Ships
- USS Isherwood (DD-520) Captain from 12 April 1943
Robert E. Gadrow was born in Rhode Island on 22 January 1908. He graduated from the United States Naval Academy with the class of 1931. He was a lieutenant by June 1938. In the first year of the Pacific war he rose to temporary lieutenant commander, in June 1942, and to temporary commander on 1 November 1942.
Early in 1943 he held a brief command of the destroyer Kane, from 22 to 28 February. On 12 April 1943, at the New York Navy Yard, he commissioned the new Fletcher-class destroyer Isherwood and became her first commanding officer. Bethlehem Steel had launched her at Staten Island the previous November.
Isherwood spent the rest of April and May working up in Casco Bay, Maine, and off Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Through June and July she patrolled and escorted shipping from Argentia, Newfoundland. On 5 August 1943 she sailed for the British Isles in company with the troopship Queen Mary and entered Scapa Flow on 19 August.
There she operated with the British Home Fleet. The duty included exercises with British, Canadian, and Dutch ships and a sweep toward Spitsbergen in search of the German battleship Tirpitz. Isherwood left Scapa Flow on 14 September and reached Boston with a convoy on 29 September 1943.
The destroyer was then ordered to the Pacific. She sailed from Boston on 14 November, went on through San Francisco to Pearl Harbor, and on 11 December joined Task Force 94 in the Aleutians. For the remainder of Gadrow's tour she carried out antisubmarine patrols in Alaskan waters. His command of Isherwood ended on 11 April 1944.
On 31 August 1944 he took command of the destroyer minelayer Henry A. Wiley. The ship was at Pearl Harbor on 9 December 1944 and on 16 February 1945 arrived off Iwo Jima for the landing operation. He stayed through the opening weeks of that campaign and gave up command on 17 March 1945. He remained in the Navy after the war, was made a temporary captain on 11 July 1949, and died in 1990. He was buried in the United States Naval Academy Cemetery at Annapolis.