Only a moment before quiet and deadly in the holds of two ammunition ships at Port Chicago, tons and tons of TNT, destined to shatter the bodies of Japanese in the far reaches of the Pacific, turned its insensate fury on its handlers Monday night in one of the greatest catastrophes ever recorded in annals of the United States Navy…In Napa, rumor immediately placed the blast at Mare Island Navy Yard, and scores of frightened citizens thronged the street in front of the police station seeking official word and news of kin employed on the shipyard night shift…
Plainly visible here was the towering pillar of flame that flared into the southern sky. The hills of the Napa Valley were momentarily illuminated as by sunlight. Scores of persons, convinced that an earthquake was imminent, ran from their homes in their night clothes.
Damage here was slight, with only a few windows shattered…One man, a resident of the Atlas Peak district, was so certain that the Japs had come, that he telephoned Undersheriff John Claussen and breathlessly reported three ‘Jap’ planes had roared close overhead just a few minutes after the blast. How he could have identified the planes even if they were Jap was not made clear.[2]
When the men were sent back to loading ammunition a few weeks later, 258 refused. Fifty were “single out, charged with mutiny, court-martialed, convicted, and handed sentences ranging from eight to fifteen years imprisonment.”[3] Before their court-martial, many of the Black seamen were transferred to barracks at Mare Island Naval Shipyard. What Napa’s Black residents – especially those working at Mare Island – thought of the mutiny has not been discovered, but they must have had some interesting conversations. No local newspapers appear to have covered the trial results, either.
[Ed. note: this article is excerpted in part from the master’s thesis “There Are No Black People in Napa”: A History of African Americans in Napa County by Alexandria Brown.]
[1] Eva Paterson, “Publisher’s Preface,” The Port Chicago Mutiny: The Story of the Largest Mass Mutiny Trial in U.S. Naval History (Berkeley, CA: Heyday Books, 2006): xi.
[2] Napa Daily Journal 7/21/1944
[3] Robert Allen, The Port Chicago Mutiny (Berkeley, CA: Heyday Books, 2006): xiii-xiv.