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Berkeley never experienced an enemy attack during World War II, but in the middle of the night on July 17, 1944 many locals must have thought the town’s time under actual fire had finally come.

The sound and vibration of a powerful explosion reverberated through the hills and flatlands shaking buildings and waking hundreds. Anyone outside at 10:18 PM might have also seen a flash of white light above the hills to the east.

Telephone calls poured into the Berkeley Police department. Some thought it was an earthquake, others a bombing attack. A few called for police help, thinking that the shaking that jolted them out of sleep was someone trying to break into their house.

It was none of those things. Instead, in one of the worst Stateside disasters of the war years, a massive explosion had obliterated the Navy ammunition depot and loading dock near Port Chicago, about 15 miles northeast of Berkeley.  

The blast was so immense it was heard up to 50 miles away. Berkeley seismographs recorded the equivalent of a 3.4 earthquake on the Richter scale. The San Francisco Chronicle called it at the time “the most disastrous explosion in the history of the Bay Area”. (SF Chronicle July 17, 1944). More people died in it than in any other “Homefront” disaster during the War. 

During World War II the Bay Area was filled with active military installations. It was the major port of embarkation for troops and supplies going to the Pacific, as well as a cargo ship building center of unprecedented size. Army and Navy installations, ranging from training camps to repair bases, military airfields, hospitals, barracks, and coastal defense fortifications, dotted the landscape.  

Civilian factories churning out materials from naval engines to medicines crowded the industrial districts of San Francisco and the East Bay, including Berkeley. 

In this hive of Homefront activity, the Navy installation at Port Chicago received regular trainloads of military munitions destined for the Pacific theater of the war. Navy teams loaded them by hand onto cargo ships moored by a wooden pier where up to three lines of boxcars could be positioned adjacent to the vessels. 

Just before 10:20 PM on that Monday night, something went terribly wrong during the loading of one ship. Thousands of tons of munitions exploded in an uncontrollable chain reaction. A pilot flying at 9,000 feet above the North Bay reported seeing a vast fireball rising immensely into the night sky, then debris hurtling past his plane.  

The nearby town of Port Chicago was devastated. Debris landed miles from the explosion site. At least 320 people were killed at and around the pier and hundreds were injured nearby, including many civilians in Port Chicago—going about their night routines, gathering in a movie theater to watch a war film, or asleep at home—who were hurt by flying glass, collapsing walls, and the powerful shock itself. 

There were two ships at the munitions dock that night, both of them more than 400 feet long. The Liberty ship E.A. Bryan, already partially loaded with explosives, was blasted entirely into small fragments scattered as far as three miles away. The Quinault Victory, on its maiden voyage and docked at the pier but not yet loaded, was broken into large segments, with the shattered stern protruding from the Bay. 

A locomotive and boxcars parked on the pier disappeared, blown apart along with most of the 1,500 foot wooden pier. Other explosive laden boxcars on shore—some of them stationed protectively between earthen and wooden berms—were damaged, but didn’t explode. Survivors successfully put out a fire that threatened to ignite the cars. 

One Coast Guard firefighting barge moored next to the cargo ships was smashed with its crewmen, and thrown hundreds of feet out into the straits, and another Coast Guard vessel on patrol was seriously damaged and set afire but made it to Mare Island for repairs. 

(Ammunition ship explosions had happened before. December 6, 1917 during World War I two cargo ships, one carrying explosives, collided outside the harbor of Halifax, Nova Scotia. A fire broke out on the ammunition ship, and could not be contained. The resulting explosion threw heavy debris more than three miles, momentarily emptied part of the harbor of its water, created a tsunami, and wrecked several towns. 1,600 people were killed and 9,000 injured, many of them blinded by broken glass; they had been watching the burning ship in the harbor through the windows of homes and businesses.) 

And on July 4, 1944, just a few weeks before the Port Chicago blast, nearly 300 people were killed or wounded when a German ammunition barge carrying munitions destined for occupied Norway blew up in the harbor of Aarhus, Denmark. Berkeleyeans had just read about that disaster in the pages of the Gazette.) 

Local dead 

In the Port Chicago aftermath, two Berkeley men were quickly identified as killed in the blast. One, Thomas David Hunt, age 26, was a civilian engineer and Cal alumnus whose widowed mother lived on Piedmont Avenue. His father, UC Professor Thomas Francis Hunt, was deceased. 

He worked for a construction company and had apparently been on the pier with two assistants, supervising construction of a new pier. Only pieces of his body, along with a notebook belonging to him, were recovered. His only sibling, a Navy flyer, had been killed in a crash in Hawaii in 1943. 

A former Berkeley man, Charles Hobart Reilly, also 26 and now a resident of Albany, was on duty on the Coast Guard fire fighting barge and also died. 

Civil response 

Over the hills, “thousands of Berkeley citizens…were awakened by the blast.” reported the Berkeley Daily Gazette the next day. The first calls to the police were a jumble of confused reports and anxious inquiries. The Contra Costa sheriff’s office in Martinez called the Berkeley police to let them know something had happened, and there would be more information later. 

Then, as commercial radio stations began reporting the likely nature and location of the explosion, the calls turned into offers of help. 

Berkeley mobilized support, including a 1,500 candlepower portable light from the Fire Department which was driven to Port Chicago for night rescue operations. Police officers were stationed on Tunnel Road to direct ambulances with the injured to Berkeley hospitals, and emergency supplies were assembled. 

After Pearl Harbor, the city had long prepared and practiced for civil defense and the Gazette said the response preceded smoothly. 

“Four ambulances and a caravan of cars and trucks, loaded down with medical supplies, including blood plasma, formed in front of City Hall and were about to start for Port Chicago when word was received from the local unit to stand by,” the Gazette reported.  

Local hospitals were mobilized and 150 beds in Berkeley reported ready for casualties, but it does not seem any were immediately sent to Berkeley. Most were taken to military or civilian hospitals closer to the blast site. Berkeley police reported ambulances with “minor casualties” came through the Broadway tunnel but continued on to hospitals in Oakland. 

“Most citizens had something to offer disaster workers” a police spokesman told the Gazette. “We had calls from Blake’s Restaurant offering food crews. All the mortuaries offered their automobile facilities. More than 50 doctors registered their names and offered assistance. A supply company listed ten tanks of oxygen, tents and stretchers plus the use of a truck.. Nurses’ Aides called up and asked what they could do to help.” 

“Police reports show many private citizens called and offered their gas and automobiles to emergency workers.” 

Police cars were dispatched to San Pablo Avenue “to try and regulate the immense flow of ambulances and thrill seekers who started for the disaster scene.” In the absence of freeways, San Pablo was still one of the more direct routes to the shores of the Carquinez Straits. 

The police noted at least three reports of windows broken by the blast in Berkeley. One was a store on the 2300 block of Shattuck, the other two were at homes on the 1600 block of University Avenue.  

Eyewitness reports 

The Gazette despatched reporter Zerelda Owsley, who often wrote human interest stories for the paper, to gather eyewitness coverage. 

She drove to Port Chicago soon after midnight and passed “a ribbon of red lights…one after another Army, Navy, and civilian ambulances wound their way into Oakland. There were few sirens. It was an orderly procession of death and pain.” 

She was stopped by military guards on the highway and couldn’t reach the blast site, but talked to numerous survivors and witnesses and gave a unnamed naval corpsman a ride back to Berkeley. He told her that he didn’t believe many bodies would be found, which was the case.  

“In Port Chicago, not a single building stands undamaged today” she wrote in the next day’s evening edition. “Hotels, restaurants, markets, barber shops and the theater vie with the homes of citizens in presenting a scene of unparalleled destruction.” 

Other military personnel she tried to interview were close lipped. However, the Navy apparently didn’t try to conceal the explosion news. Photographers were soon allowed access to the ruins and an aerial picture was even published showing the site of the demolished pier, shoreline, and a large fragment of the Quinault Victory half sunken in the bay.  

The Gazette carried several of those pictures in the July 19 issue. Since they came from wire service photographers, presumably they were also printed worldwide.  

A racial issue 

The immediate coverage hardly mentioned that mainly African-American sailors and workers had died. One note was a line in Owsley’s article that “Today, I talked to a 26-year-old Negro sailor who saw his buddy die and he himself was one of six out of a barracks of one hundred who came out unscathed.” “My buddy he was killed. He didn’t have a chance. He was just thrown with his bunk right out of the barracks.” 

Finally, two days later, the paper carried a story saying “the Navy has estimated 250 enlisted personnel, most of them Negro sailors, are ‘missing and presumed dead’.” Others missing including an estimated nine Coast Guard personnel, some 70 merchant seamen from the two cargo ships, three railroad workers, about 40 military guards, and nine officers. 

The Armed Services were segregated at the time. African American men and women who volunteered or were drafted for the military were shunted into support jobs. “Most African Americans serving at the beginning of World War II were assigned to non-combat units and relegated to service duties, such as supply, maintenance, and transportation,” despite the eagerness of many to serve in combat. (African Americans in World War II. Fighting for a Double Victory, nationalww2museum.org) 

Long time Berkeley resident and activist Betty Reid Soskin recalled many years later in an oral history that her husband, native Berkeleyan Mel Reid, had enlisted in the Navy but found he would be assigned like other African-American servicemen as a messman—that is, a cook or kitchen worker in a non-combat role, and probably stationed at a training camp on the Great Lakes. He told the Navy he would not follow that course and wanted to be a sailor, and was given an honorable discharge. (Soskin ROHO oral history, page 49). 

By 1945 the racial segregation of tasks and units would slightly ease because more soldiers were needed in combat roles as casualties mounted in Europe, but in mid-1944 it was still strongly in force. At Port Chicago, all African-American crews commanded by all white officers did most of the handling and loading of the munitions. 

Although it’s not clear if any of the African Americans killed at Port Chicago had Berkeley roots, some did have connections. Soskin talked in the oral history about African Americans in the military during the war.  

“The ones I did get to know were some of the servicemen. One of our friends among the servicemen was stationed at Port Chicago and was blown up in that explosion. In fact, some of these young guys were at my house at a party the night before and they went home and we heard the explosion all the way from Berkeley from Port Chicago when that blew up, and we knew that our friends had gone.” (Soskin, ROHO oral history, page 53). 

By Thursday, July 20, just three days after the explosion, the local news was back to “normal”. Gazette headlines included a report of an assassination attempt on Hitler, local traffic accidents, and a feature story about a Berkeley man who picked up a disoriented opossum on the highway in Martinez and brought it to a Berkeley firehouse. By the time he arrived eight tiny baby opossums had also appeared in his car, presumably from the mother’s pouch or fur. 

The possum tale merited a two column front page picture of the little creatures crawling around the lawn of the Claremont Hotel, but there was only one small, single column, story about plans to rebuild Port Chicago and investigate the explosion. It noted that 322 men were now believed dead, but only four bodies had been found—just what the Navy Corpsman had predicted.  

The names of the Navy dead were released and the Gazette printed basic information about five from Oakland and others from San Francisco and Martinez.  

Mishandling 

There was one aftermath to the blast which had important repercussions years later for civil rights in the United States. 

There were reports and accusations that the African American loading crews were not given training for the increasingly complex variety of explosives—including incendiary bombs, depth charges, and torpedoes—they were required to handle. 

The commander of the Port Chicago facility, a Navy captain recalled to active duty, had reportedly kept a chalkboard where he compared the tonnage loaded by each work detachment and some of his officers made side bets with each other on how fast their crews could work. 

The loading process was not fully mechanical, but involved lots of muscle power and manipulation of all different types of volatile materials. Munitions were taken from boxcars onto the pier, and then laboriously lifted by steam winches into the cargo holds of the ships, where they were repacked, often by hand. Observers reported seeing some of the workers having to use crowbars to lever heavy shells out of the tightly packed boxcars. 

The Coast Guard had already warned the handling procedures were not safe and had withdrawn a supervising detail from the pier when the Navy didn’t change the process. 

Also, some of the equipment was reportedly in poor working order including one of the winches on the ships. Survivors of the explosion reported that they heard a “metallic sound” and breaking wood several seconds before the main explosion. That would imply that a piece of equipment—perhaps one of the steam powered hoists on the ship—might have failed, dropping or jostling explosives, and triggering the blast. But all direct evidence of what might have happened went up in fire and fragments moments later. 

Civil rights aftermath 

Uninjured African American survivors from the loading crews who had not been on the docks were quickly taken by the Navy to the Mare Island Navy Yard in Vallejo and put in barracks there. They were given no leave and no opportunity for transfer between duties. On August 8 they were marched out to start loading an ammunition ship. When the destination became clear, they stopped marching en masse.  

Ultimately 258 sailors—all African American—refused to load ammunition and were imprisoned in what the Navy and the press characterized as a “mutiny”. Fifty were later tried in a mass Navy court martial on Yerba Buena Island, within sight of Berkeley. 

The trial was attended by future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, then the general counsel for the NAACP. After the men were convicted and sentenced to up to 15 years of hard labor, Marshall organized a nationwide petition and letter writing campaign objecting to not only the sentences but the unfair and biased procedures of the court martial. 

The campaign reached as far as the White House, where Eleanor Roosevelt informally encouraged the Secretary of the Navy to reconsider the matter. The Navy ultimately reconvened the courts-martial, but then affirmed the convictions.  

Still, the issue of discrimination and unequal treatment of African-Americans in the military had been prominently raised. In 1946 the last of the sailors who had been courts martialed were released, long before their sentences ran out. The same year the Navy became the first of the Armed Services to fully de-segregate. 

Postscript 

As an ironic local follow-up to the Port Chicago disaster, during the Cold War that followed World War II civil defense planning for the Bay Area designated various rural communities where urban residents should congregate if there was a nuclear attack.  

Berkeley, of course, would be a prime bombing target because of what is now the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the prominence of the campus in atomic research. 

Berkeley was assigned the then small town of Antioch, just east of Port Chicago, as a place to shelter and assemble if a nuclear attack threatened or occurred. 

So in the 50s and 60s tens of thousands of Berkeleyans—many of them still with memories of that night in 1944—might have found themselves trekking towards elusive safety near the site of a disaster where an explosion the magnitude of a small nuclear bomb had once flashed across the local landscape and sky.