The ceremony was for the USS Truxtun (DDG 103), the Navy’s newest guided-missile destroyer, named after Commodore Thomas Truxtun (1755-1822) who was undefeated in naval battles against the British and the French.
Among the attendees were descendants of the crew of the Truxtun (DD-229) and Pollux (AKS-2), both of which ran aground due to a navigational error along the rugged shoreline on the southeastern coast of Newfoundland and Labrador’s Burin Peninsula on February 18, 1942.
The ships grounded close to shore, but severe blizzard conditions made escape and rescue near impossible, and 203 sailors perished. Those who managed to reach the shore by swimming or life raft were faced with sheer, ice-covered cliffs rising as high as 300 feet.
One sailor cut handholds in the ice with a knife and scaled the cliffs. He roused the residents of the nearby towns of Lawn and St. Lawrence, who gave assistance by tying a rope around the sailors one at a time and hauling them up the cliffs.
They took the survivors into their homes in St. Lawrence. The women washed the sailors, who were covered in heavy crude oil leaked from the ship’s tanks, and provided them with clothing, meals, and shelter until the U.S. Navy was able to transport them to the U.S. Naval Base in Argentia, Newfoundland.
Wayde Rowsell, Mayor of St. Lawrence, traveled almost 2,000 miles to the occasion. “This is a living history story on the legacy of the Truxtun and the history of the province,” he said.
Gus Etchegary, who also attended the ceremony, was a teenager at the time of the rescue.
“We got as many ropes as we could. We walked to the place to see what was there from the top. I was given the job by my father of building a fire. The weather was really bad—raging seas.”
A small plane tried to drop a line to the ship but didn’t succeed. A small boat tried to reach the ship but capsized. If the sailors clinging to the wreckage did jump into the sea, “there was a big undertow. So when they jumped and tried to swim, it was not a good result,” said Mr. Etchegary.
“Many of those young sailors were pretty tenacious in trying to stay alive,” he said. But one, about 17 years old, didn’t make it.
“Billy Butterworth. I brought him close to the fire. He said ‘I’m from Boston.’ In about 20 minutes he passed away.” Mr. Etchegary wanted to contact the young man’s family, but he never found them.
South Carolinian Dean Lewis’ father survived the wreck of the Pollux. He said he and his father once made a pilgrimage to St. Lawrence. “In a way it brought our whole family close together.”
“My father has 21 surviving great-grandchildren. My sisters and brothers, there are five of us. Without the people of St. Lawrence we wouldn’t exist,” he said.
Mr. Shelley’s wife teaches her students history using the story of Lanier Phillips. In the 1940s, the Navy practised segregation. Black sailors were separated from white sailors, and the only assignments they were given were menial—preparing food, shining shoes, cleaning.
Forbidden to sit down to eat with the rest of the crew, black sailors had to eat standing in the mess pantry. Mr. Phillips enlisted to escape the scourge of the Ku Klux Klan in his native Georgia. But he found the Navy little better.
While Mr. Phillips made it to safety, other black sailors stayed with the wreckage because they thought they would be lynched if they went ashore, Mr. Phillips told The Epoch Times in 2007.
“He had a lot to live for,” said Tanya Drake, whose grandfather was one of the rescuers. She grew up to become a naval architect and helped build the new Truxtun at the shipyard in Pascagoula, Mississippi. She came to the ceremony to honour the history of her family and the ship.
Mr. Phillips lost consciousness on the beach that night. When he awoke, he was alarmed to see that he was naked and surrounded by white women. Violet Pike was trying to revive him by washing the oil from his skin with warm water. In the anti-Black racist U.S. South at the time, white women would be loath to even touch a black man..
But his rescuers had no intention of harming him. They gave him clothes and a warm bed. He said their kindness helped him imagine another kind of society.
Mr. Phillips went on to become a pioneer for desegregating the U.S. Navy. Overcoming all odds, he became the Navy’s first African American sonar technician. Later, in the American civil rights movement, he walked on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama in March 1965, marching alongside Martin Luther King, Jr.
Mr. Phillips received an Honorary Doctorate of Law degree from Newfoundland and Labrador’s Memorial University last June for his resistance to, and capacity to rise above, repression.
“He was a giant really in the fight for equal rights,” said Mayor Rowsell. “He always acknowledges somebody else’s goodness. He has a great heart, just inspirational.”
At the commanding officer’s reception before the commissioning, a speaker told Mr. Phillips’ story and asked him to stand and be honoured. He rose and remained standing as his son took pictures and the officers and dignitaries applauded him.
“It’s special for us to see him enjoying the moment,” said his daughter, Dr. Vonzia Phillips.
