Smith, Greg dot com

The massive blast occurred in the most unlikely of places, and the events after the blast were as even more strange and interesting than the blast itself...

Port Chicago, California was a town located on Suisun Bay. Way up at the north end of the massive San Francisco Bay, past San Quentin and the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge, the bay takes a turn to the east into Contra Costa County, where the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers converge and form a wide estuary. The bay here is renamed Suisun Bay. Port Chicago sat on the south side of this bay, just north of Walnut Creek and Concord.

The United States Navy has had facilities here for a long time. Just across the delta from what was Port Chicago the Navy still has a large fleet of ships mothballed here, including the USS Iowa.

During World War II this was a busy naval port for the Pacific Fleet. In particular, at Port Chicago ships were loaded with munitions for the island hopping fight westward toward the Japanese home islands.

On the night of July 17, 1944 munitions were being loaded onto two transport ships, the E.A. Bryan and the Quinault Victory, at Port Chicago detonated. The cause of the blast has never been accurately determined -- some sort of accident -- but the explosion was one of the largest man-made, non-nuclear blasts in history. 5,000 tons of high explosives detonated, setting off secondary explosions of whatever else was stored in dockside warehouses plus whatever whatever was in the stores of ships at dock there.

The blast destroyed everything within a one-mile radius, including the two ships, the pier and the dock. It killed 320 men on the base, and injured nearly 400 more, most of whom were black. Also almost completely destroying the town of Port Chicago 1.5 miles away, it was the worst home-front military disaster of World War II. Chunks of smoldering metal weighing hundreds of pounds and even un-detonated bombs rained down upon the community, damaging over 300 structures and injuring over 100 people. Miraculously, none of the bombs exploded, and no residents of the town of Port Chicago were killed. By sheer size of the blast, the Port Chicago explosion was as large as a 5-kiloton bomb.

The explosion was so massive that it was felt as far away as Las Vegas (500 miles distant) and windows across the San Francisco Bay area were shattered by a massive pressure wave, injuring many.

320 sailors and other workers were killed instantly and 400 were seriously wounded. Most of these were African American service men. They had enlisted in the Navy, hoping to fight but blacks were not used in combat at this time so they were assigned to do this sort of dangerous, heavy work. They were given little training and inadequate equipment. This single explosion accounted for almost 15% of African American casualties during the war. That alone would have counted as tragedy enough.

In 1968 the town of Port Chicago and the property around it were bought by the Navy and incorporated into a safety zone around a new port facility, the Concord Naval Weapons Station. There is a memorial near the spot of the explosion.

But it was the events after the explosion that were even more strange and ultimately tragic.

Three weeks after the explosion and a hurried clean up, the surviving sailors at the facility were ordered to resume weapons loading at the nearby Mare Island facility. Still without adequate training or equipment, and traumatized by the event without sufficient understanding of how it had occurred and -- more importantly -- how it could be prevented in the future, most of the African American personnel refused to continue the weapon loading operations unless safety measures were put into place.

After the confrontation, over 250 men were arrested. They were incarcerated for 3 days in a barge moored to the pier, and were threatened by their white officers with mutiny charges punishable by death during wartime. The men were given the opportunity to put the so-called uprising behind them and return to work. About 200 reluctantly agreed, but were thrown in the brig instead. The 50 remaining black enlisted men who still refused to load munitions under unsafe conditions were indeed finally brought up on charges of mutiny and a date of court martial was set.

These fifty enlisted men were tried for mutiny and sentenced between 8 and 15 years in prison.

After the war, Harry Truman commuted the men's sentences and they were released with time served, although their convictions were never overturned and thus they never received any veterans benefits and their felony convictions remained on their records for the rest of their lives.

As an interesting postscript...

Freddie Meeks, one of the few remaining survivors of the 50 court-martialed sailors, petitioned for a Presidential pardon after a Congressional effort to have the convictions overturned was unsuccessful. In September 1999, Congressman George Miller (Democrat, CA 7th Dist) and 36 other members of Congress sent a letter to President Clinton requesting he grant the pardon. In December the same year, President Bill Clinton issued a pardon for Meeks.

You can read more about the Port Chicago Mutiny and the Emmy-nominated TV movie (produced by Morgan Freeman) made from the story at www.portchicagomutiny.com.