“There are a lot of people who’re working for the Negro people,” Delucchi lectured, “and it won’t help the Negro people any if these people withdraw their support when they find out about how you men are acting.”
Delucchi was still talking when the executive officer of the base, Commander Joseph Tobin, sped up in a jeep. He told Delucchi he wanted to speak to the sailors individually and ordered the lieutenant to march his division to the recreation building. The men took seats in the auditorium, and waited their turn, as Tobin called them into his office one by one.
“You have been ordered by your division officer, while in formation, to report to work at the ammunition depot,” Commander Tobin told each man. “You refused to obey this order. I am now ordering you, individually and personally, as commanding officer, to report for work immediately.”
A few of the men agreed. They marched down toward the water to wait for the ferry.
Joe Small, Percy Robinson, and most of the others refused to go.
Tobin warned them of the grave consequences of disobeying orders in time of war. They would probably end up facing a court-martial, he threatened.
Many told Tobin they would obey any order—except the order to handle ammunition.
Tobin angrily explained that in the Navy it wasn’t up to an individual sailor to decide which orders to follow.
After leaving Tobin’s office, each man who refused to return to work was marched outside to a nearby baseball field. Armed marines stood around the field, guarding the growing group.
Standing on the field, Percy Robinson watched the men of his division gather in twos and threes, talking quietly. Like many of the men, Robinson began thinking about what he had just done, and why.
“You know, all this stuff builds up,” he said later, explaining his mindset at this critical moment. “A lot of things you didn’t like before, you just didn’t do anything about ’em. But now they’re all piled up. I guess you put ’em all together.”
“I felt like I was being mistreated,” he added. “I had no other recourse to fight back but to refuse to go back to work.”
* * *
Meanwhile, there was more trouble on the base.
At 1:30 that afternoon, Lieutenant Carleton Morehouse mustered Division Eight in front of Barracks C. When the 104 men were lined up, he told them the division’s orders were to take the ferry across the water and load ammunition on the Sangay.
Many of these men had watched Division Four stop in the road two hours earlier. Now it was their turn to decide.
“I order you to load ammunition with me,” Morehouse told his division. “All who are willing to load with me stand fast. Any who refuse to obey this order, fall out.”
Many of the men began stepping out of the ranks. In the confusion, Morehouse couldn’t tell who was willing to load and who wasn’t. One by one, he ordered each man in the division to step forward.
“I order you to load ammunition with me,” Morehouse said. “Think before you answer, because a refusal means severe disciplinary action. Will you load ship with me, yes or no?”
Eight men said yes. Ninety-six said no.
Half an hour later, Lieutenant James Tobin (no relation to the executive officer) called Division Two together. Like the other divisions, they were scheduled to begin loading the Sangay.
“Many men from the other divisions have refused to obey orders,” Tobin told his men. “Refusal to obey orders in time of war may have very serious consequences. I know some of you men may be afraid, but that is no reason for disobeying orders.”
Then Tobin got to the point. “I am ordering you men to turn to for your regularly assigned duty of loading ship. Men who obey that order, stand fast. Men who refuse to obey that order, move on to one side.”
A large group of men stepped to the side.
Tobin addressed these men. “I order you to turn to for your regularly assigned duty of loading ship,” he said. “If you obey that order, step to the rear. If not, give your name to Lieutenant Clement.”
Some turned and walked right to Clement, who was writing names down on a clipboard. Others hesitated.
“Anthony, how about it?” Tobin said to a sailor named Douglas Anthony, who seemed undecided. “Are you going to obey orders or disobey orders?”
Anthony said he had no intention of disobeying orders, but he was afraid to load bombs.
“Get on the other side,” Tobin said, pointing to Clement.
“How about you, McPherson?” Tobin asked, moving down the line.
“Frankly speaking, Mr. Tobin, I am afraid,” Alphonso McPherson said.
“Give Lieutenant Clement your name, and go over there with the cowards.”
Tobin pointed to Jack Crittenden. “Jack, now you’re a fine young person, and no use getting yourself involved. Now come sign this saying you’re going back to work.”
“Lieutenant Tobin, I’m afraid,” Crittenden said. “I got a chance over there with the enemy. But I ain’t got a chance in that hold.”
“Are you going to sign?” Tobin demanded.
“I’m afraid.”
“When you say you’re afraid, that means you refuse?”
“No, when I say I’m afraid, that means I’m afraid.”
“That means you’re refusing an order.”
“No, that means I’m afraid.”
Tobin pointed Crittenden toward Lieutenant Clement. Just twenty-six of Tobin’s men agreed to load. Eighty-seven did not.
* * *
Of the 328 sailors in the three divisions scheduled to load ammunition that day, a total of 258 had refused. These men were told to go to the barracks and pack up their gear. Then they were marched, under guard, down to the river, where a barge was tied to the pier.
As the men crowded onto the large, flat boat, Lieutenant Delucchi pulled Joe Small aside and they had a very short conversation. The details of exactly what was said would become a major point of contention between the two. But the gist of the talk, both agreed, was that Delucchi wanted Small to help see that the men of Division Four behaved themselves and followed orders on the barge.
Then Small walked onto the floating prison.
PRISON BARGE
“WE WERE PACKED IN like sardines,” Joe Small later said of conditions on the prison barge.
“We were all scared,” Jack Crittenden remembered, “and we didn’t know what was going on.”
At mealtimes, the prisoners were marched from the barge to the chow hall on base. At all other times, they remained on the barge, with marines watching from the pier. The main topic of conversation among the men was whether to give in and go back to loading ammunition.
“Two men would get to fighting right there on the barge,” Small recalled, “because one thought that he should go back to duty and another thought he shouldn’t.”
One young sailor, just seventeen, pulled Small aside and quietly confessed he wanted to go back to work.
“You can,” Small responded, “but I wouldn’t advise it.” The men were in this mess together, Small said, and they should see it through together. “If we go back as a unit, then that’s one thing,” he said. “But if we go back one at a time, the one that goes back will be looked down on by the others as a traitor.”
The young man agreed to stay.
A day passed, and then another—still no word from the officers about what was going to happen next. Small could see the men on the crowded barge becoming increasingly tense. For many, the anger they’d long felt at the unfair conditions they faced in the Navy was now bubbling to the surface.
“There’s no rule that says we have to march in ranks to go to chow,” one of the sailors grumbled. “We can just walk.”
“I’m not gonna march in cadence no more,” another added.
“I’m with you.”
“Look, man,” someone else cut in, “you’re in the Navy, and you got to abide by Navy rules.”
At meals, Small noticed a few of the men slipping spoons or forks into their pock
ets and sneaking them back onto the barge. “I saw spoons made into knives, forks made into knives,” he later said.
The marines on the pier warned the prisoners that they didn’t want to have to fire into the crowded barge—but they would.
“Now, the slightest provocation, we will shoot.”
* * *
“It was a pretty hairy situation,” Small remembered, “and I got into it to try to offset a disaster that I saw coming.”
On the second night on the barge, Small huddled with a few other men that the young sailors looked to as leaders. They agreed it was time to call a meeting. The word spread quickly and nearly everyone jammed together, with Small standing in the center of the crowd.
“All right fellows, listen to what is to be said,” Small shouted. “It’s as much for your good as it is for mine.”
A confrontation with the guards would be bloody and disastrous, Small told the men. Besides acting defiantly and disorderly was just playing into the officers’ hands.
“That is just what the officers want us to do; they want us to mess up,” Small said. “The officers want us to do something, so they will have something on us. If we obey the shore patrol and the officers and don’t get into trouble, they can’t do anything to us.”
Small hammered the point again, in stronger language. “We’ve got the officers by the balls,” he said. “They can do nothing to us if we don’t do anything to them. If we stick together, they can’t do anything to us.”
Some of the men clapped when Small was finished. The whole speech had lasted less than four minutes. At the time, Small thought no more about it. The mood was calmer after the meeting. The men obeyed orders and had no trouble with the guards.
On the barge, the talk turned to questions about the future. What would happen to the men if they kept refusing to load? Some thought the Navy would just transfer them to other duties. Some figured they’d get dishonorable discharges; some expected to be imprisoned. But talk about giving in had died down.
“We were stubborn,” remembered Percy Robinson. “We were stuck, you know. We made a commitment. There was a few guys, a very few, wanted to change their minds, but most of the people were clear—they can’t shove us around like this.”
Small was determined to stick it out too. “Improve working conditions, this is what I, personally, was after,” he later said. “And desegregation of the base.”
* * *
On August 11, the third day on the barge, Small noticed Lieutenant Delucchi and a few other officers walking along the pier toward the barge.
“Something’s up,” he said.
Sure enough, the lieutenants all called for their divisions to step off the barge and fall into ranks. The men were marched from the pier to a nearby baseball field. The three divisions assembled in a U-shaped formation on the infield. Marines stood around the field, holding machine guns.
A jeep drove up and an officer in his early fifties jumped out and strode to the front of the formation.
“Just in case you don’t know who I am,” the man began, “my name is Admiral Wright, and I am the commandant of the Twelfth Naval District.”
Admiral Carleton Wright paced along the rows of prisoners as he spoke.
“They tell me that some of you men want to go to sea. I believe that’s a goddamn lie! I don’t believe any of you have enough guts to go to sea!”
Admiral Carleton Wright
Wright leaned forward as he paced, and as he shouted the men could smell his lunch on his breath. Percy Robinson wished he could say something, explain his actions, defend himself. “But what you going to do?” he told himself. “You stand still and you take the stuff.”
“I handled ammunition for approximately thirty years, and I’m still here,” Wright told the men. “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.”
The prisoners were stunned. This was the first they’d heard about mutiny or death sentences.
Wright wanted to be absolutely sure they got the message.
“I’m going to let you all know that I personally will recommend mutiny—and death will be the penalty.”
* * *
Percy Robinson stood in shocked silence, thinking, “He can’t be telling the truth.”
A few of the men in the ranks began crying quietly.
“I’ve got a wife and kids,” someone said.
“How could it be a mutiny?” Martin Bordenave wondered. “I didn’t talk to nobody. I didn’t conspire with nobody. I just made up my mind I was tired of it, you know. I wanted to be a sailor.”
“Man, this guy can’t have nobody shot,” Jack Crittenden said to the man beside him. “They can’t do this. Shoot somebody in the United States.”
“He said it.”
“Well, hell, he can’t order someone to shoot you.”
Each of the three lieutenants stepped up to his division.
“I have been ordered by my superior officers to order you men to go to work,” Delucchi announced to Division Four. “All men that are willing to obey all orders anywhere at any time, fall in behind me.”
The men faced a life-changing decision, with just seconds to make it.
Joe Small felt a moment of indecision as he watched the men separate into two groups. He took a step toward Lieutenant Delucchi—but stopped, and thought again.
“I concentrated on what he had said,” Small later explained, “then I went back over to the other side. I realized the order could be to load ammunition, and that’s one order I wasn’t willing to obey.”
In Percy Robinson’s head, it was the admiral’s last sentence that echoed loudest. “We didn’t even know what mutiny meant,” he later said. “We thought mutiny was something like when you kill people or take over something. We didn’t know you could define disobeying orders as being mutiny. We thought mutiny could only happen on a ship.”
But he had no doubt about the seriousness of Admiral Wright’s threat. “And so I’m not going to give them a chance to shoot me,” Robinson decided. “I’ll go back to work.”
Of the 258 men on the baseball field, 214 lined up behind their lieutenants. Forty-four men stood apart.
In the unwilling group, Willie Gay tried to cut the tension with a bit of bitter humor. “You gonna let them shoot you blindfolded?” he asked Jack Crittenden. “Or you gonna be looking at them?”
THE FIFTY
JOE SMALL AND THE OTHER forty-three were marched back to the pier. They spent another night on the prison barge.
The next morning, guards led six more sailors onto the barge—these six had initially agreed to return to work, but had wavered when it came time to load. All fifty prisoners were then taken by bus to Camp Shoemaker and locked in the brig. Only Small was placed in solitary confinement.
Four days later, a marine guard unlocked the door to Small’s cell and said, “The admiral wants to talk to you.”
Small was led to a private room. The guard shut the door, leaving Joe Small alone in the office with Admiral Carleton Wright.
“Small, you are the leader of this bunch,” Wright said. “If you return to work, the rest of the men will.”
Small said he would not return to the same work under the same conditions.
Wright glared at him. “If you don’t return to work, I’m going to have you shot.”
“You bald-headed son of a so-and-so, go ahead and shoot!”
That’s how Small later described it—in fact, he used a word a lot harsher than so-and-so. It couldn’t have helped his case.
As he was led back to prison, Small cooled off. He wished he hadn’t lost his temper. “That branded me as a mutineer,” he thought.
What he didn’t regret was his refusal to give in.
“What they expected me to do was to just go back to duty and forget everyt
hing. They assumed that if I went back to duty everybody would follow me. But I had what I considered a legitimate reason for not going back to work.”
* * *
Robert Routh, the Port Chicago sailor who’d been blinded in the blast, followed the story from his hospital bed.
“Go on brothers,” he said to himself when his doctor updated him on the refusal of the fifty prisoners. If not for the wounds in his eyes, Routh knew, it would be fifty-one.
Back at the brig, Small was locked up with the other prisoners.
“Small, how do you feel about going back to work?” one of the men asked him.
“I’m not going,” Small said.
“What if they shoot you?”
“Well, let ’em shoot. Because I’d sooner die by a bullet than an explosion.”
Privately, though, Small was just as shocked by the charge as any of the men.
“I, for one, didn’t consider refusing to work mutiny,” he explained later. “We didn’t try to take over anything. We didn’t try to take command of the base. We didn’t try to replace any officers; we didn’t try to assume an officer’s position. How could they call it mutiny?”
From a legal standpoint, Small’s understanding of mutiny was pretty accurate. The Navy defined mutiny as “an unlawful opposition or resistance to or defiance of superior military authority, with a deliberate purpose to usurp, subvert, or override such authority.”
Had Small and the others really tried to seize authority from the officers? He clearly thought they had not.
* * *
In his official report on the case to Admiral Wright, Captain Nelson Goss said he was not surprised by the behavior of the men from Port Chicago. “There are undoubtedly agitators, ringleaders, among these men,” Goss wrote. “They have always been present since such personnel were first received at this depot.”
From the very beginning, the captain explained, he’d tried his best to work with the black sailors. “Particular care,” he wrote, “combined with patience, was exercised in outlining to these men the needs of the situation which required their services.”
But no matter how patient he was, claimed Goss, the sailors displayed “a consistent attitude towards discrimination; never justified, as far as I could ascertain.” He added: “The disposition, however, to seek opportunity to complain against fancied discrimination has always been present among present-day Negro enlisted personnel.”
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