Sidney Phillips' World War II experience a central part of HBO's 'The Pacific'

Mar.8th, 2010

Some men are broken by war, unable to escape the memories of what they've done or seen. Dr. Sidney Phillips, a Mobile native and survivor of some of the most brutal combat in World War II, is not one of them.

"Well," Phillips said Thursday. "Sit down and let's start telling some lies. ..."

But his life is the stuff of history, not lies. Phillips is a central character in "The Pacific," a 14-hour HBO miniseries that will premiere in Mobile this weekend.

As a 17-year-old just graduated from Murphy High School, Phillips witnessed barbarity of the most base kind in the jungles of Guadalcanal during the opening battle of America's war in the Pacific. Even today, he can recall finding decapitated and mutilated bodies of fellow Marines left to rot in the jungle, bodies that had suffered indignities too cruel to repeat.

"Our battalion never took a prisoner that I know of after that," he says.

But instead of coming home with a bitter heart, Phillips returned with a calling. It happened in the heat of battle as he fired mortars from an encampment next to a surgical tent at an enemy he couldn't see.

"They were bringing all these wounded men in past me. I wanted to be able to help so badly, but I didn't know how," Phillips said. "When I got home I went into medicine ... I was determined not to be scarred by the war."

He said the hundreds of autopsies he watched in medical school took some power from what he saw on the battlefield. "The concept of horror disappeared from my life. Those things didn't bother me anymore."

Phillips said his high school buddy, Eugene Sledge, had a harder time coming home.
"I told him over and over, 'Just forget all that crap. Get it out of your mind and get on with your life. We would stay up until 2 in the morning talking about the war."

Eugene Sledge's World War II memoir is used heavily in "The Pacific."
Decades later, Sledge wrote a celebrated memoir titled "With the Old Breed." Phillips also knew Robert Leckie, author of "Helmet for My Pillow." Those two books form the backbone of the story told in the HBO special.

"Eugene was my best friend. He was the best man at my wedding. And Robert Leckie, we were in the same company in the war. I knew him well," Phillips said.

"Robert was nobody. Eugene was nobody. Just so happens they wrote these incredible books. Now Sledge is dead and Leckie is dead. I'm all that's left. Those Hollywood producers were so excited to learn I was still around. For an 85-year-old codger to be catapulted into this is startling," he said, grinning. "You find Tom Hanks on one side, Steven Spielberg on the other, both arm in arm with you, flashes going off on the red carpet, that's heady stuff."

(article edited from the Mobile Press-Register)