When the Detroit mayor and Michigan’s governor begged the president to help, Roosevelt sent in federal troops. The troops restored peace two days later, but the NAACP, whom many accused of having instigated the violence, pointed out that three quarters of the people killed or injured or arrested were black. Four hundred fifty of the six hundred injured were black.
CHAPTER 14: WHOM ARE WE FIGHTING THIS TIME?
Lieutenant Holman’s arrival on September 29, 1943, is noted in the War Diary.
Lieutenant Holman would later testify that the black seamen “are not here because they want to be.” Lieutenant Herbert Woodland would testify that Port Chicago got Great Lakes’ “culls,” the “lower class of Negro.” He added, “The officers lacked training like myself. I’d never had any boot training; I never had any ship loading experience; I never had any ship rigging experience.…” Then he continued, “We have to push these boys sometimes too hard.”
What frustrated Holman most was what he called the “superstitious” nature of the loaders, who did not object to handling mines or bombs—though they may have been uneasy around them—but had a paralyzing dread of projectiles. In training them, he practiced a kind of benign neglect; he teamed them with the few winchmen and ammunition handlers he felt he could trust.
The description of “selective discharge” is from Samuel Eliot Morison and from researchers at the Naval History and Heritage Command (Washington, D.C., Navy Yard).
In late November 1943, Captain Goss wrote to the commandant of the Twelfth Naval District regarding his inexperienced officers and “green” work crews.
On October 14, 1943, Inez White wrote to her husband’s parents, “Bob is still working the midnight to 6 a.m. shift. They are putting a high tonnage on this shift.… When he comes home in the morning he’s just about frozen and doesn’t thaw out for several hours.” Lieutenant White also scratched a few quick sentences. “Dear Folks,” he said. “It’s just about time to go to work and I don’t feel like going. I am not sick but it is just too cold about 4 a.m.”
Back home in Detroit, George Booth’s buddies, whose draft numbers had not yet come up, were hanging out in Paradise Valley. Paradise Valley was the sexiest part of the sixty-square-block ghetto known as Black Bottom. The Valley was the place to be for a young black man looking for action in Detroit. Like Harlem and Bronzeville in Chicago, and the Fillmore in San Francisco, it had a vibrant nightlife with speakeasies, restaurants, brothels, and nightclubs such as the Paradise, the Tropicana, Club ElSino, Club Zombie, and Dee’s and the Bird Cage, and was frequented by celebrities, civil rights leaders, jazzmen, athletes, politicians, petty crooks, and gangsters. The Paradise was the neighborhood’s contribution to what was called the “Chitlin Circuit,” a collection of theaters, including the Apollo in Harlem, the Uptown in Philadelphia, the Royal in Baltimore, the Howard in Washington, and the Regal in Chicago, that hosted the country’s most prominent jazz musicians.
Black Bottom was named by early French farmers because of its fat, dark, fertile soil. Located on the city’s lower east side, Black Bottom was the black community’s answer to “deed restrictions” that prohibited blacks from renting or owning property in other parts of Detroit. Citizens who felt excluded from the city’s power circles banded together. If the Ku Klux Klan could hold a rally outside Detroit’s city hall, then they would build their own city hall and elect their own mayor. It was not an easy thing to do. Although the Michigan legislature outlawed slavery in 1837 (when Michigan became a state) and the state became a haven for escaped slaves, over one hundred years later, Detroit, which was founded by French slaveholders, was a pressure cooker of racial tension. Recruiters and labor agents combed the South enticing blacks (and whites, too) north of the Mason-Dixon Line with promises of high wages in Detroit’s war factories. Detroit’s black population doubled to 200,000 in the ten years between 1933 and 1943. Michigan Central Station was a whirlwind of activity as dozens of bewildered black families from the South’s Cotton Belt arrived every day. The Detroit Urban League helped to team up the new arrivals with employers. The migrants, however, placed enormous strains on housing, transportation, and educational and recreational facilities. And many blacks found Northern bigotry, though less well publicized, every bit as vicious as what they had left behind. Some, determined not to endure the kind of treatment they had suffered before moving north, participated in a “bumping campaign.” Newly empowered blacks walked into whites in public places, forcing them off sidewalks, or nudging them in elevators. Whites reacted angrily, the police adopted brutish tactics, and Life magazine called the situation in the city “dynamite.”
Blind Blake, the influential blues guitarist, wrote a song called “Detroit Bound Blues,” which included the lyrics “I’m goin’ to Detroit, get myself a job / I’m goin’ to Detroit, get myself a job / Tried to stay around here with the starvation mob / I’m goin’ to get a job, up there in Mr. Ford’s place / I’m goin’ to get a job, up there in Mr. Ford’s place / Stop these eatless days from starin’ me in the face.”
Paradise Valley teemed with an estimated 360 black businesses. Located principally along Hastings and Saint Antoine streets, these establishments encompassed hotels, barbershops, speakeasies, restaurants and bars, entertainment venues, banks, churches, drugstores, a newspaper—the Michigan Chronicle—bowling alleys, apartment buildings, service stations, taxicabs, a chapter of the Urban League, funeral parlors, smoke shops, business clubs, and a great deal more. It claimed heavyweight boxing champion Joe Louis, whose mother lived on McDougall Street, as its favorite son. Ella Fitzgerald, Benny Goodman, B.B. King, the Harlem Globetrotters, Langston Hughes, Louis Armstrong, Thurgood Marshall, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and Adam Clayton Powell all frequented Paradise Valley’s elegant hotel, the Gotham, which was owned, managed, and staffed by African Americans.
For Booth, it was a source of pride that the city’s Black Bottom neighborhood was home to Joe Louis and Sugar Ray Robinson. Although everyone knew that Louis lived in Chicago and Sugar Ray lived in Harlem, Booth claimed both fighters for the city. After Louis’s family left Alabama, they moved to Detroit, and his mother still lived in Black Bottom. Sugar Ray, born Walker Smith Jr., had spent a good portion of his first decade in the city and had first tied on a pair of boxing gloves at Detroit’s Brewster Recreation Center. So when Sugar Ray appeared on the September 1943 cover of Ring magazine, wearing his Army-issue uniform and saluting, Booth was beside himself with joy.
On their second day at Port Chicago, Delucchi ordered Booth and Crawford to report to the quarterdeck, his office. “What kind of work would you like to do?” he asked Booth. Booth was confused: Was the lieutenant asking what he wanted to do with his life? Booth answered that he liked to take pictures. Delucchi could have laughed in his face. Instead he said, “Well, you see, we don’t have that around here.” Then he asked Booth and Crawford if they would like to be carpenter strikers. The two looked at each other and shrugged. “What’s a carpenter striker?” Booth asked. As Delucchi explained the duties, Booth thought, Well, it sounds as good as any other job; I’ll take it.
The Rainier was bound for the Central Pacific—likely to support the invasion of Tarawa. When full, she would be carrying a tremendous load, including 111 cars of ammunition shipped from Mare Island, Hawthorne, and Puget Sound. The Shasta was filled largely with explosives. After unloading in the Hawaiian Islands, where her cargo would be loaded onto ships participating in Admiral Turner’s invasion of the Gilberts, she would continue on to Brisbane, Australia, to aid MacArthur’s push into Bougainville and his army’s drive north up the coast of New Guinea. As for the Alcoa Planter, a portion of her load was also going straight to Turner.
The Navy made no bones about it; men had their needs. Port Chicago had a prophylactic station, which the guys could go to before and after liberty for either condoms or a penicillin shot.
The quote about the amount of cargo coming into and going out of Port Chicago reaching “astronomical figur
es” is from Captain Milton Smith Davis, port director.
Captain Goss’s justification for not allowing Coast Guard observers was that the Navy and the Coast Guard operated differently and that conflicting orders confused the enlisted men. In a letter dated November 1, 1943, Goss wrote the Captain of the Port, San Francisco, a two-point memo. Point number two said, “Coast Guard details are not desired for merchant vessels loading at this Depot (Mare Island) or at the Naval Magazine, Port Chicago, unless specifically requested by the Commanding Officer.” Of course, Goss was the CO. Goss had a copy of the memo sent to Keith R. Ferguson, Lieutenant Commander U.S. Naval Reserve Judge Advocate.
CHAPTER 15: WAITING FOR WAR
Chappo Flats was part of the 123,000-acre Rancho Santa Margarita y Los Flores that President Roosevelt officially named Camp Pendleton in a September 1942 ceremony.
At night, while on maneuvers, the men sang around the fire. A song popular in the Old Corps was one of their favorites: “Over the sea, Let’s go men / We’re shovin’ right off / We’re shovin’ right off again / Nobody knows where or when … / It may be Shanghai Farewell and good-bye Sally and Sue / Don’t be blue / We’ll just be gone for / Years and years and then …”
Graf and the rest of his company went through instruction on how to use the .50-caliber machine gun, .30-caliber light and heavy machine guns, 60- and 81-mm mortars, the 37-mm antitank gun, and the BAR (Browning Automatic Rifle).
CHAPTER 16: BROKEN PROMISES
An incident at the St. Juliens Creek Annex at the Norfolk Naval Shipyard in Portsmouth, Virginia, should have convinced the Navy that it had to reform its racial policies. There, in May 1943, three hundred blacks, protesting discriminatory conditions, nearly rioted. A board of investigation criticized white officers for their “inept handling” of this and other racial altercations. The investigators reached the same conclusion that Lieutenant Commander Armstrong at Great Lakes had: it took special officers with special skills to handle black troops. Further investigation also cited the incident as yet more evidence that isolating groups of blacks from the general military population, instead of distributing them throughout the service, spelled trouble.
According to “The Negro in the United States Navy in World War II” (written by the Historical Section of the Bureau of Naval Personnel), which is a section of The U.S. Navy in World War II, memoranda circulated throughout the Bureau of Naval Personnel regarding the addition of blacks to fleet vessels. Echoing the civil rights leaders, the Bureau recommended that blacks serve aboard oilers and repair, coastal patrol, cargo, and transport ships, and also aboard LSTs, LCTs, and LCIs (the great expansion of the amphibious program provided opportunities for blacks), but the Navy dismissed the recommendation and perfunctorily created something akin to the “ordnance battalions,” called “base companies.” Under this plan the Navy would send black seamen to island bases in the South Seas with significant “colored” populations, where they would perform a variety of construction, maintenance, and ammunition-handling responsibilities. The rationale was similar to Marine Major General Charles Price’s argument for sending the 51st Defense Battalion to Melanesia and not to Samoa. In Melanesia, so went his reasoning, black servicemen would “cause no racial strain.”
Despite the concentration of blacks on the West Coast, in October 1943 the Bureau of Naval Personnel ordered naval districts across the country to transfer to Camp Shoemaker, California, monthly quotas of blacks from Naval Ammunition Depots (NADs). The plan was to send out one base company—two hundred men—each month. It also specified that the transfers from NADs to base companies were to be used as rewards for outstanding service.
Perhaps the biggest news of the new year to date (1944) was that Frank Knox, who originally dismissed the idea of having blacks serve as naval officers—he was convinced that they were happy being cooks, steward’s mates, and mess attendants—bent to pressure from the NAACP, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Adlai Stevenson, then one of his assistants, and decided to allow sixteen men to become the first black American naval officers. At the time there were more than 100,000 black enlisted men in the Navy. In January the sixteen black candidates entered Great Lakes for segregated training. All sixteen survived the course, but only twelve were commissioned. In the last week of the course, three candidates were returned to the ranks, not because they had failed but because the Bureau of Naval Personnel had suddenly decided to limit the number of black officers in this first group to twelve. The twelve entered the U.S. Naval Reserve as line officers on March 17. A thirteenth man, the only candidate who lacked a college degree, was made a warrant officer because of his outstanding work in the course. Two of the twelve new ensigns were assigned to the faculty at Hampton training school, four others to yard and harbor craft duty, and the rest to training duty at Great Lakes. All carried the label “Deck Officers Limited—Only,” a designation usually reserved for officers whose physical or educational deficiencies kept them from performing all the duties of a line officer. The Bureau of Naval Personnel never explained why the men were placed in this category, but it was clear that none of them lacked the physical requirements of a line officer and all had had business or professional careers in civilian life. Operating duplicate training facilities for officer candidates was costly, and the bureau decided shortly after the first group of black candidates was trained that future candidates of both races would be trained together. By early summer ten more Negroes, this time civilians with special professional qualifications, had been trained with whites and were commissioned as staff officers in the Medical, Dental, Chaplain, Civil Engineer, and Supply Corps. These twenty-two men were the first of some sixty Negroes to be commissioned during the war.
Inez White’s letters were kindly donated to me by her brother-in-law, William White.
When determining how much ordnance Port Chicago could store, higher authorities in planning ammunition movements used the station’s total barricade capacity without giving consideration to its respective capacity for high-explosive, projectile, and smokeless-powder cars.
By October 1943, the black “problem” in the Navy was so acute that the Navy staged the critical symposium. More than fifty officers attended, and openly discussed and criticized Navy policy. Organizers hoped that the conference could create a blueprint for the “treatment of Negro personnel” to which naval district commandants and base commanders could refer. Although the conference failed at this, its observations were considered instructive, and the notes from the conference were immediately circulated throughout the country.
Captain Clarence Hinkamp, who had served as captain of the USS Texas from May 1940 to August 1941, introduced the meeting. “It is realized,” he said, “that there are many who have preconceived ideas regarding Negro personnel, whether we want them or whether we don’t. But no matter what our choice in the matter may be, all we know is that we have them with us and we must follow the directives concerning them. Our prejudices must be subordinated to our traditional unfailing obedience to orders.” Rear Admiral Fairfax Leary, commandant of the Fifth Naval District, then took the floor. “Gentlemen,” he said, “we are faced with a problem—a very serious problem—in connection with our naval enlisted personnel and that is the introduction … of large numbers of Negro personnel … this is a fact … and it isn’t a question whether anybody likes it or not.… The problem is growing and we have got to face it with all its complications … this is a situation we are faced with due to the manpower shortage. This is the reason why they are combing us out of present personnel and putting the other personnel in its place … from now on, where anybody wants an increase in complement, it is going to be Negro personnel.”
A captain who had worked with black Seabees at Camp Peary in Newport News, Virginia, discussed the importance of blacks taking pride in their work and being given an opportunity to strive for rates. “It makes every colored man feel that he will receive that which he merits,” the captain explained, “hence he will strive to go forward.” The l
ast attendee to speak was Lieutenant Commander Downes of the Hampton Institute. Captain Downes emphasized the importance of treating blacks as individuals, the obligation of officers to work hard to earn their respect, and the necessity of demonstration. Officers should not simply shout orders and expect blacks to execute them. “Negroes,” he explained, “because of the lack of opportunity, do not have good verbal ability, that is they do not readily associate words and ideas.”
Perhaps the symposium’s most important finding was that discipline among black troops was often dependent on finding a respected black “Bossman” or “Head Man” who would help to keep the others in line.
CHAPTER 17: ERNIE KING’S BELOVED OCEAN (THE STRATEGIC PICTURE)
Details for this chapter are drawn from Morison’s New Guinea and the Marianas, Buell’s Master of Sea Power: A Biography of Admiral Ernest J. King, Hoyt’s Nimitz and His Admirals: How They Won the War in the Pacific, Larrabee’s Commander In Chief, Willoughby and Chamberlain’s MacArthur, 1941–1951, and Goodwin’s No Ordinary Time.
Though Major “Pete” Ellis’s plans were revised on numerous occasions, Ellis’s predictions were basically correct. In his Campaign in the Marianas, Philip Crowl writes that Ellis predicted that the war with Japan would be “primarily naval in character … directed towards the isolation and exhaustion of Japan through control of her vital sea communications and through aggressive operations against her armed forces and her economic life.” Ellis’s plans also anticipated a “step-by-step process involving seizure and occupation of key Japanese islands in the Marshall and Caroline groups.”
War Plan Orange had been “gamed” at the Naval War College for decades before World War II.
Pete Ellis, writing in 1921, hoped that Marines would become not just “skilled infantry men and jungle men,” but “skilled water men” as well.
The Color of War Page 45