Philip Drake (1925-2007)
The War Years
A narrative by Kendra Gemmett from remembrances of his service in World War II as told to Barbara and Paul Caswell, Rye Beach NH 2003.
Tom Brokaw did not know Philip Drake, but if he had, he surely would have included his story in his book The Greatest Generation, as Phil was surely a member in good standing. As with many of his generation, he served his country and returned to his hometown and continued to contribute to the life he knew there.
Philip Drake, raised in the bucolic and gently leaf-arched roads of Rye Beach, NH, attended Portsmouth High School, but for only a short time. At grade 10 he entered Hampton Academy from where, in 1942 at age 17 he enrolled at the Billard Academy in New London, Connecticut which was a naval training prep school for the Coast Guard Academy. Phil felt fortunate to have gotten in as the “schools were filling up with people trying to further their careers in service of people.” At Billard, he learned about navigation and seamanship. When in November of 1942, he entered the Navy, his education and training earned him an assignment as Quartermaster, third class.
From the training prep school, Phil was sent to the Great Lakes Naval Training Station, and from there went to the west coast by rail for further training. First stop was in Mir Island, California, and then with a company, on to [Grommit[1]] in Washington State, near Seattle, where “we were to work on ships coming into port there which had come from Pearl Harbor. After being bombed and crippled, the Tennessee, the California, and the West Virginia, all those battleships were pretty well beat up from the Japs (sic) raiding Pearl Harbor, so we had to paint, scrape, chip paint and help do the maintenance to get them back into good shape so they could go back to battle again, which they did.” Phil then became part of a group chosen to serve on an American escort carrier, the USS Block Island, known as CVE-21. From Tacoma, Washington, a short distance from [Grommit], the crew of the newly commissioned USS Block Island participated in training in the Puget Sound, and then headed to San Diego. There they took on board a squadron of planes, fighters and torpedo bombers, and trained for the next two months before heading for the Panama Canal and ultimately to Norfolk, Virginia. Training there continued offshore with flight landing skills. At that point the ship became part of a convoy which went to [Gention*[2]] Newfoundland. There they joined a convoy of other ships all packed tightly with Army P-30 and P-47 fighter planes, with their wings “clipped” to make room for as many as possible onboard. The convoy sailed to Ireland. The planes were left in Belfast and the ship returned to New York for more. This was all in preparation for D-Day.
At this point his ship went on submarine patrol off the Azores. The submarines were coming out of the Bay of Biscay and were from the French ports there. They were on patrol and the Navy had a system between the radio and the vhf whereby they could pinpoint the location of a German submarine as soon as it used its radio. Planes and destroyers would be sent to the location. “We had four destroyers with us at the same time, like a little task force. If they were in close enough range of the submarines, the destroyers would get right up into them and charge and shell fire. The planes would hunt them down or stay with them.”
In late ‘43 and ‘44 the system changed as the planes all had radar which had not been the case to that point. And then, just before dark on May 29, 1944, a “German submarine came in beside our escorts and torpedoed the Block Island. The planes from the ship that were in the air had to go to the Azores and try to make it because they didn’t have that much fuel. The crew of the Block Island all had to get into their life jackets and life rafts and make the best of it.” On that night, Phil was 19 years old. The ship, which had 1,200 on board, lost six men but the losses among the pilots and crew of the planes counted for many more. Only 20% of the sailors could swim, but there were enough floats, float nets, and lifejackets, yet many who went overboard could not swim and did not have lifejackets on. “They gave a lot of trouble, they panicked and [it was necessary to get] all the floats from around the water near the ship away before it went down. Anyone within a hundred feet or so would be sucked right down to instant death.” Philip got into a life raft with a capacity of twenty. “We would swim away and get one [life raft] further away from the ship, because it was pretty hard to maneuver these rafts with all the people in them. We didn’t have any paddles.”
On the ship there was a high capacity of high-octane gasoline. All the tanks were flooded with CO2, so there was no chance of a fire, but the fuel tanks had all leaked and “when I went into the water, I recall you had about six inches of fuel on top of the water so you had to actually swim in this oil.” While in the water there were also concern about sharks as the water temperature was 80 degrees, Fahrenheit, and Phil was wearing white socks which he feared might attract a shark. However, the sharks didn’t show up “because of all the goings on and the explosions. It was difficult as the oil had thickened in the water. It was pretty messy trying to do anything and as darkness came on we just hoped that, you know, everybody would be picked up. By 11:00 it was pretty damned black out and they had search lights…looking out for crews of these ships.” The rescue ships came close enough to put out nets, which helped the sailors climb aboard. Those that needed medical help were treated right away. Many had swallowed the oil water.
Before Phil and many others got off the ship, the Block Island broke in half. He had to jump over a gap of six feet. The airplanes on board the ship were all collapsed, lying on their bellies. The torpedoes really did quite a job on it. But over the time of the ship’s life in service, it had sunk twenty-nine submarines.
A two-day sail on a small destroyer took them into Casablanca. “They didn’t have enough fresh water for us all to shower. We had this fuel oil on us in the hot sun which caused many to become very sunburned. We still had the oil on us, but we managed. They fed us pretty well, continuous food line, they never did stop cooking from dawn until dusk.” They stayed in Casablanca for a few days, by which time D-Day in Europe was going well, so they were eventually shipped back to Staten Island on a small ship, the Mission Bay, and earned a 30-day survivor’s leave, during which time he came home to Rye Beach. It is to be noted that the submarine which had torpedoed their ship was eventually hit and sunk.
As soon as his leave was over, Phil was shipped back to Washington State where a ship under construction was renamed the Block Island. The crew from the original ship all got on board and it left the Puget Sound for San Diego. But this time, instead of heading for Norfolk, they went to Okinawa, and over the rest of the time of Phil’s service, he went from Okinawa to Formosa and Manila, and Guam, Borneo, and the Philippines. “We were in Guam when the time of the atomic bomb being dropped on Hiroshima, but the Pacific battle was not just bombing and strafing. When Phil’s ship was relieved by another for a night patrol, that ship was hit by Kamikaze and sunk. He felt lucky to have escaped this but lost a neighbor from North Hampton who had been on that ship.
In spite of the duties of his military life, Phil never let go of his ties to home. He learned that a good friend from Rye Beach, Dick Locke, was on the cruiser Santa Fe, and he got permission to get over to that ship on the “captain’s gig.” When he arrived there the officer on the deck told the quartermaster: “We have an officer coming aboard.” It was because he had come over on the captain’s gig, they assumed that he was an officer, not the enlisted man he was. Unabashed, he said he was there to visit his friend, Dick Clark, who was down in the boiler room. Phil said he looked pretty pasty from having been below deck for so long. He looked up another friend, Bill Moulton, who was serving near Okinawa. Coincidentally, he had also seen Bill while in Casablanca. Beyond that, while in Manila he made a point of looking up Gene Merrill from Hampton, and at Subic Bay in the Philippines, George Hackett, also of Hampton, with whom he had played football. Also, at Subic Bay he met his “summer friend from Rye Beach,” Elsmere Berkam. The way Phil managed to make this happen was, according to him, very simple: He knew the ships on which his friends served, and knew what ships were in the area of his own ship and acted upon it.
The Battle of Okinawa was the last battle for Phil, followed by the invasion of the Philippines. Then he was sent to Borneo to help the British and Australians go on shore. After that, back to Guam before heading to the Kuril Islands north of Japan. The goal was to get there before the Russians, but the weather turned bad with hurricanes for about a week. The Russians got there first and to this day they hold some of those islands, which Phil says should have been given back to Japan. They are used now as Russian military bases.
Failing to get to the Kuril Islands, they were sent to Formosa to pick up several hundred British prisoners of war who had been kept on the island, many since the start of the war. They were taken to a hospital in Manilla. The atomic bomb had been dropped [8/45] and this was just after that. From there to Guam, and then through Pearl Harbor and home to San Diego.
Phil had a story from the time he spent in San Diego about taking a captain’s gig with a buddy and slipping through the lines to go out to see the Spruce Goose[3]. “We got out there and had engine trouble. In the meantime, the Coast Guard was patrolling, and they kept an eye on the Spruce Goose where it was anchored in the channel. But they helped us get started, not saying a damned word and we got back to the ship and tied up and secured ourselves in our bunks. It was pretty exciting, but we never got caught doing it.”
Heading home the sailors all took a train from San Diego to Boston, which took six or seven days as the train had to go to a side rail every time a freight train needed to pass. Phil was the in charge of the group but could not prevent some of the men just leaving the train along the way. Even though the war was over, they were still considered A.W.O.L.
Phil got home to Rye Beach, and immediately pitched in to help with the harvest of ice from a pond off Central Road, storing it in ice houses. As he said, people wanted their cocktails, so ice was needed.
Throughout the telling of his experiences in the war, Phil’s remembrances were never angry or bitter. He may have considered it just one more of life’s grand adventures, of which he had many.
Kendra Gemmett
Rye Beach
July 30, 2020
[1] Possibly Everett? There is no Grommit in Washington State
[2] St. John’s?
[3] A Howard Hughes plane, constructed entirely of plywood
