Robert L. Allen (1) (1942–2024)

I just finished this incredible book and whole heartily recommend it to anyone and everyone, but especially those white people who have been involved in any type of social justice work, whether "radical" or "reformist." The Allens present an incredibly rich historical analysis of the dynamic interplay between racism and class exploitation/accommodation through several distinct and significant periods. I learned so much about the eras I had only superficial knowledge of (particularly the show more populist and progressive eras) and had lots of important gaps filled in in the other eras (e.g. the woman's suffrage period and the socialist and communist periods). The common thread is the consistent willingness of white people, however radical, to opportunistically betray black people and to persist in racist behavior and choose racist strategies at the expense of larger victories, victories that would benefit so many more people, but that would require letting go of notions of white supremacy and the privileges for white people associated with it. This is critical stuff to come to come to grips with and though it is tragic and angering (and momentarily disheartening), will hopefully serve as a spur to doing social justice work better.

Although I am giving this book five stars, I do wish it had covered the gay liberation movement and that an additional postscript had been written covering at least the first decade of the 21st century. show less

From my “disasters” reading program. I confess I was predisposed to dislike the book, expecting it to be a political harangue, but it turned out to be not that bad. Author Robert Allen’s main points might be thought to be self-evident:

* It is a bad idea to be careless while loading an ammunition ship.

* Black American servicemen got the shaft in WWII.

However, it doesn’t hurt to be reminded of these things.

Allen identified the incident from an old pamphlet he ran across, then spent show more years tracking down survivors. His principal informant was Joe Small, an able seaman at the time. Small had already written down some of the story – in longhand on lined notebook paper – when Allen contacted him, and allowed Allen to use his work. It’s kind of a shame – I don’t know how much, if any, rewriting was involved but Small’s story is a lot more immediate and interesting than Allen’s more scholarly treatment. Small/Allen describe a typical day at the Port Chicago naval munitions terminal – a Liberty Ship, the E. A. Bryan, was at the pier being loaded – it had already taken on 4200 tons and was schedule to take 8500. Hold #1 had 5”/38 projectiles; hold #2 had depth charges, hold #3 had 5000-pound bombs, and holds #4 and #5 had 20mm and 40mm ammunition. The cargo came in on boxcars which were kept in revetments until ready to move to the pier; sailors offloaded the boxcars, either hand to hand or by rolling bombs or projectiles down a ramp, onto a cargo net. A winch operator – Small was one – picked up the net as directed by a signalman and swung it into the hold.

Small’s narration includes a reverie about his previous days port liberty – he picked up a young lady at a bar but we never find out what happened next; a discussion of his fellow sailors – one was trying to get a Section 8 discharge by urinating in his bunk every morning; and another sailor’s account of his liberty, where he had picked up his own girl only to discover she was a he. The details of the interaction between signalman and winch operator are fascinating – the choreography of swinging a load of 5000-pound bombs up, over, and into a ship without disaster. Alas, Small never finished his account so we never get up to the actual explosion on July 17, 1944.

There was a war on, of course, so the inquiry board never really gets down to providing an explanation of what happened. Various possible causes include presence of unexpected supersensitive material – a box of fuses accidently mixed in with ammunition, for example; “rough handling”, which, considering that some of the bombs were so tightly loaded in boxcars that they had to be sledgehammered out, seems possible; failing handling gear – i.e., a winch breaking – which really seems like a subset of “rough handling”; a train collision on the pier; a ship collision at the dock (an empty Victory ship was waiting to take its turn); or sabotage. The only evidence that might point toward a cause is several witnesses said there were two separate explosions, and one said the first explosion came from a boxcar on the pier rather than a ship. However, other witnesses, including an aircrew flying overhead, only reported a single explosion.

Allen notes that none of the black sailors had ever received any formal training in ammunition loading. Their white officers hadn’t either; although the officers did get a single page handout on safe loading, it was not passed on to the sailors because they were not expected to be able to understand it. The United States Coast Guard was (and still is) supposed to be responsible for shipboard hazardous material oversight; the Coast Guard had, in fact, sent a team to Port Chicago and then withdrawn it when they decided the Navy’s practices were too dangerous. Union stevedore rules didn’t allow anyone to load ammunition until they had considerable experience with non-dangerous cargo; the union offered to train Navy men but was refused. By Small’s account, he was self-taught in winch operation; he had picked it up by watching other winchmen and then filling in when one didn’t show up for work. There were frequent problems with the steam winches on E. A. Bryan, including bearing and brake failure. Officers made bets over who could make the most tonnage in a day (one of the inquiry board’s recommendations was the rather mild comment that “Ammunition loading should not be made into competition”).

The E. A. Bryan and everyone onboard totally disappeared. The other ship, the Quinalt Victory, was split in two and all aboard were killed. All shift workers and their officers on the dock were killed; there were 320 fatalities (202 were black; this was 15% of all the black Navy fatalities in WWII) and only 51 identifiable bodies.

The account of the explosion only occupies perhaps a quarter of the book; the remainder describes the “mutiny”. Three weeks after the explosion, the survivors were ordered to work loading another ammunition ship, downstream at Mare Island. Out of 300-odd men, 258 refused to work. They were lectured by several officers, then confined under guard on a barge. Eventually 50 were pulled out and charged with “mutiny” – failure to obey a lawful order in wartime. The court martial was more or less a foregone conclusion (Thurgood Marshall was one of the defense lawyers, and said it was “fair”) and the men were sentenced to between 8 and 15 years in prison. It’s not quite clear what happened next; Eleanor Roosevelt became involved somehow, and eventually it seems like after the war ended the 50 sailors were taken out of prison, placed more or less randomly on various naval vessels without being assigned specific duties, and sailed around the Pacific.

Allen makes political hay out of the mutiny charges, with a long account of racial prejudice in the US Navy, quotes from various naval officers saying that Negroes would never perform as well as white sailors, and a general indictment of 1940s race relations. All true, or course, but perhaps beating a dead horse. At least I hope the horse is dead.

Not very useful for my disaster reading program, which is more concerned with immediate disaster response than long term aftermath. What mention there is of immediate response makes it seem like it was fairly good given the time and place – officers organized first aid and victim recovery from collapsed buildings (at least, the officers later claimed to have done so; the most convincing account comes from an officer who seems to have noted that sailors were doing a pretty good job without any direction from him and left them alone to do it). Several sailors and officers received medals for successfully fighting a fire in a loaded boxcar on the pier. The contrast between immediate response and long term response was interesting; lots of men who were perfectly willing to fight a fire on a boxcar full of bombs and to enter collapsing buildings to save their buddies were later unwilling to load another ammunition ship.


Allen concludes with a long and rather discursive appendix on the sociology of disaster (well, he’s a sociology professor, so I suppose he has to). To his credit, he notes that there is an urban legend that the Port Chicago explosion involved a nuclear weapon, which he finds “untenable”. The book has sort of a journalistic style, with frequent bold-face headlines introducing chapters and paragraphs; a little annoying. There is a decent map of Port Chicago, plus before and after aerial photography. The author was an anti-war activist during the Vietnam era, and participated in demonstrations at Port Chicago (one of which resulted in a protestor losing his legs after lying in front of a railway locomotive, a thing that falls into the “bad idea” category no matter how committed you are. When I took railroad safety instruction courses, I was assured that this sort of thing could not happen with a modern locomotive, which can be moved at speeds as slow as 0.1 inch/minute and would just push someone out of the way. I am not inclined to test this claim). A couple of gratuitous photographs of these demonstrations get included, apparently because one of the protestors is holding up a sign mentioning the 1944 explosion. I really would have liked to hear more of Joe Small’s account of his day-to-day experience in the Navy. show less