The Port Chicago Mutiny
Robert L. Allen. New York: Warner Books, 1989. Photos. Append. Bib. Ind. $19.95 ($17.95).
Reviewed by Bernard C. Nalty
On 17 July 1944, two explosions, timed by a seismograph as occurring a few seconds apart, shattered the night at Port Chicago, California, where black sailors were loading two cargo ships with ammunition destined for the war against Japan. Part of the loading dock and one ship were instantly vaporized, and the second vessel was tom to pieces. The head numbered 320, including 202 of the sailors, while 390 persons were injured, 233 of them black enlisted men.
The survivors, whose barracks had been wrecked around them, received neither leave nor any kind of formal counseling before they were expected to resume handling ammunition, this time at the Mare Island Navy Yard. When marching in formation from their new quarters at the Vallejo Naval Station, the survivors came to a fork in the road and in their lives. One branch led to the parade ground and a day of drill; the other ended at a ferry slip and a day of loading ammunition ships across the channel. At the command to turn toward the ferry, the column “stopped dead,” one of the men recalled, “just like that.” White officers tried to persuade the sailors to go to work, but most of the men refused. A court-martial tried 50 men who had been singled out as the most stubborn, found them guilty of mutiny, and sentenced them to dishonorable discharges and Prison terms as long as 15 years. The other defendants, numbering 208, were found guilty of refusing to obey a lawful order and received lesser punishments.
Such is the story told by Robert L. Men. His book, however, is more than a dramatic narrative, for it places the events in a psychological and sociological context. In 1944, since racial segregation prevailed not only in the Navy but throughout American society, racism formed a critical part of that framework. At Port Chicago and Mare Island, blacks were the only sailors who performed the exhausting and dangerous work of loading the ammunition ships. For their efforts, they received food, pay, quarters, and little else. Opportunities for promotion were limited, and the men had almost no chance for transfer. Moreover, they might encounter hostility, even violence, when on liberty in predominantly white communities. Nevertheless, the black sailors worked hard and willingly right up until the night of the tragedy, participating in the competition arranged by the officers to speed the loading.
Sudden death destroyed the confidence the men had in their officers and in the Navy, demonstrated the danger of a job seemingly reserved for blacks, and dramatized their mortality. Indeed, such was the violence unleashed on 17 July that the remains of only 51 of the victims could be positively identified. Having examined these circumstances, the author dismisses the notion of a premeditated mutiny; it was psychological shock, reinforced by resentment about racial segregation, that caused the men to disobey the order.
Before the accident at Port Chicago, the Navy had realized the corrosive effect of racial segregation upon morale. Secretary of the Navy James V. Forrestal had obtained presidential approval to ease tensions by assigning blacks in a ratio of 10% to the crews of certain fleet auxiliaries. The mutiny accelerated this process, and white units were formed to load ammunition ships at Mare Island, thus apportioning the risk between the races. Morale improved throughout the Navy, for blacks could look forward to duty at sea in a variety of specialties, and white sailors were assured of a more equitable rotation between ship and shore as the pool of potential replacements increased. Ironically, at least one of the men convicted of mutiny, released in an amnesty granted after the war, served in one of the newly integrated ships.
A black trained in sociology, the author is uniquely qualified to examine the mutiny and its causes. He refers to his opposition to the Vietnam War and acknowledges his sympathy for the black sailors, but these candid admissions do not weaken the force of his reasoning. The reader, aware of this background, will nonetheless agree that racism crushed the spirit of its victims as brutally as the explosions snuffed out the lives of those killed at Port Chicago.
The Great Betrayal: Britain, Australia & the Onset of the Pacific War, 1939-42
David Day. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1989. 388 pp. Photos. Key. Notes. Bib. Ind. $19.95 ($17.95).
Reviewed by Kenneth P. Czech
In the dark, early years of World War II, Great Britain looked to its far-flung dominions for support in both personnel and materiel. Dutifully, bound by cultural and racial ties, the former colonies trained and armed divisions to stem the Axis tide in Europe and North Africa. There was little hesitation on their part to send aid—after all, the “Mother Country” had promised military and naval protection if their own shores were threatened.
Australia sacrificed its coastal defenses to send its share of troops and supplies overseas. Satisfied with the British oath to send battleships and aircraft carriers when needed, Australia’s home-based aircraft, tanks, and artillery were sorely lacking as the web of Japanese expansion crept ever nearer. The breakdown of promises and understanding led to the estrangement of the two allies and is the focal point of Day’s book. The author contends that Great Britain never intended to keep the agreements regarding Australia’s protection.
The London government was more concerned with defending the Middle East and India than with the island-continent, which it felt was not only located far from Japan, but was also too large for invasion. Winston Churchill dismissed Australian concerns for defense by incorrectly assuming that the Japanese would be content with only a few cruiser raids on the dominion. He had adopted a Europe-first goal, relegating defense of the Pacific to a haphazard strengthening of Singapore as a fortress and to the ubiquitous string of promises regarding naval support. He also felt that if conditions deteriorated too rapidly in the Far East, the United States would be drawn into Pacific affairs to halt Japan. As the war with Japan approached in December, 1941, Australia lay practically naked to invasion.
While the title of the book refers to a betrayal of Australian interests and safety by Britain, the dominion’s administration was much to blame for the ensuing estrangement. Strapped with a colonial mentality, Australian leadership readily accepted promises of defense in exchange for arms and men. As Japanese incursions spread through the Pacific archipelagoes and Indochina, Australian prime ministers such as R. G. Menzies and Arther Fadden dutifully handed over “men and equipment in exchange for a blank cheque of doubtful value that could only be banked after the bailiffs [the Japanese] had already broken down the door.” Too often, Australia’s defensive integrity was also sacrificed by its leaders to maintain their own political survival at home even as they entertained thoughts of appointment to London’s inner circle.
Day’s thesis includes a biting indictment of Winston Churchill. The British war leader displayed little concern for Australian uneasiness and growing panic when Singapore capitulated in February 1942. When the token commitment of the capital ships Prince of Wales and Repulse ended in disaster, Sir Winston was quick to inform Canberra that Britain had faithfully displayed its interest in defending the dominion. Faced with growing resentment and calls for the return of Australian brigades, he purposefully delayed by keeping them posted in the Middle East and on Ceylon. His own aristocratic prejudices surfaced when he dismissed the Australians as coming from “bad stock,” a reference to their penal-colony heritage.
Day, an associate professor of Australian studies at Bond University in Queensland, has meticulously researched the diaries, reports, letters, and official documents to trace the breakdown of trust and communication between London and Canberra. The Japanese bombing of Darwin early in 1942, coupled with the showdowns at Coral Sea and Midway- served as impetus for Australia to turn to the United States for defense. As Professor Day indicates, the dominion did little to improve its own ability for defense, preferring to shed Britain for the U. S. umbrella of protection. His analysis provides a new, critical view as to how the Allies cooperated during World War II and sheds further light on the development of the Southern Pacific Rim today.
Commander of the Armada: TheSeventh Duke of Medina Sidonia
Peter Pierson. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989. 304 pp. Maps. Figs, Append. Gloss. Bib. Ind. $25.00 ($22.50).
Reviewed by Peter Padfield
Peter Pierson is a distinguish scholar; he wrote Philip Second of Spain (Thames and Hudson, 1977), a masterwork that skillfully married biography social, political, and economic history, and imperial strategy to produce illumination and insight. Anyone expecting the same from this account of the life of the Duke of Medina Sidonia will be disappointed. It is a mere chronicle, antiquarian in approach. Worse, where Pierson does try to bring the dusty fruits of his research alive in the Armada campaign of 1588, he exposes incomprehension of nautical reality and naval history alike. This is cause for concern: is naval history such a marginal discipline that academia feels able to spurn it and place its own gloss on naval events?
The elementary nautical errors are far too numerous to list, but since the publishers make a point of Pierson’s “ten superb maps and diagrams” of the Armada campaign, let’s start there. The diagrams show whole squadrons of individual ships and sometimes whole fleets heading directly into the wind. Arguing that this merely indicates the direction they were intending to proceed is nonsensical. At best, ships of the time could make a point toward the wind, and the lumbering, heterogeneous squadrons of the Armada certainly could not manage a course much closer than beam on to the wind. Tacking was lengthy and frequently unsuccessful. So one must know which way ships were heading at any given point in the action to make sense of h. Nine of Pierson’s ten diagrams are so amateurish in this and other respects as to disqualify his narrative of the fighting.
He shows repeatedly that he does not know the difference between a tide and a current—no minor point, since it reveals that he has not bothered to study the field of action, the English Channel and Dutch tanks. He believes that during the action off the Isle of Wight, Sir Martin Frobisher “sailed clean around the armada,” a more remarkable feat in the circumstances of that day than a circumnavigation of the globe would have been that year.
Notwithstanding his incomprehension of naval possibilities and terminology, Pierson criticizes those “many histories” who “have gone further than the evidence to infer that the English used roadsides in line ahead.” He is evidently unaware of the use of line ahead as a fighting formation far earlier than the Armada campaign; for instance, Vasco da puma’s caravels sailed close-hauled one astern of the other in a line. . .” to rout a far more numerous native fleet in stand-off artillery action off the Malabar coast of India in 1501. So far as the English went, Sir Walter Raleigh’s fighting instructions of 1617, based on experience going back before the Armada campaign, ordered attack in group line ahead. By suggesting that 16th-century fighting sailors had not discovered such a natural formation for broadside-armed sailing ships as line ahead, Pierson accuses them of being dim and perverse.
All this might not matter were it not that Pierson’s reputation and that of his publishers may lead many to accept his interpretation as authoritative. It is important to record that it is not. It is important to ask why Pierson’s editor did not trouble to find a reader competent to assess the naval aspects of the typescript.
Perhaps the best that can be said of the biographical and political side is that the summary of Medina Sidonia’s career and abilities at the end is fair and probably as much as can be said on the evidence: “When it came to battle he proved prudent and brave but not daring” and had he been daring he would probably have landed in a far worse mess. But in the body of the book there is scarcely any attempt to place the Seventh Duke in his time and milieu, to explain these to the nonexpert, or to relate the difficulties he experienced to the system of government and society or the bankruptcy and overstretch of Imperial Spain.
The book does contain useful and new material: it is interesting to read of Sir Francis Drake’s entry into Cadiz Harbor and the later sack of Cadiz by an English and Dutch expedition from the defenders’ point of view. There is much useful information on the protection of the annual Flotas to and from the New World, which occupied a far larger part of Medina Sidonia’s career than the disastrous event for which he is chiefly remembered; there is much on the protection of the coasts of Andalusia and the Strait of Gibraltar, and of Spain’s relations with Morocco just across the water. There are useful new documents on the Armada campaign itself, especially the “Battle Order,” which is printed in English as an appendix. But Pierson appears to have made no attempt either to tie this information into a comprehensible or living picture for the nonspecialist or to reach any conclusions. He scarcely addresses even questions about why the Armada was dispatched and why it failed. It is most depressing.
Submarine Torbay
Paul Chapman. London: Robert Hale, 1989. 187 pp. Order directly from publisher: Clerkenwell House, 45-47 Clerkenwell Green, London ECIR OHT.
Reviewed by Captain John Coote, Royal Navy (Retired)
This book was written shortly after Ludovic Kennedy’s autobiography On the Way to My Club (Collins, 1989) revived a long-forgotten controversy surrounding the memory of one of the Royal Navy’s most decorated World War II submarine captains. Although not named, the officer concerned was Commander Anthony Miers in HMS Torbay, the period was the darkest days of the Mediterranean campaign, when grievous losses were suffered trying to support beleaguered Allied troops in Crete.
Paul Chapman was first lieutenant and second-in-command of the Torbay on her third war patrol in July 1942. During this patrol, she sank an Italian U-boat, an escorted merchant ship, and four caiques (schooners used for interisland trade in the Aegean) and was repeatedly depth- charged. She was almost out of ammunition when the crew shaped up to deal with one more schooner flying the Nazi ensign, intending to sink her with demolition charges. Only one of the schooner’s nine survivors was recovered and taken back to Alexandria for interrogation. At least two of the remainder were seen to be carrying arms and making as if to use them. So they were all shot at close range.
Neither the flotilla captain nor the commander-in-chief demurred in this action, which Commander Miers made no attempt to conceal in his official report. Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham described it as a “brilliantly conducted patrol.” Later, during the Africa Corps’s final retreat from Tripoli, his order of the day to all Allied naval forces used the words: “sink, bum and destroy,” without any mention of taking prisoners.
The senior surviving eyewitness to Ludovic Kennedy’s charges of alleged war crimes against Commander Miers has now put on record his version of events that brooks no further argument. The book is a vivid account of the Torbay's 11 successful patrols in the Mediterranean, supported by track-charts of unusual clarity. It shows her captain to have been a man of exceptionally aggressive nature, single-minded in maintaining his submarine at peak operational readiness. Rightly he was one of only three commanding officers of British submarines to receive the Victoria Cross, the top award for gallantry in the face of the enemy.
Everyone in the Royal Navy knew that a streak of violence lurked in Miers’s nature. Without it the Torbay might not have carried the fight to the enemy with such determination, regardless of the odds. But Chapman, in his total devotion to the memory of his former captain, which was shared by all who served with him long enough not to be thrown off the boat at her next port of call, dismisses these tantrums as “summer storms” in their relationship. The fact is that Miers enforced discipline with the iron fist of a bucko mate, following more the spirit than the letter of the Royal Navy’s statutory guidance in these matters—the King’s Regulations and Admiralty Instructions.
On one occasion, while celebrating the announcement of awards for gallantry to most of the crew, the officers were abruptly put under close arrest with armed sentries outside their cabins in the depot ship. It seems that their offense was exacerbated by referring in an unguarded moment to the captain by the derogatory nickname by which he was known in the wardrooms of the fleet.
This incident is not mentioned by the author in an intensely personal account, which for some reason is written in the third person. The captain is referred to throughout, improbably, as “Miers,” while the writer is always “Chapman,” which is how they never addressed each other.
The book also suffers from uneven editing, making the whole narrative a stop- go read. Nevertheless, it has its place in submarine archives and, above all, as a memorial to a gallant leader whom those outside his devoted family and fiercely loyal shipmates never found easy to love.
Other Titles of Interest
Fireboats
Paul Ditzel. New Albany, IN: Fire Buff House, 1989. 160 pp. Photos. Illus. $24.95 ($22.95).
The French Revolution and Napoleon: An Eyewitness History
Joe H. Kirchberger. New York: Facts On File, 1989. 376 pp. Illus. Maps. Append. Bib. Ind. $35.00 ($31.50).
How War Came: The Immediate Origins of the Second World War, 1938-1939
Donald Cameron Watt. New York: Pantheon Books, 1989. 736 pp. Photos. Maps. Notes. Bib. Ind. $29.95 ($26.95)
A Picture Postcard History of U. S. Aviation
Jack W. Lengenfelder. Binghamton, NY: Almar Press, 1989. 122 pp. Photos. Bib. $12.95 ($11.65).
Shamrock and Sword: The Saint Patrick’s Battalion in the U. S.-Mexican War
Robert Ryal Miller. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1989. 232 pp. Photos. Illus. Maps. Tables. Append. Bib. Notes. Ind. $24.95 ($22.45).
WWII Wrecks of the Kwajalein and Truk Lagoons
Dan E. Bailey. Redding, CA: North Valley Diver Publications, 1989. 208 pp. Photos Illus. Maps. Append. Bib. Ind. $34.95 hard cover, $25.95 paper.
War Brides of World War II
Elfrieda Berthiaume Shukert and Barbara Smith Scibetta. New York: Penguin Books, 1989. 302 pp. Photos. Append. Notes. Bib. Ind. $18.95 ($17.05).
Wealth and Honour: Portsmouth During the Golden Age of Privateering, 1775- 1815
Richard E. Winslow III. Portsmouth, NH: The Portsmouth Marine Society, 1988 . 304 pp Illus. Maps. Notes. Bib. Ind. $30.00 ($27.00).