Proudly We Served

by Kelly, Mary Pat

  So they said, “How is he going to get to the rear?”

  “Well, he’ll have to get off then.”

  So I said, “Well, what the heck is this?” But I didn’t want to make it tough on the rest of the guys, so I said I would get off and catch the next trolley—I would be first in line and could get to the rear.

  But those guys said, “No way, Mac. You stay right aboard.”

  Then they took the tiller away from that guy on the trolley and threw the conductor off. They took that thing all the way—nonstop—all the way down to the base. And we didn’t have no problems with those guys after that—to my knowledge.

  Gordon: I was on liberty in Norfolk with three other sailors from the Mason, and, of course, I stood out for obvious reasons. I remember a car pulling up that was loaded with people, and somebody yelled and cussed me out because I was a nigger lover and was with those black sailors. And we just took it in stride and laughed it off and kept on going. But that was a constant type of harassment.

  Garrison: So I went down to Norfolk. When I got down there they didn’t need signalmen or quartermasters, but they were short of radiomen. But you had to learn how to type, and you had to learn the Morse code by sound—I knew it by sight. So I went to the base library and got a book to teach me how to touch-type, and I learned. I studied how to place my fingers and practiced on my own. At that time the navy didn’t have time to train people in some skills; you just had to know. Then I took the test for radioman, and I became a radioman third class. So I was sure, then, to be assigned to the Mason.

  DuFau: When they made up the draft for the Mason, that’s when I was taken from the light ship and sent to service school. At Norfolk I was exposed to some things that just weren’t so pleasant. For a couple of days we had to eat with the steward’s mates. We weren’t in the regular barracks like the others at the school. We were in a Quonset hut setup.

  Buchanan: We never should have been put in those so-called barracks at Norfolk. Now, I had to have a shower every day. I didn’t miss. In fact, when I was in boot camp, I didn’t miss a shower any day. If there was a guy that wouldn’t shower, we took a scrub brush and scrubbed his butt down, and he stayed clean for the rest of the time he was around us. Everybody kept themselves very clean. I remember one time when I walked in the snow out to the shower, with practically no clothes on, and took a shower in cold water. That’s how bad this barracks was. They were Quonset huts.

  I went to sleep that night and I couldn’t move in the morning. My brother-in-law was a couple of bunks over. We were supposed to go out on a ship on training that day. I said to him, “I can’t move.” So they left without me to go to the ship. They left me there to go to the sick bay. I went to the sick bay, and they acted like I was faking it! I was so sick by the time the afternoon came that they wound up putting me in a hospital. I spent thirty days in the hospital with scarlet fever. That’s what I caught that night, scarlet fever, in those barracks. I’ll never forgive the navy for that.

  Thirty days. And they let me out in thirty days only because I begged the doctors, “I don’t want to miss my ship.” They were very nice to me. I never had to do any work in there. I slept next to a guy who had been in the Mediterranean, who was there because his eardrums were busted from the bombardment that he went through on a destroyer. I thought about all this stuff that I was getting into.

  But I said to myself, “Well, I’m going to go to war, I’m going to get killed.” The nicest thing about the navy is you can’t drink all that water, but you ain’t coming home with no legs. You understand? That was always in the back of my head. I wasn’t going to eat no mud, I wasn’t going to have that problem. I was going to live pretty clean—no big deal. Which is what happened to me. I lived very clean in the navy, and I ate every day. Even if it was during a storm, if you put some food in front of me, I ate.

  Graham: Late one night in Norfolk, when several shipmates returning from liberty approached the main gate, the marine on duty demanded that we remove the chevron from our sleeves and enter the base from another gate reserved for steward’s mates. We had a few choice words with him, still walking fast, yelling back and forth. Suddenly, we heard the cocking of his carbine. Boy! Did we take off!

  Reports of such incidents caused the navy’s personnel bureau report to finally observe, “One of the strongest complaints of the Negroes is his resentment at not having the chance to use his competence on its own merits” (65). The indignities suffered by the Mason crew while in Norfolk came while (as the navy report admits) “High morale and superior grades marked the men’s performance throughout their special DE training” (66).

  At Norfolk they attended school with white sailors, competed and succeeded, yet a marine guard could still order a man to remove his hard-earned ratings badge, or the usher at a movie theater could insist that an American serviceman come in through the back door.

  Roberts: I had a very bad experience at Norfolk. It was Thanksgiving Day. I went to the chow hall, and the chaplain was holding a service out on the lawn. It was a bright sunny day, and I really felt thankful to the Lord that I was in Norfolk on a bright sunny day when there were other sailors and soldiers overseas dying at that very moment. I had very deep feelings inside. Thankful for my own safety and praying for them and for peace. I left the parade grounds and went into the chow hall for Thanksgiving dinner. Now in Norfolk, we were segregated: black sailors sat in the back of the chow hall. So I went where I sat every day. A little young white sailor came up to me and said, “Move farther back.”

  I said, “No, I’m not moving, buddy.”

  “Well, I’ll report you.”

  “I don’t give a damn who you report. I’m not moving one inch.”

  He left, saying he was going to go to the base commander. I sat there thinking. I hadn’t eaten any Thanksgiving dinner. I just sat there. Then I remembered there was a gun on the file cabinet in the office of the warrant officer I worked for. It was there every day. I jumped up and raced back there. I couldn’t see anything but red. It was as if somebody threw a red blanket over my head. Everything was red. I tore that office up looking for that gun. It wasn’t where it usually was. If I had found that gun I would have shot every white person that came into view. I’m not that hateful; I had just lost it, that’s all. I went out and sat behind a hangar. I was more or less in a daze. I just sat there for ten or fifteen minutes. Then the cloud was lifted; that red blanket just disappeared. I felt very calm, and that was the end of that. I often think when I hear of people getting in trouble through sudden outbursts of temper, “Gee, that could have been me!” If that gun had been there, my whole life would have changed.

  Garrison: The Mason was an experiment. They wanted to see if we could take to the sea. They wanted to see if we were capable of becoming regular sailors and fitting in with the white guys. But they were going to keep us segregated and separated for as long as they possibly could because the navy was the last stronghold. They did not want us there. They didn’t want any part of us, and they didn’t know what to do with us.

  DuFau: Our guys had gone to service school. When you finished service school you would come out maybe seaman third class or maybe first or second, or you might strike for a whole year. You might be a radioman striker. That meant you would apply yourself for a length of time before you got a stripe. When we went aboard ship, about 90 percent of the guys had been to service school. There were some strikers that waited to get a rating, but many of us were rated when we went aboard. The idea was that we would move up in ratings until we had relieved any of the white petty officers ahead of us. And by the end we had. We had quite a few chief petty officers, and by the very end we had two black officers.

  Peters: I heard about the Mason because a friend of mine who had preceded me at Great Lakes was a gunner’s mate who had been sent out to Vallejo, California. Through correspondence with him I found out that the Mason was going to be an actuality. I volunteered for it because I wanted to be a part of the se
agoing navy as opposed to being land based. There were some black navy enlisted people, most of them rated, I guess, who were serving on small ships like minesweepers. Some were on the coastal patrol, and some were on yard tugs. But I really wanted a warship. That’s what I was looking for.

  I figured if I was going to have to participate in the war, I should be in the thick of it, as opposed to sitting it out on some shore station. I applied for a program for naval aviators. I was at an air station. There were two slots, and the two people who came out tops on the exam were to be selected to go down to Pensacola, Florida, and become naval aviators. Four of us took the exam—two black, two white. The two black fellows, myself and Dan Motley, came out on top on the exam. Then they changed the selection process. “We’re going to make our selections based on the length of time that you’ve been in the navy.” Motley and I had been in the navy only a little over a year. These other two fellows had been in a couple of more months. So they were the ones who were selected for V-12 and went down to Pensacola and became aviators, and Motley and I went aboard the Mason.

  This was a constant kind of thing you saw going on in the navy. Anytime you achieved—or thought you had achieved—something, the rules would be changed, and that achievement would be thrown out. This was pretty much indicative of the way that the Mason’s history would be handled. You read about all of these other ships, but even though we always came out number one in all of our exercises and inspections, you don’t hear anything about the Mason.

  * For the story of the tragic loss of 202 black sailors and the unjust treatment of the survivors see The Port Chicago Mutiny by Robert L. Allen (Warner Books, 1989).

  4

  Commissioning and Shakedown

  On October 14, 1943, when the keel of the USS Mason was laid, the U-boats were a formidable adversary. The Germans had sunk eleven merchant vessels in the North Atlantic that month alone. The Mason was launched on November 17, 1943 and commissioned on March 20, 1944. She was sponsored by Mrs. David N. Mason in honor of her son Ens. Newton Henry Mason. Ensign Mason enlisted in the Naval Reserve in 1940. At age twenty-one he became a naval aviator and piloted a fighter plane in the Pacific. He was shot down by Japanese aircraft in aerial combat during the Battle of the Coral Sea on May 8, 1942. Ensign Mason received the Distinguished Flying Cross. Most DEs were named for young men killed in battle, and the navy chose this Evert-class DE to carry Ensign Mason’s name. There had been an earlier Mason named for a former Secretary of the Navy, an ancestor of Ensign Mason’s. When Mrs. Mason broke the bottle of champagne over the ship, no one knew that the Mason would play a historic role. David Mason, Newton Mason’s nephew, remembers how proud his grandparents were of the ship named for their son. “It was spoken of often,” he recalls, “but it was only after I met Jim Graham that I realized how special the crew was.”

  All the crews of destroyer escorts were unique in that they were trained for the specifics of antisubmarine warfare, which included learning to keep constantly alert in spite of the tedium of long slow days at sea. But only the Mason would have the distinction of being the one U.S. warship taken into combat by a predominately black crew. A smaller antisubmarine vessel, the PC-1264 (a submarine chaser), would have a crew of fifty-two black sailors, nine enlisted men, and white officers. She patrolled coastal waters around the United States and the Caribbean. The first black U.S. Navy admiral, Samuel Gravely, served on the PC-1264. But only the Mason would cross the ocean eight times, escort convoys, take on the U-boats, and carry her 160 black crewmen into history. Her captain, William Blackford, had been assigned to the ship before it was decided that the Mason would have a black crew. The same voices that had urged the navy to open its ranks now asked what was happening to all these well-trained sailors.

  The Mason was the navy’s answer: a way to meet two demands with one ship. After the fall of France left Britain isolated, its survival depended on the merchant ships and the huge oil tankers that brought food, medicine, clothing, and fuel—as well as weapons and ammunition—from North America. But hundreds of German U-boats were sinking these ships with impunity. Even after the United States entered the war the successful assault continued. The troop ships became even more enticing targets. By April 1942 the Allies had lost one million tons of cargo, and by December the German submarines had sunk 1,161 merchant vessels. More than forty thousand lives would be lost at sea. Though destruction at Pearl Harbor was more dramatic, the loss of life and material during the early phases of the Battle of the Atlantic represented a more serious threat. The U-boats had to be stopped or the Nazis would win the war.

  The navy developed the destroyer escort to combat the German submarines and to protect the convoy. Smaller than a destroyer, less expensive and yet capable of high speeds (twenty to twenty-four knots), the DE had substantial weapons designed for submarine combat. These included depth charges—fifty-gallon drums stuffed with up to six hundred pounds of explosives—and “hedgehogs”—a charge consisting of twenty-four projectiles fired ahead of the ship that scatters shot over a wide area. In addition, the ship carried armaments on her decks: mounted 3-inch, .50-caliber guns and smaller antiaircraft guns that were easy to maneuver.

  The most revolutionary aspect of the DE was its sophisticated tracking systems, which used high-frequency radios, radar, and sonar equipment. Scientists at the Princeton Institute such as Albert Einstein had joined the war effort and found ways to use sound beams to locate submarines. The sonar operator sent out the beam and then analyzed the reflected sound wave. The U-boats could no longer sneak into the convoys as they had done, nor could they submerge undetected. Radar supplemented the twenty-four-hour watch the sailors maintained. Radiomen could intercept even the most fleeting communication between subs. These escort vessels cost about five million dollars each, and in the fall of 1942, President Roosevelt made building them a top priority. Eventually, 565 DEs went into service and helped win the Battle of the Atlantic.

  George Polk, a petty officer on the Mason, told this story in a speech he made in 1981. He died years before this project began, but he was so devoted to the ship, it seems only right to include him.

  George Polk: Lt. Comdr. William M. Blackford, USNR, was the first skipper of the USS Mason. From time to time he was subjected to sarcastic remarks from the other ship captains relative to the fact that his crew, for the most part, was black. The following is a true excerpt from one such conversation, as recorded by a war correspondent.

  “Blackford, you must have somewhat of a problem with all those niggers on your ship, and so few white men,” the captain of another ship said to him.

  Almost angrily Captain Blackford responded, “Contrary to what you want to believe, I have less of a problem than you. We get along fine and do our jobs with no trouble of any sort. I regard my ship to be just like any of the hundreds of DEs on the high seas, not as a problem child nor as an experiment. I am not a crusader, and I am not trying to solve the race problem. I am simply trying to run a good navy fighting ship. Actually, my men get into less trouble than those from other ships because they know how to behave.”

  At this point I would like to say for “Big Bill,” as we among ourselves affectionately called him (and I wish he were present to hear me say this), as a crew, to a man, we would have probably followed him to hell and back.

  DuFau: Our first captain, William Blackford, was a captain indeed, and a man I will always have love and respect for. From the very beginning he was straight with us. He used to meet with the leading petty officers aboard ship. We would meet in the wardroom. There were few times you ever had a chance to be in the wardroom. That was like no man’s land, except for those gold braids. But he used to call the leading petty officers from each division and sit and talk with us. This was just between him and his crew. He wanted to know if there were any problems on the ship that he should know about or that he could sort of work out. Because he didn’t want any conflict on the ship.

  And he advised us that, “As long as
you do your job, what your rank calls for, you’ll have no problem. I am just here to run a U.S. Navy ship. I am not here to solve a race problem.” He said, “As long as you carry out your navy duties, you are going to get along with me. But if you cross lines, I am going to come down on you.” And he meant that. He lived up to it. He was a living example of it.

  I will always have respect for that man, because he developed a thinking among the men. He was part of making life aboard ship so wonderful. We used to call him—not to his face—“Big Bill.”

  Capt. William Blackford (letter to his parents): Boston, Mass. 9 January 1944: The ship is coming along fine but they put commissioning day back to 16 Feb. Am sure we will have a good crew as have some very fine reports concerning them. Can’t figure out why I was picked but will do the best I can—really quite an opportunity to do something.

  William Blackford was never sure why he had been selected for this command. He had been named captain before it was decided that the ship would be manned with black sailors. Perhaps only chance was responsible, but if so, it was a happy chance. In every discussion of their captain each crew member used the same phrase, “We would have followed him to hell and back.” William Blackford was born in Seattle, Washington. His father, a doctor who had founded one of Seattle’s first hospitals, was a dedicated sailor. William Blackford grew up on the family’s yacht, the Sally Bruce, learning the seamanship that would earn him the respect and gratitude of his crew. Before his assignment to the Mason he spent a year and a half commanding the USS Phoebe, a minesweeper operating in the Aleutian Islands. Blackford had been a Naval Reserve midshipman at the University of Washington during his undergraduate work there. He had then gone on to study at the University of Virginia and was two semesters shy of a Ph.D. in chemistry when he went on active duty in January 1941.