Forty-three seconds after it was dropped, the bomb, known as “Little Boy,” detonated at 8:16 a.m. Hiroshima time, 1,900 feet above the ground. Just seconds later the city ceased to exist. When Armed Forces Radio announced that the bomb had been dropped, servicemen across the Pacific shouted with joy, many believing for the first time that they would now survive the war.
President Truman again gave Japanese leaders the opportunity to surrender, warning that if they did not accept our terms they could “expect a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this earth.” But Tokyo remained silent. Orders were already in place to drop the second bomb, so when Japan’s leaders did not respond, Truman saw no reason to amend the schedule. “Fat Man” was detonated over the secondary target of Nagasaki (Kokura, the “Pittsburgh of Japan,” was the primary target, but the bombardier could not see the aiming point through the smoke and clouds) at 11:01 a.m. on August 9. Little Boy killed a minimum of 100,000 people, and Fat Man another 74,000.
Truman and General George Marshall again waited for word from Japan’s leaders. Hearing nothing, on August 14 they ordered a two-thousand-plane bombing attack. It was the last raid on Japan and the largest of the war. The following day, Japan surrendered. After a failed attempt to kill himself, Hideki Tojo was placed on trial before the International Military Tribunal for the Far East and was found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity. He was executed by hanging on December 23, 1948.
In 1968, with congressional approval, the Navy bought the town of Port Chicago for $20 million. The residents’ efforts to resist that sale, and the subsequent razing of the town, are detailed in Ken Rand’s book Port Chicago Isn’t There Anymore. Not long after, the Port Chicago Naval Ammunition Depot, which was shipping 100,000 tons of munitions every month to American forces in Vietnam, became the scene of antiwar demonstrations. Years later an investigative reporter by the name of Stephen Talbot produced a public television documentary film called Broken Arrow in which he argued that Port Chicago, which was now part of the Concord Naval Weapons Station, had become a storage and transshipment facility for nuclear weapons. The Navy refused to comment on Talbot’s charge.
In Peter Vogel’s 2001 book, The Last Wave from Port Chicago, he makes an even bolder claim than Talbot. In 1980 Vogel discovered a document written in late 1944 by Los Alamos mathematician Joseph Hirschfelder and physicist William Penney titled “History of the 10,000 ton gadget.” The document is a mathematical model of an atomic bomb detonation at the Trinity site in New Mexico on July 16, 1945. The bottom line forecasts a “ball of fire mushroom out at 18,000 ft. in typical Port Chicago fashion.” The discovery launched him on a twenty-year investigation of the Port Chicago explosion.
Relying on primary documents and correspondence between General Groves, James Conant, Robert Oppenheimer, Rear Admiral W. R. Purnell, and Captain W. S. Parsons, the director of the Ordnance Division at the Los Alamos Laboratories, Vogel argues that the explosion at Port Chicago was caused by the deliberate detonation of a low-yield nuclear fission weapon called the Mark II in a test conducted jointly by the United States Navy and the Manhattan Project Los Alamos Laboratories. In The Last Wave from Port Chicago, Vogel attempts to prove that enough U-235 isotope had been separated in sufficient degree of enrichment to enable detonation of the Mark II bomb.
One of the documents Vogel cites as evidence is an August 3, 1944, letter from Oppenheimer to Conant in which Oppenheimer writes, “We have had the first positive indications as far as our main program goes, and although the results have not been checked, they do lend some encouragement.” A week later Conant reports to General Groves that the Mark II should be shelved because of its reduced destructive capabilities and used only if other implosion methods failed. Vogel reasons that for the Mark II to be “put on the shelf,” as Conant suggests it should be, it required first a successful proof firing. In his book Images of America: Port Chicago and in his provocative blog “Discussing Port Chicago,” Dean McLeod makes charges similar to Vogel’s.
In his book Vogel also questions the court-martial proceedings and propriety of the convictions. Captain William Parsons’s brother-in-law was Captain J. S. “Jack” Crenshaw. Parsons had requested Crenshaw’s appointment to the Navy court of inquiry. From his Los Alamos office Parsons corresponded frequently during the trial with Crenshaw. Vogel insists that “the proceedings and findings of the Court of Inquiry were corrupted by Captain Crenshaw who was derelict in duty as a member of the court by his failure to report in the court proceedings the known cause of the explosion, or failure to report to the court his reasons sufficient to believe that a specific cause of the explosion could be known by due diligence, or his failure to report to the court that testimony produced from his brother-in-law Captain Parsons would provide evidence relevant to determination of the cause of the explosion.”
Vogel argues that because the court of inquiry was corrupted from the very beginning, the men tried and convicted in the formal mutiny court-martial proceedings were denied substantive due process. That being the case, Vogel insists that the Navy judge advocate vacate all the summary and formal court-martial determinations and convictions.
When Vogel wrote his book, he did not know that just days after the close of the mutiny trial, a San Francisco reporter discovered that Lieutenant Commander James Coakley was the brother-in-law of Lieutenant Ernest Delucchi. Had Vogel had access to this information, he surely would have challenged the probity of the trial, too.
Carl Matthews regained consciousness aboard a Navy hospital ship eight days after Lieutenant Leary was killed. Doctors told him that his ear had ruptured and that he was suffering from a bruised brain, and likely internal bleeding, too. Later Matthews would confess that he was an “emotional wreck,” trembling and vomiting when startled by sudden noises and disturbed by his inability to remember the last days of the battle. Matthews spent the remainder of the war at the Quantico Marine Air Base. After the war he visited Lieutenant Leary’s family, beginning a friendship that continues today. On that first trip he learned that the lieutenant’s body never made it back from the cliff where he died. Matthews also visited the Nightingale farm in Skowhegan, Maine, and found everything—the house, the barn, and the giant maple tree—as his friend had described it. Mr. Nightingale thanked Matthews for coming and told him, “I have waited twenty years for this moment. Tell me about what happened to my son.” When Matthews finished, Mr. Nightingale wiped the tears from his eyes. “I’m glad you came,” he said. “Now I can die happy. I just could not die until I knew what had happened to my boy.” Matthews participated in the filming of a Japanese public television documentary on the battle of Saipan. In 2004 he made his first trip back to Saipan for a ceremony commemorating the sixtieth anniversary of the battle. The following year he returned and served as one of the keynote speakers for the opening of the museum at American Memorial Park. On both trips he spent dozens of hours searching for Lieutenant Leary’s remains. He was never able to identify the place where Wendell Nightingale was killed. The landing-day photo of Matthews, Nightingale, and Leary hangs in the Marine Museum at Quantico. Despite Lieutenant Leary’s death, Richard Freeby was awarded the Silver Star for valor.
Robert Graf returned to Marine Camp Maui after participating in the invasion of Tinian. When he arrived at camp, standing before him was Dick Crerar. Crerar had been wounded during the West Loch explosion and was taken to a hospital in Oahu. In the chaos that followed the blast, his records were lost and everyone assumed that he had died. At Camp Maui, Graf again went through intensive field training. On February 19, 1945, at 9:02 a.m., as a member of the 23rd Marine Regiment, he was part of the first wave on Iwo Jima. That first morning, Graf was wounded by an enemy shell, but he was not evacuated. On the morning of the second day, while helping to search the battlefield for wounded Marines, he discovered Major Fought’s body. Just over two weeks later he was wounded again when an artillery shell landed near the company command post. The followi
ng day, back home in Ballston Spa, Graf’s mother told the family that “Bobby” had been hurt. The previous night she had seen him in a dream “limping down the hall.” Although Graf had lost a lot of blood, luckily for him the wound was not a serious one—he had taken a piece of shrapnel in the left buttock. Later he would write, “No missing limbs nor major damage but enough of a wound to leave this Hell Hole, this land of the Devil.” On March 7, 1945, two black Marines carried him from an Iwo Jima field hospital to an amphibious vehicle and transported him and dozens of other wounded men to a hospital ship. Graf recuperated on Guam and then later at the U.S. Naval Hospital at Pearl Harbor. On April 29 he arrived back at Camp Maui to prepare for the land invasion of Japan. One day shy of three months after the Japanese surrender (November 14), Graf, Jimmy Haskell, and Andrew “Bill” Jurcsak were discharged. For many years after the war, they would sing the song that Haskell wrote while overseas:
History will tell about our journey across the sea
How we stormed the bloody banks to take the enemy
The foe was tough, but you know us, and on to victory,
As we go marching on.
Glory, Glory, what a hell of a way to die
Glory, Glory, what a hell of a way to die
Glory, Glory, what a hell of a way to die
What a hell of a way to pass your life away.
First we took the Marshall Isles and then we took Saipan
Twenty thousand Nipponese lay bleeding in the sand.
We rested for eleven days and then took Tinian,
As we go marching on.
We sailed again out on the sea, to take that Iwo Isle
Volcanic ash and sulfur fumes poured down on us in style
At last our Flag was flying over Iwo’s highest hill,
As we go marching on.
On July 9, while on patrol, Frank Borta was nearly hit by a mortar. He blacked out and when he came to, aboard a hospital ship, he thought he was paralyzed. For a number of days he could only move his head enough to see that a Marine lying on one side of him had a bullet in his belly, and on the other side, another Marine had a severely fractured leg and only one arm. By the time the ship reached the Marshall Islands, Borta was walking again. There he transferred to a carrier that also served as a prison ship and was taking captured Japanese soldiers to Hawaii. Aboard ship, Borta was plagued by nightmares. In Pearl Harbor, Navy doctors interviewed him. When they discovered that he was only seventeen, they told him that he had done enough for his country and sent him to the Seattle Naval Hospital. One day while he was shining his shoes, he was summoned to the administration building. There, standing in the room, was his father. “I wanted to make sure you still had your arms and legs,” his father said. That night, over beers, Frank told his father about Saipan. “C’mon home, son,” his father said. “You’ve done enough for your country.” Borta was home by early 1945. Later, during a successful business career (international sales with Allied Van Lines), he would visit Saipan numerous times. Like Matthews, he attended the sixtieth-anniversary celebration.
On November 1, 1944, Edgar Huff joined the 5th Marine Depot Company as a first sergeant. One month later he was bound for the island of Saipan, where he and his men were scheduled to train in combat tactics prior to the upcoming invasion of Okinawa. Instead, the men were relegated to what Huff called “mule” work. They loaded ships, burned latrines, blew up old and defective ammunition, and cleaned up the island’s Marine camps.
In March 1945, the 5th boarded a navy ship bound for Japan’s Ryukyu Islands. The captain welcomed the men aboard and announced the berthing arrangements: white officers would bunk in “officer country”; white NCOs and enlisted men would occupy decks two and three; all Negroes would be confined to the hold. On April 1, 1945, the 5th took part in a diversionary landing on Okinawa’s southern beaches, where it was subjected to heavy fire. Two days later it was attached to the 1st Marine Division. For the duration of the battle, Huff and his men unloaded supplies and lugged them to frontline fighting troops and served as stretcher bearers and on burial crews. In late September 1945, the 5th was sent to China. In early 1946, after guarding coal cars in northeastern China, the 5th arrived back in San Diego. Days later, Huff took his men to Montford Point via train. Instead of riding in Pullman troop sleepers, the men were assigned to dusty, unheated cattle cars. On February 21, 1946, disgusted with the Marines’ Jim Crow policies, Edgar Huff retired.
Urged by friends to reenlist, he signed on again in May 1946. Huff was made a master sergeant when President Truman signed Executive Order 9981, but like other Montford Point Marines he was ambivalent about the order. He resented the Marines’ racist policies, but feared losing his identity as a black Marine. In the summer of 1951 he was sent to Korea. It was his first experience with an integrated company and the first time white Marines ever served under a black NCO. In Korea, Huff was transferred to a heavy weapons company, where he was the only black Marine in the unit and saw combat.
After the war, Huff became the first black sergeant major in Marine history. In 1955 he was transferred to French Morocco, Africa, U.S. Naval Base, Marine Barracks, Port Lyautey Naval Intelligence Center, where he guarded the King of Morocco. Returning to Camp Lejeune in 1957, he became the first black sergeant major of a Marine Corps regiment. In 1960, Huff was in charge of two busloads of Marine umpires traveling from Little Creek to Camp Lejeune when Jim Crow again raised its ugly head. The Marines stopped at a café to eat. Huff, who was in charge of the group, was not allowed to enter the restaurant. A white private had to buy him a sandwich.
Huff did two tours in Vietnam, where he was sergeant major of the largest combat force ever under Marine command, the III Marine, Amphibious Combat Force. In 1968, during the Tet Offensive, he won the Bronze Star for taking out an enemy machine gun and saving a group of white Marines. He was also awarded a Purple Heart and won the Combat “V” for saving a white Marine’s life. In 1971 he did radio broadcasts over the Armed Forces Network and wrote articles about race relations. When he retired in September 1972, he helped to make a recruiting film for the Marines. That same year he was given the key to the city of Gadsden, Alabama.
Upon being discharged from the Navy, Sammie Boykin spent the rest of his life working for the city of Oakland. He remained dedicated to his country and proud of his service, but the events at Port Chicago disturbed him. Not until he attended his first summer ceremony commemorating the explosion did he begin to tell his family about his experiences at Port Chicago. Sammie Boykin passed away on October 25, 2009.
In early 1946, after being discharged, Percy Robinson went home to Chicago, got his college diploma, and took a job teaching electronics and mathematics at the Midway Television Institute in Chicago. During the summers, while loading and unloading freighters and barges at the Lake Michigan docks, he sometimes ran the winches. In the early 1950s, after a brief stint at RCA in Indianapolis, he moved to Los Angeles, where jobs were abundant. While going to night school at various colleges in the Los Angeles area, including USC and UCLA, he took a job with the Hughes Aircraft Company, where he worked his way up the ladder from test engineer to scientist. By the time he retired, thirty-five years later, he was in charge of one of the company’s largest labs.
Although George Booth never did make it to Hampton University (as Lieutenant Delucchi promised), he, too, remained proud of his naval service. Owing partly to his experience at Port Chicago, Booth became an active member in the American Youth Democracy, which fought against discrimination and for workers’ rights. Harry Truman’s attorney general, however, thought otherwise and accused the organization of having Communist sympathies. Eventually Booth went to work for the city of Detroit, where he was one of only two blacks on the Water Board.
Despite what happened at Port Chicago, Joe Small remained proud of his service, though he rarely discussed the explosion or his role in the mutiny. He supported his family as a handyman who could do it all—carpentry, plumbing, and electrical.
Everyone who knew him considered him to be a man of integrity and principle. He encouraged his children to be strong and independent thinkers. When one son became involved in the Black Panther movement, he said to him, “Son, there is no such thing as race.” In 1958 a house fire took the lives of two of his children. Lillian, Small’s wife, sustained burns over 90 percent of her body. Eventually two of Small’s sons and one of his grandsons would serve in the Navy. Some of the Port Chicago fifty ended up changing their names and moving frequently in an effort to hide their past. Not Small. He found his peace in his family and in God.
Many of the loaders at Port Chicago had joined the Navy with hopes of serving their country as sailors bound for the South Pacific. In January 1946, Joe Small did finally do his tour, but it was under different circumstances than he had ever imagined. “We had no duties,” he later recalled. “Nothing to do but make mess call, roam about the ship, and sleep. We rode and rode, just back and forth from one port to another. We never left the ship.”
REMEMBERING A WORLD WAR II
TRAGEDY AT PORT CHICAGO
In March 2009, President Obama signed the Omnibus Public Land Management Act that created the Port Chicago Naval Magazine National Memorial in Concord, California. It is our country’s 392nd national park and commemorates the July 17, 1944, explosion, in which 320 men died and almost 400 others were injured.
NOTES
CHAPTER 1: “ANOTHER SUNDAY, ANOTHER PEARL HARBOR ATTACK”
The Color of War Page 38
