Reservist

ISS2 2015

Reservist Magazine is the award-winning official publication of the United States Coast Guard Reserve. Quarterly issues include news and feature articles about the men and women who comprise America's premier national maritime safety and security

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beneath the waves and those passengers and crew that survived the sinking had taken to the water or lifeboats in the darkness. On recording the situation for those men in the water, the ship's log noted, "all men in life jackets, lifeless." However, when COMANCHE's lookouts spotted lifeboats full of freezing survivors, the crew threw a cargo net over the cutter's port side. Charles David, Dick Swanson and several shipmates, clad only in ordinary un-insulated uniforms, swung into action as the cutter pulled alongside the boats. Racing against the clock and coping with waves ten feet high, David climbed down the forty-foot cargo net to lift DORCHESTER's living yet frozen survivors from the lifeboats onto the Comanche's deck. Swanson worked alongside David as they saved nearly 100 survivors from the lifeboats. At one point in the operation, COMANCHE'S executive officer Lt. Langford Anderson slipped and fell into the frigid seas. Without hesitation, David plunged into water that could kill within minutes and helped Anderson back on board the cutter. After hoisting the last survivors on board COMANCHE, David ascended the cargo net to the ship's deck. Despite being six years junior to Charles David, Dick Swanson succumbed to the cold and exhaustion and climbed no further than half way up. David encouraged his friend, yelling "C'mon Swanny. You can make it!" But Swanson was too tired and frozen to go any further. David descended the net to Swanson and, with the aid of second crewmen, moved Swanson's motionless body back up to the COMANCHE'S deck. David went in harm's way and risked his own life to save dozens of DORCHESTER survivors, COMANCHE's executive officer and his friend Dick Swanson. Swanson later described Charles David as a "tower of strength" on that tragic night, even though David suffered a serious illness of his own while performing his selfless feats of heroism. Days before the rescue operation, David had a raspy cough and, after his exposure to the frigid water and sub-freezing air temperatures, he contracted hypothermia. Later, when COMANCHE delivered its DORCHESTER survivors to an army base hospital in Greenland, doctors ordered an ambulance to retrieve David as well. It was the last time his shipmates would see him alive. He became bed-ridden as his cough became full-blown pneumonia. David's health declined rapidly and, within a few weeks, David succumbed to the illness. It took a number of weeks before Dick Swanson and COMANCHE's crew learned that their shipmate and friend had died. In the final irony of David's story, loved ones back home believed he was buried at sea, when he was actually interred temporarily in the frozen ground of Greenland. After the war, the service re-interred his remains at the Long Island National Cemetery at Farmdale, Long Island, only a few miles from his family in New York City. For decades, Charles David's widow had lived within miles of his final resting place without knowing it. However, sixty years after his heroic deeds, the service undertook a systematic search for David's immediate family and notified his next of kin. Charles Walter David, Jr., exemplified the Coast Guard's core values of honor, respect and devotion to duty. Despite his secondary status in a segregated service, he placed the needs of others above his own and played a key role in the rescue of nearly 100 DORCHESTER survivors. For his heroic service, David posthumously received the Navy & Marine Corps Medal, the Navy's highest recognition for wartime rescue and lifesaving. In 1999, he was posthumously awarded the Immortal Chaplains Prize for Humanity in the same ceremony that recognized famous South African archbishop, Desmond Tutu. And, in 2013, the Coast Guard commissioned David's namesake, a Fast Response Cutter (FRC), the CHARLES DAVID, JR. Charles W. david Jr. The U.S. Coast Guard Fast Response Cutter C HarlEs DaviD, Jr. (WPC 1107), moors at Mallory Square in Key West, Florida. 40 RESERVIST � Issue 2 • 2015

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