Harper Gruber was born in November 1924 in his grandmother's home town of Branchville, South Carolina, where the doctor didn't even issue him a birth certificate. Two weeks later he was taken home to Charleston, South Carolina. He was at church when he learned of the attack on Pearl Harbor, and realized the country would be on a war footing. Gruber believes that Pearl Harbor was the reason we won the war, because after the attack, everybody worked toward that goal. Gruber had an older brother already in the air force when the war started. He did not volunteer right away because he felt he was needed in the shipyard where he worked as an electrician's apprentice, and he wanted to finish his training. On 23 June 1943 he was drafted; he was discharged on 12 April 1946. [Annotator's Note: Voices audible in the background; interview is briefly interrupted.] Once he was drafted, he was able to continue his electrical education in the Navy, and wound up on a minesweeper.

Harper Gruber found boot camp very rough, but very beneficial in terms of his physical conditioning. After school, his first assignment was in the Canal Zone [Annotator's Note: Panama Canal Zone]. Gruber was at 13th Naval Headquarters [Annotator's Note: 15th Naval District Headquarters] with four other electricians in a bomb-proof communications building, converting 25-cycle Panamanian power into our 60-cycle power. It was like a vacation, Gruber said, but his orders soon came to join a crew of 33 - four officers and 29 enlisted men - a as a third class electrician on a minesweeper waiting in the lake in the middle of the Panama Canal. His duties aboard ship included taking care of the minesweeping gear, the generators, and the radar equipment. The vessel's [Annotator's Note: USS YMS-339] first voyage was to a big harbor in the Admiralty Islands, where they saw enemy action on their first night. Gruber said it was like the 4th of July, with tracer bullets filling the air and a great danger of friendly fire. The Japanese planes were flying in very low, and one hit a ship in the dry dock. There were hundreds of ships in the harbor, but not one of them was able to take the Japanese airman out of action. It was an American Black Widow [Annotator's Note: Northrop P-61 Black Widow night fighter aircraft] pursuit plane that finally shot it down. Gruber said it was a scary situation that left him very nervous and seasick.

After Leyte, Harper Gruber's vessel [Annotator's Note: USS YMS-339] took part in the second invasion [Annotator's Note: the landings on Luzon at Linguyan Gulf]. Gruber feels that General MacArthur [Annotator's Note: US Army General Douglas MacArthur], although he was a glory-seeker, was a very smart man. The Japanese expected the Allies to try to take the islands step-by-step, but after Leyte McArthur bypassed the central islands, caught the Japanese by surprise and choked them off. Gruber said he and his shipmates hardly ever put their feet on land. Gruber's duties included operating an electric winch that laid and retracted cables in the water, sometimes pulling up mines close enough to the fantail that he could see them. He had a close call on one occasion when the ship in front of his was sunk and the one behind disappeared after hitting a mine. They were receiving heavy gunfire and one shell exploded so close that water splashed Gruber's glasses. Everyone on board was scared, one guy was so alarmed that he tried to crawl under a six-inch bench on the deck. Their small vessel was often used to draw fire. The minesweepers were called wooden sprinter ships, or little pigs. Gruber grudgingly remarks that minesweepers are never featured in movies of the war. His ship continued all through the Philippine Islands, until the last invasion of the war. Then they went on to the Dutch East Indies, where the Americans did the minesweeping and the Australians did the fighting. Gruber remembers that the ship had a mascot. [Annotator's Note: Gruber grins and chuckles while telling this story.] It was a monkey named Roscoe, who fell in love with the gunner's mate and would pick salt flakes off his arm all day long. But Roscoe didn't like the skipper, and one afternoon bared his teeth at the captain and grabbed and shook his short pants. The skipper ordered him off the vessel, and the gunner's mate was nearly crying when he abandoned Roscoe on the beach. The ship pulled off, the monkey started swimming, the skipper turned his head, and the crew pulled him back on board. Later, Roscoe ate a sea marker and was poisoned. He was given a funeral at sea.

Harper Gruber described the crew as being divided between the dark crew - motor macs [Annotator's Note: motor machinist's mates], electricians and all the sailors who got dirty; and the white crew - signalmen, radarmen, the quartermaster, and all those who stayed relatively clean. The white crew went ashore more than the rest, and Gruber only remembers going ashore once in the Philippines. They had no entertainment on the ship, except for music from a record player that could be broadcast over the public address system. Nor were there any religious services; but when in port, a small boat would come and bring the Catholics to the large ships for Mass. Gruber remembers the crew trying to pick up a Japanese soldier who was floating on a raft. When they asked him to surrender, he pulled the pin on a hand grenade and put it to his chest, and was blown apart. On another occasion, they came upon a raft of eight to ten men who would not take the life rings they offered. The minesweeper stirred up the water and upended the raft, retrieved the prisoners and made them come aboard and strip off their clothes. One of the men, apparently the most senior, refused rescue and blew himself up. Gruber said it was very unnerving to watch a man commit suicide. He also recalled a time when their minesweeper engaged in a race with another ship of its kind. It was great fun until the other minesweeper went aground. It took a whole day to get it off the reef. Later in war the Japanese were using suicide planes as one of their main destructive forces and Gruber said that was the most nerve racking time of all, because they never knew when they might be hit. Luckily for the minesweepers, the kamikazes were usually going for larger ships. Gruber also recalled getting caught in the tail end of a typhoon that had tremendous waves, but their wooden ship was of a good design, and weathered it well. He notes that there were 561 minesweepers built in shipyards all over the United States; all constructed of wood to defy the magnetic nature of the mines.

There was a radioman on Harper Gruber's ship [Annotator's Note: the USS YMS-339] who would pick up the world news and when President Roosevelt [Annotator's Note: Franklin Delano Roosevelt] died, all hands on the ship were very disturbed. FDR was the only president elected to a third term, and that was mostly because Americans did not want to change horses in the middle of the stream. It was the same radioman who announced that the atomic bomb had been dropped, and this time, Gruber said, he and his shipmates were very jubilant, and excited to know that the war would shortly be over. Gruber admits that his war experiences made a man out of him, but in 1946 he was ready to get off the minesweeper and go home. He used the G.I. Bill after the war, but feels his choice of education and career was a mistake. He trained to go on the farm, and did not prove to be a successful farmer, mostly due to the grain embargo President Carter enacted against Russia. Nevertheless, Gruber is thankful for a wonderful, long life, for his three daughters, for the fact that his whole family is Christian, and that he has a church in which he holds the distinction of being its oldest member, in terms of both age and tenure. Gruber thanks the Lord for all he has received and for his loved ones. He asserts that World War 2 was the only war in which the American goal was total victory, and feels it important that institutions like The National WWII Museum continue to teach its lessons. He said he enjoyed and appreciated being interviewed.