group leaders met on the upper deck of the barge to calm what he called the “general state of rebellion.” Although Small did most of the talking, he was hardly the picture of an insurgent. Small encouraged the men to be on their best behavior, to act like proud and disciplined Navy seamen, and to show the officers that they were willing to obey any order short of loading ammunition. Perhaps then they might be transferred to other duties, or sent overseas, or at the very least receive dishonorable discharges. On a practical level, he organized meal-hall teams to cook, serve, and clean.
When Small finished his impromptu speech, some of the men, including Percy Robinson and George Booth, gave him an ovation. A leader was what they had needed, and now Small confidently assumed the role.
On August 11, the day after the meeting, guards ordered the men off the barge and marched them to the base’s baseball diamond. They were standing in formation as a jeep carrying Rear Admiral Wright drove up.
The admiral had only just received Captain Goss’s report on the situation. Ever paranoid about the influence of conspirators, Goss insisted that “agitators and ringleaders” who had been exposed to “outside propaganda” and union organizers had instigated the rebellion to seduce the seamen from their proper allegiance and advance a radical black and socialist agenda. According to him, the men involved had previously been compliant, exhibiting “the normal characteristics of negroes,” but had recently shown a “persistent disposition to question orders.”
When Percy Robinson spotted Wright, he knew that things had gone from bad to worse. In the days after the explosion Wright had come to Port Chicago to praise the men. Now he was paying them a visit of a different sort.
“They tell me that some of you men want to go to sea,” the admiral began. “I believe that’s a goddamn lie! I don’t believe that any of you have enough guts to go to sea. I handled ammunition for approximately thirty years and I’m still here. I have a healthy respect for ammunition; anybody who doesn’t is crazy. But I want to remind you men that mutinous conduct in time of war carries the death sentence, and the hazards of facing a firing squad are far greater than the hazards of handling ammunition.”
“Like hell!” George Booth shouted out from the crowd of men. Wright was bluffing. No way he could have over two hundred men shot dead. Wright heard the remark and reiterated his threat. “I will personally see to it,” he countered.
The admiral’s words struck Percy Robinson like a hard blow to the belly. He remembered his mother’s warning: “Don’t let the white man lynch you. He will lynch you if he can.” Now, here was the admiral fulfilling his mother’s prophecy.
The ultimatum devastated everyone present. Could they really be staring at the possibility of death by firing squad, or was Wright trying to intimidate them? Percy Robinson had been willing, if need be, to go to jail to get a change of duty, but now he was scared.
The admiral left and Lieutenants Delucchi, Tobin, and Morehouse instructed the men to divide themselves into those willing to handle ammunition and those who would not. Some moved back and forth between the two groups, aware that this one decision might determine the course of their lives.
After what seemed like hours of agony, the lines were finally drawn. The entire 8th Division, which was largely made up of graduates recently delivered from the Great Lakes Naval Training Center in Illinois, indicated that it would be willing to return to work. George Booth and Percy Robinson joined those willing to work, too. Robinson saw that some of his friends were standing their ground, but he did not feel a sense of responsibility to them. One thing he had learned from his father was that every man had to take care of himself. Only a total of forty-four men in Divisions 2 and 4 still refused to load ammunition. The following day, six more joined the forty-four, making a total of fifty. Inexplicably, John Dunn, a seventeen-year-old mess cook in Division No. 2, and Charles Hazard got thrown in with the group. A Port Chicago Naval Ammunition Depot doctor had declared months before that Dunn, five feet two and just 104 pounds, was “too light to work” and Dunn had never done any loading of any kind. Hazard was a soft-spoken chaplain’s assistant.
On August 12, Marine guards took the fifty men to Camp Shoemaker and put them in the brig. As the alleged leader of the group, Joe Small was separated from the group and thrown into the “hole.” If any punishment could break Small, perhaps solitary confinement could. He was confined to a seven-by-seven-foot cell with no human contact except the prison guards. He would be allowed to leave the cell only one hour a day to stretch.
For the 208 men who, faced with the possibility of a death sentence, decided that they would be willing to load ships, it was too late. They were informed that they would receive summary courts-martial and then would be taken to the naval stockade at Camp Shoemaker.
On August 13, Commander Joseph Tobin signed Percy Robinson’s court-martial. The specification of offense, like the others, was straightforward. It read: “In that Percy Robinson, seaman first class … U.S. Naval Reserve, while so serving at the U.S. Naval Barracks, Naval Ammunition Depot, Mare Island, California, having on or about August 9, 1944, at said barracks, did then and there refuse to obey and did willfully disobey said lawful order, the United States then being in a state of war.”
If Robinson hoped that the Navy would go easy on him and the 207 other men, the stockade extinguished those hopes. The men were given coveralls with a big P on them. Then guards marched them to the South Prison. Surro
unded by ten-foot-high fences of barbed wire and gun towers at twenty-foot intervals, and patrolled by a jeep with a mounted machine gun, it looked to Percy like an internment camp. The Navy could let them rot there, and no one would ever know.
While they waited to hear what their further punishment might be, guards marched them to the administration building, where Navy officers interrogated them about their roles in the so-called uprising. In violation of Navy law, none of the men was allowed to consult an attorney. Because armed guards were present during the questioning, many of the seamen felt threatened.
During the interrogations the men were encouraged to implicate the leaders of the protest, especially Joe Small. Wielding sentences of fifteen years’ hard labor and bad-conduct discharges, Navy officers pressed the men for answers. What the investigators wanted more than anything else were the details of the meeting on the barge. From the day Percy Robinson arrived at Port Chicago, the officers had been using the same tactic—trying to pit one black man against another. They would choose their Uncle Toms, pile on the praise and the liberty privileges, and then ask them to rat out other seamen. Some of the informants just made things up because officers told them that the Navy would “go lighter and easier” on them if they did. The lieutenant who questioned Percy Robinson asked him repeatedly if he had been subjected to coercion. Robinson gave him the same answer every time: no one had forced him into anything. Others, however, seeking to save their own hides, were happy to scapegoat Joe Small. Some said that during his speech on the barge, Small had grown feisty. “We’ve got the officers by the balls,” some of the seamen recalled hearing him say. “If we stick together, they can’t do anything to us.”
In the end, interrogators prepared individual statements, based on the testimonies of the seamen, and insisted that they sign them. Some of the seamen protested that their words had been twisted, but most eventually gave in. Days later, Robinson and the others learned that they would each be fined $198—a fortune for most of them—and sentenced to three months’ hard labor.
Captain Goss had already delivered his report on the “mutinous action” to Admiral Wright. After describing the events of mid-August, he informed the admiral that steps were being taken to recommend the fifty seamen for a general court-martial. Wright promptly forwarded Goss’s summary to Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal and the chiefs of Naval Personnel and Naval Operations. He included two and a half pages of remarks, adding that “pains must be taken to ensure that there is no justification for an opinion that any type of hazardous work is assigned exclusively to negro personnel.” He further added, “It is necessary that there be set up a system of rotation of duty that will ensure that Negro enlisted personnel at the Naval Ammunition Depot, Mare Island and the Naval Magazine, Port Chicago, be not retained indefinitely.”
On August 26, even before the court of inquiry released its findings and recommendations, Vice Admiral Randall Jacobs, chief of Naval Personnel, wrote Secretary Forrestal that the Bureau of Personnel “concurred with the disciplinary action to be taken.” Following Admiral Wright’s suggestion, Secretary Forrestal authorized the transfer of white loading units to both Mare Island and Port Chicago in order to “avoid any semblance of discrimination against Negroes.”
Secretary Forrestal also sent President Roosevelt a report on the situation. Two days later, Roosevelt responded. Borrowing the phrase used by Admiral Wright to describe the situation at Mare Island, Roosevelt agreed that the 208 men “were activated by mass fear” and should be treated leniently. He failed, however, to say anything about the fifty men who persisted in their refusal to handle ammunition, although they, too, were certainly motivated by the same fear. This omission, whether deliberate or unintentional, undoubtedly helped to seal their fate.
By late August the naval court of inquiry was ready to deliver its final report on the explosion. The San Francisco Chronicle had already weighed in on the disaster, which it called “the worst disaster of its kind in the American record.” “What caused the explosion,” the editorial continued, “is to date a mystery that may never be known. It is a sort of thing that can happen in an operation with highly dangerous materials in such a volume as occurs only in war, under the pressure of war and with hasty expansion of personnel in both production and handling.”
The blast, however, was too big for the Navy court not to try to assess some measure of blame, and in the end, it placed responsibility squarely on the shoulders of the black seamen. “The consensus of opinion of the witnesses,” it announced, “is that the colored enlisted personnel are neither temperamentally or intellectually capable of handling high explosives … sixty percent of the lowest intellectual strata of men sent out of Great Lakes were sent to Port Chicago. These men could not understand the orders which were given to them and the only way they could be made to understand what they should do was by actual demonstrations.… It is an admitted fact, supported by the testimony of the witnesses, that there was rough and careless handling of the explosives being loaded aboard ships at Port Chicago.”
Although it did cite a “general failure to foresee and prepare for the tremendous increase in explosives shipments,” the comment was more of an observation than an indictment of the Navy Bureau of Ordnance, the Bureau of Personnel, or Port Chicago’s leadership. In fact, no mention was made of the officers’ role in the disaster. Their carelessness and silence went largely unaddressed. Port Chicago’s regulations stated that if an officer was concerned about safety or observed the “rough and careless handling of explosives” or the buildup of ordnance on the pier, his obligation was to shut down the loading process. In practice, however, no one attempted to enforce the rule.
Rather than criticize the depot’s officers, the report, in fact, commended them for working “loyally, conscientiously, intelligently, and effectively to make themselves competent officers and to solve the problem of loading ships safely with the men provided.” It stated further that “a very sustained and vigorous effort was made to train these men [the black seamen] in the proper handling of munitions.”
On other matters, the findings of the court were patently false. The report claimed that “there was no unnecessary concentration of explosives or personnel on the pier at the time of the explosion.” It also maintained that “the loading procedures and the gear used at Port Chicago were safe and in accordance with standard naval practice and did not violate naval safety precautions.” The report said nothing about Captain Kinne’s board, despite chiding him during the investigation for encouraging competition among the divisions. The court went on to argue that “the few practices … which were contrary to the Coast Guard shiploading regulations were not dangerous and did not increase the hazards.”
Nowhere did it mention the ongoing battle between Captains Goss and Kinne and the Coast Guard over the observance of safety regulations and who should enforce them. Nor did the court address Goss’s decision to remove Coast Guard observers from the pier, though it was certainly aware that the various shipbuilding yards that dotted the Bay Area had good safety records. Their records could be attributed not only to the excellent training the workers received under the guidelines of the Maritime Commission, but also to the Coast Guard inspectors who were stationed at each yard. Although the explosion undoubtedly tarnished the careers of Captains Goss and Kinne, the two officers escaped without any sort of punishment or formal reprimand.
The same could not be said of the fifty seamen. Just days after the court of inquiry released its statement, a legal officer showed up at Camp Shoemaker. He told the seamen, “You failed to obey orders, that’s mutiny and is about the same as looking down a gun barrel.”
CHAPTER 36
Proving Mutiny
In early September 1944, Admiral Wright formally accused Joe Small and the forty-nine other seamen of “having conspired each with the other to mutiny against the lawful authority of their superior naval officers duly set over them, by refusing to work in the operation of loading ammunition a
board ships and unloading ammunition from ships, did, on or about 11 August 1944, at said Naval Barracks, make a mutiny … in that they … did then and there willfully, concertedly and persistently disobey, disregard and defy [a] lawful order [to work] with a deliberate purpose and intent to override superior military authority; the United States then being in a state of war.” Adriral Wright reiterated what he had told the men before: To be convicted of mutiny during wartime carried the maximum penalty of death by firing squad.
Next, Wright appointed a seven-member general court-martial, comprised of senior naval officers, with the distinguished Rear Admiral Hugo Osterhaus, a career officer and winner of the Navy Cross in World War I, at its head. In the military tradition, Osterhaus would act as both judge and jury and was assigned his own attorney to help him interpret and enforce Navy law. Judge advocate Lieutenant Commander James Coakley took the helm of the prosecution team. Coakley was a former Alameda County, California, assistant district attorney under Governor Earl Warren, and was a supporter of Republican presidential candidate Thomas Dewey. Short and nearly bald, Coakley was not a physically imposing man. But he had a forceful, exacting nature that he would display throughout the course of the trial. Lieutenant Gerald Veltmann led the defense. A tall, lean Texan with a pronounced drawl, Veltmann was under no illusions about the seriousness of the charge of “making a mutiny” or the Navy’s intention to prosecute the case as aggressively and publicly as possible. He was literally fighting for the seamen’s lives.
Historically the Navy had fiercely guarded its reputation, hushing up incidents of rebellion because of their implication of failed authority. Near the end of World War I, thirteen seamen aboard a cargo ship, the USS Robert M. Thompson, assembled to protest the ship’s living conditions. When an ensign ordered them to go belowdecks, they refused and were accused of mutiny. When the ship reached the Brooklyn Navy Yard and the case went to trial, however, no mention was made of mutiny. The men were charged with nothing more than disobedience.
The Color of War Page 32
