visit to Port Chicago

I was looking at a list of National Park Service sites in the Bay Area, and realized that the only one I'd never been to was the Port Chicago Naval Magazine National Memorial. So I decided to go.

This is not easy to arrange. It's located on an active-duty military base, and is only open when the army isn't doing secure operations in the vicinity. That turned out to be only the first two weeks in October out of a two-month period. Further, you can only get on the base with an NPS escort, so you need to make a reservation. For tours offered once a day, three days a week, even when it's open. I phoned them up, got the availability, and made mine.

You meet up in the parking lot of the visitor center at another NPS property in the area. A few people will fit in the NPS van, and the rest form a caravan on the long drive to the gate, and the somewhat shorter drive to the memorial. There we stand while the ranger asks the two dozen or so of us for our backgrounds, and then tells the story of the memorial.

Most of the people present were there only because they were on quests to visit, not just all the NPS sites in the Bay Area, but the several hundred in all the US. That wouldn't have occurred to me. This one, inevitably, was near the end of their lists.

On the other hand, I had long known the story of Port Chicago, which had been surprising news to most of the others. Port Chicago was - still is - a deepwater dock in the lower Sacramento River. Here all the munitions destined for the Pacific in WW2 were brought by rail and loaded on to ships. The stevedores who did the loading were not adequately trained. There were no safety precautions. They were driven by rewards and punishments to work as fast as possible - "There's a war on!" They were all enlisted Navy men and they were, of course, all Black.

And then one Monday night in 1944 at about 10 PM - because loading went on 24/7 - something went wrong. Nobody knows what because no evidence nor witnesses survived. A spark went off and a nearly-full ship exploded. Debris went over two miles into the air. The seismograph measured 3.4. Most people thought the Japanese had attacked.

No trace of the ship was ever found. Nor of the pier it was docked at. The ship docked on the other side of the pier - another violation of safety regulations - a large piece of it was found out in the bay, upside down. And 320 men were killed and another 390 injured.

There's a sequel. The surviving whites were given time off to recover. The surviving Blacks weren't. They were transferred to another naval yard nearby - because there weren't any facilities at Port Chicago for a while - and a few weeks later were ordered to start loading munitions in more ships. No new training, no new safety regulations. They refused to go. If they'd been civilian stevedores, this would have been a wildcat strike. As it was military, the ones who couldn't be cozened into changing their minds were charged with mutiny,* convicted, imprisoned for a while. Full exoneration didn't come until after they were all dead, about which time the memorial was established.

Nothing's left at the explosion site except the pilings from the base of the pier, a few scraps of metal from the second ship, and the bunkers where the train cars were unloaded - those were cushioned in case of explosion. And now there is a granite monument with the names of all the dead. That's about it. The ranger did not disguise or mince about the racist segregation policies that led Black men to enlist thinking they'd fight the enemy, but set them off in segregated units as dock workers, mess mates, and so on.

Port Chicago is also gone. It was a town. But some years after the war the military decided it was too close to the base, confiscated the land, paid the owners something (some of them had their houses moved), added the land to the base, and tore down the entire town.

I've been to Alcatraz - another grim NPS site nearby - and now here. And that's what I saw.

*Here's something even the rangers didn't know. The prosecutor in the mutiny trial went on, over 20 years later, to become the D.A. who prosecuted the students who famously occupied the U.C. Berkeley administration building in protest against the Vietnam War.