Oral history interview of Dr. Henry Rives Chalmers

Collection:: Veterans History Project: Oral History Interviews
Title:: Oral history interview of Dr. Henry Rives Chalmers
Creator:: Lacy, Margaret
Chalmers, Henry Rives, 1918-2013
Date of Original:: 2004-11-17
Subject:: Tarawa, Battle of, Kiribati, 1943
World War, 1939-1945--Personal narratives, American
Halsey, William F. (William Frederick), 1882-1959
Robinson, Red
United States. Navy. Medical Department
Methodist Hospital of Fort Worth
University of Virginia
Naval Hospital Pensacola
National Naval Medical Center (U.S.)
Saint Elizabeths Hospital (Washington, D.C.)
Emory University
Location:: Cuba, Guantánamo Bay, 19.9242388, -75.1593149217009
Fiji, Suva, -18.14161, 178.44149
Marshall Islands, Kwajalein Atoll, 9.1257934, 167.5740472
Papua New Guinea, Bougainville Island, -5.9631994, 154.9998011
Solomon Islands, Guadalcanal, -9.59842095, 160.148511701845
Tuvalu, Funafuti, Funafuti Atoll, -8.51667, 179.13333
United States, Georgia, 32.75042, -83.50018
United States, Georgia, Atlanta Metropolitan Area, 33.8498, 84.4383
United States, Hawaii, Honolulu County, Honolulu, 21.30694, -157.85833
United States, Hawaii, Honolulu County, Pearl Harbor, 21.34475, -157.97739
United States, South Carolina, Charleston County, Charleston, 32.77657, -79.93092
United States, Virginia, Charlotte County, Phenix, 37.07987, -78.74778
Vanuatu, Shefia, Éfaté Island, -17.67899, 168.39415
Medium:: video recordings (physical artifacts)
mini-dv
Type:: Moving Image
Format:: video/quicktime
Description:: In this interview, Dr. Rives Chalmers describes his experiences as a Navy doctor in the Pacific during World War II. He had just graduated medical school when the U.S. entered the war. He was being recruited by both the Army and the Navy during his last year of medical school. He remembered that an uncle who served in the Army was killed during WWI, so he opted for Navy medicine. He sailed on a destroyer during its shakedown cruise in the Caribbean, met a girl in Norfolk, but was sent to the Pacific before they could get married. His ship was the lead destroyer in a task force that supported island invasions throughout the Pacific. He had to perform an emergency appendectomy on a sailor during a terrible storm and is still in touch with that sailor to this day. He recalls his marriage, education, family and retirement.
Rives Chalmers was a U.S. Navy doctor in the Pacific during World War II.
DR. RIVES CHALMERS VETERANS HISTORY PROJECT ATLANTA HISTORY CENTER Interview Date: November 17, 2004 Interviewer: Margaret Lacy Transcribed by: Stephanie McKinnell MARGARET LACY: We're at the Atlanta History Center, and this is November the 17th, the year 2004, and Dr. Rives Chalmers is going to talk and we thank you for coming in, letting us do the video. RIVES CHALMERS: Well, I'm glad to have the opportunity. INT: Where would you like to begin? RC: Anyway you wish to begin. I've got some notes, some information if you need it. INT: The data form says you grew up in Phoenix, Virginia. You came to Georgia at some point. RC: After World War II. INT: Well, we'll start with Virginia. When you got in the service, what state were you living in? RC: Virginia. I went to University of Virginia for seven years, graduated there in '41, and entered the Naval Reserve Medical Corps reserves when I graduated medical school in June '41. Then I went down to Fort Worth, Texas, to intern at the Methodist Hospital in Fort Worth, Texas, until December 7th when the whole thing occurred. INT: Did you realize what was happening on December 7th? RC: No . . . I was in a patient's room when they told me about it. I went that night and called the Navy department and asked them whether they were going to call me back and they did. The head of the hospital was upset with me because she didn't want me to go, wanted me to stay with her. But they sent me home and I went over to Dallas two days later and entered the service as a medical officer in the Marine Corps recruiting station in Dallas, Texas. Stayed there four months while we examined many, many recruits coming through, going into the Marine Corps. My, a young Marine Corps officer rode with me over there for about a month when he was enlisting other young marines in the Marine Corps. Went on from there to southern California in a group that went on to make the landings, the first landings down in, what's the name of the place, in the Pacific, Guadalcanal. His group made the first landings at Guadalcanal. He was killed. We had a great time. Met the young lady who was being married. He was there two months in Texas, and he married. She went with him to the west coast. I have not been in touch with her since, but I have frequently wondered, hoped that they had a child who survived that, but I've never been in touch with her. Anyway, that was my early time in the service. I had not completed an internship at that time, so the Navy sent me back to Pensacola in about March or April of '42. I was there for seven months completing an internship at the naval hospital in Pensacola, Florida. From there I received orders to, 20 days leave. These memories bring back some tears. Then I received orders to go to the destroyer which was being built in the, Orange, Texas. I had 20 days leave in which—I went back by Spartanburg, South Carolina, where I'd completed high school and my aunt was teaching at Converse College. I met a young lady there who—three older women, the dean of the college and my aunt who was teaching Latin and Greek, the ladies in town, had all decided they wanted me to meet this young woman over at Converse. So the dean arranged—I already had a date with a young girl, that night in Converse, but the dean invited me that night to be at her table with [the girl who would become] my wife, who was the dean's, assistant to the dean, who had graduated the year before. We met there. The young girl I had a date with, had to go in at 9 o'clock. We followed down there. My wife, she had a date with a soldier, for soldiers came over and helped the girls marching at the college and so the soldier had been there but he had gone and she had gone, gotten herself prepared for a date. She came over to the room where my date and I were before 9 o'clock and said that she had a date that evening with a friend of mine from high school via Vermont. So when Bud came in to go with them, she had asked me to go with them to meet their friends that night, the girl _ had already gone off. But I went with ____, and we took Bud's wife back to the dormitory. We had gone by Bud's house and . . . I asked her if she'd like to date me, which she would not do. The next morning, we talked, we had a good three days. We really decided that we cared for each other. We'd never met before. But at any rate, then I went on up on my way. I was going back to my home in Phoenix, Virginia, and on to the University to visit my old friends at the medical school. When I came, I made a date to meet my wife again at Spartanburg when I came back home on my way to Orange, Texas. So as I came through, we met and went out for dinner and we were together another day there and decided we cared about each other. So we began writing the most exciting letters. I had just one from her after, when I arrived in Orange, Texas. But in this trip, I'm telling you all this but . . . I had been in close relationships with three or four young ladies while I was in Pensacola and back from Fort Worth and ended when I was in Dallas. And so on my way down, I had planned to go to University of Texas to see a young lady whom I had begun dating when she was a senior in high school in Dallas. She was then a freshman at University of Texas. I thought she was really too young for me to think about marriage, she was a great lady. When I got back to the ship when I joined the officers when I went over to Orange, Texas, from Austin. About three or four days later a letter came from my wife, it was the first letter she'd written me, and I had written to her _ from Jackson, Mississippi telling her I was going to write. That set it for me, I knew who I wanted to marry. INT: Tell us what was in the letter. Was it too graphic? RC: In a short period of time a great deal took place. It was great. INT: When did you marry? RC: We put a ship into commission, a destroyer, which we had to go on to Guantanamo Bay for a shakedown cruise which took about two months, six weeks or so. Then we came back up to Charleston, and I had, she was still at Converse at Spartanburg. So she came down to Charleston and met me there. That was the period in which we decided we were going to get married. At that time, we thought the ship was going to stay on the west coast, and we'd get married some time in the period. We went out to New York, we came back down by Chesapeake Bay and went up to Yorktown and got a mine ship loaded with mines and other munitions for all I know, to go to the Pacific. For a little bit more than a year. We went out in the Pacific. I was with the destroyer, which was the lead destroyer in the carrier task forces that went out and made the bombing over some of the Japanese-held islands. It didn't really _ the war. We operated in and out of Pearl Harbor in those days. We were down in the south Pacific; we covered the landings when the Marines went out from Guadalcanal to Bougainville. Our ship had this anti-submarine patrol in those landings. Then we came back to Honolulu. We were there several days while the ships were gathering. We were going to Tarawa for the first landings. We still had the Commodore who was in charge of all the _ destroyer squadron. Those surrounded the largest ships going into Tarawa. Then we covered the landings in Tarawa. We sat offshore and covered all the landings there. When that was over, we went down to a little island south of Tarawa called F_ B_ where we spent the Christmas time. That was probably '43. I can't really say, '43 I think. Then '44. We went down, right after Christmas, we took up, went back to Pearl Harbor. Our captain was one of the captains the _ to the landings at Kuwajalein. He didn't get with us. We were on a ship, _ ship going all the way from ______ back to Honolulu which is about a four day trip, and a terrible storm came up, worst one we had the whole time there. The morning of this heavy storm, a young seaman began complaining of pain in his right lower quadrant. And I examined him, and it was pretty obvious that he had acute appendicitis. At that time it was sort of a threat to think of having an operation on a ship. INT: Because it was storming? RC: I talked with the captain about it, of course. He assured me he'd get the ship on as steady a course as he could, head right into the big waves—it went up and down like this. But it wasn't doing like this _. But we advised at 3 o'clock in the afternoon, his pain was worse. He was not vomiting; he did not have any fever, but I was sure he had acute appendicitis. And I told the captain that we'd have to operate, and we did. And very fortunately everything went great. We got that done very simply _ thirty years later I heard among these ship's people, of that ship, a man who was living in Maryland near Reading, Pennsylvania, where _ anyway, he had been in communication, these shipmates and all the enlisted men really kept up with each other all through the war. They told me that he was still in good health. He and I have been communicating since then which is 15 or so years. He survived the operation and didn't have to go to the hospital ship. I thought he might have to go to the hospital ship. He just did fine, no problems. He's surviving today, although he's having problems with his memory, as I am these days. Anyway, that was one point that I _____ for my experience over there. Then we went on to Kwajalein where the group made the landings at Kwajalein. Then from Kwajalein, we came back by Pearl Harbor and then went south to ____ and Havana Harbor. Efate is a little small island in the Dutch, I think it's Dutch East Indies. Anyway, the big ____, Admiral Halsey was down in the, anyway, he was close by. We were ____ ships were gathering there, ____. Sometime within the first six months there, Red Robinson, a doctor who was on the Harrison, and myself, we'd meet in the officers club when we had time to go ashore. We'd have a few drinks together and Red and I had both decided we wanted to apply to post graduate study, because Red had a wife and two children, one child at least, I'm not sure whether the other one had come along back in the states. I had a girlfriend I wanted to marry. So we both put in for psychiatry, and after the Kwajalein campaign and we were down in Havana harbor, my orders came, and ___ young medical officer came to relieve me. So I got on the ship and went back to San Francisco and then to my wife's home in Lynchburg, South Carolina [Virginia?]. And we had our wedding ___ then we went on to my home in Virginia, [then] up to Washington. I was assigned to the Naval Medical Center at Bethesda. When I got there, I was assigned to the psychiatry training program at St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington. I stayed there a year and a half as a, was a medical officer there, St. Elizabeth's. But I was also interested in completing, getting training to be a psychiatrist. I went over to Bethesda and was in charge of, the captain in charge of the psychiatry program put me in charge of the enlisted men's ward, psychiatric ward, at the naval hospital there where I stayed for the next year and a half while I was getting my training. I was also taking psychiatry courses at the Washington School of Psychiatry here in that town. In early '47 I realized I was going to complete my training, and I began looking for a place to practice. We had already, we had one child, and we were looking forward to the coming ___. I had decided I wanted either to come to Atlanta or to the area, the Texas area, Dallas, Houston area, or Seattle, Washington. I was looking at all three of those places. We came out to South Carolina and came over to here, Atlanta, met with people. But I hadn't made a decision when I got a letter saying that the professor of psychiatry at Emory was looking for persons to come in the training program at Grady Hospital, and he was also looking for an associate in psychiatry to work with him in his private practice. I said I wanted to be with him in his private practice. I came down, met with him, and he decided that I was the person he wanted, and I came out of the navy. I left the navy in March of '47 and came to Atlanta. We bought a home, my wife was pregnant, we had our second child, born here at Crawford Long Hospital. Lawrence Matthews who was our down the street neighbor when we bought our house here—we were two doors down—was our obstetrician. He delivered four of our children in the next years. We lived over on Westminster Way a long time, and we decided that we would move across town to Ridgewood Road, where we've been almost 40 years now. INT: It's a lovely area. RC: Oh, it's a great area. INT: You were in Washington, DC, I guess, when the war was over? RC: Oh yeah. We were there '46, August, September '46, August '46 I guess. We were there when the war in Germany was over first and the big celebration that was there. Then the war in the Pacific the next year. We participated in all those special times. INT: It was such a terrible war. A lot of people thought it would last longer than it did. RC: Well, if we hadn't had the atomic bomb, it would have lasted longer. Boy, that relieved the whole thing. We had men all ready to go into Japan at that time. INT: Everybody remembers where they were that day. RC: Those were great times. That was just a great period. INT: So you already had your plans for a civilian career? RC: Yeah, I already, I had been in med school and knew what I wanted to do if I ever got through with the navy. I wasn't making money. In the spring of my senior year at medical school we were being recruited by members of the army, into the army medical corps, and the navy in the navy medical corps. I had heard so many stories about the army, and my uncle for whom I was named was killed in France during World War I. I had read about the mud and all that the army, soldiers lived in, and I didn't want any part of the army. I wanted the navy and that's the reason. INT: A lot of memories. [shipboard surgery] RC: Really, I had performed one hysterectomy, appendectomies, and other surgical procedures in my internship with supervision in Fort Worth. So I knew how to perform these. Of course, I'd had good training in medical school. I had worked as an extern in medical school, University of Virginia Hospital, so I had learned from the surgeons there what they were doing. So I had no real problem doing the surgery, although I had not identified that as ____. If the psychiatry hadn't come up in connection with being at Emory's postgraduate course and married my wife, I might have gone on into surgery. That was my crowning moment of surgery with that. For many years I didn't know how Charlie had gotten along. I went on with other things too. Then in the years when we, shipmates, began to get together and finally had some meetings of the whole crew. They are meeting every year now somewhere in the country. I don't go to those meetings. I only went to two or three of them. I then realized how much they would communicate with each other, and I began asking about Charlie S___. I found that they were all remembering that day. I had a letter from one of them right after these men began sharing these memories telling of how the crew had all gathered on the deck outside quarters aboard ship where I was doing the operation, that they were almost certainly waiting to see how it came out. Of course I had no idea that they would ____. He was telling me what a relief it was to them. INT: ____ years later, you hear the rest of the story? RC: Yeah. INT: ____ person going a long time? RC: It's great. ____ so attached to. In fact, he has written so many letters [I'm] not keeping up with all of them. I'd respond after I got four or five probably at one time. Charlie had a close attachment with ___. He's the one that had the operation. INT: When you were in the military, how was keeping in touch with the home front? I guess by mail. RC: Oh, yeah. Mail. INT: _ leave time, or were you too busy to go on leave? RC: _ that was a very active time. I don't know that anybody except people coming out of the war zone had leave when they came back to the states. But during the period out there, there was no thought of leave. You wanted to get on with what was going on. INT: I don't want to leave anything out. Did you have any special awards? RC: No. INT: You had no service related injuries? RC: None. _ pictures _. Some people did have pictures but I don't have any of those. INT: That's quite a history. I guess when you went in, you didn't know you'd be in so long. RC: I was glad to be in as long as necessary. There's no question in my mind. I had been watching it all _ the summer of 1940, really I was doing an internship in a _ Baby Hospital _ Spartanburg, South Carolina. All of us that summer were watching the activities going on in France and Germany and what the Germans were doing. We thought sooner or later we were going to have to get into it. We didn't know how or what but I, when I decided to enter the medical corps, I felt sure that ultimately we would be in some kind of a war. It turned into out that way, of course. INT: You said the submarines ____ Atlantic. Then you turned around and ___. RC: Yeah. She'd already made her plans, we were going to go back. We came into Norfolk, she was coming up, and we were going to get married. If we came into Charleston, we were going to get married there. We went down through the Panama Canal and on to the west coast and then on to Honolulu. INT: You mentioned some _ places I've never heard of like E___ and F___ F___. RC: And Halsey is that admiral's name of who was down, he was at a place south of Efate. Havana Harbor is where we were. That's a large bay where the ships gathered to get there. They had protection outside from submarines and so forth. Really a protected harbor called Havana Harbor. The island, it's a small island called, well, maybe it's a town on that larger island where Halsey's headquarters were. Halsey's headquarters were over at Espirita which was south of where we were. In any event, that's where it's located, down in the south Pacific. INT: _ a few places down there _. RC: Oh, boy. But you know, we didn't, rarely go ashore except for when the officers club would greet us. We had the greetings, friendship with people, well, the beach, we were in the harbor at S_, Fiji Islands in the earlier days of the contest before we went to Tarawa. And we had some time and went up to an officers club up in the mountains from S_. I didn't get on any of those islands, spend any time there. INT: _ Tarawa. One of them said Tarawa, one of Tarawa like you said. RC: I said Tarawa, and I think… INT: That was right because you've been there. RC: There's a lot of pronunciations, so I'm not sure. I used to say Tarawa and now I say Tarawa, so I'm not real sure where all that comes from. INT: Getting back to your home life in Atlanta and your four children. RC: Yeah, fine. INT: Do they live in the area? RC: Two of them. Two of them are here in town, my youngest son, David, and my younger daughter Dana each has their family here in Atlanta. My next daughter Beth is in St. Paul, Minnesota. Her husband's got a big position up there. My son, Rives, my oldest son, is a musician in Los Gatos, California, up from San Jose, up in the mountains. My older daughter Alice is retired from University of Georgia this past year, and she's now living up in North Carolina at, these names will come to me. She's living up there, North Carolina. INT: Keep up with all of them? RC: Yeah, they're spread around but we enjoy getting together with them. INT: I bet you have grandchildren? RC: We've got ten. But we wanted great grandchildren but _ they all are going to make it on their own. But some of them have one child who's already made his _ he is well established, and he's really looking for a wife. He's had three or four women who wanted to marry him, but now he's beginning to think about which one he wants to marry. And so that _. Then my, both of his grandchild, Adam and Shane graduated University of Georgia. Shane is engaged as of now. They're engaged, and he's going to get married this spring. We're looking forward to that one. That's the first one that's really going to do it. INT: Looking back, _ comments or advice that you want to get on record. RC: About? INT: Your experience either in civilian or in the war. RC: Well, all of my experiences are relatively peaceful. I have no criticism at all, and some people have struggled with various things but all my experience with officers with personnel, I've never run into any situation which I would really try to change it. I admire the officers and all experiences I've had with them. INT: _hard _ scary times. RC: Yeah, but they were interesting times. For instance, we'd come in and out of Honolulu, the Hanekoloni Hotel at Honolulu. It's just a wonderful spot. My wife and I went back there for one of our vacations. We've been there three or four times. We went down to New Zealand, my daughter was in New Zealand, Australia, we went down there. But anyway, we've had good experiences in many places. In our later years, after our kids were all grown up and through college, we had a motor home and we traveled all over most of the United States, all through Alaska and through Nova Scotia, Canada and Nova Scotia. We've been over the United States and Canada and we've been down in Mexico but this was not in the motor home. We down to _. We flew down and got on a train and went up in the mountains down in Mexico, and we've been to Mexico City. We've been around and enjoyed all of it. INT: I think you all like to travel. RC: We have, when I was 81, or 82, we were driving back from _ across Canada and gotten on I-75 where it begins up in Canada, anyways up there, and we, in coming down that time, I noticed that all these big trucks driving _ motor home, and a motor home was a rather large vehicle. Well, the trucks come up to one side of you and squeeze in front of you, and too many accidents then occur. I told my wife I was not going to drive that thing up there anymore. Finally kept it two years and gave it to my daughter because it… Now we drive, we go to Virginia. I've got some old property and family up in Virginia. We also go to the beach frequently, we have a time share at a house over there. So we are still driving, but we're driving a smaller car and we're not getting out on long trips unless we particularly have a place we are going to go. We don't just go. My wife would like to go out and see the leaves and the mountains and I show her the leaves in our backyard. INT: Thanks for sharing, you've already been. RC: We've got pictures and all that goes with it. INT: I want to be sure and thank you for telling us what you did. RC: I appreciate the opportunity to share all this. My kids don't know all this, but it's… You know, it's really difficult to think of communicating. I have written some things which they would be able to see if they ever choose to look at them. I kind of think I'm going to put them in a little book and let them read it at their own leisure because each time they sit down to talk about, but then they've got an appointment, they've got to go. INT: They're so busy. RC: They've got their own lives and moving on with those. INT: I sure wish I had gotten biographies of all of my parents [and relatives]. RC: My wife and I feel that although we had some material from each of our parents, we didn't record it, but I do have records. We've got something so that they can know something. And then there are books and things. INT: Well, we thank you so much. RC: I appreciate you being interested and having the opportunity to talk. I've never put all this down anyway. INT: Well, I hope you do. RC: I hope—Frances said I'll get a copy of what you… That may be better than that. My handwriting would ___ if I had it. My typing is pretty good. I've got a lot of stuff typed for various things, but talking like this is more easily done that it is sitting down and talking to them and having me explain what these things mean and where they were and so forth. INT: I guess I could record your length of service in the U.S. Navy. RC: I was on active duty from December 9, '41 to March of 1947. INT: December 9, Pearl Harbor was December 7th, they didn't waste any time. RC: I called them. INT: I see. RC: They sent me orders to, they told me to just wait, I was going to get orders. INT: '41 to ‘47. Six years. We're glad you came to Atlanta. RC: I came to Atlanta and Atlanta's been good to me. It's worked very well. [tape ends]
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Extent:: 54:42
Original Collection:: Veterans History Project oral history recordings
Veterans History Project collection, MSS 1010, Kenan Research Center, Atlanta History Center
Holding Institution:: Atlanta History Center
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