A father’s heroism remembered
Sons recall how their father, a physician on a WWII carrier, died saving lives 75 years ago.
George Fox was found right where he wanted to be, doing what he volunteered to do when he joined the Navy after Pearl Harbor.
As bombs fell out of Japanese planes and pierced the decks of the aircraft carrier USS Franklin, George Fox was in the sick bay, trying to save the lives of his fellow sailors.
On that horrible day 75 years ago, the Milwaukee physician who left his wife and three young children behind as so many other Americans did during World War II, refused to save himself by leaving the ship’s medical quarters.
More than 800 men died on the USS Franklin on March 19, 1945, George Fox among them.
His family later learned his lifeless body was found slumped over with his hands holding oxygen masks for two men he tried and failed to save.
“He refused to leave the sick bay,” said his son Rick Fox, 82, of Winnetka, Ill. “He must have known he was going to die because of all the bombs exploding or because of asphyxiation from smoke.”
George Fox was posthumously awarded the Navy Cross, second only to the Medal of Honor.
During the war the Fox family was living on Downer Avenue on Milwaukee’s east side. Bill Fox, 83, has few memories of his father, but he remembers how his mother Elise heard the terrible news.
“There’s an alley that goes behind our house. I was standing there when I saw someone from the military drive up and give my mother a note,” he said. “She
couldn’t tell anyone.”
The telegram reported that George Fox had been killed and his remains buried at sea with full military honors. The note ended with these words: To prevent possible aid to our enemies please do not divulge the name of his ship or station.
Caught up in the war effort
At 38 years old, George Fox was the second oldest person on board the USS Franklin. As the Fox brothers recall, their mother, who died in 2002, never tried to dissuade him from joining the Navy.
“She was strong as a rock,” said Bill Fox, a Milwaukee attorney. “They were all caught up in the war effort. Everyone was very patriotic.”
That March 1945 attack on the USS Franklin crippled but did not sink the ship nicknamed “Big Ben” after the American founding father. One of the bombs dropped by the Japanese pierced the flight deck where 31 armed and fueled planes were warming up and penetrated to the hangar deck where 16 fueled planes were located.
An explosion on the hangar deck ignited aircraft fuel tanks killing all but two crewmen on that deck. Planes on the flight deck waiting to take off were smashed together, igniting fires and explosions and detonating a dozen air-tosurface rockets.
Though it was the most heavily damaged U.S. aircraft carrier to survive World War II, the Franklin is not as well known as other carriers that served in the Pacific, like the Saratoga, Lexington or Enterprise.
George Fox was assigned to the Franklin when she was commissioned, making him a “plank owner,” a member of a U.S. ship’s crew when the vessel is commissioned for active service.
The Franklin participated in several battles in 1944 and 1945 and was hit in a kamikaze attack near Leyte in October 1944, killing 56 men and wounding 60. One of the wounded was a man named Thomas Hoy who lost an eye and suffered a severed backbone from shrapnel.
Rick Fox has few memories of his father aside from the nice man who brought him a box of chocolates while home on leave. It wasn’t until after Rick Fox left the Marines in 1963 that he got interested in military history and began to wonder about his father’s service and death. He attended a USS Franklin reunion and learned more from sailors who served with the man they called Doc Fox.
He also searched for information on the Internet and read an account of his father performing brain surgery on a wounded man aboard the Franklin.
“He was a general surgeon, he didn’t know anything about brain surgery, but he operated anyway. It took him two hours to cut through the man’s damaged skull and remove blood clots,” Fox said.
That man was Hoy. Intrigued, Rick Fox tried to find out what happened to Hoy, so he wrote to the Navy and learned Hoy was from Massachusetts. Fox found a phone number for a man with the same name. A woman who answered the phone asked why he was calling.
“I said, ‘Well, my father operated on him.’ She said, ‘Would you like to talk to him?’ My heart just dropped,” Fox recalled.
He spoke to Hoy and learned he was a quadriplegic who was able to marry and father three daughters because George Fox had saved his life. Rick Fox never met Hoy in person but after Hoy’s death, he managed to meet his wife and daughters. And every year on March 19, the date of George Fox’s death, and on Memorial Day, one of Hoy’s daughters always emails Rick Fox her thanks.
Related to Chappie Fox
George Fox grew up in Madison, was an excellent pole vaulter and loved to fish for musky. One of his brothers was Chappie Fox, who helped start the Great Circus Parade in Milwaukee. He came from a long line of medical professionals, and after earning an undergraduate degree at the University of Wisconsin-Madison he attended Rush Medical College in Chicago because that’s where his father, George Sr., attended medical school.
George Fox Sr. helped established a Spanish flu clinic in Wisconsin before dying of the flu in 1920.
After their father’s death, Rick and Bill Fox and their younger sister Mary, moved to River Hills and grew up surrounded by family, like Chappie Fox, who looked after them, attended their sports events, graduations and life milestones. They know their lives would have been different had their father survived the war, but they also know they were not unusual — many died during World War II, leaving behind children who grew up without a parent.
The Fox brothers have made sure their family’s next generations know of George Fox’s heroism and sacrifice. And they continue to hold their father’s memory close to their hearts.
Bill Fox keeps the rosary found in his father’s pocket after his death.
Rick Fox has his dad’s Navy Cross and Purple Heart framed and hanging in his bedroom. He sees it every day before he goes to sleep and when he awakens each morning.