THROUGH THE MORNING of Monday, July 2, thousands of longshoremen, seamen, teamsters -- strikers, sympathizers, the merely curious -- clustered on the Embarcadero. By early afternoon, a dense crowd (the Chronicle said 1,500; the ILA strike bulletin, 20,000) expectantly faced the docks around Pier 38. "Huddled four deep, approximately 4,000 strikers along the waterfront eyed the Matson and other docks, waiting for the port to open," the News reported. A few clutched clubs or stones. The outnumbered police "grinned at the strikers." Mounted police stirred restlessly as their horses fidgeted. From Rincon Hill above the Embarcadero a gallery of hundreds looked down on the tense scene. Doors of the dock were partly open, motorcycle cops waiting on each side. Overhead two planes circled. One bore the letters S.F.P.D., the police department's one-plane air patrol. (It had only a one-way radio; it could receive orders, hear alarms, but its only communication with the ground was by a handwritten note, weighted with a rock and dropped as near as possible to the closest policeman.) The other belonged to Universal News Service. On the ground, news photographers and newsreel cameramen cruised slowly by. From his seat on the crowded top of a freight car, one striker wondered, "Will they try to move the trucks?" and realized that the same question was on everybody's mind. What do we do? he asked an older man, a squad captain. "Use your own judgment," the man replied, "but I reckon we'll try to storm those trucks."

Word of the Industrial Association's intention to open the port that afternoon was spread wide. The newspapers, radio stations, and word of mouth had alerted the entire city. At 3:00 P.M., they announced, a parade of trucks, under heavy police protection, would enter Pier 38, load, then deliver the merchandise to the Atlas warehouse on King Street.

"This latest move of the Shipowners, San Francisco Industrial Association and the police has been definitely taken to break the strike through intimidation and terror,'' the Joint Marine Strike Committee declared. It called on all AFL local unions to send delegates to a conference in Eagles Hall on Saturday, July 7, "to discuss and prepare for a general strike of the workers in the Bay Region."

No one was exempt who came within range of the battle. Joe Rosenthal, a newspaper photographer who later won worldwide fame for his World War II photo of the flag raising at Iwo Jima, was beaten on the Embarcadero. He told Bridges biographer Charles P. Larrowe he had been "stoned by strikers, tear gassed by police, and beaten so badly that he was hospitalized for a week." Two passengers on a Market Street streetcar were wounded by stray bullets. Many injured were treated at ILA headquarters (where a doctor was on duty) but, when it came under police attack, were removed to a number of places, including headquarters of the Communist Party on Haight Street. George Hedley, an official of the Pacific School of Religion, had spent some ten days at this point on the waterfront talking with union officers, strikers, passersby. He insisted that the police were invariably the aggressors; he never saw a weapon in the hands of a striker. "Such rioting as occurred," he argued, "was the direct product of their own aggression." Chief Quinn said later that "at times it looked quite bad . . . we were faced by from five to seven thousand infuriated men bent on" wreaking havoc with the nonunion men, then the steamship companies' property; "after that, only the imagination can determine what they would have done in the way of sacking San Francisco."