July 17, 2026

The Deadliest Blast on the WWII Home Front Killed 320. The Survivors Were Tried for Mutiny.

On July 17, 1944, two munitions ships blew apart at a California pier, killing 320 men, most of them Black sailors with no training for the work. Three weeks later, the survivors who refused to reload were court-martialed. That trial is what desegregated the United States military, and it took eighty years to clear their names.

Port Chicago was a naval magazine on Suisun Bay, about forty miles northeast of San Francisco, where ships took on bombs and shells for the Pacific. By 1944 every man who handled that cargo was Black. The officers were all white, and Black sailors were barred from nearly every seagoing job in the Navy, so the most dangerous work on the base fell entirely to enlisted men in their teens and twenties who had been given no instruction in handling explosives. There were not even regulations for loading ammunition safely until after the disaster.

On the night of July 17, 1944, the Liberty ship E. A. Bryan sat at the pier packed with 4,606 tons of munitions, nearly 1,800 tons of it high explosives. Another 429 tons sat in sixteen railcars on the pier, and the brand-new Quinault Victory was tied up alongside to begin loading at midnight. At 10:18 p.m. a small blast on the pier was followed, within seconds, by the ship. The column of fire and smoke climbed twelve thousand feet. An Army Air Forces pilot cruising at nine thousand feet reported seeing glowing metal "as big as a house or a garage" thrown above his own altitude. The seismograph at the University of California in Berkeley registered a jolt. Windows broke in San Francisco, and people heard it in Nevada.

Everyone on the pier and both ships died instantly: 320 men, of whom only fifty-one could ever be identified. Two hundred and two of the dead were Black sailors, about fifteen percent of all African American casualties in the entire war. More than 390 others were injured.

Then came the part that ought to be harder to believe than the explosion. The Navy's court of inquiry met for thirty-nine days and, in effect, examined the dead men's character, not the officers' leadership. The survivors were shipped to nearby Mare Island and ordered back to loading ammunition under the same conditions. On August 9, 258 of them refused. After appeals, 208 went back to work and were summarily convicted of disobeying orders. Fifty stood their ground.

A few days later, Rear Admiral Carleton Wright addressed the holdouts.

"Mutinous conduct in time of war carries the death sentence, and the hazards of facing a firing squad are far greater than the hazards of handling ammunition."

The fifty were charged with mutiny. Their trial opened September 14 at Treasure Island and ran six weeks. Thurgood Marshall, then the NAACP's chief counsel and a future Supreme Court justice, sat through much of it and told the press the Navy itself was on trial for its racial policies. The court disagreed. It convicted all fifty and sentenced each to fifteen years at hard labor and a dishonorable discharge.

That is where the story turns. The disaster and the trial made the gap between what the country said it was fighting for and how it treated its own sailors impossible to ignore. The Navy began desegregating its ships in 1946, the first branch to do so. On July 26, 1948, Harry Truman signed Executive Order 9981, declaring "equality of treatment and opportunity for all persons in the armed services without regard to race, color, religion or national origin." The men whose refusal had been called mutiny had forced open the institution that court-martialed them.

And the last surprise is how long the rest took. Bill Clinton pardoned one of the fifty, Freddie Meeks, in 1999. The other convictions stood until July 17, 2024, the eightieth anniversary of the blast, when Secretary of the Navy Carlos Del Toro exonerated all 256 men convicted in the affair. The Navy's own review found they had been denied a meaningful right to counsel and tried together despite conflicting interests. It took eight decades for the country to decide that refusing to walk back into an unsafe hold was not mutiny.

Also on this day

• 1917 At a meeting of the Privy Council, King George V proclaimed that the British royal house would henceforth be called Windsor, shedding the German name Saxe-Coburg and Gotha amid wartime anti-German feeling.
• 1918 On the night of July 16-17, Bolsheviks under Yakov Yurovsky shot and bayoneted the abdicated Tsar Nicholas II, his wife, and their five children in a Yekaterinburg basement, ending three centuries of Romanov rule.
• 1936 A military uprising in Spanish Morocco triggered the Spanish Civil War, the conflict that would bring Francisco Franco to power.
• 1955 Disneyland opened in Anaheim on a day so plagued by meltdowns, broken rides, and counterfeit tickets that staff called it Black Sunday.
• 1975 An Apollo and a Soyuz spacecraft docked in orbit, and the American commander Thomas Stafford and the Soviet commander Alexei Leonov shook hands through the hatch, the first joint United States-Soviet space mission.