The Pork Chop Express — San Diego's tuna clippers go to war.

When the Eleventh Naval District put out its call for auxiliary small craft in the weeks after Pearl Harbor, San Diego answered from the waterfront south of Broadway. The city's tuna fleet — Portuguese-American and Italian-American families who had been working the Pacific grounds since before the first war — tied up their boats and walked to the district recruiting office. By February 1942, roughly six hundred San Diego fishermen had volunteered. Approximately fifty of their long-range tuna clippers were requisitioned, painted Navy gray, and put to war.

The clippers were built for ocean distance. Unlike the inshore day boats that populated most American fishing harbors, San Diego's tuna fleet ran to the Galápagos and the equatorial grounds off Ecuador and Peru — voyages of thirty to sixty days, five thousand miles round trip, on vessels typically sixty-five to a hundred feet, diesel-powered, with refrigerated holds and crew quarters built for a Pacific passage. The San Diego fleet had been pushing these boats deeper into the Pacific every decade since the 1910s, which meant that by 1942 their captains were practiced navigators who could find a given position by dead reckoning across thousands of miles of open ocean. That knowledge was exactly what a Navy building a Pacific war from scratch needed.

Conversion happened quickly at the district yards. Tuna holds were cleaned out and reconfigured for fuel drums and general cargo. A single deck gun — typically a three-inch piece — went forward, with a pair of fifty-caliber machine guns amidships. Minesweeping gear was installed on several boats. Navy haze gray went over the white hulls. Hull numbers replaced or supplemented the names. The skippers who had spent their careers reading sea surface temperature and current to locate yellowfin schools now stood watches under military command, their crews enrolled as Naval Reservists, drawing military pay and subject to the Uniform Code for the duration.

The first assignments were coastal: patrol off Point Loma, picket duty on the seaward approaches to San Diego Bay. The fear of Japanese submarine operations in Southern California waters was not abstract in early 1942. On February 23, the submarine I-17 surfaced off Ellwood, north of Santa Barbara, and shelled a coastal oil installation — the first enemy bombardment of the continental United States since the War of 1812. The converted clippers, drawing little fuel and comfortable in the heavy coastal swells that kept smaller patrol craft in harbor, were suited to the offshore watch work that destroyers were too scarce and too valuable to perform.

The longer assignments began as the Pacific campaign opened outward. Midway Atoll — two flat coral islands at the northwest end of the Hawaiian chain, roughly 1,300 miles from Honolulu — held the airfield the Navy was determined to defend at any cost. The island's aircraft consumed aviation gasoline at a rate the regular supply chain strained to maintain. Converted clippers ran drums of high-octane fuel stacked in holds that had last carried albacore packed in ice, making the long haul from Pearl Harbor to keep the Wildcats and Dauntlesses fueled and flyable. The fishermen's boats were the capillaries of a logistics system that had to keep an airfield operational — and at the Battle of Midway in June 1942, those Dauntlesses sank four Japanese fleet carriers in a single afternoon.

The Guadalcanal campaign, running from August 1942 through February 1943, generated the most improvised logistics problem of the early Pacific war. Japanese air and naval pressure made conventional resupply of Henderson Field hazardous; the enemy was running its own express service — the Tokyo Express destroyer runs down the Slot — to land troops under cover of night. The American response needed vessels that could work shoal water, unload fast, and clear the anchorage before the next air raid. At Christmas 1942, with the Marines four months into the jungle fighting, the converted San Diego clippers were among the boats that delivered the holiday stores: turkey, canned goods, and whatever comforts the commissary could pack into a hold built for a long Pacific passage.

San Diego remembered the fleet, imperfectly. Tuna Harbor, the small cove just south of the convention center, still carries the name. The Portuguese-American families of Point Loma and Ocean Beach — whose ancestors arrived largely from the Azores and whose sons crewed the wartime clippers — remain in the city today, their presence visible in the parish records and street names of the old fishing neighborhoods. The canneries themselves are gone; the last major plant closed in the 1980s. The Naval Base San Diego that expanded along the bay during and after the war now occupies much of the waterfront where the cannery docks once stood.

The Pork Chop Express was never named in any battle report. The clippers that carried fuel to Midway and turkey to Guadalcanal did not receive unit citations or make the newsreels. What six hundred fishermen and their gray-painted boats proved across two years of Pacific auxiliary duty was something the Navy had not fully measured before the war: that the Pacific is a logistics problem before it is a combat problem, and that the people who had already mastered the logistics of reaching a remote ocean coordinate with a hold full of perishable cargo were exactly the people you wanted when the cargo became aviation gas and the destination a contested airfield. San Diego had been training that workforce for thirty years without knowing it was a naval asset. The same bay. The same summer swells. You could sail it tonight.