Initial actions Divisions Two, Four, and Eightreinforced with replacement sailors fresh from training at NSGLwere taken to
Mare Island Navy Yard, where there was an ammunition depot and loading piers. On August 8, 1944, the docked to be loaded with naval mines and other munitions. The next day, 328 men were assembled and marched off. When they heard the orders "Column left" and "Forward March" to march toward the ammunition loading dock, the entire group stopped and would not continue. All said they were afraid and that they would not load munitions under the same officers and conditions as before. It was a mass work stoppage, which would have been called a
strike if the workers had been civilians. The Navy would not countenance such conduct. Seventy of the men changed their minds after their officers made it clear that loading ammunition was their duty. The 258 African-American sailors in the ordnance battalion who continued to refuse to load ammunition were taken under guard to a barge that was used as a temporary
military prison or "brig", despite having been built to accommodate only 75 men. Most of the men in the brig had not been given a direct orderthey had simply been asked if they were going to load ships or not, and to step to one side if not. All said they were afraid of another explosion. On August 11, 1944, the 258 men from the prison barge were marched to a nearby sports field and lectured by Admiral Wright, who told them that troops
fighting on Saipan desperately needed the ammunition they were supposed to be loading and that continued refusal to work would be treated as mutinous conduct, which carried the
death penalty in times of war. Wright, who had seen nearly 400 of his men killed in 1942 in the
Battle of Tassafaronga, said that although loading ammunition was risky,
death by firing squad was the greater hazard. After the admiral departed, the men were ordered to separate themselves into two groups, one for those willing to obey all orders and one for those not willing. To a man, Division Eight chose to obey all orders. Divisions Two and Four were split by the decisions of their men: Small and 43 others chose to form a group unwilling to obey every order. These 44 were taken back to the brig and the remaining 214 were sent to barracks. On the morning of August 12, six men from Divisions Two and Four who had put themselves in the obey-all-orders group failed to show up for work call; these six were confined to the brig, making 50 prisoners in all. These 50 were identified by the Navy as mutineers. Throughout August, all 258 sailors were taken to Camp Shoemaker and questioned. Forty-nine of the 50 mutineers were imprisoned in the camp's brig. Joe Small was placed in
solitary confinement. Each was interviewed by officers, sometimes in the presence of an armed guard. Questions focused on identifying "ringleaders" of the work-stoppage and on what was said by whom at the meeting on the prison barge. The men were asked to sign statements summarizing the interrogation, but the officer's version rarely matched the enlisted man's recollection of the interview. Some men, upon seeing that the written statements did not reflect what they had said, refused to sign. Others felt they had no choice but to signthey were being ordered to do so by an officer. Several men refused to give any statement at all. Others spoke freely, thinking that the officer was their
defense counsel. After the interviews concluded, the 208 men were convicted in summary courts-martial of disobeying orders, Article 4 of the Articles for the Government of the United States Navy (
Rocks and Shoals).) Each was subject to forfeiture of three months' pay. A few of them were held as witnesses for the upcoming mutiny trial. The rest were split into smaller groups and shipped out to the Pacific Theater. Carl Tuggle, one of the 208, said in 1998 that a group of prisoners, including himself, were assigned menial tasks. After returning from active duty, they each received
bad conduct discharges, which meant the loss of
veterans' benefits.
Port Chicago 50 The 50 remaining mensoon to be known as the "Port Chicago 50"were formally charged in early September 1944 with disobeying orders and making a mutiny. in 2007 The Navy held the court-martial on
Yerba Buena Island, part of Naval Training and Distribution Center (later "Naval Station")
Treasure Island, halfway between
Oakland and
San Francisco. Reporters were invited to watch the proceedings; Navy public relations officers gave reporters copies of photographs and press statements describing the trial as the first mutiny trial in World War II and the largest mass trial the Navy had ever convened. Chosen to head the seven-man court was Rear Admiral Hugo Wilson Osterhaus,
United States Naval Academy, class of 1900. The prosecution was led by Lieutenant Commander James F. Coakley, who had recently served as deputy chief prosecutor in
Alameda County under district attorney
Earl Warren. Defending the men were six Navy lawyers, with a leader and one attorney for every 10 men. Lieutenant Gerald E. Veltmann headed the defense. Veltmann and his team talked to their clients—they discovered that not all of the 50 were experienced ship loaders. Two of the men had never before loaded ammunitionthey were permanently assigned as cooks because of physical conditions making them unsuited to loading. The two cooks had responded "no" when asked if they would load munitions. Another of the 50, who had a broken wrist in a sling, was asked if he would load ammunition, to which he replied that he would not. Coakley opposed with a brief stating that, under
military law, a persistent refusal to work by two or more mensomething that might be called a "strike" among civilianswas sufficient proof of a conspiracy to override superior military authority and was equivalent to mutiny.
Prosecution The trial started on September 14 with each of the 50 men pleading "not guilty". Coakley began his prosecution by calling officers from Port Chicago and Mare Island as witnesses. Commander Joseph R. Tobin of Ryder Street Naval Barracks said that he personally ordered six or seven of the men to load munitions on August 9 but was unable to verify if any others were so ordered. He said that the men he had spoken with were willing to follow any order except to load munitions; that each man expressed fear of another explosion. Tobin verified that the men were not aggressive or disrespectful. Lieutenant Ernest Delucchi, Commander of Division Four at Port Chicago, testified that he personally ordered only four of the 50 defendants to load munitions. Delucchi described overhearing men of Division Eight say to his men, "Don't go to work for the white motherfuckers" On September 15, Delucchi continued his testimony, saying that some of his men told him they would obey all orders and perform all work except loading ammunition because they were afraid of it. Delucchi confirmed that a cook and a man with a broken wrist were among the 25 men in his division that now sat among the 50 accused. Delucchi added that the cook and a second man were sailors he did not consider "up to par"; the cook in particular was prone to nervous attacks and was seen as a liability at the pier. Later in the trial, Lieutenant Carleton MorehouseCommander of Division Eight at Port Chicagotook the stand to say that at the first sign of problems on August 9, he assembled his men and read their names off alphabetically, ordering each man to work. Ninety-six of 104 refused and were sent to the prison barge, but all of these men agreed to work after hearing Admiral Wright's speech on August 11; none of Morehouse's men were on trial for mutiny. Morehouse confirmed to Veltmann that some of his men had said they were afraid to handle ammunition. Following Morehouse, Lieutenant James E. Tobin, Commander of Division Two, took the stand. Lieutenant Tobin (no relation to Commander Joseph R. Tobin) related that 87 of his men initially refused to work but that number was reduced to 22 after Admiral Wright talked about the
firing squad. Tobin said he put three additional men in the brig the next morning when they, too, refused to work, saying they were afraid. Tobin affirmed that one of the accused men from Division Two was permanently assigned the job of cook because he weighed and was considered too small to safely load ammo. The next few days of testimony were filled with accounts from African-American enlisted men from Divisions Two, Four, and Eight, who were not standing accused of mutiny. Some of these men had already been convicted of disobeying orders in summary courts-martial. The testimony of the men agreed on several points: that there had been talk among them of a mass work-stoppage leading up to August 9, that some men (none of the accused 50) Coakley summed up his prosecution case on September 22. His aim was to show the court that a conspiracy had taken placethe mass of accounts from officers and men appeared to support the conclusion that ringleaders and agitators had forced a rebellion against authority. Veltmann pointed out that few of the accused had been ordered to load ammunition, meaning that they could not all be guilty of the charge of disobeying orders. Veltmann stressed that much of the testimony was hearsay and failed to establish a conspiracy or a mutiny. The court, however, seemed to side with Coakley on all points, settling each objection in favor of the prosecution.
Defense Veltmann scored a victory at the beginning of his defense: he moved and was granted that each officer's testimony could be applied only to the men they had specifically named as having been given the order to work. In principle, this ruling was favorable, but in practice it would benefit the men only if the court had been attentively keeping notes for each accused man. Instead, reporters observed the court to be drowsy at times, with one judge regularly nodding off. Starting on September 23 and continuing for over three weeks, each of the accused men was brought to the witness stand to testify in his defense. The general trend of the men's responses was that all of them were willing to obey any order except to load ammunition, all were afraid of another explosion, and none had been approached by "ringleaders" persuading them not to workeach had made his own decision. Each man said that he himself had not coerced others to refuse to work. Some of the men related how, following the official interrogation at Camp Shoemaker, they had been under great pressure to sign statements containing things they had not said. Some men said that, at the meeting on the barge, Joe Small had not urged a mutiny and had not uttered any phrase to the effect of having the officers "by the balls". On the witness stand, Small himself denied saying any such thing, though he would admit to it decades later in interviews. Coakley's
cross-examinations began with an attempt to have the signed statements admitted as evidence. Veltmann objected that each statement was obtained under duress and was not voluntary. Coakley characterized the statements as not being confessions requiring voluntary conditions but merely "admissions" that had no such requirement. Osterhaus ruled that Coakley could not introduce the statements as evidence but that he could ask the defendants questions based on what each man's signed statement contained. Some of the men who had been named as having been given direct orders to work testified that they had not been given any such order. Seaman Ollie E. Greenwho had accidentally broken his wrist one day prior to the first work-stoppage on August 9said that though he had heard an officer in prior testimony name him as one who had been given a direct order, the officer had only asked him how his wrist was doing, to which he responded "not so good." At the end of his testimony, Green told the court that he was afraid to load ammunition because of "them officers racing each division to see who put on the most tonnage, and I knowed the way they was handling ammunition it was liable to go off again. If we didn't want to work fast at that time, they wanted to put us in the brig, and when the
exec came down on the docks, they wanted us to slow up." This was the first that the newspaper reporters had heard of speed and tonnage competition between divisions at Port Chicago, and each reporter filed a story featuring this revelation to be published the next day. Naval authorities quickly issued a statement denying Green's allegation. October 9, 1944, was another in a string of days consisting of accused men testifying on the witness stand. This day, however,
Thurgood Marshall, chief counsel for the
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), sat in on the proceedings. Marshall had flown to the
Bay Area on a special wartime travel priority arranged by Navy Secretary Forrestal. The NAACP had given the mutiny trial top importance due to the U.S. Navy's policy of putting Negroes into dirty and dangerous jobs with no hope of advancement. Although Marshall was allowed to observe the trial, as a civilian he was ineligible to take an official role in the men's defense. After hearing five of the men defend themselves, Marshall spoke to the 50 men and then conferred with Veltmann's defense team. The defense continued a few more days with testimony from a Navy
psychiatrist who verified that the immense explosion would generate fear in each man. A Black petty officer under Delucchi testified that he had heard no derogatory remarks or conspiratorial comments and that it had been a surprise to everybody when all of the men suddenly refused to march toward the docks on August 9. Marshall held another press conference on October 17 to announce that the NAACP was requesting a formal government investigation into the working conditions that had led the men to strike. He called attention to three aspects: the Navy policy that put the great majority of African Americans into segregated shore duty, the unsafe munitions handling practices and lack of training that had led to the catastrophic detonationand the unfair manner in which 50 of 258 men had been singled out as mutineers, when their actions concerning loading ammunition after the explosion were not significantly different from the other 208 men. Marshall pointed to the men of Division One who had refused to load ammunition prior to August 9, but had been shipped out and given other duty, not arrested and court-martialed. Coakley's rebuttal witnesses consisted of officers who had interrogated the prisoners at Camp Shoemaker. The rebuttal fared poorly, as Veltmann was able to elicit from them: that some of the accused men had not been informed they could refuse to make a statement; that some of the interrogations had taken place with an armed sentry standing guard; that very few of the prisoners' explanations that they had been afraid of another explosion had been included in the statements; and that the officers had emphasized portions of the interrogations that would satisfy Coakley's requirement for evidence of conspiracy. Coakley's last rebuttal witness testified on October 19, and the whole court took October 20 off to allow both sides to prepare closing arguments.
Closing arguments In his closing argument, Coakley described a chronological sequence of mutinous occurrences, beginning at Camp Shoemaker shortly after the explosion when two and a half companies were mixed together for two weeks. Coakley stated that conspiratorial talk among the men about refusing to work and trying to get out of loading ammunition was the root of their August 9 mass refusal. Coakley described how the mutiny continued in the barge when Joe Small spoke to the men and asked them to stick together. Coakley entered into the record his definition of mutiny: "Collective insubordination, collective disobedience of lawful orders of a superior officer, is mutiny." Veltmann denied that there was a mutinous conspiracy, saying the men were in a state of shock stemming from the horrific explosion and the subsequent cleanup of human body parts belonging to their former battalion mates. He said the conversations at Camp Shoemaker were simply those of men who were trying to understand what had happened, and that these discussions were not mutinous nor could they provide the groundwork for conspiracy. Veltmann argued that Small's brief four- or five-minute speech to the men on the barge was given in the performance of his duty to maintain order, a duty placed upon him by his superiors. Veltmann restated that the established legal definition of mutiny was a concerted effort to usurp, subvert or override military authority, and that there had been no such action or intent. Refusal to obey an order was not mutiny. In late November, the 50 men were transferred to the
Federal Correctional Institution, Terminal Island in
San Pedro Bay near the
Port of Los Angeles and the
Port of Long Beach.
Appeal and release During the 12 days that he watched the court-martial proceedings, Thurgood Marshall began to formulate an appeal campaign, having noticed that none of the men's grievances had been aired in court. Directly after the court closed the case, Marshall sent a letter to Secretary Forrestal asking why only Blacks were assigned the task of loading munitions, why they had not been trained for that task, why they were forced to compete for speed, why they were not given survivor's leaves, and why they had not been allowed to rise in rank. Forrestal replied weakly, saying that a predominance of Black men were stationed at Port Chicago so of course they would be working there to load munitions. Forrestal pointed out that there was no discrimination because other naval weapons stations were manned by White crews loading munitions. The Navy Secretary said that the men had not been promoted because their time at Port Chicago had been a "trial period", and that they were not given 30-day leaves because he thought it best for men to get quickly back to duty to prevent them from building up mental and emotional barriers. Marshall obtained written permission from each of the 50 convicted men for him to appeal their case when it came up for review in Washington, DC in front of the
Judge Advocate General of the Navy. On April 3, 1945, he appeared to present his arguments. Marshall's appeal made the case that no direct order was given to all 50 of the defendants to load munitions and that even if orders had been given to certain individuals, disobeying the orders could not constitute mutiny. He said that Coakley deliberately misled the court on the definition of "mutiny" and that the mass of evidence he introduced was hearsay, thus
inadmissible. Marshall wrote that "[t]he accused were made
scapegoats in a situation brought about by a combination of circumstances. […] Justice can only be done in this case by a complete reversal of the findings." Finally, on January 6, 1946, the Navy announced that 47 of the 50 men were being released. These 47 were paroled to active duty aboard Navy vessels in the Pacific Theater, where the men were assigned menial duties associated with post-war base detail. Two of the 50 prisoners remained in the prison's hospital for additional months recuperating from injuries, and one was not released because of a bad conduct record. Those of the 50 who had not committed later offenses were given a
general discharge from the Navy "under honorable conditions". In all, the Navy granted clemency to about 1,700 imprisoned men at this time. == Political and social effect ==