Today In History: Port Chicago

On July 17, 1944, 320 people were killed, and almost 400 injured when a pair of ammunition ships exploded in a U.S. Navy depot in Port Chicago, Calif.

It is now known as Concord Naval Weapons Station. In 1944, it was the Navy's largest and busiest base for shipping munitions to the Pacific during World War II.

The SS Quinault Victory and the SS E.A. Bryan were moored with 3.5 million pounds of explosives aboard or waiting nearby on the pier.

The cause of the explosion was never determined. The nearby town of Port Chicago was devastated. The explosion had the force of a nuclear blast and was felt 30 miles away in San Francisco.

Two-thirds of the blast victims were black. In those days of the segregated Navy, the difficult and dangerous job of loading explosives at Port Chicago was reserved for black sailors. The officers who supervised them were white.

The U.S. Navy Court of Inquiry failed to pinpoint the cause of the explosion, but indirectly laid the blame on the black sailors, observing, "the colored enlisted personnel are neither temperamentally nor intellectually capable of handling high explosives."

A few weeks after the explosion, those officers ordered the blacks to resume loading ammunition.

Approximately 258 sailors refused the order. The Navy called it mutiny, and there was a spontaneous work stoppage. Fifty of the men were singled out and put on trial for mutiny, and the remaining 208 sailors were given the lesser charge of summary courts-martial.

After 32 days of testimony, the all-white panel of officers took only 80 minutes to convict the men. Although the 50 mutineers were sentenced to up to 15 years in prison, they were released a year and a half later as part of a general amnesty at the end of the war.