July 17, 1944: The Port Chicago Disaster

July 17, 1944: A munitions explosion aboard the ship SS E.A. Bryan kills 320 sailors and civilians at the Port Chicago Naval Magazine in Port Chicago, California. Another 390 were injured. About 2/3rds of that total were enlisted African-American sailors.

The town of Port Chicago was located on Suisun Bay, in the estuary of the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers, about 36 miles northeast of San Francisco, with the rivers connecting the town to San Francisco Bay. Construction on the Magazine began after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and began operations on December 8, 1942.

Munitions, destined for the Pacific Theater of Operations of World War II, were delivered to the Port Chicago facility by rail, then individually loaded by hand, crane and winch onto cargo ships for transport to the war zones. From the beginning, all the enlisted men employed as loaders at Port Chicago were African-American, while all their commanding officers were white. (The U.S. armed forces remained racially segregated until 1948.)

All of the enlisted men had been specifically trained for one of the naval ratings during their stay at Naval Station Great Lakes, outside Chicago, but the men were instead put to work as stevedores. None of the new recruits had been instructed in ammunition loading.

The E.A. Bryan was a "Liberty ship," a class of cargo ship built under the Emergency Shipbuilding Program. Though British in concept, the design was adopted by the United States for its simple, low-cost construction. Mass-produced on an unprecedented scale, the Liberty ship came to symbolize U.S. wartime industrial output.

At 10:18 PM on July 11, 1944, witnesses reported hearing a noise described as "a metallic sound and rending timbers, such as made by a falling boom." Immediately afterward, an explosion occurred on the pier, and a fire started. Five to seven seconds later, a more powerful explosion took place, as the majority of the ordnance within and near the SS E. A. Bryan detonated in a fireball seen for miles. An Army Air Forces pilot flying in the area reported that the fireball was 3 mi (4.8 km) in diameter.

Chunks of glowing hot metal and burning ordnance were flung over 12,000 feet (over 2 miles into the air. The E. A. Bryan was completely destroyed, and the Quinault Victory was blown out of the water, torn into sections and thrown in several directions. The stern landed upside down in the water 500 feet away. The Coast Guard fire boat CG-60014-F was thrown 600 feet upriver, where it sank.

The pier, along with its boxcars, locomotive, rails, cargo, and men, was blasted into pieces. Nearby boxcars‍, waiting within their revetments to be unloaded at midnight‍, were bent inward and crumpled by the force of the shock. The port's barracks and other buildings and much of the surrounding town were severely damaged. Shattered glass and a rain of jagged metal and undetonated munitions caused many more injuries among military personnel and civilians, although no one outside the immediate pier area was killed.

Seismographs at the University of California, Berkeley sensed the two shock waves traveling through the ground, determining the second, larger event to be equivalent to an earthquake measuring 3.4 on the Richter scale.

A month later, unsafe conditions inspired hundreds of servicemen to refuse to load munitions, an act known as the Port Chicago Mutiny. Fifty men‍, called the "Port Chicago 50,"‍ were convicted of mutiny, and sentenced to 15 years of prison and hard labor, and were dishonorably discharged. Forty-seven of the 50 were released in January 1946, while the remaining three served additional months in prison.

Widespread publicity surrounding the case turned it into a cause célèbre among Americans opposing discrimination targeting African Americans. In 2019, a concurrent resolution was introduced in Congress, but has never been approved.

The Town of Port Chicago is no more: In 1968, all property was bought and buildings demolished by the federal government to form a safety zone around the adjacent Concord Naval Weapons Station loading docks. It is now the Military Ocean Terminal Concord.

*

July 17, 1944 was a Monday. Actress Brazilian soccer star Carlos Alberto Torres and Hungarian actress Catherine Schell (Maia from Space: 1999) were born on this day.

There was only 1 score on this historic day, and it was baseball's All-Star Games, played at Forbes Field in Pittsburgh. The National League beat the American League, 7-1. The winning pitcher was Ken Raffensberger of the Philadelphia Phillies. The losing pitcher was Tex Hughson of the Boston Red Sox. No home runs were hit, by either side.

The bottom of the 5th inning was key, as the NL scored 5 runs. They got a double from Bill Nicholson of the Chicago Cubs; singles from Connie Ryan of the Boston Braves, Augie Galan and Dixie Walker of the Brooklyn Dodgers, and Walker Cooper of the St. Louis Cardinals; a walk from Phil Cavarretta of the Cubs; and Stan Musial of the Cardinals reached on an error.