Robert Hampton Gray was born on November 2, 1917, in Trail, British Columbia, the middle of three children born to John Balfour Gray, a jeweller and veteran of the Boer War, and Wilhelmina Gray. Phyllis was the oldest, Robert was in the middle, and Jack was the youngest. The family moved early in Robert's childhood to Nelson, a small city in the West Kootenay region at the edge of Kootenay Lake, where his father established his jewellery business, was elected to town council, and raised his three children in a household that emphasized duty, education, and service. Robert was known to his friends as Hammy, was described as affable and irreverent, had a talent for impressions and an easy laugh, and was, by every account of those who knew him, the kind of person who made a room feel easier just by being in it. He completed high school in Nelson in 1936, enrolled at the University of Alberta, transferred to the University of British Columbia to study arts, and served as Associate Editor of the UBC yearbook alongside a young man named Pierre Berton, who would go on to become one of Canada's greatest journalists and historians. He intended to go to medical school at McGill when he was done.
He did not finish his degree. With the war expanding across Europe, Gray enlisted on July 18, 1940, in the Royal Canadian Naval Volunteer Reserve at HMCS Tecumseh in Calgary. He was 22 years old. His brother Jack, who had just graduated from high school at 18, had enlisted with the RCAF in Vancouver three weeks earlier, on June 28. Their parents in Nelson had sent both sons to the same war within the same month.
Gray was selected as one of 75 candidates to travel to Britain for officer and pilot training. They were ordinary seamen when they boarded the train at Montreal, ordinary seamen when they crossed the Atlantic, and ordinary seamen when they arrived at the Royal Navy training facilities at HMS Raleigh and then HMS St. Vincent. Of the 75, twelve chose to serve as Fleet Air Arm pilots. Gray was one of them. He received his naval wings in September 1941 and was commissioned a Sub-Lieutenant. The Royal Canadian Navy did not operate its own carrier aircraft, and so Gray, like all Canadian naval aviators of the period, flew on loan to the Royal Navy's Fleet Air Arm.
In the late autumn of 1941, while stationed at HMS Heron on the southwest coast of England, Gray had an encounter that would mark him for the rest of his life. His brother Jack was also in England, serving with the RCAF as a Wireless Operator and Air Gunner, and had been selected to appear as a crew member in the documentary film Target for Tonight, a 1941 production showing a real RAF bombing mission against Germany. Robert got to see Jack while both were in England. It was the last time they saw each other. On February 27, 1942, returning from night operations over Germany, Jack's Handley Page Hampden bomber crashed at Warmsworth, near Doncaster, in Yorkshire. He and his three crew members were killed. He was 21 years old. He was buried at Doncaster Rose Hill Cemetery. He was the first man from Nelson to die in the war.
Robert received the news while still in England. He was at HMS Winchester with 757 Naval Air Squadron at the time, conducting further training. A few months later, in May 1942, he was assigned to Africa, flying Hawker Hurricanes with shore-based squadrons in and around Nairobi, Kenya. He spent nearly two years there, waiting for a Japanese fleet that never came. His friends from those days remembered his impatience and deep frustration that the war kept moving beyond his reach. He was promoted Lieutenant in December 1942.
What his parents in Nelson carried through those two years, watching their surviving son keep flying while Jack lay in an English cemetery, is not documented in the available record. Robert wrote frequently to his parents and sister throughout the war, and many of his letters survive in the Canadian Letters archive, but the content of those conversations in Nelson, the weight of what John and Wilhelmina Gray felt about their second son pressing forward, belongs to the private history of that family and not to anything any source has recorded. What the record does show is that Robert Gray never requested reassignment, never sought a safer posting, and never showed any sign that the loss of his brother made him want to stop. If anything, the opposite seems true.
In February 1944, Gray returned to Britain and trained to fly the Vought F4U Corsair, the American carrier fighter the Royal Navy had adopted for Pacific operations. In August 1944 he joined 1841 Naval Air Squadron aboard HMS Formidable.
He found his war almost immediately. From August 24 through 29, 1944, Formidable launched Operation Goodwood, a series of raids against the German battleship Tirpitz anchored in Alten Fjord, Norway. On the final strike, August 29, Gray led a section of Corsairs against the German destroyers protecting the fjord. Enemy fire shot away most of his aircraft's rudder. Unable to land right away, he circled Formidable for 45 minutes, nursing the damaged aircraft through the carrier's landing pattern until he could bring it down safely. He was Mentioned in Dispatches for undaunted courage and determination. A second Mention followed on January 16, 1945, for his continued attacks against the Tirpitz.
In April 1945, Formidable joined the British Pacific Fleet operating alongside the United States Navy's Third Fleet in the final campaign against Japan. Gray led Corsairs against Japanese airfields at Ishigaki and Miyako in the Okinawa campaign and flew aggressively throughout the summer's strikes against the Japanese home islands. On July 18 he led a strafing run against airfields near Tokyo. On July 28 he helped sink a Japanese destroyer near the capital and was recommended for the Distinguished Service Cross. His citation read: "For determination and address in air attacks on targets in Japan."
On the morning of August 9, 1945, Gray led eight Corsairs off Formidable's deck. Their assigned target was Matsushima airfield on Honshu, but a previous strike from Formidable earlier that morning had already reduced it to rubble. The airfield was no longer a viable target. Gray had been briefed before departure that if the primary target was unusable, the secondary target was naval shipping at Onagawa Bay in Miyagi Prefecture. He redirected the flight.
What neither Gray nor any of the other pilots knew that morning was that a second atomic bomb was about to fall on Japan. Admiral Philip Vian, commanding Royal Naval forces attacking Japan, had been informed of the Nagasaki mission before the strike launched. The strategic picture by August 9 had shifted dramatically. The Soviet Union had declared war on Japan just the day before, on August 8, and Soviet forces were already pouring into Manchuria, eliminating any possibility of Japan negotiating a peace through the Soviets. The conventional firebombing campaign had already reduced most of Japan's major cities to ash. The first atomic bomb had fallen on Hiroshima three days earlier. And now a second was coming. The weight of all these pressures converging simultaneously made Japan's collapse feel genuinely imminent to anyone who could see the full picture. Continuing to spend pilots' lives for objectives that would soon be irrelevant was not a risk worth taking. Vian had specifically signalled his squadron commanders not to take unnecessary risks, and to limit bombing runs to a single pass per target. Gray acknowledged the order and led his flight toward Onagawa Bay.
The bay held at least four Japanese warships at anchor. Each Corsair carried two 500-pound bombs. Gray selected the escort ship Amakusa as his target, an Etorofu-class coastal defense vessel that had already survived a magnetic mine in December 1944 and a Task Force 58 air attack in February 1945 that killed 26 of her crew. She had been repaired twice and was lying in harbor when Gray's flight arrived over the bay. The concentrated anti-aircraft fire hit his aircraft on the first pass, tearing away one of his 500-pound bombs before he could release it. He pulled out of the run with one bomb remaining, his aircraft already damaged. He had one bomb left. He had direct orders to make only one pass.
He told his flight members he was going in again. They peeled off and followed him.
On the second pass, Gray descended to within approximately 50 feet of the Amakusa, his aircraft burning as he flew, and released his remaining bomb. It struck the ship directly, passed through the engine room, and detonated the magazine below the after gun turret. The explosion blew out the ship's side. The Amakusa sank rapidly with the loss of 71 of her crew. Gray's burning Corsair crashed into the bay. He did not survive. He was 27 years old.
His attack had taken place in the morning, local time in Japan. A few hours later, at 11:02 in the morning, the atomic bomb fell on Nagasaki, dropped from a B-29 named Bockscar. Japan surrendered six days later on August 15, 1945. Jack had been the first man from Nelson to die in the war. Robert was the last.
Robert Hampton Gray was posthumously awarded the Distinguished Service Cross on August 21, 1945, and the Victoria Cross on November 13, 1945. The Victoria Cross is the highest award for valor in the British Commonwealth, and Gray's was the last one awarded to any serviceman of any nation in the entire Second World War. The Victoria Cross citation described his attack on the Amakusa as an act of great valor carried out "in the face of fire from shore batteries and a heavy concentration of fire from some five warships," noting that Gray "pressed home his attack, flying very low in order to ensure success, and, although he was hit and his aircraft was in flames, he obtained at least one direct hit, sinking the destroyer," and that he had "consistently shown a brilliant fighting spirit and most inspiring leadership."
The Victoria Cross was officially presented to Gray's family on February 27, 1946. It was four years to the day since Jack had been killed in Yorkshire.
His body was never recovered. He remains in Onagawa Bay. In the 1980s, a man named Yoshio Kanda began a campaign to build a memorial to the Canadian pilot who had attacked his town. Kanda was not simply a shopkeeper moved by sentiment. He was a former communications officer in the Onagawa Defense Force, a military man who understood from his own experience what Gray had done and why. He had also been among those who built a memorial to the area's Japanese victims of the war, completed in 1966. His motivation for honoring Gray was not a romanticization of the enemy but something more considered. "It is not enemy soldiers we hate," Kanda said, "but the war itself." He chose to raise the memorial to honor the sacrifice of all parties and to create a symbol of peace between two nations that had spent the years since 1945 rebuilding a relationship. He was joined by Terry Milne, Canada's military attaché to Japan. Together they approached the mayor of Onagawa, a man named Zenjiro Suda, who as a boy had stood on the shore and watched Gray's final attack with his own eyes. Suda was apprehensive. The attack on August 9, 1945, had killed 149 Japanese civilians in addition to the Amakusa's crew. He agreed anyway. A granite memorial was carved in Victoria, British Columbia, and erected overlooking the bay where Gray's Corsair went in. On August 9, 1989, 44 years to the day after Gray died, the memorial was officially dedicated in the presence of Gray's sister Phyllis, her family, surviving members of Gray's squadron, and survivors from the crew of the Amakusa. It is the only memorial in Japan dedicated to an Allied serviceman.
When the earthquake and tsunami of March 11, 2011 struck Onagawa, the wave killed 1,300 of the town's 10,000 residents. Among those killed were Kanda's daughter Emiko and her husband. Kanda himself survived. The memorial was knocked over by the earthquake. Local volunteers from the Onagawa Lions Club found it and moved it to new ground beside the local hospital, where a rededication ceremony was held on August 24, 2012. Kanda's grandson Yoshitake has continued his grandfather's work of maintaining the memorial and welcoming Canadians to Onagawa. Hampton Gray rests in the waters of Onagawa Bay alongside the Kandas who chose to remember him. The community of Onagawa and the city of Nelson have maintained ties ever since, with student delegations traveling between the two communities across the Pacific, sitting across tables in each other's kitchens, bound together by the morning of August 9, 1945.
Gray's sister Phyllis, who outlived both brothers, lived to see the Japanese memorial dedicated. The family name is on the family headstone in Brechin Cemetery in Nelson alongside both brothers, though Robert has no grave there. His name is on the Halifax Memorial in Point Pleasant Park in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Panel 13, among the Canadians who died or were lost at sea. His bust stands among 14 figures at the Valiants Memorial in Ottawa, unveiled in 2006. A mountain in Kokanee Glacier Provincial Park in British Columbia, named after both brothers on March 12, 1946, rises to 2,753 meters above sea level. It is called Grays Peak, and it is the mountain pictured on the label of Kokanee Beer. Most of the people who have ever raised a Kokanee did not know what they were looking at.
He was the middle child. He enrolled at university intending to be a doctor. He and Pierre Berton edited the yearbook together. He spent two years in East Africa waiting for a Japanese fleet that never showed up. He saw his brother alive in England and received the news of his death weeks later. He flew a borrowed plane on August 9, 1945. He pressed his attack to within 50 feet while his aircraft was on fire. He sank the ship. He was the last man from Nelson to die in the war, and the last recipient of the Victoria Cross in the entire Second World War. He was 27 years old. He is still in the bay.
At the California Capital Airshow at Mather Airport in Sacramento in 2025, I photographed a Corsair wearing Royal Navy markings. The bureau number was 92436. It is a Goodyear-built FG-1D accepted by the United States Navy in July 1945, a month before the war ended. It served with VMF-213 at Pearl Harbor in the immediate postwar period, was rescued from a scrapyard by Ed Maloney of Planes of Fame in 1959, and was sold to the Canadian Warplane Heritage Museum in Hamilton, Ontario in 1973, where it flew for 25 years in tribute markings as KD658/115, honoring the memory of Robert Hampton Gray. The aircraft has no operational connection to Gray. It was not his squadron, not his navy, and not his plane. The Corsair Gray flew on August 9, 1945, lies at the bottom of Onagawa Bay. Bureau 92436 was the Canadians' way of keeping his name visible, and it worked. I looked up the bureau number when I got home and found all of this.