The Bravest Man: Gunnery Sergeant Fred W. Stockham

Fred William Stockham came into the world on March 16, 1881, in Detroit, and almost immediately the world made clear it had no particular plans for him. His mother died when he was very young. His father, a traveling man with no apparent interest in raising a child alone, brought the boy to New Jersey and left him in the care of a foster mother in Newark. That was that.

What kind of boy he was, what he dreamed about, whether he was angry or sad or quietly determined — the record doesn't say. What it does say is that by the time Fred Stockham was 22 years old, he had found something that would claim the rest of his life: the United States Marine Corps. He enlisted on July 16, 1903.

Over the next four years he went places most Americans couldn't have found on a map. The Philippines, twice. China in between. He was honorably discharged in New York City in July of 1907 as a private and moved to Belleville, New Jersey. He took a job doing the other kind of work that suited a man built for danger. He became a firefighter, first in Detroit briefly, and then with the Newark Fire Department, where he served from 1907 to 1912. He lived at 96 Dow Street and attended St. Peter's Church. It was, by all appearances, a quiet life.

It didn't last. On May 31, 1912, Stockham walked back into a recruiter's office and re-enlisted. He was thirty-one years old. Whatever civilian life had to offer, it wasn't enough. Over the next four years he rose to sergeant and served primarily in Nicaragua, where the Marines were deployed to stabilize a country in near-constant upheaval. He saw combat at León on October 6, 1915. By the time he was discharged again in May of 1916, he had the look and manner of a man who had been tested in more than one country and come out the other side intact.

He re-enlisted within a week.

By February of 1918, Gunnery Sergeant Fred Stockham — now 36, an old man by infantry standards — was in France. The war he was walking into was unlike anything in human history. The Western Front was a scar running nearly five hundred miles across Europe, from the Belgian coast to the Swiss border, and along it millions of men had spent four years digging themselves into the earth in an attempt to survive weapons that had outpaced all previous imagination. The trenches were not the romantic redoubts of old war paintings. They were ditches of standing water, mud, rats the size of small dogs, lice, the smell of rot and wet wool and unwashed men. Soldiers lived inches below ground and still died by the thousands every week — to artillery, machine gun fire, snipers, disease, and increasingly, to gas.

The Germans introduced poison gas on a massive scale in 1915, and by 1918 it had become one of the defining horrors of the war. Mustard gas was perhaps the most despised weapon in the arsenal. It had a faint smell of garlic or horseradish. It settled close to the ground and lingered. One of its cruelest qualities was that the symptoms were significantly delayed. A man could be exposed and feel almost nothing for hours, going about his duties with no idea his body had already begun to break down. Then the blistering would start — on the skin, in the throat, across the eyes. The lungs would begin to deteriorate from the inside, the airways ulcerating and filling with fluid. Men blinded by it stumbled in lines to aid stations, each man with a hand on the shoulder of the man ahead, as rendered in John Singer Sargent's famous painting Gassed. Those who got a full dose and no treatment drowned slowly in their own bodies over the course of days. A gas mask — the crude, rubbery, claustrophobic masks every soldier carried — was the difference between that fate and life. Losing it was among the worst things that could happen to a man on the line.

Stockham's unit, the 96th Company, 2nd Battalion, 6th Marine Regiment, entered the fight at Belleau Wood on June 6, 1918. The battle had been raging since the first days of June, when German forces smashed through Allied lines and drove to within thirty miles of Paris. French units were falling back in disarray when the Marines were ordered in — some of the first American forces to see major offensive action in the war. A French officer reportedly told a Marine captain to join the retreat. The captain's response became legend: "Retreat? Hell, we just got here."

Belleau Wood was a dense, boulder-strewn hunting preserve about the size of Central Park, and the Germans had turned it into a fortress. Machine gun nests were dug into the rock. Snipers worked from the trees. The Marines attacked across open wheat fields, standing upright in long lines in the old style, into interlocking fields of fire from Maxim guns that cut them apart. The casualties on the first day were the worst the Corps had ever suffered. They attacked again. And again. Six times in all before the wood would finally be declared clear.

The 96th Company bore its share of the carnage. Among its officers was a young second lieutenant named Clifton B. Cates, a Tennessee lawyer's son who would survive Belleau Wood, Soissons, Blanc Mont, and the Meuse-Argonne, earn a fistful of decorations, and one day become the 19th Commandant of the Marine Corps. At one point during the battle, surrounded and low on men, Cates sent a message back to regiment: "I have no one on my left and very few on my right. I WILL HOLD." He would later say of Fred Stockham that he was the bravest man he had ever known. Coming from Clifton Cates, that was saying something.

By the night of June 13, the battle had ground into its second week. The Marines had taken appalling losses — the 96th Company at one point was reduced to a handful of effective riflemen — but had refused to give ground. The Germans, unable to dislodge them by direct assault, turned to artillery and gas. On the night of June 13 into the early hours of June 14, they unleashed a combined bombardment of high-explosive and mustard gas shells on the Marine positions.

The shelling was intense. Shells don't just explode — they arrive. There is a sound, a pressure, a concussion that moves through the body before the mind can process what's happening. Men were killed and wounded throughout the company. In the chaos, with gas saturating the air and artillery still falling, Gunnery Sergeant Stockham was doing what a gunnery sergeant does: moving, organizing, directing the evacuation of the wounded to the aid station.

At some point in the darkness and the confusion, Stockham reached a wounded Marine whose gas mask had been shredded by shrapnel. The man was lying exposed in air thick with mustard gas. His name was Private Barak Mattingly, a young man from St. Louis.

Without hesitating, Stockham removed his own mask and put it on Mattingly's face. According to the Medal of Honor citation he would later receive, he did this "well knowing that the effects of the gas would be fatal to himself."

Then he kept working.

This is the part that makes the act almost incomprehensible. Giving a drowning man your life preserver and jumping into the water is one thing. Giving a drowning man your life preserver and then continuing to pull other drowning men from the water is something else entirely. Stockham directed and assisted in the evacuation of the wounded, unprotected, with the gas still in the air, with artillery still falling, until his body simply stopped cooperating. He collapsed.

He died on June 22, 1918, nine days later. He was 37 years old. Mustard gas poisoning is not a quick death. The tissue damage is progressive — the airways ulcerate and fill, breathing becomes increasingly labored, the body essentially dissolves from the inside on a timetable of days. There was no treatment in 1918 beyond keeping the patient comfortable and waiting. Fred Stockham had breathed a lethal dose and spent more than a week dying of it. His remains were buried in France.

Barak Mattingly went home.

He went home because Fred Stockham had put a mask on his face in the dark, in the gas, under fire, and carried him to the aid station. Mattingly had his own wounds from that night — the gas had touched him too, and for the rest of his life he would sometimes have to close his office door and lie down on the floor when his lungs failed him. He went on to become a prominent attorney in St. Louis, a senior partner in a well-regarded firm, chairman of the Missouri Republican Committee, a member of the Republican National Committee, and one of the more influential political figures in the city for decades. He was tall, handsome, described by those who knew him as robust-looking even as his lungs quietly reminded him of a June night in France.

In 1919, Mattingly helped found American Legion Post 245 in St. Louis. He made sure it was named after Fred Stockham.

He also spent the better part of two decades making sure the rest of the country remembered who Fred Stockham was. A medal citation had been written, the heroism witnessed, but the official machinery moved slowly and the statute of limitations on the award had technically expired. It took a joint resolution of Congress — passed on July 15, 1939, 21 years after Stockham's death — to waive that limitation and authorize the Medal of Honor posthumously. When it was finally issued, no relatives of Stockham's could be located. The American Legion post Mattingly had founded became its custodian for a time.

Barak Mattingly died in 1957, 39 years after the night Stockham saved his life.

The name Fred W. Stockham has been carried on two United States Navy vessels. The first was the destroyer USS Stockham (DD-683), commissioned in 1944 and sent to the Pacific, where she earned eight battle stars across World War II and the Korean War before being decommissioned in 1957. The second was the USNS GySgt Fred W. Stockham (T-AK-3017), a massive maritime prepositioning ship commissioned in 2001 to support Marine Corps operations worldwide. She served for twenty-eight years, delivering wartime aid to European allies in 2022 and supporting operations in Gaza in 2024, before being retired in 2025.

In Belleville, New Jersey — the town where Stockham once lived at 96 Dow Street, attended St. Peter's Church, and quietly went about the work of being a firefighter between tours — the Belleville Historical Society dedicated a monument to him at St. Peter's Church cemetery. In 2018, the township council declared a Sgt. Fred Stockham Week. His name had been missing from the local Medal of Honor monument for a hundred years before a historian noticed the omission.

Clifton Cates lived until 1970. He rose to four-star general, led Marines at Iwo Jima, served as Commandant of the Marine Corps. He survived more battles than most men ever see, was shot at, gassed, concussed, and wounded more times than the record cleanly tracks. When he looked back on all of it — all the men he had fought beside and watched die across two world wars — he kept coming back to one name.

The bravest man he ever knew, he said, was a gunnery sergeant from Belleville, New Jersey, who took off his gas mask in the dark and gave it to someone else.