Earle, New Jersey is a naval ammunition dump. An ammunition storage depot. Where ammunition is loaded upon or unloaded from many different kinds of naval vessels, especially ammo ships. U.S.S. Great Sitkin was arrived stateside from her eight month Med cruise; unloading, in preparation to go to dry-dock in the shipyards of Brooklyn, New York, for a general maintenance over-haul.

The pier in Earle, is several miles long. The galley cockroaches were humorously rumored to abandon ships when they pulled into Earle and tied up to the loading or unloading piers; because the subjected vermin were said to know what went on there...

There are actually only a few occasions of ammunition ships exploding. In 1958, the French corvette escort, LE COUBRE, while unloading ammunition in a Cuban port, is one such occasion. Then there was the Pacific 7th Fleet based U.S.S. MOUNT HOOD that blew up during W.W.II, while she was tied to a pier, peacefully unloading ammunition. Each perished ship left only devasated sites as traces of where they had been. Nothing remained of the crews. No survivors.

Between December, ‘60 and March, ‘61, Great Sitkin, having recently returned from a Mediterranean deployment, unloaded all her ammo in Earle, went to Todd Shipyard’s dry dock for three months, and then went back to Earle to reload herself with ammo, with one exception, without incident. The exception being, a civilian yardworker in a Diesel forklift almost crushed Ericson. The lift operator drove his machine into a working area he wasn’t supposed to enter, when Ericson’s back was turned to attending to the work at hand - the driver rounded a corner, saw Ericson and hit the brakes on his truck.

A ('disarmed') 500 pound bomb slid off his illegally raised forks, almost obliterating Ericson, who heard the load above him slip off the fork and swiftly stepped sideways, still suffering a severe contusion as the defused bomb grazed his foot. Ericson ordered the yardworker off the machine, lowered the elevated remaining load of ammo to deck-level and vomited on the floorboards.

On the other hand, there is a particularly tragic historical incident of ammunition ship loading and unloading casualties, besides those major losses mentioned above; certainly worth taking note of in this record.

The foregoing incident also reveals an unfortunate element of racism in a segregated navy. President Truman desegregated the navy just after World War II. This incident is said to have had it’s influence on that desegregation action by the president...

The following information is quoted and paraphrased from the Sunday, June 27, ‘99 issue of the SAN JOSE MERCURY newspaper.

“On 7 July 1944, in the deep northeastern ‘Siusun bay’ interior of San Francisco Bay, a massive blast rocked what was then called the ‘Port Chicago’ ammunition base; now known as the U.S. Naval Weapons Station, Concord, CA., with the force of a 3.4 magnitude earthquake.

Siusun Bay was littered with the remains of two ships and 5,000 tons of unexploded ammunition. Three hundred twenty men - 202 of them Black - were killed and nearly 400 others were injured. It was the worst disaster to occur on American soil during the war.

Surviving White sailors were given thirty days leave after the blast incident. On the other hand, none of the incumbently surviving Black sailors were given any leave, and three weeks after the blast, the Black sailors were ordered to resume loading explosives on ships ported in or near Mare Island.

Freddie Meeks and 49 others refused. They were court martialed and found guilty of mutiny by an all White panel. On his 25th birthday, Seaman 2nd Class Meeks was sentenced to 15 years in prison.

Future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall - then a senior lawyer with the NAACP - later persuaded a Navy board of review to shorten the sentences. Meeks served 17 months.

Meeks, now 79 years old and ailing, has appealed to many officials, for vindication for himself, and the 49 other men who Meeks insists with credibility, were not guilty of mutiny. At this time and until president H. Truman desegregated the military in 1948, White and Black sailors were segregated to different living quarters on board ship, and ashore. The Black sailors walked to their shore quarters, the white sailors were provided with bus service. “We couldn’t talk to the white sailors. Couldn’t associate with them”, Meeks said. ‘They ate first, and we always ate their leftovers’.

“The blast claimed 15 percent of all American black lives lost in the war. Historians say events surrounding the case not only hastened integration of the Navy, but also led to President Truman’s 1948 executive order that integrated the military and had a positive impact on the Civil Rights Movement(s).
“The racial symbolism of the case runs headlong into the military tenet that service members, especially in wartime, must obey orders.

“Indeed, some veterans have said that the ship loaders faced no greater danger than soldiers fighting on the front lines”. - San Jose MERCURY News, 6/27/’99.

About 15% of the ammo ship’s crew actually works - makes contact - with; has tactile, visual circumstantial and emotional experiences with handling the ammo. A Deck Seaman who had a close call with his other ammunition handlers may mention such an incident later, on the messdeck over chow, to whoever he’s sitting with that wasn’t there when it happened, who would have perished with everyone else but only hears about it (the near miss - however it occurred this time - often underway; while transferring ammunition to other ships running alongside of you), second hand and after the fact. It’s just another day.

Like going to the zoo and/or circus and trying not to think about live music or elephants, lions, tigers, trapeze artists and clowns. Acrobats. Cotten candy: Every kind of large and small container(s), package(s), canister(s) and white oaken box(es) of sudden death. Get just one little small arms round going in this wide spectrum nitro-cellulistic company and right away the incident of no importance turns into a chain reaction of 'secondary explosions' that could easily work its way to the artillery ammo and 500 and 2,000 pound bombs and then create enough heat to melt down the fissile material separators in each of the over 50 on board nuclear weapons of various description.

Wicked and deadly humor; usually with ammo handlers taking the brunt of the joke. No. We weren’t in the bush when we were handling ammo, but don’t tell a navy Boatswain’s Mate (‘Deck Ape’) that he’s not a 'Grunt'. He may take rightful difference to any such denial of a title he earned and well deserves. Especially on an ammunition ship.

A semi-unique, rare state of mind with a correspondingly unique, circumstance induced body chemistry. This becomes ‘routine’. ‘Normal’; even ‘safe’... Working, sleeping and eating: on a floating bomb.

San Jose MERCURY News, continued:
“Meeks told his commandant that he would do anything else, even fight on the front, but he would not return to loading ammunition.
.
“To this day, Freddie Meeks remembers how he felt “stacking all the bombs and torpedoes and everything on top of each other. And when they let the ammunition slide down that runway (inclined gravity feed ramps) to me, the bombs were hitting each other.”

(You are constantly told by officers that the ammo is ‘unarmed’ and ‘non-explosive.’ Enlisted ammunition workers created a lot of jokes out of that, to keep up moral. ‘Non explosive explosives’. Crazymaking. The U.S.S. Mount Hood used to be an ammunition ship, also. She was not lost to enemy fire, she was vaporized while loading and unloading ammunition. Apparently they had some explosive ammunition on the Mount Hood that this record’s ship didn’t. Har har. ).

“Sometimes it would come so fast, and I got so scared I couldn’t keep my food down my stomach’. Freddie Meeks (before the disaster); Ibid.

In the weeks before the blast, Meeks said he was ‘a nervous wreck’. The night of July 17, ‘44, he had been given a pass with his division to go into town - but shortly after ten PM., ‘all hell broke loose’. He was recalled to the base with his division to a scene he said he’ll never forget. “When you saw how those bodies had been scattered all over that base, there wasn’t anything but pieces’, he said. “You couldn’t tell the white from the black because it was all blown to pieces”.
President Clinton is considering the vindication - Presidential pardon - Freddie Meeks is asking for.
- San Jose Mercury News, quoted/paraphrased, Sunday, 27 June ‘99.

On *Christmas Eve, 24 December, 1999, President Clinton pardoned Freddie Meeks.
Front page *San Francisco CHRONICLE.
‘We didn’t commit mutiny. We were charged with something we didn’t do’. - Freddie Meeks, Ibid.

Excerpt from Butterfly, Owl & Eagle: Athena Marie Prima