Ships
- USS Philip (DD-498) Captain from 21 November 1942
Commander Thomas C. Ragan took command of the United States destroyer Philip (DD-498) on 21 November 1942, the day the ship was commissioned. She was a Fletcher-class destroyer, one of the fast fleet escorts then leaving American yards in large numbers, and Ragan was her first captain.
The ship had been built at Kearny, New Jersey, by the Federal Shipbuilding and Drydock Company. Her keel was laid on 7 May 1942, and she was launched on 13 October. The name honored Rear Admiral John Woodward Philip, who had commanded the battleship Texas in the battle off Santiago in 1898. A destroyer of the First World War had carried the name before her, and the new Philip was the second ship to do so.
Ragan had a new hull, a new crew, and a short path from the fitting-out pier to the war. In the weeks after commissioning, Philip finished her trials and shakedown, exercising her five-inch battery, torpedoes, and depth charges and settling a wartime crew into watches and general quarters. When that work was done, she left the Atlantic, passed through the Panama Canal, and crossed the South Pacific to join the forces operating around the Solomon Islands.
There a destroyer's days were spent on convoy escort, antisubmarine patrol, and gunfire along contested beaches. Philip entered the traffic of troops and supplies moving from the rear bases up to Guadalcanal and, as the campaign shifted, into the central Solomons. In the summer of 1943 she was among the ships that screened and supported the landings of the New Georgia operation, including the assault on Rendova at the end of June. Japanese aircraft, submarines, and destroyers running at night made those passages combat duty, and the captain was responsible for the formation he guarded and for the readiness of his own guns and torpedoes.
The command recorded for Ragan opens on that commissioning day in November 1942 and covers the months in which Philip changed from a yard-new destroyer into a working ship of the South Pacific force. She remained in the Pacific war through later campaigns farther west. Thomas C. Ragan is the officer who took her out of Kearny, through the canal, and into the Solomons.