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Butrflynet came home from school one day in tears because the kids were calling her a communist because I supported the Port Chicago 7.
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END OF AN ERA
Part of Concord Naval Weapons Station closing
By Ryan Huff
CONTRA COSTA TIMES
11/14/2005
Concord to jump into planning as soon as Navy gives go-aheadFeb 8:
Weapons station ready for next step, Navy saysDec 26:
City calms down after furor over Navy baseDec 13:
City agrees to delay meeting over Naval Weapons StationDec 10:
Base deal to hinge on Concord: Navy wants city's blessing on proposal to trade weapons stationMay 4:
Weapons station's future begins with debate
CONCORD - Just months after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, the United States found itself without a West Coast munitions depot large enough to fight World War II in the Pacific.
Mare Island Naval Shipyard didn't have enough room to expand in Vallejo, so the military pursued a deepwater port along the Suisun Bay. In 1942, the Navy quickly built loading docks needed to ship bullets, mortars and other ammunition off to war.
The Concord Naval Weapons Station was born and over the next 60 years would prove to be a critical terminal to take weapons off rail cars from around America and get them to battlefields in the Eastern Hemisphere.
Those operations will continue, even after Congress last week approved the closure of more than 5,000 acres of the base's inland portion. Concord officials envision building 13,000 homes and adding 13,000 jobs on this land in the next five decades.
Meanwhile, the Army will take over the waterfront area and the 7,600 acres that make up the base's tidal region.
But gone will be the miles of inland railroad tracks and scores of ammunition magazines that symbolized the naval base since World War II.
"The base played an instrumental role in getting munitions out to soldiers and sailors during World War II, the Korean War, Vietnam and right up the (1991 Persian) Gulf War," said Dean McLeod, a Bay Point historian who has extensively researched the station.
Ray Emig, a World War II combat infantryman who worked at the station,
recalled Concord's importance to winning the war.
"This was the most critical location of any during the Japanese war," said Emig, a Pleasant Hill resident. "It's unfortunate it has to close, but I can understand why it had to be done." Yet the base had roots long before the wars it supported. In 1927, the Navy envisioned the area later known as Port Chicago as a place to put a munitions depot, McLeod said.
By 1944, activity on the base was booming. But the era also produced the darkest moment in the station's history.
While sailors loaded weapons at Port Chicago on July 17, 1944, two explosions ripped through the ships E.A. Bryant and Quinault Victory, killing 320 men and injuring 390. The bursts broke windows at the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco, some 30 miles away.
The explosion marked the largest homefront tragedy of World War II and the biggest disaster in Contra Costa County history. Officials never determined the exact cause.
About two-thirds of those who died were black. When 50 black sailors later refused to return to work to protest work conditions they called unsafe and unjust, they were convicted of mutiny.
The convictions fueled political pressure on President Truman to desegregate the military.
"I call it the silver lining of the explosion," said historian John Keibel. "The explosion itself was a catastrophe -- but the silver lining was the treatment for minority populations was improved as a result." The Navy also wanted to ensure safety for the citizens of Port Chicago should another explosion occur. In 1952, the military made the first of nine attempts to dismantle the town of 3,000 to enlarge its blast zone.
These efforts united the tight-knit town against the Navy takeover. For more than a decade, the area's veteran congressman, John Baldwin, fought military officials, saying the only way they would get Port Chicago was "over my dead body." He died in 1966. Two years later, the Navy started ripping apart the community.
"Towns seldom disappear, but it did in Port Chicago," said Keibel, a Concord resident who is writing a book about the base's history.
"At that time people were opposed to the (Vietnam) war, and they left kicking and screaming. It left scars that they are still smarting over." During that period, Jerry Wood spent 67 consecutive days loading ships with ammunition in 1965, as the 3,000 people working on the base supported its critical role in getting weapons to Vietnam.
Wood, a 30-year base employee from Antioch, remembers dock workers loading ships 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
"At times we had 500 to 600 railcars on the station full of ammunition," he said. "We'd just try to get it on the next ship. It would come in, we'd load it, top the ship off, send it down the river and then ship it off to the Philippines or some other overseas port." The 1980s marked a time of increased anti-war protests around the base. Perhaps the most infamous protest incident happened on Sept. 1, 1987, when Vietnam veteran Brian Willson was run over by a munitions train.
Willson lost both his legs and turned into a national symbol for the peace movement. The protesting continued when the Department of Energy announced that starting in 1998 ships would offload spent nuclear fuel rods at Concord before trains took them to an Idaho repository.
But by that point, most people had begun writing the base's obituary. During the 1990s, the station's civilian work force dwindled from 1,087 to a couple of hundred.
That was followed by the Navy's decision to mothball the station's inland area in 1999. Today, tule elk and cows roam around what was once a thriving ammunitions depot.
Its permanent closure leaves some old Navy workers like Harold Baltazor appreciating its important role in military history.
"I hate to see the Navy give up this property," said Baltazor, a former station planning director.
"I foresee a need for it in the future. It's like an insurance property: hopefully you don't need it, but the possibility is always there. There's no other place like this."
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Ryan Huff covers Concord and Clayton. Reach him at 925-977-8471 or
[email protected].
