Ships
- USS Gregory (APD-3) In command, 7 August 1942
Harry Frederick Bauer was born on 17 July 1904 at Camp Thomas in Lytle, Georgia, the son of a U.S. Army first sergeant. Chattanooga was his home. He entered the Naval Academy in 1923, graduated with the Class of 1927, and was commissioned an ensign on 2 June of that year.
His first decade as an officer mixed sea duty with time at Annapolis. He served in the destroyer Twiggs, the oiler Cuyama, and the destroyer Tracy, and he spent a tour as an instructor at the Naval Academy. In 1937, while he was assigned to Tracy, the Academy granted him the degree that officers of his class could claim years after graduation. He was promoted to lieutenant on 30 June 1936. In February 1939 he reported to the Bureau of Navigation in Washington as a detail officer. On 1 July 1941 he became a lieutenant commander and stayed in the bureau until he was ordered back to sea.
By the Guadalcanal campaign Bauer was commanding officer of Gregory. She had started as a flush-deck destroyer of the First World War and had been rebuilt as the high-speed transport APD-3, with room for troops and landing boats and only a modest gun battery. He came to her from Washington around the turn of the year and had her working in the short, close-in hauls the southern Solomons required.
On 7 August 1942 Gregory put Marines ashore on Guadalcanal, the first day of that campaign. She remained in the area after the landing, moving men and supplies along the coast and standing by the force already fighting inland. The busy hours were at night, in a sound where Japanese warships still moved freely.
On the night of 4–5 September, Gregory and the transport Little had landed a Marine Raider battalion on Savo Island and were heading back toward Tulagi. Three Japanese destroyers, Yudachi, Hatsuyuki, and Murakumo, were in the same water, covering a small landing of their own and preparing to shell the airfield. Flares from a patrol plane lit the two American ships, and the Japanese destroyers opened fire. Bauer took the lightly armed Gregory in to meet them. Searchlights caught her. He fought the ship, scored hits while trying to draw clear, and kept the guns firing until shells burst her boilers and set the decks ablaze. Wounded, he ordered the crew over the side. Two sailors were helping him into the water when he heard another man calling, and he sent those two to help. Bauer was lost. Gregory sank stern first off Lunga Point in the early morning of 5 September 1942, and Little went down in the same fight.
The Navy advanced him to commander after his death and awarded him the Silver Star and the Purple Heart. A memorial marker stands in Arlington National Cemetery, and his name is on the Tablets of the Missing at the Manila American Cemetery. The destroyer minelayer Harry F. Bauer, launched at Bath, Maine, on 9 July 1944 and sponsored by his widow, carried his name. Off Okinawa in 1945 that ship earned a Presidential Unit Citation for radar-picket and screening duty.