Ships
- USS Aylwin (DD-355) Captain, 15 June 1942 – 7 January 1943
- USS Terry (DD-513) Captain, 26 January 1943 – 1944
George Richardson Phelan was born in Memphis, Tennessee, on 31 October 1902. He graduated from the United States Naval Academy in the class of 1925 and made his career in the Navy. By the spring of 1940 he was a lieutenant commander, the rank he held when the United States entered the Second World War.
From 20 November 1940 until April 1942 he commanded the light minelayer Tracy, a destroyer converted for mine work and numbered DM-19. That tour ran from the last months of peace through the opening of the Pacific war. He left her in the spring of 1942.
On 15 June 1942 he took command of the destroyer Aylwin. The ship, DD-355, was a Farragut-class destroyer that had already served in Hawaiian waters through the first months of the war. Phelan had her for the rest of 1942, while American destroyers shifted into the long campaign around Guadalcanal and the Solomon Islands, screening heavier ships and working the routes that kept the fighting supplied. On 1 August 1942, still in command of Aylwin, he was given the temporary rank of commander. He left the ship on 7 January 1943.
He was soon ordered to a new destroyer. Terry, DD-513, was a Fletcher-class ship built by Bath Iron Works in Maine. Her keel had been laid in June 1942 and she had gone down the ways that November. She was commissioned at the Boston Navy Yard on 26 January 1943 with Phelan in command. He saw her through fitting out at Boston in February, shakedown training off Guantanamo Bay, and the post-shakedown work that followed back in Boston. On 2 April she shifted from Boston to Norfolk, and two days later she headed north to Argentia, Newfoundland, in the screen of a convoy.
Early summer still found Terry in New England waters. On 10 June 1943 she was among the destroyers escorting the battleships Iowa and Texas during trials and exercises off Casco Bay, Maine, in company with Walker, Bulmer, and Barker. On 20 July 1943, while he remained her commanding officer, Phelan was advanced to the temporary rank of captain.
That same month Terry went to the Pacific. From 12 to 24 July she escorted the new aircraft carrier Yorktown from Panama to Pearl Harbor, then stayed in Hawaiian waters for training until 19 August. She sailed that day from Pearl Harbor for Suva, in Fiji, and continued on to Efate in the New Hebrides, arriving in early September. From there she entered the Solomon Islands fighting, escorting supply convoys and patrolling as the advance moved up the chain toward Bougainville. She was at Port Purvis, off Tulagi, on 17 and 18 November 1943. Japanese aircraft attacked her on 3 December on the way from Guadalcanal to Bougainville, and again on 14 December on another run toward Bougainville.
Phelan left Terry on 3 January 1944 and turned her over to John Marshall Lee. The destroyer stayed in the Pacific war under later commanding officers, including William Brigham Moore. Phelan died in Memphis on 25 May 1975, at the age of seventy-two.