Led home by the hand of God
The war was over, but Ike Murphree needed to reach for the hand of God one last time to get home.
It had been nine months since Germany’s surrender, February 1946, and PFC Willie M. (Ike) Murphree boarded the USS Sea Robbin in France. He and others who had spent the final days of World War II serving on special assignment as personal security detail to Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower were finally headed back to the U.S.
They had fought the Nazis, and they had fought the European winter. But their last test was against the Atlantic.
Miles from shore, the ship encountered a storm that Murphree said the captain described as the worst he’d ever seen. “We were caught between the devil and the deep blue sea, he told us,” Murphree said. “And we were getting tossed around like a bail of hay.”
Swells lurched the battleship into the air to the point it felt it could tip at any moment. Instead, after reaching a peak nearly on its side, the ship would slide down the wave and crash back into the ocean with a thunderous roar. Murphree didn’t think he’d survive, but he’d told himself before he left that God had a plan.
Through tears, Murphree’s daughter, St. Clair County Revenue Commissioner Elizabeth Mealer, said that when soldiers on the Robbin laid eyes on the Statue of Liberty in New York, the men broke down.
“They were so glad they kissed the ground at their feet,” she said. “Happy to have survived. Happy to be home at last.”
Ike Murphree, 97, who was born in 1918 at the foot of Chandler Mountain, entered the war with a sense of duty. On Dec. 7, 1941, his wife held their 20-month old son, Billy, while the family listened to a preacher on the radio. The preacher interrupted the broadcast to announce that Japan had attacked Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. President Franklin D. Roosevelt responded soon after with words Murphree remembers well.
“‘Japan slipped up and stabbed us in the back,’” Murphree said, quoting the President. “’We have no choice but to protect our freedom. It will be a long, hard fight, but we will win.’”
Murphree’s wife, Alice Lucille, started crying when she realized what it meant for her husband — that he would be going to war. She told him he had to though, and he agreed.
“If it takes me laying down my life for your freedom, the freedom of our son, and the freedom of the American people, I will lay it down,” Murphree said he told her. “But Gold holds the future. It’s His plan, and He has a reason.”
Murphree proved to be an excellent marksman in training, earning him the label “sharpshooter” on his records. He was deployed in January 1944 as part of an operation to remove a German blockade — the Gustave Line — which had prevented Allies in the south of Italy from progressing north into enemy territory.
Murphree was part of the second wave to take on the German army at Anzio Beach on Italy’s western shore. The first wave, the Nazis “were looking down our throats,” Murphree said. “They wiped out every man, took down every plane and sunk every ship.”
Two-thirds of the second wave stuck, though, Murphree among them. Many of the Germans trying to escape were captured, and that resulted in Murphree being reassigned to the Military Police. His job after taking the beach was to transport prisoners of war to Allied internment camps.
In this role, it was often a single MP — “armed to the teeth,” Murphree said, with a Thompson machine gun that sprayed bullets “like water from a hose” — moving groups of German soldiers that numbered from 10-20. Their paths through the Italian marshes and mountain were full of snipers, and memories of this time still haunt Murphree.
“There were definitely two or three times that if God didn’t have me by the hand, I wouldn’t be here,” he said.
After Allied forces succeeded on D-Day and entered France, they rapidly moved east toward Germany. The Nazis surrendered in 1945, but Murphree’s work would continue. He was assigned as part of Eisenhower’s personal security detail, which meant four months of travel with the general to battlefields in Europe.
That work continued back in the States, as Murphree accompanied Eisenhower to Abilene, Kansas where the general would walk in a parade in his hometown. It was one of Murphree’s final acts of service before his discharge.
Murphree now lives on 80 acres near Ashville that he’s farmed all his life. A commendation from the Alabama House of Representatives recognizing his service also recognizes Murphree as a master gardener who’s known for his prized peas and watermelons. The family, Mealer said, grew up here, working the land for its living. They didn’t have a lot of material goods, but their life was rich in family, integrity and values — things that Murphree prioritizes.
As Murphree recounted his service, Mealer sat listening, clutching a photo of her father in his service uniform. “Veterans Day is a time to reflect, to be thankful,” she said. “It’s a time to look at the way men like my father served our country, his family and God and to see what we need to get back to.”