But that was after the disaster, when the officers were scrambling to deflect blame from themselves. The men who did the work at Port Chicago told a very different story.
“We were pushed,” said Joe Small. “The officers used to pit one division against the other. I often heard them argue over what division was beating the others.”
Even more alarming to Small was when he realized Lieutenant Delucchi and other officers were actually placing bets on whose division could load the fastest.
“If he decided that he wanted to make $100,” Small said of Delucchi, “and that we could outwork the Second Division, then he would bet the commander of the Second Division that we would put on more tonnage than his division would.”
If Small’s division fell short, the men were left to deal with a very unhappy lieutenant.
* * *
“I think in the minds of a lot of people, including myself, what we were doing there was essential,” Spencer Sikes later said of the vital job the Port Chicago men were doing. “The ammo had to be there. Somebody had to do it.”
American troops needed massive quantities of ammunition, and they needed it fast. The Port Chicago sailors appreciated this. What bothered them, more than the dangerous working conditions, was the feeling they’d been singled out for this work because of their race.
From the Navy’s point of view, the sailors at Port Chicago were treated like any other enlisted men. All sailors had dangerous jobs, and there was no use whining about it. “There was no discrimination or any unusual treatment of these men,” a Navy report insisted.
But naval leaders were ignoring one essential point—segregation was discrimination. The very fact that black sailors were stuck at Port Chicago instead of being allowed to fight was discrimination. And the black sailors felt it, even if the white officers didn’t.
“We used to talk about what big fools we were, you know, only black boys loading ammunition,” Martin Bordenave remembered. “Only white boys can go aboard ships.”
“You didn’t see no white boys out there loading,” said another sailor, Willie Gay. “I guess they figured that was all we were good for.”
* * *
The loading continued in three shifts, around the clock. As the speed of the work increased, so did the tension at the waterfront.
Cyril Sheppard described rolling huge bombs into one of the nets on the pier. The winch operator lifted the net too quickly and the heavy load swung back—CRACK!—into the side of the railroad car.
“Damn, man!” Sheppard shouted. “Can’t you do better than that?”
Sailors prepare to receive a load of crates on board an ammunition ship.
“Oh, man, don’t worry about that,” the winch operator said. Like many on the pier, he coped with the danger by trying to pretend it didn’t exist.
On another day, Percy Robinson was standing on a stack of ammunition in the hold of a ship tied to the pier. Nets were lowering bombs into the hold, and the men were stacking them higher and higher.
As one bomb came down it slipped from the tilting net and slammed, nose first, into the side of the ship. Everyone froze.
A PSSSSSSSSSSS-sound filled the hold. Some sort of red liquid started shooting out the front of the bomb.
Men dove for the ladders leading up to deck.
“You had ten, twelve guys trying to get out of the hold at the same time,” Robinson remembered. “You can’t do it. Some guys broke their legs trying to get out of that hold.”
As the terrified crew stumbled and limped and collapsed onto the pier, they noticed the other crews were just standing there, calmly looking on. Some of the men were laughing.
It was just dye, someone on the pier explained. The bombs had pressurized capsules of dye in their noses, different colors for different ships, and when one of the bombs hit something, the dye would spray out. That way, even in the chaos of battle, crews could see where their bombs were exploding, and adjust their aim.
It all made perfect sense—except that no one had bothered to inform the men loading the bombs.
“They should have told us about that,” Robinson said after this senseless accident. “We should have gone to school or something to learn about something like this.”
Most of the young sailors were afraid to gripe to the officers about the increasingly dangerous working conditions. The quick-tempered Lieutenant Delucchi, in particular, was not an easy man to approach.
Not surprisingly, Joe Small was one of the few to speak up. During one hectic shift, Delucchi came over to check on the progress.
“How are things going?” he asked Small.
“Rough,” Small said. “I think we’re pushing too hard.”
Delucchi looked at his watch. He asked Small if he thought the men could load thirty tons by the end of the shift.
“Sure, if the place doesn’t blow up,” Small said. “And someday it will.”
Delucchi had heard this worry before. He responded the way he always did.
“If it does,” he told Small, grinning, “neither you nor I will be around to know about it.”
* * *
By July 1944, there were 1,431 black enlisted men at Port Chicago, and 71 white officers. The base was guarded by 106 marines, all white.
“The 17th of July was a beautiful day,” Robert Routh would recall many years later. “It was a Monday, a hot July day, and for some reason I felt a great foreboding, and I don’t know why.”
At the pier, crews were loading the cargo ship E. A. Bryan. The Bryan was scheduled to take on 8,500 tons of bombs and ammunition; about half of that was already aboard.
That afternoon a civilian plumber from Pittsburg named Albert Carr drove down to the waterfront. He’d gotten a call that the steam-powered brakes on one of the winches were malfunctioning.
As Carr replaced a faulty part in the winch, the rapid loading continued around him. He heard bombs rolling down ramps from the boxcars, clinking together on the pier. A sailor walking past him lost his grip on a shell, and it fell with a heavy thud.
Carr announced that he was done, and the winch operator climbed on to test the brakes. They were working fine. Seeing this, the plumber quickly began gathering his tools.
“Where are you going?” an officer asked.
“Well, I’m through,” Carr said. “I don’t like the looks of things around here.”
The plumber headed back to Pittsburg as fast as he could.
* * *
Joe Small and the men of Division Four finished work at three o’clock that afternoon. They rode the cattle cars back to their barracks as fresh crews took over the loading.
For Spencer Sikes, it was a liberty day. He was hanging around the base when he heard someone shouting:
“Sikes! Telephone!”
He picked up the phone, and was surprised when the woman on the other end introduced herself as the mother of Alverta, a girl he’d met recently in Berkeley.
“Spence, what are you doing today?” asked the mother.
“Nothing, I’m off today.”
“Why don’t you come into town tonight? Why don’t you guys go to a movie?”
Sounded a lot better than reading in his bunk. “Yes,” he said, “that’s a good idea.”
He showered and shaved and walked to the bus stop.
“That date really saved my life,” he later said.
* * *
At 6 p.m., as Sikes headed for Berkeley, a second ship, the Quinalt Victory, cruised up to Port Chicago and was tied up across the pier from the E. A. Bryan. While Division Three continued moving explosives onto the Bryan, the men of Division Six climbed onto the Quinalt Victory to prepare its holds for loading.
Spencer Sikes
The air cooled quickly as the sun set. The floodlights on the pier came on. Sixteen railroad boxcars, holding about 430 tons of bombs and ammunition, were lined up on pier. Armed marines patrolled the waterfront. Coast Guard boats patrolled the bay.
A diagram included in the c
ourt martial records shows the location of explosives on the Port Chicago Pier and the Bryan on the day of the explosion.
A little after 9 p.m., several crew members of the Quinault Victory left the ship for a few hours of liberty. Most of the crew stayed aboard.
Lieutenant Commander Glen Ringquist paced the pier, supervising the work. The holds of the Bryan were loaded nearly to their tops. As Ringquist watched, sailors added what they called the “hot cargo”—incendiary bombs with fuses already attached. Ringquist saw that the men were handling these bombs very carefully.
“Operations were proceeding in a normal routine matter,” Ringquist would later report. “Conditions normal about this time.”
At 9:30, Captain Kinne came down for a look at the work. Seeing that everything was going well, he got back in his jeep and drove to the officers’ quarters. In the enlisted men’s barracks, a mile from the pier, men were getting ready for lights out.
“I had pimples, you know, still being a teenager,” Robert Routh remembered. Routh spread acne cream on his cheeks, put his gear away, said his prayers, and got into bed.
At 10 p.m. exactly, the usual announcement came over speakers: “Lights out, quiet about the deck.”
Men settled into their bunks.
Joe Small lay on his top bunk in the dark, thinking fondly of a woman he’d met in Pittsburg. They had a date to meet again the next night.
“But naturally that never came about,” Small later said. “See, everything changed.”
THE EXPLOSION
JOE SMALL WAS STILL AWAKE AT 10:18 P.M.
He was lying on his stomach when he heard what sounded like a thunderclap coming from the direction of the pier.
“Oh my God, we’re being bombed!” someone shouted.
Men lifted their heads from their pillows and looked out the windows in the direction of the sound. Then, just seconds after the first blast, came a much more massive explosion.
“The sky lit up, and it’s just like the sun rose,” Percy Robinson remembered.
“All these tremendous beautiful flashes in the sky,” said Robert Routh, “like at a Fourth of July celebration.”
The speeding shock wave slammed into the barracks.
“It was like someone shot in the windows with a shotgun,” Willie Gay said.
Flying glass slashed many of the men. “My left arm got mutilated,” Robinson said, “face, head, neck, shoulders.”
Routh, who was looking out toward the pier, took glass shards in both eyes.
The blast lifted Small straight into the air, his mattress still underneath him. Flipping over as he fell, he landed facedown on the barracks floor, with the mattress on top of him—lucky protection from the shower of glass and wood splinters.
Cyril Sheppard, who’d been sitting on the toilet reading a letter from home, was knocked across the bathroom and into the wall. He got up and dashed out into the dark barracks.
“Men were screaming,” he remembered. “Glass was flying all over the place. The whole building was caving in.”
“First thing I thought—Pearl Harbor again,” Albert Williams said. “That’s what it was like, somebody dropped bombs over the place.”
As he lay bleeding in the dark, Robinson heard a series of sharp cracks. The wood beams holding up the second story were giving way.
“Get out of the barracks!” men shouted. “It’s coming down!”
Crawling, tripping, carrying each other, the men raced outside as the building tilted over.
Unable to see from his wounded eyes, Routh called out, “Hey! Come and get me and take me to the sick bay!”
Someone shouted back, “The sick bay has been blown up!”
* * *
Lieutenant Commander Glen Ringquist had a closer look at the blast than the men in the barracks.
He had left the pier at 10:15 p.m., just three minutes before the explosion. He was in his jeep, driving away from the waterfront, when the sky lit up. Ringquist jumped out of the car and watched a column of smoke and red flames shooting thousands of feet into the air.
“And then darkness set in,” Ringquist said, “and fragments started to fall.”
Sailors look out through barracks windows that were blown out in the blast.
Fiery hot chunks of metal, some over 100 pounds, rained down all over the base.
An Air Force pilot cruising above Suisun Bay witnessed the blast from 9,000 feet above. “It seemed to me that there was a huge ring of fire, spread out on all sides,” he later reported. “And there were pieces of metal that were white and orange in color, hot, that went a ways above us. They were quite large.”
The movie theater in the town of Port Chicago, about a mile from the base, was showing a war film. A bombing scene had just begun, causing some to think the loud boom they heard was part of the picture—until the side wall of the theater buckled and pieces of the roof started falling in. The panicked audience darted into the street in time to see the flames rising above the Port Chicago pier.
In a café next to the theater, Morris Rich and another sailor on liberty from the Quinalt Victory had just ordered sandwiches. They never got them.
“We hadn’t been sitting there maybe five minutes or less and this explosion took place,” Rich remembered. “We found ourselves across the room. I mean, it blew us out of the booth clear across the room.”
Rich stumbled into the street and stood, amid raining hunks of steel, looking down toward the pier. He knew instantly that everyone on his ship was dead.
The massive blast was felt all over the Bay Area. In Berkeley, thirty miles from Port Chicago, seismographs recorded a jolt with the force of a small earthquake.
Spencer Sikes and his date, Alverta, were sitting in a Berkeley movie theater when they heard the boom and felt the building shake. Moments later a theater employee ran out to pass on an announcement he’d just heard on the radio: “All military personnel stationed at Port Chicago, please report back immediately!”
Sikes dropped Alverta at home and jumped on a bus.
* * *
Back at the base, Captain Kinne ran out of the officers’ quarters and looked toward the water.
“What happened?” someone shouted to him.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I think the ships blew up.”
Kinne saw that falling debris had ignited grass fires, and flames were spreading toward several boxcars full of ammunition. A team of enlisted men and officers were working together to put out the fires, and they seemed to have things under control.
“There was no appearance of panic or disorder,” Kinne would later report with pride.
Outside of the barracks, quick-thinking sailors had flipped on truck headlights. Crouching in the beams of light, men with only minor scrapes treated the more seriously wounded.
“Fellows were cut and bleeding all over the place,” Joe Small recalled. “One fellow’s feet were bleeding and I gave him my shoes. Another fellow had a cut all the way down his arm, and I put a tourniquet on it to try to stop the bleeding. There were no medics around—it was chaos.”
Another group of sailors formed a crew of volunteers to head down to the pier. Percy Robinson, still unaware of how badly cut up he was, stepped forward.
“I want to volunteer,” he said to his squad leader.
The guy turned to him and asked, “Hey, did you see Percy get out of the barracks?”
“I’m Percy, I’m going down to the docks.”
The squad leader looked more closely at Robinson’s blood-streaked face, and recognized him.
“You can’t go,” he said. “You have to go to the hospital to get sewed up.”
Cyril Sheppard was among the sailors who jumped into a truck and sped toward the water. But when they got near the pier, the driver stopped.
“Go on down!” guys in the back of the truck shouted. “What the hell are you staying up here for?”
“Can’t go no further,” the driver said, pointing out at the bay.
Everyone stood up and looked.
The pier was gone. The ships were gone. The truck lights shone out on an empty patch of water. Low waves lapped at the shore.
“Just calm and peaceful,” Sheppard recalled. “I didn’t even see any smoke.”
THE INQUIRY
LATER THAT NIGHT, in the hospital, a doctor removed Robert Routh’s left eye. “And the right eye was lacerated,” Routh later said, “and so consequently, I lost the sight in that too.”
Spencer Sikes made it back to Port Chicago a few hours after the blast. Out of curiosity, he took a quick look at his bunk—and saw sword-sized glass slivers piercing his pillow, buried deep into the mattress below. If he’d been in bed at the time of the blast, he knew, he’d be dead.
It was not until sunrise that the men at Port Chicago got a clear look at the scene of devastation. The huge open space leading down to the water was dotted with piles of rubble, burned grass, splintered wood. One 200-pound chunk of gray steel—part of one of the ships, clearly—lay more than two miles from the pier.
The men walked along the railroad tracks leading down to the bay. At the waterfront, where the pier used to be, two twisted rails stuck out a few feet from the shore and ended in the air above the water.
The 1,200-foot pier was simply gone. The locomotive and ammunition boxcars that had been on the pier at the time of the blast had disintegrated. The only piece of the Quinalt Victory in sight was its upright stern, sticking up from the water just offshore. Of the E. A. Bryan, which had been packed with nearly ten million pounds of explosives, nothing visible remained. The ship had essentially exploded like one gigantic bomb—one of the biggest man-made explosions in history to that point.
Onlookers gather on what remains of the pier at Port Chicago to survey the damage.
Shreds of clothing and other bits of debris bobbed on the water. Some of the men with only minor injuries were given the gory task of wading into the bay to pull out bodies, and parts of bodies.
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