GEORGE DROHAN • WWII & VIETNAM WAR
George Drohan, 98
Gloucester, MA
Born 4/28/1927
Born/Raised: Gloucester, MA
Service: US Army/Army Security Agency
Rank: Master Sergeant (E-8)
Dates of Service: 1945-1968 (WWII/Vietnam)
If you sent military message transmissions in Europe between 1945-1947 or in Vietnam from 1964 to 1965, there’s a good chance that George Drohan was listening in and copying them down to send to Command. George is the 12th of 13 brothers and sisters born to Katherine and William Drohan on Hartz Street. His father, a mill worker, died when he was six years old and his mother died in February 1945. Right after graduating from GHS, the 17-year-old collected his diploma and headed to Boston to enlist in the Army near the end of World War II.
He had spent four years in ROTC in high school and the Army popped him into an engineering program at Camp Claiborne in Louisiana before shipping him off to Italy on the USS Blue Ridge Victory – “everyone said the Mediterranean was smooth, but I was way down in the bottom and every time the screws came out of the water you’d feel it.”
He arrived in Naples with the 88th Infantry, but they didn’t need engineers, so the Army shifted him to the 88thSignal Co. and trained him to listen in to any, and all, radio transmissions from all over Europe. He spent the next 18 months in Italy before leaving the Army in February 1947 as a corporal. He returned home to Gloucester, but there weren’t many jobs available, so two months later he re-enlisted in the Army Security Agency (ASA) and became an intercept operator.
It took him two weeks to arrive at his first posting at the US Embassy in Tehran, Iran. It was supposed to be a two-year posting, but Iranian civilians had set light to the oil wells filling the skies with thick black smoke. The ASA pulled him after nine months and sent him back to Virginia for even more training. What followed, career-wise, was twenty years in embassies in Turkey, Syria, Beirut, Egypt, all assigned to the State Department. By 1953 he was a Master Sergeant serving in Istanbul, Turkey.
In 1964 he was posted to the 8th Radio Research Unit in Phu Bai, Vietnam, listening to North Vietnamese radio transmissions out of Hanoi. At the end of 1965 they shipped him back to Fort Devens where he retired as a Morse code instructor in 1968.
On the personal front, while serving as a courier to the Middle East posted in Madrid, he met Air Force nurse Anne Cummings, from Illinois, at a Moroccan airbase. She left her service with the Air Force as a 1stLieutenant and headed home. She returned a short while later and met up with George in Iraq. She got off her flight with two wedding rings and a wedding dress. “I was lucky there was a Jesuit there.” The two married and set up house until the Army sent home all the spouses. He stayed in Baghdad for another year before joining Anne in Mt. Vernon, Ill, “a dry city with no beer.” They packed up her Ford and drove to Gloucester where they settled while George finished his three-year assignment at Fort Devens.
Before he’d re-enlisted, George had taken the Civil Service exam, so on his return to Gloucester, he secured a position at the Rockport Post Office, a position he held for 22 years. In 1964, they had a son, George, Jr., who died in 2023, and he has a daughter, Kelly, who lives in Gloucester. Anne died in 2007 at 78. George currently lives in a senior complex in Danvers.