"Unsinkable," by James Sullivan

 

 

Sydney M. Williams

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

 

Burrowing into Books

“Unsinkable,” James Sullivan

January 10, 2021

 

“In the infantry, one bullet might find one man, but it didn’t work that way

in the kind of combat Jim was engaged in. What might get him was a torpedo

or a glide bomb, and if it got him, it was going to get a boatload of them.”

                                                                                                                                Unsinkable, James Sullivan, 2020

 

Twenty-five minutes can seem a lifetime. In those few minutes, Plunkett, supporting the Anzio invasion in late afternoon, January 24, 1944, dodged five German torpedos and held off a dozen dive bombers, before one 550-lb bomb hit the destroyer, killing fifty-three sailors, mostly young and mostly instantly. 

 

Among the dead was John Gallagher of Dorchester, Massachusetts, great uncle to the author. Gallagher lived through the evening, dying at 1:00AM on the 25^th. His last words were to his shipmate and fellow gunner Jim McManus: “I’m a tough Irishman. Those Germans can’t kill me.” “With that last pronouncement,” Sullivan writes, “it appeared that John had started back to Dorchester…and the broad veranda across the front of the house,” Thirty men were so obliterated they were listed as missing in action.

 

The Plunkett (DD-431) was commissioned in late 1940. The destroyer, Mr. Sullivan writes, “is the ‘minute man’ behind the stonewall, the grunt on point in the jungle…” It was a ship that met John Paul Jones request of being designed to get in harm’s way. The author adds: “…the ship was first and foremost a floating gun platform…” By War’s end, according to a memoir by one of the ship’s officers, Plunkett had “participated in every major invasion of Europe [from Anzio to Normandy], and it is believed to be the only major warship so distinguished.” Thirty-five years after it was launched, and now named Nan Wang, it was scrapped, somewhere in Taiwan. Yet, for its heroic action in Anzio Harbor on a late January afternoon in 1944 its Captain, Edward J. Burke was awarded the Navy Cross.

 

Mr. Sullivan takes the reader on an exciting, and personal, odyssey. Besides Gallagher, McManus and Burke, we meet (among others) Ken Brown, gunnery officer aboard Plunkett, first in January 1942 as a 21-year-old graduate of the Naval Academy, assigned to the ship, and then again seventy years later in Thornton, Colorado where he had retired. We first know Jim Feltz as a sixteen-year-old in Overland, Missouri when he had just met Betty Kneemiller. He joined the Navy at age seventeen. We meet him again, years later, back in Overland. At Anzio, Feltz was in the forward fire room when the ship was hit. Going topside, he was one of the first to hook up hoses and begin putting out the fires. In April 1944, while on leave back in the U.S., as the ship was undergoing repairs, Jim and Betty married, a marriage that lasted seventy years.

 

Approximately 10% of the American population served in uniform at some point during World War II. Stories that James Sullivan heard as a child at family gatherings seemed “so ordinary…that the details hardly qualified as something to talk about.” Yet stories from those backyard picnics germinated in Mr. Sullivan’s mind and became the genesis of this book, which is far from ordinary. And that is because his tale is based on on-site and personal research, during which he read diaries and accounts, and then reached out to living veterans who had served aboard Plunkett in World War II – a riveting read.