Stake Square

There's nothing unusual about cities putting up war memorials, but Worcester takes an unusual approach. In addition to the usual memorials, it names intersections after individuals. Nobody uses, or even knows, these names. People pass the piece of granite with the bronze plaque on the streetcorner with eyes glazed over. If they ever glance at it, they see a name that means nothing to them. Not only is the Greatest Generation thin on the ground and fading fast, but babies born after WWII are retiring now. For the kids who pass Stake Square (the intersection of Ames and Stockton) as they enter Vernon Park, the plaque may as well commemorate Caesar's Gallic Wars.

But I recently started walking a couple of miles around my neighborhood every morning, and the plaque for Seaman 1/c Herbert Stake, Jr caught my eye. He was lost at sea off Anzio Beach. It seemed so sad, so lacking, compared with all the "died of wounds received" or "killed in action" plaques. I wanted to know what had happened to him.  I doubted that anyone would remember. It seemed unlikely that he'd left a wife and child behind, and surely his parents are long gone. If any collateral relatives remain in the Worcester area, it's unlikely they're old enough to remember him.

I tried reading what I could into the plaque. A block away is a marker for a Seaman 2/c five years Stake's senior (though perhaps not senior in service), so I decided that Stake must have given satisfactory service to rate 1/c. It's far from the top of the pyramid, but I pegged him for a guy who did his work well and pulled his own weight. I didn't think I would be able to find anything else to satisfy my curiosity, but I googled Seaman Stake anyway.

I got three hits for the right person. One informed me that his parents had once lived a few streets away from the marker. Another was the list maintained by Worcester Public Library of all the memorial squares in the city. The third was a webpage memorializing all the crewmen of LCIs - Landing Craft Infantry - killed in action. Stake was listed as lost with the LCI 32, sunk by a mine.

There were 23 names listed under the LCI 32, the longest list on  the page. I thought, some of these can't be crewmen; this must include passengers being brought ashore. But a quick search told me the LCI's were far larger than I thought. This ship was over 150 feet long, built to land 200 infantry at a time, with two dozen or more crew.

It sank on the 26th of January, 1944. The landings at Anzio had begun the 22nd, and were nearly unopposed. That first trip into shore must have been nerve-wracking, but by the 26th, I concluded, it must have been routine. Sure, there would be more fighting to come, but Stake and his crewmates must have figured they'd weathered the worst for now. The mine must have come as a shock. But 23 men lost? If that wasn't the entire crew, it must have been close, and there was a whold flotilla of ships of Anzio. Why wasn't anyone rescued?

Then it hit me. Because if you wanted to rescue them, you needed to follow them into a minefield. If ever anything says "proceed with caution," "minefield" is it.

Now that I had the ship's designation, I was able to find one last site that gave me more of the story. In the early hours of the morning of the 26th, a storm drove the LST 422 into a known minefield, where it began to sink. In 20 to 30 foot seas that were pushing around larger ships than the LCI 32, and the winds to create such seas (and did I mention hail?), the LCI 32 was one of the ships that knew, whatever I thought in the last paragraph, you don't leave men in the water. They went into the minefield to rescue the men of the LST 422. There it became the second ship to sink, with almost all of its crew.

Now, the thing that caught my eye when I glanced at this particular plaque was a date. I thought, "That can't be right," and stopped to take a closer look, and start researching. Because when Herbert Stake, Jr. went into the sea off Anzio, he was 16 years old.

My mind protests, tries to reach back across the decades, tries to put a hand on this boy's shoulder and tell him, "Herbie, you don't belong here. Go on home, go back to school." But he's having none of my condescension. He just shrugs my hand off, and says, "My name isn't Herbie, Pops, it's Seaman Stake, and I've got work to do."

Stake Square

In Memory of

S 1/c Herbert Stake, Jr.

Born July 26, 1927

Lost at Sea

Anzio Beach, Italy

Jan. 26, 1944