The Port Chicago disaster was a deadly munitions explosion that occurred on July 17, 1944, at the Port Chicago Naval Magazine in Port Chicago, California, United States. Munitions detonated while being loaded onto a cargo vessel bound for the Pacific Theater of Operations, killing 320 sailors and civilians and injuring 390 others. Approximately two-thirds of the dead and injured were enlisted African American sailors. A month later, unsafe conditions inspired hundreds of servicemen to refuse to load munitions, an act known as the PortChicago Mutiny. Fifty men were convicted of mutiny and sentenced to 15 years of prison and hard labor.
About Port Chicago disaster in brief
The Port Chicago disaster was a deadly munitions explosion that occurred on July 17, 1944, at the Port Chicago Naval Magazine in Port Chicago, California, United States. Munitions detonated while being loaded onto a cargo vessel bound for the Pacific Theater of Operations, killing 320 sailors and civilians and injuring 390 others. Approximately two-thirds of the dead and injured were enlisted African American sailors. A month later, unsafe conditions inspired hundreds of servicemen to refuse to load munitions, an act known as the PortChicago Mutiny. Fifty men were convicted of mutiny and sentenced to 15 years of prison and hard labor, as well as a dishonorable discharge. Forty-seven of the 50 were released in January 1946; the remaining three served additional months in prison. Widespread publicity surrounding the case turned it into a cause célèbre among certain Americans; it and other race-related Navy protests of 1944–45 led the Navy to change its practices and initiate the desegregation of its forces beginning in February 1946. A concurrent resolution sponsored by U.S. Representative Mark DeSaulnier was introduced in the 116th United States Congress on June 11, 2019. The resolution recognizes the victims of the explosion and officially exonerates the 50 men court-martialed by the Navy. The original magazine was planned in 1941 with construction beginning shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor. The first ship to dock at Port Chicago was loaded on December 8, 1942. Munition transported through the magazine included bombs, shells, naval mines, torpedoes, and small arms ammunition.
The munitions were delivered 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 PortChicago were African-American; all their commanding officers were white. The Navy’s General Classification Test results for the enlisted Men averaged 31, putting them in the lowest twelfth of the Navy, according to the Navy’s records. The men were instead put to work as stevedores. Black laborers were led by black petty officers who were regarded by some workers as incompetent and ineffective in voicing their men’s concerns to higher authority. Captain Merrill T. Kinne had not been trained in supervising enlisted personnel in handling munitions until they had been posted to Mare Island, after they were considered adequate to the task. Since April 1944, no enlisted men had been pushing the explosive cargoes to the cargo ship. Captain Kinne, who had served in the Navy from 1915 to 1922, had returned to Port Chicago from civilian life in 1941 to be posted aboard a general cargo ship and be posted to be general cargo officer. He and his men sometimes struck an antagonistic relationship, which led to the explosion of Port Chicago. The Port Chicago National Memorial was dedicated to the lives lost in the disaster in 1994, and is located on Suisun Bay in the estuary of the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers. It is a little more than a mile from a U. S. Navy munitions depot.
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This page is based on the article Port Chicago disaster published in Wikipedia (as of Nov. 21, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
