Shadow box

Grover Barron Bishop was born August 30, 1916, in Ladonia, a small Texas town in far northeast Texas. His father, Grover Bishop, was a farmer, stockman, and owned a cotton gin. His mother, Anna Barron, was a schoolteacher before she married.

Barron, as he was called by his family and friends, had three sisters. He attended college after high school until he left to join the Navy on January 11, 1936. His enlistment would have ended in January 1942 and he planned to visit his family in Texas before re-enlisting.

In a letter home a month before he was killed, MM1c Bishop wrote: “The Army seems to be having a little trouble over morale. Well, maybe the morale is low & maybe the morale of the Navy isn’t so high but once we start fighting that’ll all be forgotten. The men out here are hard worked and would like to see the fleet return but we have faith. We believe the President will return us home just as soon as he thinks it is safe. For that reason & because we know it is in the best interest of the nation we don’t mind it so much. In a few more months we’ll all be native anyway. It won’t matter then. I’d say the morale on the ship is as high as it has ever been. One thing that would help would be war with Japan. That would give us confidence in ourselves & at the same time furnish a lot of good training.”

The war with Japan came soon enough. Machinist’s Mate First Class Grover Barron Bishop (Serial Number 355957) died on December 7, 1941.

At the onset of the December 7, 1941 attack, the battleship USS Arizona (BB-39) was moored at berth Fox 7 on “Battleship Row.” The repair ship Vestal (AR-4) was on the port side, and the starboard side faced the northeastern shore of Ford Island. Just before 8 am, the ship’s air raid alarm sounded, and the crew was ordered to general quarters. During the attack the battleship was struck by as many as eight aerial bombs, including one 1,700 lb. armor-piercing shell which penetrated the deck near the Number 2 turret and detonated in the smokeless powder magazine, causing a “cataclysmic” explosion “which destroyed the ship forward” and ignited a fire which burned for two days. Most of the Arizona crewmen who perished in the attack died instantly during the explosion. The ship quickly sank to the bottom of the harbor along with 1,177 of the 1,512 personnel on board, representing about half the total number of Americans killed that day.

MM1c Grover Barron Bishop’s remains are entombed in the hull of the USS Arizona in Pearl Harbor. His name is also inscribed on a wall within the Courts of the Missing in the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, located in Honolulu, Hawaii. MM1c Bishop was survived by his wife, Johnnie Earl Hilliard Bishop, and their two-year-old daughter, Barrie Lou.

This information was researched and written on behalf of the USS Arizona Mall Memorial at the University of Arizona.

Sources: The Longview (Texas) Daily News; The Paris (Texas) News; The Dallas Morning News; National Museum of the Pacific War; Census; grave marker; Navy muster roll; marriage record; Veterans Administration.

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This story is part of the Stories Behind the Stars project (see https://www.storiesbehindthestars.org/). This is a national effort of volunteers to write the stories of all 400,000+ of the US WWII fallen here on Together We Served and on Fold3. Can you help write these stories? Related to this, there will be a smartphone app that will allow people to visit any war memorial or cemetery, scan the fallen person’s name and read his/her story.

Susan Singleton - Contributing Editor, Stories Behind the Stars

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Bishop, Grover Barron, MM1c