The U.S. Army’s San Francisco Port of Embarkation in World War II

Welcome sign at the Presidio. Photo by Runner1928, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=33396594

Essay by Gordon Chappell, Regional Historian, National Park Service

"From the early days of the campaigns in the Southwest Pacific, when men and supplies available to reinforce our position were but a trickle, to the time when with added resources we were enabled to mount offensive operations with increasing violence," wrote General Douglas MacArthur, "the U.S. Army's San Francisco Port of Embarkation and its subsidiary Oakland Army Terminal, "gave magnificently of their full support--support which in no small measure contributed to the victorious march which carried our arms to the heart of the Japanese Empire."

During World War II, more than 4,000 voyages by freighters and over 800 by troopships emanating from the San Francisco Port of Embarkation carried nearly 1,650,000 soldiers and 23,600,000 ship tons of cargo to support the efforts of General MacArthur in the Southwest Pacific Area and Admiral Chester Nimitz, Commander in Chief of the Pacific Ocean Area.

But the Army's Port of Embarkation, which played so important a role in American victory in the Pacific Theater of World War II, already embodied great historical significance as the symbol of and an institution contributing to America's coming of age as a world power at the beginning of the 20th century.

Until the last three years of the 19th century, the United States had never fought a major overseas war, other than sporadic naval and Marine entanglements. The United States Army had never sent forces overseas. But in a five-year period beginning in 1898, the United States suddenly stepped onto the world stage and took its place among powerful European nations as a world power. First, war with Spain began in 1898, ending the following year, but while on the Atlantic side of the continent it involved sending American forces as far as the offshore islands of Cuba and Puerto Rico, in the Pacific it meant sending troops 10,000 miles across the ocean to the Philippine Islands and Guam, both of which came under American rule.

Furthermore, a revolution sponsored by American business interests in 1893 had toppled the Hawaiian monarchy and installed a Republic of Hawaii. After unsuccessful attempts to involve the United States government, in 1898 the United States finally acquired the island archipelago as a territory, which stretched in the middle of the Pacific Ocean from the large volcanic island of Hawaii itself northwest to Midway and Wake Islands and beyond. In addition, although the United States had acquired Alaska by purchase from the Russian Empire in 1867, it had been regarded as an "icebox" of little value until the Klondike Gold Rush of 1898 and 1899 in Canada's adjacent Yukon Territory, accessible principally across Alaska, led to gold discoveries in Alaska itself and the Nome Gold Rush of 1900. Not only was there gold in Alaska, there were copper and other resources which made Alaska a treasure chest rather than a mere icebox. Then in the Philippines, which U.S. forces had seized from Spain in 1898, a rebellion against the United States began in 1899 led by Philippine patriot Emilio Aguinaldo and others. Once that had been suppressed, another rebellion of Muslim people in the southern Philippines known as the Moro Rebellion broke out and continued intermittently down to the present day. An attack on the foreign embassies in Peking (Beijing), China, by rebels known as "Boxers" which took place in 1900, led to an international relief force including American soldiers marching to Beijing. Eventually a U.S. infantry regiment was permanently stationed in Tientsin and a U.S. Marine regiment in Shanghai, not to mention American Marines at the Embassy and navy gunboats patrolling the Yangtse River--navy, marine and army deployments that would continue for 40 years. Thus in a mere five-year period, the United States Army which had not previously fought an overseas war, suddenly had to supply, maintain and rotate troops to and from permanent overseas garrisons in the Philippines, Hawaii and China, and provide a much enlarged force in suddenly valuable Alaska Territory, and within a decade and a half, provide for garrisoning the Panama Canal.

Initially, the army accomplished this by renting commercial ships and piers. But as overseas involvement became permanent rather than temporary, spurred by the catalyst of the Earthquake of 1906, which destroyed or damaged piers and warehouses, the army decided to build its own port for seagoing ships in San Francisco Bay, and began to purchase its own ships under a new branch known as the Army Transport Service. There was no suitable location at the army's premier San Francisco post, the Presidio, for such a port, but there was at the northwest corner of Fort Mason, and by 1908 planning was underway to construct such a port, largely on filled land. In the decades that followed, the U.S. Army's Port of Embarkation, consisting of three piers, warehouses and railroad spurs connecting with the State Belt Railroad of San Francisco, hosted ships which came and went, carrying soldiers and supplies to Hawaii, the Philippines, China and Alaska. White-hulled U.S. Army transport ships with names such as the U.S.A.T.S. Grant, the Sherman, the Sheridan, the Thomas, all named for Union Generals in the American Civil War, regularly made calls at the Port. And when on December 7, 1941, the Japanese attack on the U.S. Navy base at Pearl Harbor, Territory of Hawaii, dragged the United States into the Second World War, the army had a functioning port for shipping men and material to the far Pacific.

Of course World War II proved so large an involvement that the San Francisco Port of Embarkation soon was overwhelmed, and expanded onto land across San Francisco Bay in Oakland, California, where it built a subsidiary Oakland Army Terminal much larger than its headquarters. The port and its subsidiary, served by three transcontinental railroads, handled more than 350,000 freight car loads, and employed 30,000 military and civilian employees, not counting the longshoremen who loaded and unloaded cars and ships.

Because of the long distances involved, the Pacific War required a particularly long logistical "tail" to support the fighting troops at the "sharp end." As American troops island hopped across the Pacific from Hawaii and Australia towards the Philippines and Japan, a string of airbases and forward supply points provided aerial supremacy, control of the vital sea lanes and staging areas for combat divisions. Most of these soldiers, and many of the navy ships and personnel too, started their overseas journeys from the numerous military posts around San Francisco Bay. And many of the soldiers and sailors recalled the passing through the Golden Gate and under its spectacular bridge as the last memory of home and their first sight of homeland upon their return.

In the years following World War II, the army's Port returned to peacetime duties, now including the supply of permanent American garrisons in occupied Japan and South Korea, until five years later, a new war erupted on the Korean Peninsula, another war in which the Port played a large role. Thus the U.S. Army's San Francisco Port of Embarkation, including its Oakland Army Terminal, played a major role in World War II and in America's whole involvement in the Pacific Ocean region.

Discover more history and culture by visiting the World War II in San Francisco Bay Area travel itinerary.