The Men and Mission of WWII's Unsinkable U.S.S. Plunkett
Episode Stats
Summary
The story of the USS Plunkett, the only Navy ship to participate in every Allied invasion in the European Theater of Operations, and the stories of a group of men who served on this destroyer, Unsinkable, by author Jim Sullivan.
Transcript
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I'm Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.
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76 years after the end of World War II, that singular event continues to capture our interest
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and fascination, and there's a reason for that.
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The war combined two greatly compelling things, the epic historic sweep of large-scale battles
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and the personal stories of the individual young men who fought in them with determined
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My guest has written a book that deftly combines both of these elements into a thoroughly memorable
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His name is Jim Sullivan, and he's the author of the book Unsinkable, Five Men in the Indomitable
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Today on the show, Jim shares the story of the Plunkett, the only Navy ship to participate
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in every Allied invasion in the European theater, as well as the stories of a group of men who
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Jim then explains the role the Navy's destroyers played during World War II, before getting
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into the backstories of some of the men who served aboard the Plunkett.
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From there, we delve into the escorting and landing operations the Plunkett was involved
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in leading up to its arrival along the Italian coast of Anzio, where a dozen German bombers
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bore down on the ship in one of the most savage attacks of the war, and how the ship yet lived
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And we enter a conversation with what happened to the men Jim profiled, how the war affected
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After the show's over, check out our show notes at aom.is slash unsinkable.
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So you got a new book out called Unsinkable, Five Men in the Adominal Run of the USS Plunkett.
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So what led you in doing this deep dive in the history of this World War II destroyer,
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the USS Plunkett, and some of the men who served on it?
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We were going to go to Rome and Florence and Venice, and we were thinking about a side trip
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to Pompeii, but logistically from Rome, it's a big day trip.
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So much closer and of more interest to my kids were the beaches at Anzio.
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And Anzio was also the site of a famous battle during the Second World War, and two of my
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And there was this one story that my great-uncle Frank Gallagher used to tell.
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He was one of five Gallagher brothers, four of them on the way to the war.
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And Frank used to tell this story his whole life about this reunion that he had with his
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brother John, who was in the Navy, right before they both went into Anzio.
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And right before they went into Anzio on this amphibious landing, Frank realized that his
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brother's ship, the USS Plunkett, a Navy destroyer, was part of the task force that would
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He's got a jerry can half filled with red wine.
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And knowing Frank, I'm sure he was hauling off it all the way into Naples.
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And they tell him that, yeah, well, the Plunkett's in the area.
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So Frank jumps into this little bum boat, a wooden boat, has this Italian boatman, row
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And he's looking for the profile of a destroyer and its hull number, 431.
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And so he has this Italian boatman, row him up to the fantail, which is about four and
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And he clamors up on board, uninvited, defying all protocol with his jerry can of wine.
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And the ship is coming to general quarters because it's dusk, which is the most perilous
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You've got bombers coming in, the road's dead at that time of day.
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He thinks they've turned out because he's done something wrong.
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And the captain comes down from the bridge and is chewing him out.
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And as that's happening, one of the gunners on the ship is looking over the apron of his
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And he sees this guy getting chewed out by the cow.
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And he runs to the fantail and explains what's going on to the captain.
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And my family, we'd heard it, each of us, so many times.
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And when I started heading to Italy in 2016, I thought, you know, I should, I know very
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little about this story except what Frank said.
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And so what I liked about this book is I've read a lot of books about World War II, but
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I've read a lot of books about air warfare during World War II.
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And this is like one of the few books I've read about naval warfare.
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So before we get into the story of the Plunkett and your great uncles, can you give us some
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history behind the destroyers in the U.S. Navy?
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Like first off, like what makes a destroyer a destroyer?
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There's the battleship, the aircraft carrier, the submarine, the cruiser, and the destroyer.
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And the destroyer is about, you know, the size of a destroyer is 1,650 tons.
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Now a battleship is, you know, its displacement is 38,000 tons.
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And the destroyer's job was really to shepherd other ships, whether they be in convoy, liberty
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ships, merchant ships that are crossing, you know, the Atlantic or the Mediterranean to
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supply ground forces, or it's to work along the outer edges of a task force as they're
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There were six of them in North Africa and in Europe during the Second World War.
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And they were fighting, you know, submarines below the water.
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And to a much lesser extent, they were engaged in surface combat on the water.
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The hull on a destroyer is only three-eighths of an inch thick.
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On a battleship, you know, the armored plates are, you know, it's a foot thick.
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So these ships that are about as long as a football field in most of its end zones, they
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I mean, 30, 37, 38 knots, which is 43, 44 miles per hour is their top speed, what they
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So, you know, think of this ship that's as long as a football field moving that fast at
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And there were occasions during the war when the plunket was moving out that fast.
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I like to think of them as, you know, sort of the grunt on point in the jungle.
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They were always first in harm's way, sort of the minute man behind the stone wall.
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And, you know, there's a certain romance that goes with a destroyer that maybe isn't there
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They think of themselves as, you know, the men, the sailors who are on destroyers think
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of themselves as destroyer men, as something of a breed apart.
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What sort of weaponry does a destroyer typically have?
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Well, during the Second World War, and the plunket in particular had four five-inch guns,
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destroyers generally had five five-inch guns, but they always had problems with, they were
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So the plunket removed one of its five-inch guns and put a 1.1-inch gun mount in place.
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It takes a dozen men, four barrels on a 1.1-inch gun.
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So you've got four big five-inch guns, and they run up and down the center line of the
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You've got the 1.1-inch gun, which is essentially on the center line of the ship.
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And then all around the edges of the ship, you've got a half a dozen.
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And the five-inch guns would go after the dive bombers in the aircraft, the high flyers
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And the 20 millimeters would go after torpedo bombers or aircraft that would sweep in low
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Do you have any idea how many men typically served on a destroyer?
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And I think that was the number on plunket at its greatest.
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They also were the flagship for their squadron.
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There were seven other ships or six other ships in their squadron.
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And so you had a complement of six junior officers and the squadron commander.
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So about 250 enlisted men and then a dozen officers.
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And what was the destroyer's role during World War II?
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So let's talk about like at the beginning and then how did that change as the war progressed?
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Well, you know, in the beginning, they did a lot of hunter-killer work.
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That was the term they used when they went after submarines at the beginning of the war.
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Before we were really in the war, there was the phony war where the Germans were in the
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We were trying to supply Great Britain with material before we got into it through the
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So there was a lot of convoy work early on in the war.
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And they were doing a lot of, you know, with sonar, looking for submarines.
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Later in the war, carrier-based aircraft became a more effective means of getting at submarines.
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And when you think of some of those old World War II movies, not too long ago, I saw Dusk
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And there was nothing a submariner wanted to see less in his periscope than a destroyer,
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So that's, especially in the Atlantic theater, that's what they were doing early on in the
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Yeah, I guess that Tom Hanks movie, Greyhound, that's kind of like what they did, protecting
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I think they were escorting a convoy of liberty ships.
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And I just watched Dusk Boot for the first time this week.
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So how many, do we know how many destroyers there were like at the peak of World War II?
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I think 514 destroyers went into the war in both the Atlantic and the Pacific.
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And 71 of them were lost to the likes of torpedoes and aerial assault, and especially in the Pacific.
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You know, the Pacific was much more the Navy's war than the Atlantic or the Mediterranean.
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And it's in the Pacific at the likes of Guadalcanal and Lady Gulf, where you had, you know, you had
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those real fire away Flanagans where the ships were, I mean, battleships were going toe to
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I mean, the Pacific was all about, you know, carriers, aircraft, and destroyers were pivotal
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and critical in the Pacific because they had to watch out for submarines around the fringes
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It was much more a matter of destroyers and cruisers.
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And the battleship by this time, really, it was almost obsolete.
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So your book focuses on a few of the men who served on the Plunkett.
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There's your great uncle, of course, but who are the other men you decided to focus on?
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Why did you pick, why did you focus on those guys?
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Well, you know, before I knew it was a book, there was that family trip I mentioned to Italy.
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And before we went over there, I began to wonder, you know, knowing that we were going
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to go to Anzio, I began to wonder, are any of the men who were on that ship still with
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So I jump on the internet and I start looking and I run into a website for the last reunion
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There was a phone number for a man at the bottom of the page.
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I just rang him out of the blue and he had been on the Plunkett during the war, but he
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came on after Anzio and we had a really nice talk.
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And I asked him if he knew of any of the men who had been on the ship at Anzio, were they
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And he said, yeah, there's this one, there's this one fella named Jim Feltz, really nice
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So he gives me Jim's two phone numbers, his cell phone and his home phone.
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I catch him on a, he's at a home show, which I think is just great.
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And so we start talking, Jim and I, and I tell him I'm just interested in the Plunkett.
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And for about five or six minutes, we're talking and he says, well, look, would you give me
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I'll be happy to talk to you as long as you like.
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And I told him before I hung up, I said, I just want to let you know, my uncle was on
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I have a personal connection and his name's John J. Gallagher.
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And I hear this silence on the other end of the phone.
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And I'm thinking, well, here's, here's a man who's in his nineties trying to remember back
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He doesn't want to disappoint me because I'd heard that from other people.
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I look at my phone and it wasn't in, in, in, when Jim comes back to me, there's a, there's
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a smile in his voice as big as the moon and he says, Johnny Gallagher was a very good
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And I knew from that moment, you know, that, that more was going to have to be done with
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So, so it began, it began really with that phone call from, with Jim Feltz.
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And I think by the time I had hung up the phone, I knew that I was going to have to do something
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So Jim was sort of the, the guy through the linchpin to this, like he was able to give
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And one of the men that you talked about in the book, and I'm sure Jim talked to you a
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The Plunkett had a few commanders, but the one you focus on the book was this guy named
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What was his background and how did that prepare him for the leadership of the Plunkett?
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He was, he was born in 1907, just outside Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, son of, grandson
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of a coal miner and the son of a man who began work in the coal mines and then came out of
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the mines, became semi-professional, but who never moved his family out of that neighborhood.
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So, so Eddie Burke grew up fighting all the time.
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And it was actually a, a Grantland Rice, the renowned sports writer once wrote a sports
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like column about Eddie Burke and writes about his youth.
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So, so Burke, he gets an appointment to the Naval Academy where he's in the class of 1929,
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starts boxing as soon as he gets to the Academy or continues fighting as soon as he gets to
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And he was a light heavyweight in his senior year in 1929.
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He loses the national light heavyweight collegiate championship to this guy, O'Malley from MIT.
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So at the same time that he's, you know, he's, he's boxing, he's also playing football and
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he's one of only just a handful of men who became all American from the midshipmen on
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So in fact, they played at Soldier Field in 1928 against Newt Rockne's Ramblers before
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It was the largest group of spectators that had ever gathered in the history of the world
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There's this great photo of Ed Burke staring down this other, the captain of the, of the
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And so Burke had this, he, he was a guy who knew how to play offense and defense at the
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And, you know, both of those skills were, were going to be necessary at Anzio where he
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had to play offense and defense, you know, for the course of that, that 25 minute run with
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Well, the way you describe, you know, his relationship with his men, they, then like, he wasn't like the
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They've had other commanders that they liked a lot more.
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He was, you know, and, and, and he followed the captain of the Plunkett who preceded him
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was Lewis Miller from Texas, who ran with Jack Simpson, one of the five men at the heart
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He called the, he said that Lewis Miller, Captain Miller ran a happy ship.
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And I think that was a Navy term that they used back, back in the day.
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A happy ship was a ship where you had a really good, well-respected commander, commander
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I think that was the, the principal attribute of a, of a commander of a happy ship was that
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And Burke, Jackson's, and we said, he was an incredible wartime commander, but he did
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They all respected him, but he was at the same time, a man who, who broke no discord, who brought
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boxing gloves onto the Plunkett and, and who would take his shirt off on the fantail and
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Anybody who wants to go toe to toe with me, please step up.
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Nothing will be said after the, and I think he did, he did a lot of sparring, but at the
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end of the day, they, they respected him to no end.
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And it was a remarkable journey that Burke had with him.
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Another one of the veterans of the Plunkett that you got to talk to in person was this guy
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named Ken Brown, what's his story and how did he end up on the Plunkett?
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So Ken is from Glen Ellyn, Illinois, not far from Chicago.
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His father was a typewriter, Royal typewriter salesman.
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And, and they were middle-class family, fairly well to do.
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His father bought him a new car when he turned 16 or 17 years old.
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And Ken was the kind of guy who was making as much as he could of what it meant to be a
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He loved boozing it up as a kid, girls, the whole thing, music.
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When you look at pictures of him in the 1930s, you, you can almost read from, from his, you
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know, the smirk in his face that, that he was, he was up to a lot of no good and, you
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And his father decided him, he, Ken's got no plan for his, his future.
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And this is Ken telling me all this, but his father does.
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And his father decides that Ken should go to the, the Naval Academy.
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He said very hard at it, but he was smart enough.
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And he'd gotten an appointment to the Naval Academy class of, of 1942.
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And so he gets to the Academy and it's the same thing.
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You know, he, he, he, and some, some other guys, they, they carved a illicit room into a,
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into Bancroft Hall where they were living there, their first year.
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And they'd have this little private drinking chamber.
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You know, it was those, those are the sorts of stories that Ken tells about his time at
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And so he's in the class of 1942 and in the fall of 1941 is, is the war seemed imminent.
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You know, the U-boats are causing havoc all up and down the Eastern seaboard of, of the
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And, you know, it's only a matter of time now before we're going to get into it.
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And so the Academy bumps up its graduation from June to February and then Pearl Harbor
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And they, they bump up the graduation again to December 19th, 1941.
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So Ken thinking that the war was going to be really active in the Atlantic and in the
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Mediterranean, he had put in for an assignment for the Atlantic, but then after Pearl Harbor,
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it became clear that the Navy's greater mission was going to be in the Pacific, but he's, you
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know, on his way to the Atlantic now, he goes home for the holidays and in January, he took
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a train from Chicago to Boston and reported for duty on the Plunkett.
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The story that I enjoyed the most following was, you know, Jim Feltz's story.
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There's this epic battle that happened that the Plunkett took part in, but before that,
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What was his life like before joining the Navy?
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Like, I mean, how old was he when he signed up?
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Well, Jim, you know, he got his first year into high school and then into his second year,
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and he just decided that high school wasn't for him.
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One of his good friends broke his leg and lost his job at the local Five and Dime.
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Jim called Mr. Siegel and said, can I have his job?
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He got out of school and he went to work as a stock boy.
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This is in a little town just outside St. Louis, Overland, Missouri.
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His father had been a skilled, a semi-skilled laborer, but had had an accident, was crippled.
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And, you know, Jim lived in a house with his brothers and sisters and their wives.
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And one day, he's 16 years old, and this girl walks into the store and he's smitten.
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Jim, but her aunt, who is only six years older than she is, her name is Betty Neemiller and
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She thinks the world of Jim because he was essentially just a kid of great integrity who
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And she wants, you know, her niece to connect with Jim.
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They read a lot of the letters between them and she was really mean to him.
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And she admitted as much later during the early days, but he hung in there.
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She loved nothing to do nothing so much as dance, you know, swing dancing and jitterbug
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And Jim couldn't dance a lick and wouldn't even try.
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He was just, he said, too bashful and he'd never do it.
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Not only that, but Betty's father, you know, well, he liked Jim well enough, but he had higher
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And so, you know, the deck was stacked against Jim.
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And now here comes the war and he's in the Five and Dime.
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And as Jim once told me, he said, you know, the war sort of swept down Main Street in our
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And he went into the Navy because, you know, guys were telling him that, you know, the Navy
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is where you debunk and where you get hot food and you don't have to sleep on the ground.
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So that's how in April of 1942, he was swept into service.
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But during his service, like him and Betty, they stayed in touch.
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You know, I had asked Jim early on if, you know, if they were writing as everybody was
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And he said he said they had and I went out to visit him several times and I asked if he
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And he says, yeah, I think I've I've got a few of them around here.
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Betty wanted me to destroy them, but I always save them.
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And he takes me into this closet in his house and he opens his cardboard boxes, literally
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And, you know, if by that time I was writing and researching and it was just a goldmine
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and I asked him if I could if I could read some of them and he picked up the whole box
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So I got this really interesting relationship of this romance that began in 1941 between these
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I've persuaded Jim that at some point, you know, those letters need to go into an archive
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So so, yeah, I you know, that was just fascinating to get that kind of information, access to
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I was like wondering, OK, are Jim and Betty going to make it throughout the whole book?
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Because I mean, there's this great picture of them.
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So we'll see if it works for them here in a bit.
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But what sort of duty did the plunket do early on in the war?
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Well, early in the war, there was a lot of training to be done up and down the eastern
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I mean, you've got what the Germans called the happy time.
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There was a happy time and a second happy time because there was a lot of initial resistance.
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I think that's that's sometimes forgotten that, you know, we didn't plow into the Second
00:23:23.800
There was a there was a lot of resistance to our getting involved in another European
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And President Roosevelt was was biding the country's time and reading the mood of the
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And there had to be the American public had to be persuaded that this was something that
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we had to do where he got that event precipitously at Pearl Harbor.
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But even leading up before Pearl Harbor, the U-boats were prowling up and down the east coast
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of the United States and businesses up and down the east coast were reluctant to follow
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the dim light ordinances into to black out the cities and the coastal communities.
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Because if you're a merchant ship and you're coming up the eastern seaboard from the Gulf
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with, you know, with with a tanker of oil, if the lights of a city are behind you, well,
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And that's why they called it the happy time, because it was just so easy to take down merchant
00:24:26.240
So there was a lot of that happening up and down the east coast.
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So the plunket is there in the early part of the war and they're up and down and into
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And then they started on the convoys after Lend-Lease came into play early on, before
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The destroyers were called upon to help transport the material from the United States to supply
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I mean, they were they were, you know, after the Battle of Britain in the Blitz, they were
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We had not yet got into the war and and they were down to the bare minimum.
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So the plunket is back and forth to the UK and to Scotland, which is where the convoys
00:25:09.180
And it was only it wasn't until November of 1942 that these guys waded into the war in
00:25:19.360
Operation Torch in November of 1942 was the first transatlantic convoy that that transported
00:25:28.600
This is where we were going to prosecute the war first.
00:25:31.440
And the plunket was in on this first was part of this first task force in the second wave.
00:25:40.200
In fact, on the day that the movie Casablanca, the Bogart and Bergman movie came out, it premiered
00:25:49.100
And the plunket was was in Casablanca on that day that it premiered.
00:25:57.640
Jim and my great uncle, John Gallagher, were out on liberty that day.
00:26:01.120
They went into a photographer's studio and took all these great pictures with locals and
00:26:06.980
And so they were they were happy to get into it.
00:26:09.700
You know, they were they were bored in the beginning.
00:26:15.820
And this was how they were commemorating their their first invasion.
00:26:19.380
Wasn't much of an invasion for them because they came in the second wave.
00:26:25.700
They were even calling Casablanca the ice cream front at that point.
00:26:30.020
But those those things would change for them soon enough.
00:26:33.680
We're going to take a quick break for your words from our sponsors.
00:26:39.620
When did the plunket seeds like first real action during the war?
00:26:48.460
And once we had brought all of our the allies had had come into North Africa, engage Rommel.
00:26:53.840
You know, there were months of fighting before we finally we finally took charge there.
00:26:58.060
I think it was all the way into May or so before North Africa was was settled.
00:27:04.260
Plunket had gone back to the States, went back to Casablanca, back to the States again.
00:27:08.820
And then finally, in May of 43, they went back over to North Africa.
00:27:15.040
And and now that North Africa has been relatively pacified by the allies, it's time to turn their attention to Europe.
00:27:22.960
And in July, the allies planned the invasion of Sicily.
00:27:31.480
And Plunket is part of that first wave in now on this invasion at Gela.
00:27:37.580
There were three landing spots on the island of Sicily.
00:27:41.000
It was eventually going to take the allies 30 days to get the Germans off Sicily.
00:27:47.080
I mean, Patton, along the north shore of Sicily, moved the Germans right up toward Messina and they escaped across the Strait of Messina.
00:27:57.020
That's where Plunket first, you know, engaged in battle.
00:28:00.500
And then from there on, pretty much from from July 10th, 1943, right up through Anzio, all the way through Omaha Beach.
00:28:09.560
You talk about one story where they played a pivotal role in defending there was like, I guess, a British hospital ship got bombed and the Plunket was there to defend.
00:28:23.680
It was a British hospital ship and there happened to be 100 or so American nurses.
00:28:28.720
They had been going into Salerno a couple of days after the landing.
00:28:34.980
He's ashore now getting his first taste of combat in September of 1943.
00:28:43.060
The Allies are now for the first time they have they have gone ashore on mainland Europe at Salerno, which is south of Rome, south of the Amalfi Coast.
00:28:53.880
And the Newfoundland now is coming in to deliver this contingent of nurses who were excited to be the first nurses to come ashore during the Second World War.
00:29:05.920
Frank Gallagher used to say we had panzer tanks right down in the sand with us.
00:29:10.960
And it was so bad that beachhead and so hot for a week that there was a chance that that the Germans were going to throw the for the allies right offshore back out to sea.
00:29:21.560
And Navy commanders were beside themselves because they said, you know, we have never done this.
00:29:25.660
You guys need to you guys need to do what you do to maintain that beachhead.
00:29:29.440
And so Mark Clark, he was the commander of that army.
00:29:36.980
In the meantime, the Newfoundland, which was about to land, moves way back offshore and it gets bombed by the Germans.
00:29:42.920
You know, you're not supposed to you're not supposed to bomb a hospital ship.
00:29:45.840
The thing's got it's lit up like a Christmas tree at night with all kinds of streamers and lights.
00:29:51.200
There's a huge red cross on the on the roof of the deck houses.
00:29:55.440
But the Luftwaffe dropped one on it, killed a couple of dozen people.
00:30:00.360
But the thing is burning and it's full of medical supplies that are that are needed because, you know, the beachhead, the hold on the beachhead is still tenuous.
00:30:10.180
And so Plunkett is one of the ships that that responds to this crisis.
00:30:14.000
And they they they they they steam out to to to where the Newfoundland is.
00:30:18.440
And they do you know, they spend 24 hours fighting that fire.
00:30:23.560
Jim Feltz, he says he was the first he was on a repair party.
00:30:28.020
It was his job on the Plunkett, you know, when a bomb struck or a torpedo struck or there was fire.
00:30:33.840
The repair parties were the guys that the men that got to it.
00:30:37.020
And so Jim and a dozen men jumped over onto the Plunkett and they fought that fire for in, you know, bouts of like an hour and a half.
00:30:45.360
And then they pull them all back aboard the Plunkett and the ship would circle around.
00:30:49.420
So there was there was a lot of that happening.
00:30:51.360
And finally, they just decided that the ship couldn't be saved and they had to scuttle it.
00:30:54.860
So they, you know, Ken Brown, who was the gun boss on the ship who commanded the ship's battery of guns.
00:31:00.480
He put 40 some odd five inch shells into the hull of that hospital ship until it sunk.
00:31:07.420
So so there were incidents like that, you know, all the way from the summer now.
00:31:13.540
It just kept getting hotter and hotter for these guys.
00:31:16.320
The Newfoundland was one and the buck was another and another destroyer that was torpedoed.
00:31:20.160
When everything leads up to this epic battle off the coast of Anzio, Italy.
00:31:25.840
So and it was like it was 24 minutes long, lots of damage.
00:31:30.520
What what what led up to this battle with the Plunkett was involved in?
00:31:35.420
So there so the allies are ashore now and they've been ashore in September.
00:31:43.300
If you picture Italy, think about, you know, a line that's cut right across the middle of of Italy.
00:31:51.060
The Germans had fortified this line, knowing that the allies eventually would sweep up from the south.
00:31:56.060
And they had their guns on the high ground, especially at Monte Cassino, which is sort of famous for because the allies couldn't get past it.
00:32:03.920
There was the the Rapido and the Volturno rivers.
00:32:06.280
The allies were trying to punch up either of these river valleys to get to Rome, but they couldn't do it.
00:32:13.140
So so Winston Churchill, who is famous for wading into among his generals on a tactical level, he decides that what they need to do is an end run around Monte Cassino, land the allies at Anzio in the Tuno.
00:32:29.960
And then they can just make the final push up to Rome, which was 25 miles to the north.
00:32:35.520
It sounded great in conception, except that the Germans anticipated the allies landing there because they were the natural two stunning beaches, perfect for amphibious landings.
00:32:49.920
And when the allies came, they plugged them for five months.
00:32:55.460
And by beachhead, I mean a swath of land that was maybe five miles deep and 10 miles wide.
00:33:04.540
The run up to Anzio was was a way to sort of do an end run around the Monte Cassino.
00:33:11.500
And so what was the Plunkett's role in all this?
00:33:16.940
There were 36,000 men that were landed at Anzio Natuno.
00:33:21.100
And when you're moving that many men in landing craft, which is, you know, we've all seen Saving Private Ryan have a picture in our minds of those Higgins boats
00:33:29.740
and the the landing craft with the bow that flaps down.
00:33:35.900
It was the Plunkett's job to guard the fringes of this task force, this convoy of landing craft that were moving north.
00:33:41.900
They would they move north along the coast of Italy.
00:33:45.200
And then they made this this huge right turn and went in for the landing.
00:33:50.240
So it was the Plunkett's job, you know, to to mind the fringes of that convoy against incursion by E-boats, which are kind of like PT boats with the German boats and submarines.
00:34:01.500
And they were successful over the first two days.
00:34:04.380
The men in the Plunkett describe it as a milk run.
00:34:06.560
You know, that landing was nothing like Salerno.
00:34:09.520
Everybody got ashore they were going to be stuck for five months, but they all got ashore.
00:34:15.920
And that's when that's when things really turn south for the Plunkett.
00:34:26.780
You know, the Germans would would, you know, there were there were five amphibious landings during the Second World War in Europe.
00:34:35.400
Anzio, I guess now, was the second, third, actually, after Sicily.
00:34:39.540
So when the Germans would come in on one of these amphibious landings, what they do is they'd these squadrons, these waves of bombers would come in over a roadstead, the harbor where the ships would call in and they'd pick a target and they'd drop their stick of bombs on targets that came in their sights.
00:34:56.740
These individual ships, you know, would be in the thick of it for three or four minutes and then a squadron would sweep by and other squadron would sweep in and they'd go after some other ships.
00:35:06.780
But at Anzio, something they changed strategy a little bit in early 1944.
00:35:13.020
This was something that the Navy was writing about in these magazines in early 1944.
00:35:18.480
They decided that they were going to focus on a on a single ship.
00:35:22.500
And for whatever reason, the Plunkett was on a picket line about five miles off the coast of Anzio just doing routine patrol two days after the landings.
00:35:31.480
And the first of what became 12 or 14 German bombers swept in on the Plunkett and they they harried them for for the next 19 minutes and then five additional minutes.
00:35:42.780
So that was that was the Plunkett situation at the beginning of this this battle.
00:35:47.740
And what were the the roles that some of the guys that you follow, Ken Brown, Jim Felts, your uncle, what were they doing during this battle?
00:35:58.480
Well, Ken Brown is is the gunnery officer on the Plunkett, also known as the gun boss.
00:36:03.020
And in his job was to command the four five inch guns, the one point one inch guns, as well as the 20 millimeter guns around the perimeter of the ship.
00:36:12.080
Except that, you know, with the 20 millimeter, it was more a matter of if you see him, shoot him with the five inch guns.
00:36:18.580
They had, you know, primitive analog computers in the combat information center behind the bridge.
00:36:23.140
And so Ken, with five other men, was in this little compartment shaped like a bread box, seemed no bigger than a than a than an old telephone booth at the highest part of the ship.
00:36:34.140
There are six of them squeezed in their hatches.
00:36:37.060
So they're popping in and out in the midst of the battle.
00:36:39.040
And they are they are tracking these incoming planes.
00:36:42.840
And it's their job to communicate with the combat information center and with each of the gun bosses who are in the four big the four mounts or turrets that run up the center line of the ship.
00:36:53.440
So so that's that's Ken's role during this battle.
00:36:55.600
He's coordinating these these four or five inch guns and the one point one inch gun in the six other men.
00:37:01.360
The 20 millimeters are all manned by by these gunners.
00:37:04.620
My great uncle John Gallagher was was on the I was a gunner on one of the 20 millimeter guns.
00:37:10.540
It was behind the number two stack on the starboard side of the ship.
00:37:15.520
And those guys would go after the torpedo bombers.
00:37:18.820
You couldn't get to the dive bombers with a 20 millimeter.
00:37:25.120
Some of the men even reported that they could make eye contact with the pilots on on the torpedo bombers.
00:37:30.480
They were that close. So that's where the the 20 millimeter guys are going after those planes.
00:37:35.620
Ken Brown is going after the the dive bombers and and the the high flying bombers that are dropping glide bombs at them.
00:37:46.600
He had been on the midship repair party until two weeks earlier, but he became he was really good at his job as an engineer.
00:37:53.760
And and so at battle stations now at General Quarters, his job was was in the fire room.
00:37:59.100
And he's down in there listening to requests for speed changes from the bridge as Burke is navigating the ship in the midst of this battle.
00:38:07.680
You know, he's calling for speed changes and course changes.
00:38:10.540
And it's Jim's job, along with the other men working in his fire room in the fire room.
00:38:15.320
That's where they had the boilers that would heat the water to make the steam to drive the ship.
00:38:19.400
And and so that's what he's doing during the midst of this battle.
00:38:23.120
And Jim is counting as each of these bombs falls in the ship shutters because they are getting pummeled from, you know, a dozen planes swarming them.
00:38:32.740
But Jim at one point decides I got to go up there and help out like I'm not doing anything down here.
00:38:39.660
He does. He does. He's, you know, 19 minutes into this battle, they have dodged a couple of torpedoes.
00:38:49.680
But the action reports say one action reports say there were, I think, eight bombs that they they missed, including a couple of these radio controlled dive bombs.
00:38:58.160
But 19 minutes into this into this battle, one of the dive bombers drops his stick of bombs in the fifth bomb in that stick hits the ship square on the one point one inch gun mount where you have a dozen men working.
00:39:13.240
That explosion obliterated 29 men were listed as missing.
00:39:19.060
They were killed, but it was going to take a year for them to be officially recognized as such.
00:39:26.980
And when that bomb hit, Jim was in the fire room and he said it was as if a hand had come down from the deep and it had taken the ship and it had pulled the ship down.
00:39:39.500
And I talked to one other man who said the exact same thing, that experience of the ship being pulled straight down.
00:39:48.220
And now Jim is up on the fire room on a destroyer, his two levels.
00:39:52.060
And he's on the top watch on the great on the second level.
00:39:56.240
And the chief petty officer says, take a look at what happened, find out what happened.
00:40:01.120
And he didn't mean for Jim to leave the fire room.
00:40:03.900
But Jim throws open the hatch of the fire room and he's up there.
00:40:09.140
It's a wall of flames in the middle of the ship right behind the number two stack.
00:40:13.060
And and he is is watching this conflagration and he's looking for men who are fighting this fire who should have jumped to.
00:40:21.780
And it occurs to him then that, you know, the midship repair party is not fighting the fire because maybe they're not there anymore.
00:40:30.140
Nine of the 10 men on that repair party were killed.
00:40:35.080
One of the things in the Navy that they tell you is you don't leave your battle station, but he didn't see any choice but to jump out and to go for what he called a handy billy pump.
00:40:51.960
And this other sailor, he never remembered who the man was, came and helped him.
00:40:55.620
The two of them grab this handy billy pump on either side.
00:40:58.860
They've got, you know, a hose that they throw over the side of the ship.
00:41:02.320
They rev this thing up almost like a lawnmower.
00:41:04.500
You start the thing and they get water on that fire.
00:41:09.780
They know that if that fire gets to the magazines, that the whole thing is going to go up.
00:41:17.360
They knew that it was it was only a matter of time.
00:41:23.040
And and Burke is dispatching, you know, the forward repair party and other junior officers.
00:41:27.740
They're making their way back now in the in the wake of this bomb hit to do what can be done.
00:41:35.700
They should have been set on safe, but you needed to make sure.
00:41:39.660
And so there were all these things all of a sudden that were happening to ensure the survival of the ship.
00:41:47.780
Did Americans back home know about this battle?
00:41:53.660
They found out soon enough because, you know, I think it was three days after the after the battle.
00:42:04.500
Well, the the notice came to my great grandmother that her son had been killed.
00:42:11.520
Frank Gallagher was on the beach when this was going on and he saw the plunket hit.
00:42:22.820
It just seems so unbelievable that that he could have seen that he Frank carried a camera during
00:42:28.780
the war. And he took this one picture at Anzio of the aircraft fire going up on the beach because
00:42:33.280
at the same time that the swarm of planes had come down on plunket, there were dozens and dozens,
00:42:38.480
maybe as many as 100 Luftwaffe bombers that had finally, you know, hit the beachhead at Anzio and
00:42:48.840
And Frank saw the plunket hit and and saw that it was a significant explosion, didn't know
00:42:56.460
what had happened, of course, wasn't going to be able to find out what happened while he was there
00:43:02.360
and only found out months later that his brother had been killed on the ship.
00:43:07.340
John survived the initial blast and lived for six hours and had some pretty interesting things
00:43:12.960
But but that was how the Americans at home did find out several days after after the after the battle.
00:43:43.640
John had he was he was his correspondence was going with this this woman that I was never
00:43:52.600
And I discovered these six letters right at the end of the writing of this book and realized
00:43:56.740
that he had this relationship that was moving along.
00:43:59.980
Frank was going to end up marrying the woman that he was corresponding with during the war.
00:44:04.720
And I kind of think that John might have the same thing might have happened to him as well.
00:44:09.160
So he didn't lose his family, but his family lost him.
00:44:14.340
So, I mean, thanks to the actions of these guys, the plunket was able to be salvaged.
00:44:20.040
They continued to serve throughout World War Two.
00:44:32.580
They buried them there in Palermo in a temporary graveyard.
00:44:34.880
And then the plunket steamed back to the United States, to Brooklyn, to the Navy Yard.
00:44:39.760
And I think they were only able to move at 11 knots because they lost one of their screws,
00:44:44.220
one of their propellers, and one of their engines.
00:44:47.380
One of the engine rooms was completely obliterated.
00:44:49.860
But they get back to Brooklyn, and all of the stuff is waiting for them dockside.
00:44:54.780
You know, the new stack, the new engine, the propellers, the shafts, everything.
00:45:00.580
And it's fitted out, and they steam back in May, once again, to the UK, and they begin
00:45:11.360
This was going to be the fourth European invasion of the war.
00:45:14.760
And plunket was the only ship that the Navy knows of that was in on every invasion in North
00:45:23.400
And what's kind of interesting about what happened to the plunket in the Normandy invasion is
00:45:28.960
about a few days before they were able to set off, a VIP comes aboard the ship.
00:45:37.020
But he's also John Ford, the famous film director that everybody knows because they'd all seen
00:45:41.720
the movies, you know, How Green Was My Valley and The Informer.
00:45:45.520
And John Ford at that time cut a pretty big swath.
00:45:50.660
And they knew that if the likes of John Ford was on their ship, he had produced a documentary
00:45:56.060
during the war midway that was received with great acclaim.
00:46:01.280
They knew that they were heading into something significant.
00:46:04.460
And sure enough, you know, when the Allies went into Normandy, when they went into Omaha
00:46:09.100
Beach, the plunket was part of that amphibious landing.
00:46:14.260
And somehow things got turned around and pretty soon they found themselves at the head of the
00:46:18.640
convoy, so close to the shore, in fact, that they were all but scraping sand in the hull,
00:46:26.820
So that was its next big moment was the D-Day landings.
00:46:31.360
They went on later to the bombardment of Cherbourg.
00:46:36.540
The Allies, until that time, were landing all their material on the beaches and in these,
00:46:42.900
But once they got to Cherbourg, they were able to bombard the Germans into submission there.
00:46:54.340
And what happened to the plunket after the war?
00:46:56.580
Like, when did it, did it keep, did it serve in the Korean War at all?
00:47:03.780
They went on from Omaha, Normandy, to the invasion of southern France.
00:47:08.920
And then they headed over to Japan like they hadn't done enough in Europe.
00:47:13.860
But they got, at the time they got to Japan, the war was over.
00:47:31.420
I got off that ship and I got on a bus and I went home.
00:47:39.360
And then it was reactivated in the 1950s and given to the Taiwanese.
00:47:43.380
And it was used as a destroyer in the Navy of Taiwan until early 1970s when it was scrapped.
00:47:50.280
Well, let's talk about what happened to the men.
00:47:51.620
So what happened to, let's talk about Ken Brown.
00:47:59.060
He was commended, you know, the work that he did on the plunket at Anzio.
00:48:03.080
They took out three, maybe four planes at Anzio.
00:48:06.460
And Ken was a big part of the success that the plunket had.
00:48:11.400
And until that point, he and Burke had this really fractious relationship.
00:48:14.780
And he said, everything between me and Burke changed after Anzio.
00:48:20.440
He got command of a destroyer escort, which is sort of like a smaller version of a destroyer right after the war.
00:48:26.160
He was appointed the number two man at the Naval Academy in 1960s, in the 1960s.
00:48:34.340
He always, if he saw something, he said something.
00:48:37.140
He could never keep quiet about things that he thought weren't right.
00:48:39.940
He didn't like hazing at the Naval Academy, and he tried to end it.
00:48:48.240
The Navy was not prepared to end a tradition like that.
00:48:54.800
He was naval attaché to General Westmoreland staff for a year, and then the commander of a squadron for another year.
00:49:01.500
Then he was, as he said, put out to pasture, commanding ROTC for four years in the late 60s, early 70s,
00:49:12.500
And Burke's career, he took command of a cruiser, the Des Moines, in the 1950s, just a small world moment.
00:49:20.200
My father's brother, David, was on that cruiser when Burke was commander.
00:49:24.580
I didn't know that until I'd seen these records.
00:49:28.680
If they gave you a cruiser in the Navy, they were going to make you an admiral.
00:49:31.340
And he retired as a rear admiral in 1965 or 6 and died shortly thereafter of emphysema.
00:49:39.680
He received the Navy Cross for what he had done at Anzio.
00:49:44.240
And even the Navy Cross might not have been enough for the brilliance of what he had done there.
00:49:49.740
Jim Feltz, you know, jumps on a bus that breaks down en route to St. Louis,
00:49:55.620
sticks out his thumb and gets a ride and goes home, goes right to Betty's house,
00:50:01.400
And he remembered the first two words that he said to her when she opened the door.
00:50:10.840
He launched a trucks part business that thrived for a number of years.
00:50:16.480
He kept a dozen men employed for all those years.
00:50:22.540
And then he had to bury each of his three sons.
00:50:24.760
But I talked to him yesterday and he's doing well.
00:50:29.800
As you talk to Ken and Jim in particular, I mean, how were you able to get a feel of how
00:50:35.320
that experience, particularly at Anzio, how it affected them or influenced them for the
00:50:44.640
I asked him this question about Anzio and how it had rippled through the rest of his life.
00:50:49.860
I mean, once I'd done all my research and saw what they had done there, I asked him if it
00:51:00.820
He was a slight man, maybe 5'8", 5'9", and not very heavy.
00:51:04.660
But he had the voice of a man who was twice as large.
00:51:09.600
And he says, no, Jim, he says, I think, you know, if I were to talk about the defining
00:51:14.840
experience of my life, it would be getting command of that destroyer escort.
00:51:19.860
And then he said, no, maybe it was when I was a squadron commander picking up downed
00:51:29.960
But it occurred to me after Ken died that sometimes, you know, we can't articulate or
00:51:36.460
You know, if any of us are asked, what is the defining experience of your life?
00:51:40.260
But when it came time to bury Ken Brown two years ago at the age of 98, there was one,
00:51:46.100
there was the name of only one ship on his gravestone.
00:51:51.480
And, you know, there was only one job recognized on that same stone.
00:51:55.800
So I think that, you know, that day rippled through the rest of his life.
00:52:03.100
You know, I think that the destroyer is a little bit of a different ship in the Navy.
00:52:10.340
And there is that, that anthropologists talk about Dunbar's number, you know, the number
00:52:14.940
of people with whom we can maintain a stable social relationship.
00:52:21.040
And they say that, you know, that number is about 150 men.
00:52:23.540
And, you know, there's 150 people that you'd feel comfortable inviting to go out with a
00:52:30.360
And you have, you're close to that on, on a destroyer.
00:52:33.520
So there's, there's this thing that they had, these, these men on a destroyer that was a
00:52:41.440
And then you had, you had the shared experience of, of war, the most cataclysmic event of the
00:52:50.300
And then you had what happened to them at Anzio, you know, that bomb really galvanized
00:52:57.600
And, and I think those three things together forge something that it's just hard to imagine
00:53:04.420
And it became, it became for many of them, I think the defining experience of, of their
00:53:10.000
And even as they drifted into the rest of their lives, you know, they, they, they were going
00:53:16.760
And I saw that even in these men into their nineties, you know, just how ardently they
00:53:22.880
held to the memories of these men that they'd lost and with whom they were still in contact.
00:53:28.760
And as you know, spending so much time looking into their stories, talking to, you know, Jim
00:53:37.660
What did you learn anything about what it means to be a man, like talking to these guys and
00:53:45.140
You know, it, it, it, it's a question that, that would, would percolate in me as I was
00:53:52.880
I've never been through anything like that, but I think all of us as we're coming up as
00:53:57.500
young men, you know, we're wondering, how would I be, you know, that eternal question
00:54:04.300
And, um, and, and I, I remember asking that of Ken and of Jim, you know, how did you get
00:54:12.600
You know, because from, from where we sit today, we look back on this thing, you know,
00:54:23.920
You know, one can only imagine how long we're going to be talking about this one.
00:54:29.180
And how did you get through that while they were in the thick of it?
00:54:32.680
They don't recognize it for, for what we do when we have, you know, the, the luxury
00:54:36.960
of, of, uh, of time to look back and perspective.
00:54:40.000
And, and they both would say the same thing, you know, about what it was like to be out
00:54:45.080
on the deck of a ship when, you know, they were under aerial assault, you know, when there
00:54:54.300
And, and they both said the same thing and they said that they said it the same way all
00:55:00.640
He said, you know, it was just a matter of doing your job.
00:55:08.220
We knew what we had to do and we went and we did it.
00:55:10.840
And that's how we got through every day by, by staying committed to the work, to the job.
00:55:16.300
They thought about what they had done is, is, is doing their job.
00:55:20.480
And, and it might be, you know, that euphemism, maybe how, how we can sometimes get through
00:55:25.220
Um, you know, don't, uh, we don't extrapolate and provide too much perspective.
00:55:34.580
I mean, you ask a lot of World War II veterans, the ones that are still around, but they would
00:55:41.400
And I think that it influenced the way their humility about the war.
00:55:46.260
You know, a lot of these guys, they did these amazing things.
00:55:59.020
I mean, we look at it as, is completely extraordinary, but you know, they were just doing what they
00:56:05.020
Well, Jim, uh, where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?
00:56:08.860
Well, there are a lot of pictures at, at, at a website.
00:56:16.700
There are links to, to where the book can be sold.
00:56:19.080
I think it's, it's an independent bookstores, the national retailers.
00:56:25.780
And, uh, I talked early on about that story that Frank Gallagher told.
00:56:29.340
Well, in 1998, I sat down with him in a tape recorder and, uh, I had Frank tell me that,
00:56:34.920
that story and that's up there in with a little bit of video as well.
00:56:39.560
So yeah, ussplunkett.com is about the best pivot point for, uh, for readers.
00:56:51.460
It's available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere.
00:56:53.620
You can find out more information about the book at his website, unsinkableplunkett.com.
00:56:57.680
Also check out our show notes at aom.is slash unsinkable, where you can find links to resources,
00:57:10.160
Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast.
00:57:12.700
Check out our website at artofmanless.com, where you can find our podcast archives,
00:57:15.820
as well as thousands of articles written over the years about pretty much anything you think of.
00:57:19.200
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00:57:27.360
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00:57:33.900
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00:57:43.340
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00:57:45.200
Until next time, this is Brett McKay, reminding you to not only listen to the AOM podcast,