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A Memorial Day Remembrance
In the autumn of 2006, on a visit to Oklahoma to see our children I received a call from a friend of mine. Grover Phillips and I had been friends for more than twenty years.
“I want you to come by my house,” he told me, “I want to talk to you.”
I did as he requested. On that sunny Sunday afternoon Grover asked me to write a short memoir/essay for him about the two years he spent in the U.S. Navy, (1943-1945) aboard the escort naval carrier, Gambier Bay, built in a Kaiser shipyard near Vancouver, Washington.
Grover was an aviation radioman (ARM3c) and machine gunner in VTB (Torpedo Bomber) aircraft. He was part of a three man crew that flew anti-submarine patrol with various pilots from the complement of Avenger torpedo bombers assigned to the carrier. He was aboard the Gambier Bay when she sank in the South Pacific in the Battle of Leyte Gulf.
“I spent my 19th birthday floating in a raft,” he told me. “My friend Hank saved my life. He wouldn’t let me drink sea water and tried to keep me going. I was one of the lucky ones.”
For years I had known that Grover had received a Purple Heart in WWII, and when asked to speak at Veteran’s Day events, he would talk of crash landing behind the fantail of his carrier, or being on deck when a bomb shell “the size of a small couch” exploded in the water just off the bow. He never talked about how he, along with hundreds of other wounded sailors, spent two days in the shark infested waters off the island of Samar, in what has been described by military historians as the largest naval battle ever waged.
Over the course of several months of conversation Grover would eventually tell me, “I remember being pulled aboard an LCI (Landing Craft Infantry), and a guy, a pharmacist mate, taking care of me.”
Grover was sent to New Guinea to an Army field hospital, and finally made it back to San Diego to nurse a wound that wouldn’t heal. Nine months after his return, a doctor cut a considerable slit into his back in order to dislocate his right shoulder and remove deeply embedded shrapnel. He was discharged from the Navy on November 8th, 1945.
Like many veterans, Grover took advantage of the GI Bill, married, had a family and worked hard throughout his life.
Shortly before one of my visits, Grover had been diagnosed with lung cancer. At the local treatment center one day in late 2006, Grover was wearing his Gambier Bay cap. A man approached him and asked him if he had served on the Gambier Bay. Yes, he told the man, he had. The man extended his hand, introduced himself as Leonard George, and said that he had been the pharmacist mate on an LCI that had picked up 175 wounded sailors.
Leonard remembered that one of the rafts included the ship’s captain and navigator. Grover was with that group, and after comparing notes the two men concluded their conversation with the likelihood that the pharmacist mate that had cared for Grover was at that moment shaking his hand.
In 2007 Grover attended his last reunion with his fellow survivors of the Gambier Bay. He took the memoir with him and called me from the car on his way to the event in San Antonio to thank me for “doing him the favor of putting it all down for him and his family.”
I told him it had been an honor. And I thanked him for the privilege.
Grover Cleveland Phillips Jr. died on September 26th, 2008. I am profoundly indebted to him for his trust in me to commit to paper that part of his life that affects us all.
Post script: In a column of this length it isn’t possible to do justice to his story. If there is an interest in this short memoir, please contact me at mary@marykalbert.com I promised Grover and his family I would share it with anyone interested in one man’s service to our country during WWII.
The photo included with this column is one I took of the gift of a book and picture that Grover gave to me in 2006. I arranged them on my table, placed on an American flag presented to me by an Italian Colonel assigned to NATO flying national security missions over Washington D.C.shortly after 9/11. Grover thought it was highly appropriate. It had been cloudy all day, but the sun broke through the clouds for the ten minutes I snapped photographs.
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