RevRick
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Joined: 9/16/2000
From: Thomasville, GA
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quote:
ORIGINAL: mikemike
quote:
ORIGINAL: JeffK
quote:
ORIGINAL: mikemike
This sounds suspiciously like the Port Chicago disaster - black personnel loading ammunition without proper training and using unsafe procedures under pressure from their officers.
A nice racist remark!!!
ANY COLOURED personnel loading ammunition without proper training and using unsafe procedures under pressure from their officers would likely suffer the same result!!
If my remark was felt to be racist, I'd like to apologize for not making my meaning clear enough - no slur on black servicemen was intended.
What I wanted to say is that these two incidents seem to show a certain mindset in the USN at the time. Apparently black servicemen were regarded as expendable if they were used for such a high-risk occupation as ammo handling without proper training and additionally were pressured to use unsafe practices by their white officers. To use soldiers trained for chemical decontamination (which I think needed specialized and probably expensive training) to hump shells is a blatant misassignment of personnel. It would be tolerable in an emergency, but PH in 1944 should have had lots of personnel better suited for this job. Black servicemen seem to have been regarded as mere field hands regardless of what their official job description was; one is reminded of the way the Japanese treated the Koreans.
Even if one disregards the obvious racist aspects, the PH event should have acted as a wakeup call to revise ammo handling practices; that Port Chicago happened just two months later shows a degree of insouciance I wouldn't have expected from the USN (you know the saying: once is bad luck, twice is carelessness, three times is intent); that the PC survivors were ordered back on the job without any changes in working practices demonstrates a remarkable callousness on the part of the chain-of-command. One wonders how many similar situations did not develop into disaster by sheer luck.
JeffK, I was of the impression that, at this point of time, Americans with major ethnical roots in Africa south of the Sahara regard "black" as more PC than "coloured", which is imprecise, anyway, for "white" people are also coloured, viz: pink. (Peter Ustinov, on entering the USA, once wrote "Pink" in the "Color" entry of his Immigration interrogation form which caused him no end of trouble.) Perhaps you are better informed.
I concur. This fits almost exactly with the data I uncovered in about two months of online, and offline searching into over 90 documents addressing just this historical set of facts.
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"Action springs not from thought, but from a readiness for responsibility.” ― Dietrich Bonhoeffer
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RE: Navy commemorating 1944 Pearl Harbor disaster - 
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