LESSON LEARNED - Port Chicago

I was curious about the the tragedy of 17 July, 1944.  It came just five weeks after the D-Day invasion of Normandy, which, in the first 24 hours,  left 19,000 dead and wounded on both sides. And two weeks after the United States Navy invaded Saipan in the central Pacific, which over the next month killed or wounded another 66,000.  And sandwiched in between was the horror of 320 killed and 390 injured in a split second on an isolated pier in a Northern California backwater. 

The tragedy of Port Chicago was a mere drop of blood into a world wide abattoir, where on average 220 Americans were killed in each day. Still it is not enough to say it happened because during a war human life is cheap. The victims of Port Chicago and their families deserve respect and an explanation. Why did what happened, happen?  And why did it happen almost exclusively to African American men?

It happened where it did because of extraordinary geology. It took 3 million years for the the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers to carve a deep canyon to the Pacific. Then, just 10,000 years ago, the rising ocean filled the gorge creating 275 miles of nooks and crannies, lobes, outlets and inlets which came to be called San Francisco Bay.  

For 400 years ocean going ships sailed through the mile wide Golden Gate (above), then...

...slipped between the sentries of Angel and Alcatraz islands, then north...

...beyond San Quentin Point, then....

...west through San Rafael Bay (above)  and passed the broad mouth of the Napa River...

...beyond San Pablo Bay and the Carquinez Strait, and passed Roe and Ryer Islands, thirty miles inland to a deep water port on the south shore of Suisin Bay, just nine miles from the mouth of the Sacramento - San Joaquin delta, that is the head of San Francisco Bay.

It also happened where it did because just after 5:00 p.m. on 10 July, 1926, a bolt of lightning set off fires in Pitcantiny, New Jersey which, over the next three days,  set off 600,000 tons of World War One surplus explosives (above), destroying 200 buildings and killing 21 souls. 

Because of this multi-billion inflation adjusted dollar disaster, the U.S. Navy established a new west coast ammunition depot in the Nevada desert (above), forty miles south south-west of Lake Tahoe, far from most thunderstorms, in the isolated desert village of Hawthorne. 

 After Pearl Harbor, the 5,000 employees at this facility assembled and shipped almost all of the explosives the United States used in the Pacific, from Naval TNT (Trinitrotoluene) shells, Torpex (50% stronger than TNT) torpedoes and sea mines, and Marine Corps TNT mortar and artillery shells. 

The assembled mayhem was then shipped by rail 120 miles over the Sierra Nevada Mountains to Port Chicago, California..

It happened where it did because,  in 1928,  California was hit by a drought that would last until 1937. In response the state and federal governments approved large scale water projects, like the Shasta dam on the Sacramento River headwaters, and the Central Valley project on the upper San Joaquin River, and many smaller one, like the Contra Costa Canal, which diverted fresh water around the Sacramento River delta. 

In 1940 the canal construction (above) reached the head of the San Francisco bay. This ensured potable water for the 1,700 residents of the little town of Port Chicago. Serviced by three railroad lines, it boasted 660 homes, three hotels, a small shopping district – even a movie theater. The canal also guaranteed water for the new naval base and dock a mile and a half to the north of the town. And it was here that the explosives from Hawthorne were to be loaded aboard transports to feed the great American Pacific war machine. 

It happened because in 1922 Annapolis graduate Merrill Talmadge Kinne resigned from the United States Navy. In his seven years of service, he had risen to the rank of commander, and was being groomed as a staff officer.   But the Washington Naval treaty signed that year required the scrapping of 30 combat ships under construction (above) or planned, and cutting the existing U.S. fleet from 774 to 365 ships.  

Seeing this contraction, the 28 year old Merrill traded in his uniform for a business suit. He remained in the Naval Reserve but did not go to sea again until he was called back in 1941. Now a 48 year old, Captain Merrill Kinne (above) quietly commanded a supply transport ship for two years, until April of 1944,  when he was given the command of Port Chicago.  He had no training in handling munitions, and at 50 had spent just nine years in uniform, but 19 years selling men's clothing

It happened because until 1932 African-Americans were not accepted into the Navy, because, as one report insisted “The enlistment of Negros...leads to disruptive and undermining conditions....” Pearl Harbor and a Presidential order broke through the racism, but African-Americans were still not allowed to serve on combat vessels because they had “poor eyesight”. 

So all 1,400 stevedores loading explosives at Port Chicago were black. Racism forced these men to walk half a mile to use a “colored” toilet. Because there was just one commissary building, blacks had to wait outside until all whites had finished their meals. They were provided no public transport off the base, and even if they walked the mile and a half,  they could not even enter the movie house in the town of Port Chicago.  No wonder they described the base as a “slave labor camp”. 

Institutional racism encouraged the white officers to discount enlisted men's suggestions for safety or efficiency improvements.  Even when the supervising white U.S. Coast Guard Commander Paul Cronk warned that working conditions at Port Chicago were “ripe for disaster”,  he was ignored. As a protest, and to protect his own men, he withdrew his crew from the base. This during a world war. The black stevedores had no such option.

It happened because sixteen rail cars at a time, packed with explosives from Hawthorne,  were pushed on three parallel rail spurs onto the 90 foot wide, 1, 200 foot long pier. Each “division” of 100  stevedores unloaded the cars by hand, transferred the ammunition to cargo nets, which a boom winch then lowered down a hatch into one of the ship's 5 holds where they were re-packed by black hands.

Competition between divisions were encouraged, the goal being ten tons per hour, but the average speed being closer to seven. Although the men had received no training in proper procedures, running totals for each division were posted on chalk boards, with junior white officers wagering on the results. Safety was not entirely ignored, just mostly. 

On the land side were 27 barricaded sidings where 203 rail cars could be safely “parked” until there was a ship to be loaded. The administrative buildings were a mile inland, including 4 navy enlisted (black) and one marine (white) barracks. During its first year of operation, 39 ships were loaded at Port Chicago with 115,000 tons of high explosives. Command was on target to more than double that amount for 1944.

It happened when it did because on 17 July, 1944  the SS E. A. Bryon was preparing to start her second voyage, which meant she had already earned the $1.5 million invested in building her.

Her keel, number 2761, had been laid down on 11 February, 1944 at the Kaiser Permanente Shipyard Number Two, in Richmond, California (above) - less than 20 miles from Port Chicago. Eighteen 24 hour work days later she hit the water, and just eight days after that she went into service. 

Named after a popular president of Washington State University, she was one of 2,700 “Ugly Ducklings” built during the war.  Each "Liberty Ship" was identical,  441 feet long and 28 feet wide, with three holds forward of the central island and two toward the stern. Her best speed was barely 11 knots. And at 8:15 the morning of 17 July, 1944, she tied up on the land side of the Port Chicago pier, and at ten that morning started taking on cargo.

It happened because by night fall the number five (stern) hold of the Byron was stuffed with  40mm cannon shells. Her number four hold held  462 tons of fragmentation and cluster bombs. The Byron's number three hold (midships) contained 525 tons of 1,000 pound bombs. The  number two hold held 565 tons of Mark 47 Torpex air dropped sea mines. And the number one (bow) hold was still being loaded with 660 pound incendiary bombs. 

Still less than half full, at 10:00 a.m. the Byron contained 3,600 tons of high explosives. There were another 1,000 tons waiting to be unloaded from the rail cars when, at eighteen minutes and forty-four seconds after ten, the S.S. Byron blew up.  Nobody knows exactly why.

Seismographs in Berkeley recorded the explosion (above) at that moment, as a 3.4 earthquake on the Richter scale. The 25 million pound Byron, her cargo, her crew, most of the pier, the box cars sitting on it, the steam locomotives moving rail cars, and 320 human beings, two thirds of them African Americans,  working near, on and in the ship,  were all vaporized. (15% of all African American dead  suffered during World War Two.)  A 66 foot deep, 300 feet wide and 700 foot long crater was carved into the sea bed beneath where the Byron had floated an instant before. 

A larger cargo ship, S.S. "Quinalt Victory", which was waiting to be loaded on the bay side of the wharf, was lifted out of the water by the explosion, torn in half, and its stern left floating 500 yards into Suisin Bay (above). A Coast Guard fire boat stationed at the end of the wharf was thrown 600 feet and destroyed.. 

 Three thousand feet from the center of the blast, the Roe Island lighthouse (above)  was shattered by the blast wave moments before a 30 foot tidal wave shoved the entire structure 40 feet up the beach.

Commercial pilots at 9,000 feet reported house sized hull fragments of the ships flying past their plane. A mile and a half south of the base every home in the town of Port Chicago was damaged. 

The northern wall of the crowded movie theater (above)  buckled as if punched by a giant fist and the ceiling fell - but none of the 192 white patrons were injured. 

Debris fell two miles away. Forty miles away the fireball 3 miles in diameter was clearly visible. People 200 miles away heard the blast. The explosion was comparable in size to that which would occur one year and three weeks later over Hiroshima, Japan.

Three weeks and one day later, on 8 August, 1944. 328 African-American stevedore survivors at Port Chicago refused to load another Liberty Ship, the USS Sangay,  unless their officers were replaced and safety procedures were improved.  Eventually 208 men were reassigned to menial duties until finally issued a dishonorable discharge. Another 50 were convicted of mutiny and sentenced to hard labor. After the end of the war the fifty were released and given a “general discharge under honorable circumstances”.

The irrational disparity of punishments made no more sense than the reasons some lived while others died in the explosion. Within a few months, a Navy review board offered lessons learned, and last on their list of suggestions, was: “The inadvisability of employing 100% colored ordnance battalions to handle and load ammunition was amply demonstrated.”  It wasn't much as a lesson, and the language invited misunderstanding and false justification. But for the victims, each distanced now from the blast by space and time, the explanation of the tragedy at Port Chicago was pure farce and insult. And surely we can do better than that, three quarters of a century later. 

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STARK RAVING SANE

 

I judge it a victory for the legal process that no one answered the exhausted, exasperated plea of a spectator who responded in open court to the umpteenth outburst by defendant Charles Julius Guiteau (pronounced “Gitto”, above) by begging somebody to , “Just shoot him, now.”  

There is no doubt Charles was funny in the head. But if he had murdered some random schmuck on the street , he would have been locked safely away in an insane asylum, where he could die quietly of tuberculous like most of the 19^th century mentally ill.  If that had happened, then with time he would have been considered “ha, ha” funny.  

As it was the children who grew up with Charles noted his “offensive egotism”, thirty years before he shot President James Garfield in the back.  Because of that murder, Charles was not, as Sarah Vowell suggested, “the funniest man in American History”. But he still comes close.

Just after nine on 2 July, 1881, as he got out of the cab in front of the Baltimore and Potomac railroad station (above), his ex-girl friend, Pauline Smolens, asked, “What are you plotting now, Charles dear?” He was plotting to gun down President Garfield inside the station. But her asking the question raises the question why Miss Smolens got in a carriage with dear Charles after showing the common sense to break up with this lunatic exhibitionist.  

Fifteen years earlier Charles' long suffering wife Anne Bunn had divorced him only after he re-gifted her the syphilis he had received from one of the prostitutes he frequented. The judge who granted Anne's divorce ordered Charles to never marry again.  Legally the judge couldn't do that, but that was the effect Charles Guiteau eventually had on everybody who knew him - they were all driven to extremes.

Having shot the President, Charles was run to a nearby police station by officer Patrick Kearney.  All the way there Charles kept shouting, “I have killed Garfield!...I have a letter that will tell you all about it!” 

Charles was then chased by a angry mob as he was escorted to the city jail. Charles' note read, “I have just shot the President. I shot him several times as I wished him to go as easily as possible...I am a lawyer, theologian, and politician.... Very respectfully, Charles Guiteau” Almost nothing in that note was true, except that he had committed murder.

First, Charles was a no theologian. As a teenager he had joined the free love cult of John Humphrey Noyes.  But Charles' groundless arrogance offended so many members, he literally couldn't get laid in a free love commune.  After five years of celibacy “Charles Git Out”, as his fellow cult members called him, tried suing Noyes, and failing that, then plagiarized two of the leaders' books, self publishing them under his own name. Then Charles became an itinerant preacher (above). 

One newspaper described a typical performance (a lecture on his book) by the self described “Little Giant of the West”, “...The impudent scoundrel talked only 15 minutes.” Charles then ran out the back with the ticket receipts in his pocket.  According to one member, the abandoned audience, “had a conference and all came to the conclusion that he was crazy.”

Charles was also not really a lawyer.  His bar exam was four questions long, and a passing grade was just 50%....so he did get his law degree.  But he only used it to make himself a bill collector, keeping whatever he collected whenever he felt like it.. 

The first inaccuracy in Charles's note was that President Garfield was not dead – yet - and would not die easily.   And Charles was never respectful of anybody. The only truth in the note was that being an egomaniac Charles did fit the working definition of a politician. As such he decided President Garfield owed him an ambassadorship, and when he did not receive it, Charles bought a gun and began stalking the President of the United States.   But that was just the latest in a life time of arrogant fantasies.  It seemed as if before he shot the President,  everybody in first Chicago and then Boston and then New York thought Charles ought be hanged. So after he pulled the trigger, he set out to convince everybody in Washington, D.C., as well. 

While James Garfield was slowly dying of septicemia, Charles Guiteau was writing his autobiography and planning his new lecture tour. From his prison cell Charles offered to sell the suit he wore while shooting Garfield, well as photographs of himself. Again, after only a few weeks, most of the people in the closest contact with Charles, his jailers, wanted to kill him..

On 11 September, Sargent William Mason, of the Fourth Artillery regiment got fed up with “coming to work every day to protect a dog like Guiteau.”  Mason shoved a pistol through the grate in Charles' cell door and ordered the assassin to “Get up and meet your death like a man.” Instead Charles began screaming and running back and forth in his tiny cell, while Mason kept firing and missing him. 

In desperation Mason yelled “Stay still, you rotten shit!” just before the gun was knocked from his hand by another guard.  Despite widespread public acclaim, and funds raised for his family, Sargent Mason was sentenced to eight years in jail, perhaps because he missed.

After James Garfield finally died on 19 September, 1881, Charles was charged with murder and hate mail began to flood the new jail at 19th and B Streets, SE (above). Typical was the opinion of one writer who called Charles a “dirty, lousy, lying rebel traitor”, adding, “hanging is too good for you, you stinking cuss... You damn old mildewed assassin. You ought to be burned alive and let rot. You savage cannibal dog.”

Perhaps the most inventive suggestion was that Charles be forced to eat two ounces of his own cooked flesh every day, as long as he lasted.. About this time, another guard was driven to attack Charles with a knife. Again, Charles' screams brought help. But none of this seemed to shake Charles' reality, or lack thereof.  He assured courtroom spectators, “I've had plenty of visitors...everybody was glad to see me...they all expressed the opinion without one dissenting voice that I be acquitted.”  He sounded only slightly more sure of himself than Donald Trump!

The newspaper serialization of Charles' arrogant autobiography would have poisoned the jury pool if those waters were not already putrid with hate. Worse, Charles complained that while a fund had been set up to support the newly widowed Mrs. Garfield, he still needed money for his expected dream team of defense lawyers. 

The trial began on Monday, 14 November, 1881, in the courtroom of Walter Smith Cox (above), a longtime D.C. attorney, who had only been on the bench for two years. Fearing any verdict might be appealed, Judge Cox allowed Charles to to act as one of his own attorneys. 

“I came here...as an agent of the Deity,” asserted Charles, “and I am going to assert my right in this case.” As a practical matter this meant Charles kept springing up whenever he was inspired to, to argue or spew insults and obscenities on witnesses and his own “blunderbuss lawyers”, ordering his brother-in-law to “Get off the case, you consummate ass!”, telling Judge Cox, “I would rather have some ten-year-old boy try this case than you!”, and often spitting and foaming at the mouth while he did so.

Meanwhile the search for an impartial jury eliminated 175 on grounds they wanted Charles dead. Prospective juror John Lynch suggested that Charles “ought to be hung or burnt”, adding, “I don't think there is any evidence in the United States to convince me any other way”. Potential juror John Judd said Charles ought to be hung – not for murdering Garfield, but because he had once cheated Judd out of $50. 

A writer to the New York Times suggested, “it would be best to execute him first and try the question of his sanity afterward.”  After three days, Charles' great objection to the chosen twelve was that one of them, Ralph Wormley, was black.

On Saturday the doctors offered their account of the President's injuries, introducing a preserved section of Garfield's spine (above).  It was passed among the hushed jury, and was eventually handed to Charles, who looked it over and handed it back without comment. Much to everyone's relief.

According to the papers, that night, “a wild and reckless youth” named Bill Jones - who was actually 29 and had been drinking heavily - rode up next to the carriage returning Charles to jail, and let loose a shot. 

“The Avenger” then lead police on a high speed (one horsepower) chase, south to the outskirts of Fredricksburg, Virginia, where he was finally arrested. Worse, in most estimations, was that Jones, like the previous avengers, this one had also missed.

“People will learn after awhile”, said Charles, “ that the Lord is with me and will not allow me to be killed!” The Washington Times labeled young Jones a hero, despite his record for impersonating police officers and threatening strangers with arrest. Several thousand dollars were raised by “The Evening Star” to support Jones' wife and child and hire him attorneys while he sat in jail for two years. In 1884, a jury quickly acquitted Bill Jones of the assault, which must have made Sargent Mason feel like a complete fool.

Monday, 21 November – the first court date after the Bill Jones assault - the only actual criminal lawyer working for Charles Guiteau, Mr. Leigh Robinson, resigned from the case. The 49 year old Confederate veteran had only taken the thankless job at the request of Judge Cox. 

But Robinson was now clashing with Charles' brother-in-law, George Scoville (above), whose legal career had focused on property rights. George wanted to plead Charles temporary  insanity.

But Charles refused to admit he was insane, shouting at George in open court, “You are no criminal lawyer! I can get two or three first-class criminal lawyers in America to manage this case for me.!” 

Where those lawyers were hiding was unclear, so Judge Cox finally had the lunatic handcuffed in his chair. As the bailiffs struggled with him, Charles kept shouting, “Mind your own business. Mind your own business!” Once restrained, Charles sulked, and Robinson was released from his painful duties.

George Scoville put Charles' older brother John (above left) on the stand, who said of Charles, “His life is a wreck and worthless."   When John wrote to ask when he could expect repayment of a loan, Charles wrote back, “Find $7 enclosed. Stick it up your bung hole and wipe your nose on it...” However there was no money in the letter. Charles' big sister Francis (above, right) testified Charles had “gone daft” without warning and chased her with an ax. And then Charles spent a week on the stand, driving his legal defense six feet under ground.

Charles insisted medical malpractice had killed Garfield, not him.  Besides,  he was not crazy in the moral sense, because “The Deity” had ordered him to kill Garfield, but he was definitely insane in the legal sense, in that the jury should not convict him.  Twenty psychiatrists (called alienists) watched this performance, one telling a newspaper that Charles was the most fascinating psychotic he had ever seen.  District Attorney George Corkhill, disagreed, asserting that Charles was “no more insane than I am...he's a cool, calculating blackguard, a polished ruffian... He wanted excitement...and notoriety, and he got it.”

Corkhill asked, “Who bought the pistol, the Deity or you?” Charles (above) responded, “The Deity furnished the money...I was the agent.” Corkhill asked directly, “Are you insane at all?” To this, Charles tried a clever answer. “A good many people think I am badly insane”, he told the jury, ”My father thought so, and my relatives thought so and still think so.” 

And that was when Corhill sprung his  trap. “You told the jury you were not insane,.” he reminded Charles. The madman smirked, certain of his own cleverness. “I am not an expert. Let the experts and the jury decide whether I am insane.” At least half the people in the courtroom, the jury included, were probably willing to lynch him right there, because of that smirk.

One of the few spectators able to hold onto their own sanity in the presence of Charles' pretentious hubris, was Fredrick Douglas. The great man pointed out that if Charles were merely acting crazy, “he is the most consummate actor in the world.” Meanwhile Douglas's old ally, Henry Ward Beecher, announced he believed Guiteau, “sane enough to hang.”

After 100 witnesses and 10 weeks of testimony, the case went to the jury. They came back with a verdict in 20 minutes. Allowing them five minutes to use the toilet, ten minutes to elect John Hamlin as foreman, and count the ballots, and five minutes to reassemble courtroom security: it cannot have been a contentious deliberation. At the reading of the verdict, Charles jumped to his feet, screaming at the jury, “You are all low, consummate jackasses! My blood will be on the heads of that jury!”. A Chicago Tribune headline caught the general public reaction. “The Hyena Hangs!”

Six months later, after his breakfast on Friday, 30 June, 1882, a clean shaven Charles Guiteau asked that the flowers and cards sent by his supporters be delivered to his cell. The warden informed him there were none. Charles then placed an order for his evening meal, which the warden took. Just before noon Charles was led out of his cell by a clergyman, his brother John and a pair of guards. He was led into the rotunda of the jail, where the permanent gallows awaited him. At the foot of the stairs, Charles paused to weep. Then he climbed the 13 steps, and found himself facing a crowd of 250 who had paid up to $300 to watch him die. Hundreds more stood outside the walls, waiting to cheer the event.

Charles could not go without a speech. As his hands were tied behind his back, and his legs were bound together, he recited: “I am now going to read some verses which are intended to indicate my feelings at the moment of leaving this world....I wrote it this morning about ten o'clock.” He than recited in a child like voice, '“I am going to the Lordy, I am so glad, I am going to the Lordy,...”  His poem went on for five stanzas and then Charles bent his head so the genial hangman, “Colonel” Robert Strong, could slip the noose around his neck.

The papers called Strong "the jolliest Jack Ketch in the whole country",   and bestowed on the long time city jail guard the honorary title of “Colonel” (above).  The 56 year old was best known for his genial nature, who once earnestly chided a condemned man, “If you don’t cheer up you’ll never learn how to look on the bright side of life.” Said a fellow guard of Robert Strong's work, “His noose for the neck was simply perfection.” As this noose was tightened on his own neck, Charles begged the hangman, “Do not pull it too tight, Mr. Strong”. Robert assured him, “I won't hurt you, Charlie.”

With the hood closed, Strong and the clergyman stepped away, and Charles shouted, “The Angels are coming to me!” He opened his left hand, dropping a square of paper. Before it hit the platform floor, Charles shouted, "Glory, ready, go!” and “Colonel” Strong jerked the lever, opening the trap door. That quick, and almost without a sound, Charles Guiteau dropped six feet and jerked to a stop. A cheer went up from the crowd, inside and outside the jail.

The body hung still for 40 seconds, and then jerked. After three minutes without further movement the body was lowered until the feet just touched the ground. The heart kept beating for another 14 minutes. After it stopped, just to be sure, the body was left hanging for another half an hour, and was then lowered into its coffin and cut down. On autopsy Charles Guiteau was found to have died of suffocation. His neck was not broken by Mr. Strong's noose. 

Charles' brain weighed 49 ½ ounces, and had asymmetry of the hemispheres and signs of Syphlitic paresis, which can produce grandiose delusions. 

Charles has never been buried. His skull (above)  and most of his bones are in the National Museum of Health and Medicine, while sections of his brain are in the Mutter Museum, both in Philadelphia. His head, minus his skull, was part of a private collection in Indiana for some years, before it was destroyed in a fire.  Free at last.

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