The Color of War

by James Campbell

  On February 27, Secretary Forrestal officially abolished the Navy’s Jim Crow policy in favor of complete integration. “Effective immediately,” said the edict, “all restrictions governing types of assignments for which Negro personnel are eligible are hereby lifted. Henceforth they shall be eligible for all types of assignments, in all ratings in all facilities and in all ships of naval service. In the utilization of housing, messing, and other facilities no special or unusual provisions will be made for the accommodation of Negroes.”

  One week after being moved from Camp Shoemaker to Treasure Island, Percy Robinson and a small group of black seamen he had served with at Port Chicago boarded the USS President Monroe. Robinson was sent to a series of bases throughout the Pacific, where, despite volunteering for combat duty, he was assigned to a variety of menial work details. In December 1945 he returned to the United States. The Navy offered him a promotion to chief petty officer, but he refused, and was discharged in early 1946.

  George Booth, too, went to the South Pacific. Eventually he ended up on Espíritu Santo, where he ran the post office and supply store. Days after President Truman announced Japan’s surrender, black sailors on Espíritu Santo were ordered to dump everything—ammunition, jeeps, even trousers and boots—into the bay. Rather than discard unused clothes, Booth distributed them to the local people. The picture of South Sea islanders walking around in pea coats in the sweltering heat would amuse him years after he left the Navy. In late 1945, Booth was discharged in Detroit, Michigan.

  When he was released from the hospital, Sammie Boykin returned to Port Chicago and active duty. He heard rumors of what had happened in mid-August at Mare Island and was grateful he had not been there and faced with the decision of whether to return to handling ammunition or side with the fifty mutineers. At Port Chicago there was little for him to do while the depot was being rebuilt, and most days he picked up work at the Shell Oil Refinery in Martinez, California.

  In July 1946, Joe Small received a general discharge from the Navy “under honorable conditions.” Neither he nor any of the other mutineers, however, was granted veteran’s benefits, and the Navy never reversed the felony conviction for mutiny.

  • • •

  In 1990, George Miller, whose district includes Port Chicago, and three other northern California congressmen petitioned the then secretary of the Navy, Henry L. Garrett, requesting a review of the Port Chicago mutiny trial cases. Three months later Garrett rejected the petition, suggesting instead that the survivors apply for presidential pardons. Joe Small wanted no part of it. “We don’t want a pardon,” Small insisted, “because that means ‘you’re guilty, but we forgive you.’ In January 1991, with the backing of forty members of Congress, Miller again asked Secretary Garrett to review the Port Chicago convictions. Three years later, Secretary of the Navy John Dalton maintained that the trial was influenced neither by racial prejudice nor by other “improper factors.” Secretary of Defense William Perry also weighed in on the issue. “Sailors,” he said, “are required to obey the orders of their superiors, even if those orders subject them to life-threatening danger.”

  Forty-plus years after leaving the Navy, Joe Small would still remember a dream he had on the anxious night before the trial began. In that dream he was bitten by a poisonous snake. He survived and the wound healed. The scar, however, remained.

  EPILOGUE

  Saipan was a battle whose significance cannot be overestimated. The historian Donald Miller called it “as important to victory over Japan as the Normandy invasion was to victory over Germany.” For the Americans, the cost of taking the island was 16,525 casualties, including 3,426 killed or missing. The Marines lost more men on Saipan than in any previous Pacific campaign, including Guadalcanal and Tarawa. The death toll for the Japanese was staggering. Out of a garrison that some estimated at 32,000, Marine and Army forces took only 921 Japanese soldiers prisoner. Except for two thousand—plus stragglers who roamed Saipan’s jungle-clad hills, the rest died in combat or martyred themselves in the largest banzai charge of the Pacific war.

  On the night of July 17, 1944, as Admirals Ernest King and Chester Nimitz were celebrating the battle’s end aboard the cruiser Indianapolis, within sight of the devastated island, on the very day General Tojo Hideki announced the loss to the Japanese people and was forced to present his resignation to Emperor Hirohito, the Port Chicago Naval Ammunition Depot exploded.

  These two seemingly disparate events are linked together by a fate explained by the eminent World War II historian Samuel Eliot Morison. He wrote, in New Guinea and the Marianas: March 1944–August 1944, that the expenditure of ammunition by American forces in the battle for Saipan and in the Battle of the Philippine Sea was “colossal.” The invasion of Saipan placed demands on the Port Chicago Naval Ammunition Depot that prior to the spring of 1944 would have been considered fantastic. The depot was ill equipped to handle such an onrush of ordnance, and the longshoremen’s union warned that Port Chicago was a powder keg waiting to blow.

  In the lead-up to the battle for Saipan, the Navy still had not issued a comprehensive “ammunition handling” textbook. In fact, it was not until 1945 that the Bureau of Naval Personnel released a 256-page training manual titled Ammunition Handling that provided a uniform code of loading and unloading procedures for an array of ordnance ranging from depth charges to torpedo warheads and ship-mounted rockets to 1,000-pound, armor-piercing bombs. When it finally published the textbook, the bureau insisted that its new standards be “rigidly enforced.”

  Whether this new attention to safety could have prevented the worst home-front disaster of World War II and one of the largest explosions in American history, we will never know. What we do know is that what happened in the aftermath of the July 17 blast highlighted the inequities of the Navy’s benighted policy on race.

  When Port Chicago’s seamen learned that the officers had been given survivors’ leaves that had been denied to them, they grew bitter. Many felt like lambs being led to slaughter. Black servicemen, in general, had always done the work that no one else wanted. They were the ones who buried the dead, built bridges and airfields, cleaned latrines, drove trucks, peeled potatoes, handled toxic chemicals, and loaded ammunition.

  By mid-August 1944, all of black America was fed up. Adam Clayton Powell Jr., the pastor, politician, and civil rights leader from Harlem, New York, attributed the anger in the black community to “the whole, sorrowful, disgraceful bloody record of America’s treatment of one million blacks in uniform.” General Douglas MacArthur, no supporter of integration, knew the importance of morale. He warned that it could “quickly wither and die if soldiers came to believe themselves the victims of indifference or injustice.”

  By initiating the Port Chicago mutiny trial, the Navy heaped injustice upon misfortune. If it hoped to discourage future unrest by using the trial as an example of what could happen to disobedient blacks, its plan backfired. The trial became a cause célèbre.

  In the wake of the guilty verdict and the extreme sentences handed down by the Osterhaus court, a wave of discontent swept through the Navy. A deadly race riot in which white and black Marines fired on each other broke out on Guam (120 miles south of Saipan) in the Mariana Islands. White and black Marines died during two days of gun battles, but it was the black Marines of the 25th Depot Company who were court-martialed and sent to prison. At Camp Rousseau in California, one thousand black members of a naval construction battalion (the Seabees) staged a two-day hunger strike against racial discrimintaion.

  To his credit, Navy Secretary James Forrestal recognized that segregation had to end, and in late 1944 he ordered the Bureau of Personnel to lift restrictions on where blacks could serve, announcing that the Navy was “making every effort to give more than lip service to the principles of democracy in the treatment of the Negro.” Just over a year later he officially abolished the Navy’s Jim Crow policy in favor of complete integration.

  Unlike the Navy, the Army and the Marine
Corps resisted integration. Secretary of War Kenneth Royall defended the Army, arguing that it “was not an instrument for social evolution.” Meanwhile the Marines’ General Vandegrift asserted that “the assignment of Negro Marines to separate units promotes harmony and morale and fosters the competitive spirit essential to the development of a high esprit.”

  Disgusted with the glacial pace of change in the armed services, A. Philip Randolph and the black press threatened a campaign of civil disobedience, including a black boycott of the draft. How could a Fair Employment Practices Commission (FEPC), Randolph asked, presume to condemn unfair labor practices in industry if the government was discriminating against blacks in the armed services?

  Confronted with a black backlash, President Harry Truman used Executive Order 9981 to desegregate the entire military on July 26, 1948. “It is hereby declared to be the policy of the President,” the order read, “that there shall be equality of treatment and opportunity for all persons in the armed services without regard to race, color, religion or national origin. This policy shall be put into effect as rapidly as possible, having due regard to the time required to effectuate any necessary changes without impairing efficiency or morale.”

  While the president had not explicitly called for an immediate end to segregation in the military, his action represented an extraordinary victory for the civil rights community. A full decade before Martin Luther King Jr.’s crusade, black leaders had brought to bear the newfound power of African Americans across the country.

  Change, however, came slowly. Not until the North Korean People’s Army almost drove the American-led United Nations forces off the Korean peninsula did commanders on the ground accept black replacements for white units. When integrated combat units proved that they could perform under fire, the Army high command took notice, and on July 26, 1951, exactly three years after President Truman’s Executive Order 9981, the U.S. Army formally announced its plans to desegregate. By the end of the Korean War, 90 percent of black soldiers served in integrated units. What’s more, interviews with servicemen indicated that the more contact white and black soldiers had, the more favorably they felt about racial integration.

  It had been ten years since the Port Chicago explosion, but the forces unleashed by that incident had transformed the military. Despite its long history of resistance and neglect, the United States military proved itself a progressive force in the fight for racial justice. No civilian industry could claim such an accomplishment. By 1954 a quarter of a million blacks were serving side by side with whites in the armed services. By October 30, 1954—three years before the “Little Rock Nine” entered Little Rock Central High School—the last racially segregated unit in the armed forces had been abolished, and all federally controlled schools for the children of servicemen had been desegregated.

  Forty years later, despite the efforts of Congressman Miller, the Navy still refused to clear the names of the Port Chicago fifty, standing by a three-page statement released in January 1994. That statement, which followed a review of the case ordered by Congress, stated that although “racial discrimination did play a part in the assignment of African-American sailors … racial prejudice and discrimination played no part in the court-martial convictions or sentences.”

  In 1999, one Port Chicago survivor—Freddie Meeks—accepted a pardon from President Bill Clinton.

  Today, almost seven decades after the Port Chicago explosion and the subsequent mutiny trial, few Americans who read about the Good War and the Greatest Generation know anything of the Good War’s ugly underbelly, a largely untold story about the struggle on the home front for justice and equality by black servicemen who, desiring to respond to their country’s call to arms, were denied that right. It is an American tragedy best not forgotten.

  On October 17, 1944, on the day Thurgood Marshall stepped up his legal counterattack on the Navy, accusing it of having disregarded the myriad danger signs at Port Chicago, the first B-29 arrived at Isley Field on Saipan. Five weeks later, ninety-three B-29s made the first attack on Japan’s home islands, unloading their bombs on the Nakajima aircraft factory, just ten miles from Emperor Hirohito’s palace. The “hell” that Hirohito had predicted on July 17, 1944, was now a reality.

  The “precision bombing” of Japan continued until early 1945, when General Curtis LeMay, who had been the head of the 8th Air Force in Europe, came to Saipan to take over the bombing campaign. By March, LeMay had radically changed the 21st Bomber Command’s tactics. Not in his darkest nightmares could Emperor Hirohito have imagined the horror that LeMay would unleash. No longer would the B-29s go in at 30,000 feet. They would fly in at night, at 5,000 feet, and they would use napalm, a new weapon of warfare. When dropped on Japanese cities, the napalm clusters—LeMay called them “fire sticks”—broke apart above the target, and each separate stick ignited on contact, setting off thousands of small blazes that together became an inferno. The napalm killed not only by fire, but also by heat and suffocation, as hot flames sucked oxygen out of the air. Bombardier and poet John Ciardi recognized the new strategy for what it was. “We were in the terrible business of burning out Japanese towns,” Ciardi wrote later.

  On the afternoon of March 9, 1945, 334 bombers took off from Saipan on one of LeMay’s “burn job” attacks. The planes hit Tokyo at 3:00 a.m. on March 10, and in less than three hours dropped almost 250,000 incendiaries, leveling sixteen square miles of one of the most densely populated areas on earth. By sunrise the B-29s had killed 100,000 people, injured another million, and left another million homeless. In Tokyo, where most buildings were constructed of wood, straw, or paper, the fire sticks left nothing standing. The city was a bed of ashes. Those who had fled to smoldering waterways were boiled alive. Thousands of feet above, American bomber crews covered their mouths and noses to shut out the smell of burning flesh.

  The Japanese called LeMay’s B-29 raids “slaughter bombing.” Later LeMay admitted that had Japan defeated the United States he would have been tried as a war criminal. Part of his strategy was to wipe out the people who were part of the war effort, and in Japan that meant everyone. “It was their system,” LeMay said. “Entire populations got into the act and worked to make those airplanes or munitions of war.”

  Night and day, America’s incendiary bombing campaign laid waste to Japan’s major cities. With Japan’s air defense system all but gone, there was little to fear. On June 15, 1945, Lemay turned his attention to small and medium-sized cities like Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In the meantime, American submarines, operating out of the Marianas, initiated Operation Starvation, mining the country’s harbors. The submarines closed the ports of Nagoya, Yokohama, and Tokyo, cutting off most of Japan’s imports. Admiral Bull Halsey got in on the act, too. Task Force 58 cruised up and down the coast, shelling port cities and military installations. Admiral King’s vision had come true—the Marianas were the key to victory in the Central Pacific. By seizing Saipan and Tinian, the United States could both starve Japan by isolating it from its resource base in the Southwest Pacific and threaten it directly with aircraft carriers, long-range submarines, and the B-29 bomber.

  While American air and sea forces pounded Japan, military officials assembled plans for a massive land invasion of the country. “Operation Downfall” called for General MacArthur and Admiral Nimitz to assemble 750,000 assault troops and the largest fleet of warships ever assigned to a single campaign. Military intelligence officers anticipated a “titanic confrontation” with potentially “unbearable” losses. All of Japan, they knew, would be mobilized to defend the “divine homeland.”

  The world’s first nuclear explosion, at the remote Alamogordo Air Force Base in New Mexico on July 16, 1945, allowed President Truman and American military officials to contemplate an alternative to a costly land invasion. On that same day a heavily guarded railroad car shipment, carrying a top-secret four-foot-tall canister, arrived at the Port Chicago Naval Ammunition Depot. There it was moved to another pier, loaded on a barge, sent
down the Sacramento River and then across San Francisco Bay to Hunter’s Point Naval Shipyard. At the shipyard it was transferred to the heavy cruiser USS Indianapolis. Unescorted, the Indianapolis covered the 5,000 miles to Tinian in a record-setting ten days. It anchored 1,000 yards off the shore, where the canister containing the radioactive components (probably the fissionable uranium bullet—U-235—and the firing mechanism) for “Little Man” was moved to an onshore shed and assembled by atomic scientists. On that very same day, July 26, emboldened by the successful test at Alamogordo, Allied leaders at Potsdam, Germany, issued an ultimatum calling for “the unconditional surrender of all the Japanese armed forces.” “The alternative for Japan,” they warned, “is prompt and utter destruction.”

  When Japan did not respond to the president’s ultimatum, Truman gave the order to drop the bomb: “Release when ready but not sooner than August 2.” Although the president confessed in his diary the fear that “machines are ahead of morals,” the mission was on. Bad weather canceled the first flight, on August 3, but on the morning of August 5, meteorologists called for days of clear skies.

  At the briefing on Tinian, Captain William “Deak” Parsons, the Manhattan Project’s chief of weapons development, told the crews that they would be delivering the most powerful weapon in the history of the world. The flight surgeon distributed cyanide capsules. If the mission went awry, crew members were encouraged to use them. The B-29 Enola Gay and the two planes accompanying it left Tinian at 2:45 a.m. on August 6. Afraid that the plane would crash on takeoff, Parsons waited eight minutes before he crawled into the bomb bay and inserted the explosive propellant powder into the bomb’s firing mechanism and hooked up the detonator.