I had never even heard of that.

I drive past it twice a day, five times a week. Yes, we've come a long way since then, but we have a long way to go still.

Port Chicago was a ship terminal just upstream from the north part of SF Bay where naval ammunition, explosives and weaponry were loaded onto transport ships for use in naval ops in the Pacific during WWII. Loading the transport ships was very dangerous work. When faced with how to address such an extremely dangerous
job, the Navy decided to use only African American
sailors and to lie to them about the dangers involved. Quite a scandal seen through today's eyes.

While all the ship loaders of enlisted ranks were African-American sailors, the commanding officers were all Caucasian. None had had any training and safety precautions were minimal. The enlisted men had been told that the ordinance was unarmed and couldn't explode.

In July of 1944, there was an explosion during loading operations that killed over 300 people and injured a slightly larger number. About one-third of the deaths and also of the injuries were African-American servicemen.

There was a work stoppage and mutiny afterwards. It's a long story, you can find accounts of it by searching.

I did search, and I did read. Thanks.

That's where I'm from. Well not the town of Port Chicago, it was gone by the time I was born, but I grew up about two miles from there in Concord. The street I spent 25 years on, and my mom is still on, dead ends at Port Chicago Highway. Until I was grown, I never realized anyone who didn't grow up there, or wasn't somehow involved, was aware of the explosion at the base. It's a very tragic story. The shipping area was part of the Concord Naval Weapons Station. I grew up next to hills FULL of bombs. Its all closed down now. There is a small memorial out buy the old shipyard honouring the men who died. It only took the Navy some fifty years to place it.

Please understand that I do not mean to minimize the hurt and sorrow that resulted for many as a result of this explosion, or the useful results that may have been generated as a result, in what I am about to say.

We have had so little military style activity in this part of North America that such events strike us harder than in many other parts of the world where such militarily-related experiences have long been much more common.

There were millions of our compatriots killed in World Wars I and II ... but most of them were elsewhere - in someone else's back yard.

After the Revolutionary War, we had the War of 1812 (which was Britain and the U.S., mostly, as it was 55 years before Canada became its own more or less independent entity).

There'd been a bit of a rebellion in 1837 in two provinces of what became Canada ... but if anyone was killed during that fuss, I can't give you any indication of how many ... but it did result in the old country offering some more democratic systems in our fair land.

Then there was the War Between the States/Civil War in the early 1860s, which was a fairly major set-to.

And when I was thinking along these lines a while ago ... I thought that to be the last such military-style adventures that our part of the world had seen in our own back yard.

But ... then I remembered that we Canadians had had a rebellion in the west, saying that they wanted a fair shake, and that was in 1885, the year in which the last spike was driven in the mountains of what became British Columbia on our transcontinental railroad.

A contingent of military was sent out from central Canada to cool them off some and also in 1885 there was a bit of a battle in what became Saskatchewan, against Louis Riel and Gabriel DuMont and other rebels ... but if there were casualties, it wasn't more than a dozen or two.

Such a small issue that it was some time before I even remembered it.

Though we also have lost millions in overseas adventures in the last somewhat over a couple of centuries, we have very little idea of the horrors of war happening in our own back yard.

ole joyful

According to a brief search, I learned that Canada's military death rate as a percentage of its population for WW 2 was higher than that of the US. Same is also true of Canadian military deaths in Afghanistan for a good stretch of years post-9/11.

No need to go back to previous centuries to find the same military activity as here in the US. Thanks to your countrymen for joining in, but don't be misinformed about the activity or the consequences.

Hi Snidely,

World War II started for us in 1939, so we were involved for substantially longer.

My point was that we've known very little military-style activity as in active warfare close to home, far less than that experienced by people in various other parts of the world.

Traditionally, having had less experience of it as direct involvement in our daily life than many others, it may have a greater impact on us when it does happen.

ole joyful

I've read a lot of books on the World Wars, it's been an interest of mine for decades.

Canada has had plenty of active warfare close to home, no more but no less than the US. I seem to recall that something over 1500 people were killed in Halifax from the explosion of an ammunition transport during WW I. A similar but greater tragedy than Port Chicago.

There was no racial element to this one, but there was civil unrest during the years of both wars and opposition to the draft, much of it a backlash from the francophones against the historically discriminatory practices against them from English-speaking Canadians.

WW II ended more than a year earlier for Canadian forces than for the Americans because the war in the Pacific (in which Canadians did not participate) lasted another 15 months after the war ended in Europe. Canada experienced plenty of homeland action during the war, the same German U-Boat activity along the Atlantic coast (and in the St Lawrence) and Japanese balloon bombs on the West Coast (as did the US). RAF pilots were trained in Canada, certainly a major presence in a small country.

I'm sorry if I've misunderstood your indirect insinuations, but I don't think I have. Your information is incomplete, a better understanding might bring you to having a different perspective.