I have a new hero and his name is Charles Jackson French. He was born in Arkansas on 25 September 1919. In 1937 he enlisted in the Navy. Like many others at the time, he probably saw it as a way to earn a living while getting ‘3 hots and a cot.’ When he was mustered out at the end of his hitch, he returned to Omaha Nebraska where members of his family lived. But four days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, French re-enlisted, eager to do his part for his country. He was assigned to the USS Gregory. The Gregory was a Wickes-class destroyer laid down during WWI and converted to an APD (a high-speed transport) in WWII. On 31 July 1942, the Gregory became part of Task Force-62, the task force given the job of securing Guadalcanal.
On 4 September 1942, the Gregory along with another APD, the Little was returning to the anchorage at Tulagi after dropping off a Marine Raider battalion on Savo Island. Since the night was pitch black and hazy, the two ships began to patrol rather than try and find their way through the tricky channel in the darkness. At 0056 lookouts on the ships spotted muzzle flashes from Japanese ships shelling Henderson Field. Radar revealed four enemy ships. Then a Navy pilot, assuming that the shelling was coming from a submarine dropped a string of flares right over the Gregory and the Little, exposing them to 3 Japanese destroyers and a Japanese cruiser. Badly outgunned, the two ships fought back but to no avail. In minutes, the Gregory was dead in the water and on fire. Her badly wounded skipper Lt. Commander Harry Bauer gave the order to abandon ship.
French went in the water along with the other crewmen from the Gregory. He climbed aboard a life raft and began collecting other survivors including Ensign Robert Adrian. Of the 15 or so survivors, every man except French was wounded, many of them badly. Worse, the currents were taking the raft towards a stretch of Japanese held coast. All of the survivors feared that if they were found by the Japanese they’d be executed at once. French immediately volunteered to tow the raft away from the beach. He stripped down, tied a line to his life jacket and began swimming. And kept swimming. Through shark infested waters. He towed the raft and its survivors until dawn-somewhere between six to eight hours-until they were spotted by a plane and a landing craft came out to rescue them.
French was hailed as a hero and rightly so. Now you’d think that a man like this would be given a medal. Ensign Adrian certainly thought so, he recommended French for a Navy Cross. What French got was . . . a commendation. You see, French was black. He was a mess steward aboard the Gregory, the only job he was allowed to do in the segregated Navy. Lt. Cdr. Bauer was posthumously promoted to Commander and given a Silver Star. In 1942 there was no way that the Navy was going to give a higher award to a petty officer, especially a black petty officer than to his commanding officer. French didn’t complain and after the cheering ended, he went back to war, serving aboard the USS Endicott which was doing convoy duty in the North Atlantic and then aboard the USS Frankford which was at D-Day and the invasion of Southern France.
After the war, French suffered from PTSD and alcoholism. He passed away in 1956. Now there is a movement to upgrade his award. Bruce Wigo who at one point headed the International Swimming Hall of Fame has done his best to spread French’s story, and Representative Don Bacon whose district includes Omaha has written to the Navy seeking to upgrade French’s award. I read about French in my newsfeed, in an article from the Omaha World-Herald written by Steve Liewer and it inspired me to try and spread the word about my new hero, Charles Jackson French. So, if you read this, please, spread the word. Petty Officer French was a true American hero and he deserves to be recognized as such, even eighty years after the fact.
But perhaps the best tribute he got at the time was from the men he rescued. Once ashore, some Navy Masters-at-arms tried to separate French from his shipmates whom he’d rescued. After all, a black man shouldn’t be in a tent for white men. His shipmates threatened to fight anyone who tried to make him leave. They knew a hero when they saw one.
Material in this article is drawn from Steve Liewer’s article “Medal sought for Black WWII sailor from Omaha lauded as a hero, then forgotten.” and from Wikipedia entries on the USS Gregory and Charles Jackson French.
Here is a link to Mr. Liewer’s article: https://omaha.com/news/local/history/medal-sought-for-black-wwii-sailor-from-omaha-lauded-as-hero-then-forgotten/article_99cb9968-cbda-11eb-a17d-1743646bdf7a.html?