Strange Cargo

The dangerous job began secretly in the first empty days of the war. It was a gallant thing then--dirty old "rust buckets" from West Coast bone yards taking aboard the tag end of a nation's aged and faulty munitions, bound for Pearl Harbor, Melbourne, the Philippines. But the munitions-loading grew. Slingloads of shells and high explosives were turning dozens of the new grey Liberty ships into floating bombs in scores of American harbors. Thousands of men & women spent their days & nights making and handling cordite and TNT.

It was a secret job. Only the cabled accounts of vast air raids, of stupendous barrages, of naval battles, hinted at the enormous amount of the output.

Month after month, munitions ships came in, loaded, and headed out again into the Gulf, the Atlantic, the Pacific.

Up a long inland arm of San Francisco Bay the ships came to the naval magazine at Port Chicago, a cheerless town sprawling under dusty trees. The 1,500 citizens watched them come & go incuriously; after the novelty wore off, the ships might have been loading wheat, for all the thrill there was in it. Few even knew the names of the two ships which lay at the low, wooden naval wharf one night last week with slingloads of heavy ammunition swaying aboard in the glare of masthead lights.

Then the two ships, Quinault Victory and E. A. Bryan, exploded within five seconds of each other, filling the sky with an enormous, blinding incandescence. A howling gale blew and died away as air roared back into the vast vacuum. Then great chunks of twisted metal from the ships and jagged fragments of exploded shells began falling. The people of Port Chicago, asleep seconds before, began calling out in the darkness amid the falling walls of their wrecked town.

Thousands in San Francisco, in Oakland and Alameda, in towns for 50 miles around, saw the glare in the sky and, seconds later, felt a rumbling earth shock. Windows broke in houses 20 miles away. Telephone lines were down; many a doctor and nurse blundered for hours before they found the scene of the disaster. It was dawn before Port Chicago could see what had happened.

There was not an undamaged house within three miles of the kindling wood which had been the water front; scores of buildings were flat or leaning tipsily. Hardly a man, woman or child was un-bandaged. Three hundred and twenty-one men were dead--merchant seamen on the vessels and Negro naval enlisted men on the wharf had simply vanished.

At week's end the shattered town echoed to the sound of hammers as limping men patched their homes. The cause of the explosion would probably never be known.

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