“Most of us didn’t know how to shave,” Percy Robinson recalled. The food, at least, was decent. “We ate three squares a day, which we never did before, at least I never did.”
That was the good news about life in the Navy. The bad news was that the men couldn’t go anywhere at Great Lakes without being made to feel like unwelcome guests.
“The first thing they did,” remembered a sailor named DeWitt Jameson, “was to start segregating us.”
Percy Robinson described lining up for his first meal at Great Lakes. “There were two lines,” he explained. He stood with the other black recruits. “So you look around, and there’s another line over there that’s all white.” Robinson watched the white recruits march up to the main floor to eat. Then the black recruits were led downstairs to separate tables. Until that moment, he hadn’t realized how completely segregated the Navy was going to be.
Black recruits are inspected by an officer at Naval Training Station (NTS), Great Lakes, August 1943.
The black recruits were actually housed in their own separate camp, a brand new black-only training center, slapped together when the Navy announced its new policy of accepting black sailors. The Navy needed somewhere to train these men, but didn’t want them mixing with white recruits at Great Lakes. Classes at Great Lakes were segregated, musical bands, sports teams—everything.
The attitude of the black camp’s commander, Lieutenant Commander Daniel Armstrong, was typical of the times. He had his men decorate the base with murals of black naval heroes throughout history, from Dorie Miller all the way back to black sailors who served with Revolutionary captain John Paul Jones. The murals were Armstrong’s way of honoring black sailors. But this same officer wouldn’t allow black recruits at Great Lakes to compete with whites for spots in special schools that trained sailors to be electricians, radiomen, and mechanics. He didn’t think they were smart enough, so he didn’t even let them try.
Just how deeply ingrained was segregation? Absurdly, the military even segregated its blood supply. Military leaders knew there was no difference between the blood of black and white men. They knew it was a waste of time and money to store two separate blood supplies. But that was the tradition, and no one in power wanted to challenge it.
Sailors in formation on the parade ground at NTS, Great Lakes, 1943.
“Negro sailors—we were called Negroes—Negro sailors were not accepted as real seamen,” remembered Robert Edwards, who came to Great Lakes from Brooklyn, New York, at the age of eighteen. Edwards never forgot the day Secretary of the Navy Knox came to visit Great Lakes.
“We stood on the parade grounds for about two hours, waiting for him to come by, and he went to all the white camps and inspected the white camps, and then left,” Edwards remembered. “That didn’t make us feel very proud or patriotic.”
* * *
For twelve weeks, the black recruits exercised and marched and stood at attention. They scrubbed their barracks spotless and practiced on the rifle range and took swimming tests in the pool. They were never trained to handle explosives, but were not surprised by this.
They had no idea it was something they would soon need to know.
As boot camp neared an end, the men swapped guesses about where they’d be going next. Like most of them, Joe Small imagined himself joining the fight aboard a ship at sea. It’s what he was being trained for—or so he believed.
Martin Bordenave felt the same. “When I first enlisted in the Navy, I loved the sea,” he later said. “I expected to be a sailor, like any other sailor in the Navy.”
Cyril Sheppard knew all about the Navy’s history of using black men only as messmen. He wanted no part of it. “See, when I come to fight,” he said, “I don’t want to come fighting with pots and pans.”
“Most of us, a lot of us, wanted to go overseas, and wanted to shoot, get into combat,” agreed Percy Robinson. “We figured that by serving and fighting and dying in the service, that when we got back home, we would get better rights.”
Think about that. Robinson felt he had to prove himself in combat in order to “win” rights already guaranteed to all citizens in the United States Constitution.
Spencer Sikes, a teenager from Florida, was so eager to join the fight he convinced his mother to sign him up for the Navy when he was just seventeen.
“We had expectations to go to sea on a big Navy ship,” Sikes remembered. “The letdown was that once we reached our station, we found out that a lot of the things we had believed were a fantasy.”
* * *
Now officially seamen in the United States Navy, the young men boarded trains headed west, with no idea where the Navy was sending them. In California, buses carried them through the gates of a naval base about thirty miles northeast of San Francisco. The buses climbed a series of tall hills covered with dry grass. From the top of the last hill, the men looked out at a flat stretch of land along the banks of the mile-wide Suisun Bay. There were a few wooden buildings scattered around the mostly empty space and a pier at the waterfront.
This was their new home, the Port Chicago Naval Magazine.
“Strange thing, to look at all this vast space,” Robert Routh remembered of his first view of Port Chicago. “And very few trees. Coming from a farm area, this was really hard on me, to see so little foliage. Really, it was a sad place to look at.”
“Big open place, and a dock,” recalled Percy Robinson. “That’s about all there was there.”
“Dumpy looking place, way back there in the boondocks,” said a sailor named Freddie Meeks, echoing the first impressions of many. “And you were kinda disappointed. Because I really wanted to go out on a ship.”
Port Chicago sailors at work on the loading pier.
The bigger disappointment was still to come.
After dropping off their gear in the barracks, the sailors jumped on trucks and were driven about a mile down to the waterfront. There they got their first look at the work they’d been brought to Port Chicago to do.
A huge Navy ship was docked alongside the long wooden pier, which stretched 1,200 feet into the bay. There were railroad tracks on the pier. Boxcars sat on the tracks. Crews of young sailors in dungarees and blue work shirts were hauling heavy bombs and crates of ammunition out of the train cars and loading them onto the ship.
All the officers standing on the pier and giving orders were white. All the sailors handling explosives were black.
* * *
Captain Nelson Goss, commanding officer at Port Chicago, was not pleased with the personnel the Navy was sending him. He didn’t want black workers, or any minorities, if it could be avoided.
“Most of the men obtainable from these races do not compare favorably with those of the white race,” he complained. His busy base had one mission: to load bombs and ammunition onto ships, and he felt that black workers could only do about 60 percent as much work as whites.
The feeling was mutual: Goss didn’t want these men, and the men didn’t want to be there. Sure, the work at Port Chicago was a vital part of the war effort. American forces battling Japan in the Pacific needed massive supplies of ammunition, and someone had to load it onto ships. But that didn’t lessen the men’s frustration at being denied a chance to serve at sea. Soon after arriving, Robert Routh heard fellow sailors grumbling in the barracks.
“Ship us anywhere,” men muttered.
“We came to fight. Let us fight.”
There was an even more immediate problem, though, and Joe Small spotted it right away. At Great Lakes the sailors had been taught nothing about the safe handling of torpedo warheads or massive incendiary bombs. And, Small quickly realized, they were not going to be taught at Port Chicago either.
“The first time I saw any ammunition was the first time we were called out of the barracks and lined up and marched to the dock,” Small recalled. “Our specific jobs were explained, and we took it from there as best we could.”
The white officers at Port Chicago had been given
a brief course on the safe handling of bombs and ammunition. They’d also spent a few hours at ports on San Francisco Bay, watching professional stevedores at work loading ships. That was the extent of their training.
It was more than the black sailors got.
The Navy never even gave the men any kind of written manual describing how to handle bombs safely. No such manual existed. Some safety regulations were posted on sheets of paper at the pier, but not in the barracks, where the men might actually have had time to read them; the officers didn’t think the black sailors would be able to understand written regulations.
“They just brought you in and showed you—taught you a little something and turned you loose,” remembered Freddie Meeks.
“I didn’t know what to do,” Morris Soublet later said. “So we improvised our own ways.” Yes, there were white officers who were supposedly supervising the work. “But they didn’t know any more of what to do than we did.”
It was a recipe for disaster, and civilian stevedores in the Bay Area were horrified. They never let a worker handle explosives until he’d gained years of experience on the job. The longshoremen’s union offered to send trained loaders to teach the Navy recruits. The Navy never responded.
From the moment they arrived at Port Chicago, most of the men lived in constant fear of a catastrophic explosion. Seventeen-year-old Spencer Sikes was convinced he’d die at the base.
“Boy, I’ll never make it back home,” he thought as he worked. “I’ll never see my mom again.”
WORK AND LIBERTY
CLINK … THUD … CLINK …
This was the annoying series of sounds that woke Joe Small almost every morning at Port Chicago. He’d open his eyes and check the clock—just 4:30.
He’d try to get a little more sleep, but the clinking and thudding would continue. Small didn’t have to look out the window to know the cause. The guy they called T. J. was out there in the dark, pitching horseshoes in bare feet and boxers, his sneakers tied together and hung over his neck.
T. J. did this every morning, week after week. Small figured T. J. was angling for a Section Eight—a discharge given to men mentally unfit for service. Anything to get out of Port Chicago.
Whether Small got back to sleep or not, he was usually the next member of Division Four to get out of bed. He’d always been an early riser, and the other men quickly began counting on him to get them up and on their way to chow.
“All right, buddy,” Small would say, moving from bunk to bunk, shaking heavy sleepers. “Let’s go, buddy, get up.”
* * *
He’d been like that from a young age.
“My father didn’t believe in me depending on help,” Small would later explain. “He taught us to be independent.”
Growing up on his family’s 80-acre farm in New Jersey, Joe handled jobs in the fields and around the house. “For instance I had the chore of bringing in the night pail every night,” he said. With no indoor plumbing, the Smalls used an outhouse during the day—and at night, the pail. “And if I went to bed without getting that night pail in, if it was needed at any time of night, I went out and got it.” Didn’t matter what time it was, or what the weather was like. “I’ve gotten out of bed at 3:00 in the morning,” he said, “in two foot of snow.”
One afternoon, when Small was fourteen, he was hanging out at a roadside truck stop near his home, watching the big rigs come and go. A driver stepped out of the restaurant and saw the skinny teenager staring up at his truck, piled high with long logs. He thought he’d have some fun with the kid.
“You think you can move that?” the driver teased.
“Sure, I can,” Small snapped back. “I can drive anything on wheels.”
A slight exaggeration—he’d driven a tractor on his family’s farm, but that’s about it.
The driver smiled and pointed up to the cab. “The key’s in it. Go ahead.”
Small climbed in and took a quick look around. He started the engine, grabbed the shift stick, and wrestled the truck into first gear. Then, gently, he lowered his foot onto the gas pedal.
The driver looked up, stunned to see his rig begin rolling through the parking lot. He hollered for Small to stop.
Small’s foot slammed on the brake. The jolt of the sudden stop sent one of the logs sliding forward; it smashed through the back window, sped past Small’s head, crashed through the front windshield, and came to a stop sticking out from the front of the truck.
There was a short silence.
And then the driver erupted with a burst of curses, roaring so furiously he literally started hopping up and down. Small opened the cab door, jumped to the ground, and took off down the road.
Joe’s father died a year later. The family scraped by, growing their own food, sometimes selling extra tomatoes and lettuce. But the Smalls needed income, and Joe stepped up.
In a local newspaper he saw that a furniture company was looking for truck drivers. He was just fifteen. He didn’t have a driver’s license, and didn’t exactly know how to drive a truck. None of that stopped him. He walked into the furniture company’s office and asked for the job.
“You got a license?”
“Yeah,” Small said, tapping his hip pocket.
“All right, all right,” said the manager, “as long as you got it.”
Joe drove for the company for a year and finally got his driver’s license when he turned sixteen. All the while, he tried to keep up with school. The schoolwork was no problem, but there was an irritating kid in his class, a white kid who thought it was funny to call black kids like Small “Smokey”—and then duck behind his 200-pound cousin.
Small was thin, about five foot seven, but never one to back down. He promised his tormentor he’d catch him one day when the big cousin wasn’t around. He kept the promise. “I put a good whipping on him,” Small recalled. “They gave me an alternative: either leave school or be sent to a reform school.”
That was the end of Joe Small’s formal education.
Small was twenty-two years old when he got to Port Chicago, a few years older than most of the men in his division. He had a bit more life experience than the other men, and the confidence that came with it.
“I demanded, I guess you could use that phrase, I demanded respect,” Small later said, explaining how he came to be seen as the unofficial leader of his division. “I mean, I would tell a man, ‘Shut up. You talk too much.’ Look him straight in the eye, and that was it, and he’d get the opinion I meant what I said, and if he didn’t shut up the consequences would be disastrous. And through that attitude I gained the respect of the men.”
* * *
Small and the men had to be dressed and ready for work by 6:45 a.m., when their lieutenant’s voice came blasting out of the speakers in the barracks: “Now hear this, now hear this! Division Four, Barracks B, fall out, fall out!”
From that moment, the men had exactly two minutes to line up in the street outside the barracks. As they were forming ranks, elbowing each other into place, Lieutenant Ernest Delucchi walked up to inspect his division. A schoolteacher in civilian life, Delucchi had joined the Navy when the war began. He was short, stocky, in his early thirties.
“He looked like an old guy,” Percy Robinson remembered of Delucchi. “I didn’t like him too well.”
“He spent half the day wanting to knock somebody down,” Cyril Sheppard recalled. “He was always challenging different guys: ‘If you think you’re big enough, come on out here, step forward’ and all that kind of stuff.”
“Very hot-tempered,” Joe Small added. “If things didn’t go his way, he was very quick to punish you for it.”
Sailors march onto the Port Chicago pier to begin their work shift.
Small managed to stay on Delucchi’s good side, though. The lieutenant quickly recognized Small’s leadership skills and assigned Small the job of marching outside the ranks and calling cadence.
“Left! Left! Left, right, left!” Small chanted as the di
vision marched in rows, the pounding of boots on pavement falling into rhythm with his chant. After a short march, the men crowded into trucks—“cattle cars,” the guys derisively joked—and rode down to the pier to begin another day’s work.
On the long pier leading out into the bay, the men divided into five groups of about twenty men each. The ships they loaded had five hatches, and each team loaded bombs into one of the hatches. Each team broke into two squads. One worked on the pier, one in the ship’s hold—the huge, open storage area below deck.
Train tracks ran down from the base and out onto the pier, allowing boxcars full of explosives to roll onto the pier and stop beside the waiting ship.
Above and below: Sailors unload crates of ammunition from boxcars at the pier.
“We’d open the boxcar doors,” Small described, “and the bombs would be stacked four, five, or six high inside the car.”
A couple of men climbed in, crouching between the top layer of bombs and the roof of the car. Using long wooden planks, they set up a ramp from the top of the bombs down to the pier, about eight feet below. Others, meanwhile, hung mattresses on the side of the ship—to cushion the blow in case one of the 500-pound shells rolled too fast down the ramp, sped across the pier, and slammed into the side of the metal ship. It happened all the time.
“You’d hear this all day long: BOOM! BOOM! BOOM-BOOM!” Percy Robinson remembered.
“And that would almost give you a heart attack,” said Freddie Meeks. Several times he asked the officers if there was any danger of an accidental explosion.
Their response was always the same: “Oh, no, don’t worry about it.”
Small heard this, but wasn’t convinced. He asked his lieutenant for a more detailed answer. Delucchi took out a booklet, flipped to a diagram of the 500-pound bomb they were loading and pointed out the detonator, which was attached to the head of the bomb. It was the detonator that triggered the explosion by sending a spark into the TNT packed into the bomb. The bombs the men were loading didn’t have the detonators attached yet.
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