The Art of Manliness - The Men and Mission of WWII's Unsinkable U.S.S. Plunkett

00:00:00.000 I'm Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.

00:00:11.360 76 years after the end of World War II, that singular event continues to capture our interest

00:00:16.080 and fascination, and there's a reason for that.

00:00:18.160 The war combined two greatly compelling things, the epic historic sweep of large-scale battles

00:00:22.500 and the personal stories of the individual young men who fought in them with determined

00:00:26.060 resolve and humble heroism.

00:00:27.940 My guest has written a book that deftly combines both of these elements into a thoroughly memorable

00:00:32.080 tale.

00:00:32.660 His name is Jim Sullivan, and he's the author of the book Unsinkable, Five Men in the Indomitable

00:00:37.020 Run of the USS Plunkett.

00:00:38.900 Today on the show, Jim shares the story of the Plunkett, the only Navy ship to participate

00:00:42.340 in every Allied invasion in the European theater, as well as the stories of a group of men who

00:00:46.260 served on this destroyer.

00:00:47.880 Jim then explains the role the Navy's destroyers played during World War II, before getting

00:00:51.780 into the backstories of some of the men who served aboard the Plunkett.

00:00:54.380 From there, we delve into the escorting and landing operations the Plunkett was involved

00:00:57.720 in leading up to its arrival along the Italian coast of Anzio, where a dozen German bombers

00:01:02.060 bore down on the ship in one of the most savage attacks of the war, and how the ship yet lived

00:01:05.840 to fight another day.

00:01:07.140 And we enter a conversation with what happened to the men Jim profiled, how the war affected

00:01:10.560 their lives, and how their lives affected Jim.

00:01:13.260 After the show's over, check out our show notes at aom.is slash unsinkable.

00:01:16.800 All right, Jim Sullivan, welcome to the show.

00:01:28.760 Thank you for having me, Brett.

00:01:30.040 So you got a new book out called Unsinkable, Five Men in the Adominal Run of the USS Plunkett.

00:01:35.920 So what led you in doing this deep dive in the history of this World War II destroyer,

00:01:40.300 the USS Plunkett, and some of the men who served on it?

00:01:42.600 Well, it started with a family trip.

00:01:45.720 I was planning to Italy in 2016.

00:01:47.920 We were going to go to Rome and Florence and Venice, and we were thinking about a side trip

00:01:52.220 to Pompeii, but logistically from Rome, it's a big day trip.

00:01:55.860 So much closer and of more interest to my kids were the beaches at Anzio.

00:02:00.680 And Anzio was also the site of a famous battle during the Second World War, and two of my

00:02:07.100 grandfather's brothers were involved in that.

00:02:09.200 And there was this one story that my great-uncle Frank Gallagher used to tell.

00:02:13.320 He was one of five Gallagher brothers, four of them on the way to the war.

00:02:17.100 And Frank used to tell this story his whole life about this reunion that he had with his

00:02:21.920 brother John, who was in the Navy, right before they both went into Anzio.

00:02:25.940 Frank was a medic in the Fifth Army.

00:02:28.120 And right before they went into Anzio on this amphibious landing, Frank realized that his

00:02:33.360 brother's ship, the USS Plunkett, a Navy destroyer, was part of the task force that would

00:02:38.060 be taking the landing craft in.

00:02:39.500 There were 36,000 men going in.

00:02:41.560 So Frank steals out of camp.

00:02:43.140 He's got a jerry can half filled with red wine.

00:02:45.940 And knowing Frank, I'm sure he was hauling off it all the way into Naples.

00:02:49.620 He wasn't supposed to go in there.

00:02:50.940 They had typhoid.

00:02:52.100 They said, stay out.

00:02:53.040 But he wanted to get in.

00:02:54.940 And he gets in.

00:02:55.800 And he goes to the flagship.

00:02:57.360 And they tell him that, yeah, well, the Plunkett's in the area.

00:03:00.120 They wouldn't tell him where.

00:03:01.000 So Frank jumps into this little bum boat, a wooden boat, has this Italian boatman, row 1.00

00:03:06.300 him out among these harbored out Navy ships.

00:03:08.780 And he's looking for the profile of a destroyer and its hull number, 431.

00:03:13.100 And he finds it.

00:03:14.700 And so he has this Italian boatman, row him up to the fantail, which is about four and

00:03:19.440 a half, five feet above over the waterline.

00:03:22.080 And he clamors up on board, uninvited, defying all protocol with his jerry can of wine.

00:03:27.500 And the ship is coming to general quarters because it's dusk, which is the most perilous

00:03:32.500 time of day for a Navy ship.

00:03:33.920 You've got bombers coming in, the road's dead at that time of day.

00:03:37.200 And he thinks it's for him.

00:03:38.420 He thinks they've turned out because he's done something wrong.

00:03:40.960 Well, he did do something wrong.

00:03:42.320 And the captain comes down from the bridge and is chewing him out.

00:03:47.440 And as that's happening, one of the gunners on the ship is looking over the apron of his

00:03:52.200 gun tub.

00:03:52.700 And he sees this guy getting chewed out by the cow.

00:03:54.760 He says, geez, that looks like my brother.

00:03:56.540 And then he realizes it is his brother.

00:03:58.480 And he runs to the fantail and explains what's going on to the captain.

00:04:03.160 And well, they had their reunion.

00:04:04.800 So Frank told that story his whole life.

00:04:06.540 And my family, we'd heard it, each of us, so many times.

00:04:09.340 And when I started heading to Italy in 2016, I thought, you know, I should, I know very

00:04:15.760 little about this story except what Frank said.

00:04:17.620 Maybe it's time to find out more.

00:04:20.000 And so what I liked about this book is I've read a lot of books about World War II, but

00:04:23.820 they've usually been about land warfare.

00:04:25.280 So, you know, the 101, tank warfare.

00:04:28.500 I've read a lot of books about air warfare during World War II.

00:04:31.720 And this is like one of the few books I've read about naval warfare.

00:04:34.600 So I learned it quite a bit.

00:04:36.240 So before we get into the story of the Plunkett and your great uncles, can you give us some

00:04:40.980 history behind the destroyers in the U.S. Navy?

00:04:45.020 Like first off, like what makes a destroyer a destroyer?

00:04:48.220 Sure, sure.

00:04:48.940 Well, it's one of five iconic Navy ships.

00:04:52.580 There's the battleship, the aircraft carrier, the submarine, the cruiser, and the destroyer.

00:04:57.800 And the destroyer is about, you know, the size of a destroyer is 1,650 tons.

00:05:03.300 That was the size of the Plunkett.

00:05:04.620 It displaced 1,630 tons of water.

00:05:08.000 Now a battleship is, you know, its displacement is 38,000 tons.

00:05:11.160 So it's like 20 times larger than a destroyer.

00:05:14.140 And the destroyer's job was really to shepherd other ships, whether they be in convoy, liberty 0.94

00:05:20.460 ships, merchant ships that are crossing, you know, the Atlantic or the Mediterranean to

00:05:25.280 supply ground forces, or it's to work along the outer edges of a task force as they're

00:05:30.800 going into an amphibious landing.

00:05:32.700 There were six of them in North Africa and in Europe during the Second World War.

00:05:36.240 And they were fighting, you know, submarines below the water.

00:05:39.900 They were fighting, you know, aircraft above.

00:05:41.940 And to a much lesser extent, they were engaged in surface combat on the water.

00:05:46.300 So that's the destroyer.

00:05:48.260 It's built light to go fast.

00:05:50.640 The hull on a destroyer is only three-eighths of an inch thick.

00:05:54.220 Now they call them tin cans for that reason.

00:05:56.400 On a battleship, you know, the armored plates are, you know, it's a foot thick.

00:06:00.300 So these ships that are about as long as a football field in most of its end zones, they 0.71

00:06:05.060 could really move out.

00:06:05.920 I mean, 30, 37, 38 knots, which is 43, 44 miles per hour is their top speed, what they

00:06:12.360 call flank speed.

00:06:13.620 And that's about as fast as a racehorse goes. 0.88

00:06:15.980 So, you know, think of this ship that's as long as a football field moving that fast at

00:06:19.880 flank speed.

00:06:20.420 And there were occasions during the war when the plunket was moving out that fast.

00:06:24.920 So that's the basics on this story.

00:06:26.920 I like to think of them as, you know, sort of the grunt on point in the jungle.

00:06:31.340 They were always first in harm's way, sort of the minute man behind the stone wall.

00:06:36.240 And, you know, there's a certain romance that goes with a destroyer that maybe isn't there

00:06:40.720 with the battleship or the carrier.

00:06:42.960 So they're distinctive.

00:06:44.020 They think of themselves as, you know, the men, the sailors who are on destroyers think

00:06:48.200 of themselves as destroyer men, as something of a breed apart.

00:06:52.540 What sort of weaponry does a destroyer typically have? 0.90

00:06:55.700 Well, during the Second World War, and the plunket in particular had four five-inch guns,

00:07:00.900 destroyers generally had five five-inch guns, but they always had problems with, they were

00:07:07.440 top-heavy.

00:07:08.220 So the plunket removed one of its five-inch guns and put a 1.1-inch gun mount in place.

00:07:14.320 It takes a dozen men, four barrels on a 1.1-inch gun.

00:07:18.120 So you've got four big five-inch guns, and they run up and down the center line of the

00:07:21.980 ship.

00:07:22.480 You've got the 1.1-inch gun, which is essentially on the center line of the ship.

00:07:27.060 And then all around the edges of the ship, you've got a half a dozen.

00:07:30.240 And there were six 20-millimeter guns.

00:07:32.400 And the five-inch guns would go after the dive bombers in the aircraft, the high flyers 0.99

00:07:36.700 that were really far away.

00:07:38.480 And the 20 millimeters would go after torpedo bombers or aircraft that would sweep in low

00:07:44.780 because their range wasn't as far.

00:07:47.340 Do you have any idea how many men typically served on a destroyer?

00:07:49.960 Like a rough idea?

00:07:51.520 Yeah, there were generally 250 men.

00:07:53.940 And I think that was the number on plunket at its greatest.

00:07:58.000 They also were the flagship for their squadron.

00:08:00.960 There were seven other ships or six other ships in their squadron.

00:08:04.120 And so you had a complement of six junior officers and the squadron commander.

00:08:08.480 So about 250 enlisted men and then a dozen officers.

00:08:13.820 And what was the destroyer's role during World War II?

00:08:16.340 So let's talk about like at the beginning and then how did that change as the war progressed?

00:08:19.700 Well, you know, in the beginning, they did a lot of hunter-killer work.

00:08:24.540 That was the term they used when they went after submarines at the beginning of the war.

00:08:28.540 Before we were really in the war, there was the phony war where the Germans were in the

00:08:33.160 North Atlantic taking out merchant ships.

00:08:35.400 We were trying to supply Great Britain with material before we got into it through the

00:08:40.380 Lend-Lease program.

00:08:41.600 So there was a lot of convoy work early on in the war.

00:08:44.600 And they were doing a lot of, you know, with sonar, looking for submarines.

00:08:49.100 Later in the war, carrier-based aircraft became a more effective means of getting at submarines.

00:08:54.920 But early on, it was the destroyer.

00:08:56.940 And when you think of some of those old World War II movies, not too long ago, I saw Dusk

00:09:01.600 Boot again.

00:09:02.560 And there was nothing a submariner wanted to see less in his periscope than a destroyer,

00:09:08.020 you know, plowing a V right at them.

00:09:10.100 So that's, especially in the Atlantic theater, that's what they were doing early on in the

00:09:15.080 war.

00:09:15.500 Yeah, I guess that Tom Hanks movie, Greyhound, that's kind of like what they did, protecting

00:09:20.480 merchant marines.

00:09:21.560 That's right.

00:09:22.120 Yeah.

00:09:22.360 I think they were escorting a convoy of liberty ships.

00:09:25.480 Right.

00:09:25.940 Yeah.

00:09:26.200 And I just watched Dusk Boot for the first time this week.

00:09:28.840 And it's intense.

00:09:30.280 It's a really good movie.

00:09:31.000 It is.

00:09:31.320 It's a really good movie.

00:09:32.180 So how many, do we know how many destroyers there were like at the peak of World War II?

00:09:35.920 I think 514 destroyers went into the war in both the Atlantic and the Pacific.

00:09:43.460 And 71 of them were lost to the likes of torpedoes and aerial assault, and especially in the Pacific.

00:09:50.600 You know, the Pacific was much more the Navy's war than the Atlantic or the Mediterranean.

00:09:55.940 And it's in the Pacific at the likes of Guadalcanal and Lady Gulf, where you had, you know, you had

00:10:02.380 those real fire away Flanagans where the ships were, I mean, battleships were going toe to 1.00

00:10:07.260 toe with 14 inch shells.

00:10:09.580 That didn't happen in the Atlantic.

00:10:11.700 I mean, the Pacific was all about, you know, carriers, aircraft, and destroyers were pivotal

00:10:17.660 and critical in the Pacific because they had to watch out for submarines around the fringes

00:10:23.060 of the carrier task forces in the Atlantic.

00:10:26.000 It was much more a matter of destroyers and cruisers.

00:10:28.780 And the battleship by this time, really, it was almost obsolete.

00:10:33.140 All right.

00:10:33.260 So your book focuses on a few of the men who served on the Plunkett.

00:10:36.540 There's your great uncle, of course, but who are the other men you decided to focus on?

00:10:40.560 Why did you pick, why did you focus on those guys?

00:10:43.860 Well, you know, before I knew it was a book, there was that family trip I mentioned to Italy.

00:10:49.980 And before we went over there, I began to wonder, you know, knowing that we were going

00:10:55.180 to go to Anzio, I began to wonder, are any of the men who were on that ship still with

00:11:00.920 us?

00:11:01.220 It just seems so improbable.

00:11:02.520 This is 2016.

00:11:04.120 So I jump on the internet and I start looking and I run into a website for the last reunion

00:11:10.380 in 2011.

00:11:11.440 The USS Plunkett had had its last reunion.

00:11:13.880 There was a phone number for a man at the bottom of the page.

00:11:17.040 I just rang him out of the blue and he had been on the Plunkett during the war, but he

00:11:21.340 came on after Anzio and we had a really nice talk.

00:11:25.080 And I asked him if he knew of any of the men who had been on the ship at Anzio, were they

00:11:30.200 still around?

00:11:30.860 And he said, yeah, there's this one, there's this one fella named Jim Feltz, really nice

00:11:35.420 guy.

00:11:35.760 And I'm sure he'll talk to you.

00:11:37.220 So he gives me Jim's two phone numbers, his cell phone and his home phone.

00:11:41.380 And I call him on a Saturday morning.

00:11:43.360 I catch him on a, he's at a home show, which I think is just great.

00:11:47.160 He's 91 years old at a home show.

00:11:49.500 He's going to do a kitchen renovation.

00:11:51.280 He's not giving up, this guy.

00:11:53.060 And so we start talking, Jim and I, and I tell him I'm just interested in the Plunkett. 0.59

00:11:58.360 And for about five or six minutes, we're talking and he says, well, look, would you give me

00:12:02.960 a call back tomorrow?

00:12:03.920 We can pick it up at home.

00:12:05.700 I'll be happy to talk to you as long as you like.

00:12:07.560 And I said, I would.

00:12:08.480 And I told him before I hung up, I said, I just want to let you know, my uncle was on

00:12:13.320 that ship.

00:12:13.700 I have a personal connection and his name's John J. Gallagher.

00:12:16.980 And I hear this silence on the other end of the phone.

00:12:19.140 And I'm thinking, well, here's, here's a man who's in his nineties trying to remember back

00:12:23.000 70 years, 250 men.

00:12:25.660 He doesn't want to disappoint me because I'd heard that from other people.

00:12:29.000 And then I think my calls drop.

00:12:30.420 I look at my phone and it wasn't in, in, in, when Jim comes back to me, there's a, there's

00:12:34.820 a smile in his voice as big as the moon and he says, Johnny Gallagher was a very good

00:12:39.980 buddy of mine.

00:12:40.860 And I knew from that moment, you know, that, that more was going to have to be done with

00:12:46.020 this story.

00:12:46.640 So, so it began, it began really with that phone call from, with Jim Feltz.

00:12:51.840 I mean, I just pivoted.

00:12:52.880 I was standing in my, my driveway.

00:12:54.660 I made this phone call.

00:12:55.760 It was just curiosity.

00:12:56.900 And I think by the time I had hung up the phone, I knew that I was going to have to do something

00:13:01.240 significant with this, with this story.

00:13:03.160 All right.

00:13:04.060 So Jim was sort of the, the guy through the linchpin to this, like he was able to give

00:13:07.420 you this firsthand account.

00:13:09.100 And one of the men that you talked about in the book, and I'm sure Jim talked to you a

00:13:13.280 lot, was about the commander of the Plunkett.

00:13:15.480 The Plunkett had a few commanders, but the one you focus on the book was this guy named

00:13:19.280 Edward Burke.

00:13:20.740 What's his story?

00:13:21.740 What was his background and how did that prepare him for the leadership of the Plunkett?

00:13:26.000 Sure.

00:13:26.440 Yeah.

00:13:27.220 Eddie Burke, he, what a character.

00:13:28.860 He was, he was born in 1907, just outside Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, son of, grandson

00:13:34.180 of a coal miner and the son of a man who began work in the coal mines and then came out of

00:13:39.720 the mines, became semi-professional, but who never moved his family out of that neighborhood.

00:13:44.100 So, so Eddie Burke grew up fighting all the time.

00:13:46.820 That's what he did.

00:13:47.500 And it was actually a, a Grantland Rice, the renowned sports writer once wrote a sports

00:13:51.680 like column about Eddie Burke and writes about his youth.

00:13:55.160 This is back in the 1920s.

00:13:57.380 So, so Burke, he gets an appointment to the Naval Academy where he's in the class of 1929,

00:14:03.080 starts boxing as soon as he gets to the Academy or continues fighting as soon as he gets to

00:14:08.000 the Academy.

00:14:08.720 And he was a light heavyweight in his senior year in 1929.

00:14:13.600 He loses the national light heavyweight collegiate championship to this guy, O'Malley from MIT.

00:14:18.880 So at the same time that he's, you know, he's, he's boxing, he's also playing football and

00:14:24.320 he's one of only just a handful of men who became all American from the midshipmen on

00:14:29.440 the Academy's football team.

00:14:31.440 So in fact, they played at Soldier Field in 1928 against Newt Rockne's Ramblers before

00:14:37.600 they were called to fight in Irish.

00:14:39.200 And the sports crowd was 110,000 people.

00:14:41.920 It was the largest group of spectators that had ever gathered in the history of the world

00:14:45.940 for a sporting event up until that time.

00:14:47.820 There's this great photo of Ed Burke staring down this other, the captain of the, of the

00:14:53.100 Ramblers.

00:14:54.040 And so Burke had this, he, he was a guy who knew how to play offense and defense at the

00:14:58.840 same time.

00:14:59.700 And, you know, both of those skills were, were going to be necessary at Anzio where he

00:15:03.860 had to play offense and defense, you know, for the course of that, that 25 minute run with

00:15:08.980 the, with the German Luftwaffe.

00:15:10.480 Well, the way you describe, you know, his relationship with his men, they, then like, he wasn't like the

00:15:15.740 nicest captain.

00:15:17.480 They've had other commanders that they liked a lot more.

00:15:19.580 This guy, Burke was a little tougher.

00:15:21.980 He was, you know, and, and, and he followed the captain of the Plunkett who preceded him

00:15:27.240 was Lewis Miller from Texas, who ran with Jack Simpson, one of the five men at the heart

00:15:32.040 of my book.

00:15:32.780 He called the, he said that Lewis Miller, Captain Miller ran a happy ship.

00:15:36.200 And I think that was a Navy term that they used back, back in the day.

00:15:39.700 A happy ship was a ship where you had a really good, well-respected commander, commander

00:15:44.560 who kept his men well fed.

00:15:47.000 I think that was the, the principal attribute of a, of a commander of a happy ship was that

00:15:52.040 he, he got good food for his guys.

00:15:54.420 And Burke, Jackson's, and we said, he was an incredible wartime commander, but he did

00:16:00.780 not run a happy ship.

00:16:02.240 They all respected him, but he was at the same time, a man who, who broke no discord, who brought

00:16:08.440 boxing gloves onto the Plunkett and, and who would take his shirt off on the fantail and

00:16:13.840 say, look, my shirt's off, my gloves are on.

00:16:16.760 Anybody who wants to go toe to toe with me, please step up.

00:16:19.940 Nothing will be said after the, and I think he did, he did a lot of sparring, but at the

00:16:24.320 end of the day, they, they respected him to no end.

00:16:27.140 And it was a remarkable journey that Burke had with him.

00:16:31.300 Another one of the veterans of the Plunkett that you got to talk to in person was this guy

00:16:35.760 named Ken Brown, what's his story and how did he end up on the Plunkett?

00:16:39.600 Right.

00:16:40.180 So Ken is from Glen Ellyn, Illinois, not far from Chicago.

00:16:43.840 His father was a typewriter, Royal typewriter salesman.

00:16:47.400 And, and they were middle-class family, fairly well to do.

00:16:51.080 His father bought him a new car when he turned 16 or 17 years old.

00:16:54.940 And Ken was the kind of guy who was making as much as he could of what it meant to be a

00:16:59.820 kid in the 1930s.

00:17:00.840 He, he loved to drive his car, to drive fast.

00:17:03.580 He loved parties.

00:17:04.500 He loved boozing it up as a kid, girls, the whole thing, music.

00:17:08.620 When you look at pictures of him in the 1930s, you, you can almost read from, from his, you

00:17:13.620 know, the smirk in his face that, that he was, he was up to a lot of no good and, you

00:17:18.440 know, horse races.

00:17:19.480 He loved the horse races.

00:17:20.920 And his father decided him, he, Ken's got no plan for his, his future.

00:17:24.840 And this is Ken telling me all this, but his father does.

00:17:27.760 And his father decides that Ken should go to the, the Naval Academy.

00:17:31.420 He's a smart kid, Ken is, and didn't work.

00:17:34.120 He said very hard at it, but he was smart enough.

00:17:36.640 And he'd gotten an appointment to the Naval Academy class of, of 1942.

00:17:42.000 And so he gets to the Academy and it's the same thing.

00:17:44.860 You know, he, he, he, and some, some other guys, they, they carved a illicit room into a,

00:17:49.740 into Bancroft Hall where they were living there, their first year.

00:17:53.400 And they'd have this little private drinking chamber.

00:17:55.940 You know, it was those, those are the sorts of stories that Ken tells about his time at

00:18:00.380 the Academy.

00:18:01.340 And so he's in the class of 1942 and in the fall of 1941 is, is the war seemed imminent.

00:18:08.940 You know, the U-boats are causing havoc all up and down the Eastern seaboard of, of the

00:18:12.600 United States.

00:18:13.460 And, you know, it's only a matter of time now before we're going to get into it.

00:18:16.720 And so the Academy bumps up its graduation from June to February and then Pearl Harbor

00:18:22.080 on December 7th.

00:18:23.740 And they, they bump up the graduation again to December 19th, 1941.

00:18:29.540 So Ken thinking that the war was going to be really active in the Atlantic and in the

00:18:35.420 Mediterranean, he had put in for an assignment for the Atlantic, but then after Pearl Harbor,

00:18:40.540 it became clear that the Navy's greater mission was going to be in the Pacific, but he's, you

00:18:44.300 know, on his way to the Atlantic now, he goes home for the holidays and in January, he took

00:18:48.740 a train from Chicago to Boston and reported for duty on the Plunkett.

00:18:52.880 The story that I enjoyed the most following was, you know, Jim Feltz's story.

00:18:57.720 So tell us, we'll talk about what happened.

00:19:00.360 There's this epic battle that happened that the Plunkett took part in, but before that,

00:19:03.960 what was Jim like?

00:19:05.320 What was his life like before joining the Navy?

00:19:07.220 Like, I mean, how old was he when he signed up?

00:19:08.840 Why did he join the Navy, et cetera?

00:19:11.240 Right.

00:19:11.460 Well, Jim, you know, he got his first year into high school and then into his second year,

00:19:16.280 and he just decided that high school wasn't for him.

00:19:19.460 One of his good friends broke his leg and lost his job at the local Five and Dime.

00:19:23.400 Jim called Mr. Siegel and said, can I have his job?

00:19:27.100 And he said, okay.

00:19:28.300 Jim's mother signed the paper.

00:19:30.240 He got out of school and he went to work as a stock boy.

00:19:32.720 This is in a little town just outside St. Louis, Overland, Missouri.

00:19:35.820 His father had been a skilled, a semi-skilled laborer, but had had an accident, was crippled.

00:19:42.820 And, you know, Jim lived in a house with his brothers and sisters and their wives.

00:19:46.600 It was crowded.

00:19:47.340 He slept on a cot in a living room.

00:19:49.160 There wasn't a lot of money.

00:19:50.440 And he's working in this Five and Dime.

00:19:52.720 And one day, he's 16 years old, and this girl walks into the store and he's smitten.

00:19:57.580 And she doesn't think much of him.

00:19:59.060 Jim, but her aunt, who is only six years older than she is, her name is Betty Neemiller and 1.00

00:20:04.220 her aunt is named Mickey.

00:20:05.700 She thinks the world of Jim because he was essentially just a kid of great integrity who

00:20:09.860 grew into a man of great integrity.

00:20:11.560 And she wants, you know, her niece to connect with Jim.

00:20:15.160 And Betty agrees and she goes out.

00:20:17.780 They read a lot of the letters between them and she was really mean to him.

00:20:21.460 And she admitted as much later during the early days, but he hung in there.

00:20:24.820 She loved nothing to do nothing so much as dance, you know, swing dancing and jitterbug 1.00

00:20:29.740 and the imperial style.

00:20:31.120 And Jim couldn't dance a lick and wouldn't even try.

00:20:33.260 He was just, he said, too bashful and he'd never do it.

00:20:35.920 So the deck was sort of stacked against him.

00:20:38.500 Not only that, but Betty's father, you know, well, he liked Jim well enough, but he had higher

00:20:44.620 aspirations for his daughter.

00:20:46.740 And so, you know, the deck was stacked against Jim.

00:20:49.520 And now here comes the war and he's in the Five and Dime.

00:20:52.600 He's trying to make this romance stick.

00:20:55.660 And as Jim once told me, he said, you know, the war sort of swept down Main Street in our

00:21:01.420 town and it just swept us up all along.

00:21:04.280 And he went into the Navy because, you know, guys were telling him that, you know, the Navy

00:21:09.340 is where you debunk and where you get hot food and you don't have to sleep on the ground.

00:21:14.560 And that made sense to him.

00:21:16.080 So that's how in April of 1942, he was swept into service.

00:21:23.480 But during his service, like him and Betty, they stayed in touch.

00:21:27.960 They did, you know, and it was remarkable.

00:21:31.140 You know, I had asked Jim early on if, you know, if they were writing as everybody was

00:21:37.560 writing back then.

00:21:38.840 And he said he said they had and I went out to visit him several times and I asked if he

00:21:45.180 ever saved any of the letters.

00:21:46.600 And he says, yeah, I think I've I've got a few of them around here.

00:21:49.500 I haven't looked at them in years.

00:21:51.040 Betty wanted me to destroy them, but I always save them.

00:21:54.000 And he takes me into this closet in his house and he opens his cardboard boxes, literally

00:21:59.140 hundreds of letters from the war.

00:22:01.780 And, you know, if by that time I was writing and researching and it was just a goldmine

00:22:07.940 and I asked him if I could if I could read some of them and he picked up the whole box

00:22:11.820 and said, here, have at it.

00:22:14.000 So I got this really interesting relationship of this romance that began in 1941 between these

00:22:21.980 two kids.

00:22:22.600 She was 15 at the time.

00:22:24.040 He was 16.

00:22:25.200 And that ran all the way through the war.

00:22:28.020 And I mean, it's priceless stuff.

00:22:29.760 I've persuaded Jim that at some point, you know, those letters need to go into an archive

00:22:34.420 or a museum or somewhere.

00:22:36.780 So so, yeah, I you know, that was just fascinating to get that kind of information, access to

00:22:42.240 that.

00:22:42.740 I'll admit, that was my favorite.

00:22:43.580 I was like wondering, OK, are Jim and Betty going to make it throughout the whole book?

00:22:48.020 Because I mean, there's this great picture of them.

00:22:49.920 I mean, just a great looking couple.

00:22:52.060 You want you wanted to wake it work for them.

00:22:53.780 So we'll see if it works for them here in a bit.

00:22:56.000 So these guys get on the plunket.

00:22:57.240 But what sort of duty did the plunket do early on in the war?

00:23:02.060 Well, early in the war, there was a lot of training to be done up and down the eastern

00:23:07.140 seaboard.

00:23:07.760 I mean, you've got what the Germans called the happy time.

00:23:10.960 There was a happy time and a second happy time because there was a lot of initial resistance.

00:23:16.720 I think that's that's sometimes forgotten that, you know, we didn't plow into the Second

00:23:21.940 World War guns blazing.

00:23:23.800 There was a there was a lot of resistance to our getting involved in another European

00:23:28.400 war.

00:23:29.540 And President Roosevelt was was biding the country's time and reading the mood of the

00:23:34.680 country.

00:23:35.040 He knew that he had to lead from behind.

00:23:37.880 And there had to be the American public had to be persuaded that this was something that

00:23:43.520 we had to do where he got that event precipitously at Pearl Harbor.

00:23:48.060 But even leading up before Pearl Harbor, the U-boats were prowling up and down the east coast

00:23:53.880 of the United States and businesses up and down the east coast were reluctant to follow

00:23:58.940 the dim light ordinances into to black out the cities and the coastal communities.

00:24:04.840 Because if you're a merchant ship and you're coming up the eastern seaboard from the Gulf

00:24:09.580 with, you know, with with a tanker of oil, if the lights of a city are behind you, well,

00:24:16.200 your ship is silhouetted by that city.

00:24:19.000 And the Germans loved it.

00:24:20.640 And that's why they called it the happy time, because it was just so easy to take down merchant

00:24:25.480 ships.

00:24:26.240 So there was a lot of that happening up and down the east coast.

00:24:29.240 So the plunket is there in the early part of the war and they're up and down and into

00:24:33.000 the Caribbean.

00:24:33.620 And then they started on the convoys after Lend-Lease came into play early on, before

00:24:41.040 we actually even got into the war.

00:24:42.760 The destroyers were called upon to help transport the material from the United States to supply

00:24:48.240 Great Britain.

00:24:49.520 I mean, they were they were, you know, after the Battle of Britain in the Blitz, they were

00:24:53.700 hurting pretty badly.

00:24:54.620 We had not yet got into the war and and they were down to the bare minimum.

00:24:59.680 And so the convoys were resupplying Britain.

00:25:01.760 So the plunket is back and forth to the UK and to Scotland, which is where the convoys

00:25:08.100 often ended up.

00:25:09.180 And it was only it wasn't until November of 1942 that these guys waded into the war in

00:25:17.680 a meaningful way.

00:25:19.360 Operation Torch in November of 1942 was the first transatlantic convoy that that transported

00:25:25.180 men from the United States to North Africa.

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.

00:25:37.220 And they ended up in Casablanca of all places.

00:25:40.200 In fact, on the day that the movie Casablanca, the Bogart and Bergman movie came out, it premiered

00:25:47.120 at the Hollywood Theater in New York.

00:25:49.100 And the plunket was was in Casablanca on that day that it premiered.

00:25:54.020 There was no Rick's Cafe, of course.

00:25:55.920 But Jim, I've got some interesting pictures.

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

00:26:05.820 foreign sailors.

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.

00:26:12.680 They really wanted to get into it.

00:26:14.360 They were desperate to get into it.

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.

00:26:23.420 All the major fighting had been done.

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.

00:26:37.860 And now back to the show.

00:26:39.620 When did the plunket seeds like first real action during the war?

00:26:43.460 So that was let's see now.

00:26:45.460 So this is Casablanca is November of 42.

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. 0.74

00:27:22.960 And in July, the allies planned the invasion of Sicily.

00:27:28.340 I think it was July 9th.

00:27:31.480 And Plunket is part of that first wave in now on this invasion at Gela. 0.75

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.

00:27:46.020 And they did.

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.

00:27:55.080 It took 30 days to mop it up.

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.

00:28:08.160 They were they were in the thick of it.

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.

00:28:19.060 What happened there?

00:28:19.860 What was going on there?

00:28:21.560 Yeah, that was the HMS Newfoundland.

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.

00:28:33.420 Frank Gallagher was was part of that.

00:28:34.980 He's ashore now getting his first taste of combat in September of 1943.

00:28:39.520 So so Sicily was July, early July.

00:28:41.900 Now we're up to September.

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.

00:29:01.960 But it was too hot.

00:29:03.020 In fact, the landings at Salerno were so bad.

00:29:05.920 Frank Gallagher used to say we had panzer tanks right down in the sand with us.

00:29:09.960 It was so bad.

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.

00:29:33.080 He he did what he could.

00:29:35.140 They avoided disaster.

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. 0.82

00:29:42.920 You know, you're not supposed to you're not supposed to bomb a hospital ship.

00:29:45.680 Right.

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.

00:29:53.880 So there's no mistaking it.

00:29:55.440 But the Luftwaffe dropped one on it, killed a couple of dozen people.

00:29:59.740 None of the nurses.

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.

00:31:11.180 It just it was almost like a whirlpool.

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?

00:31:34.780 Right.

00:31:35.420 So there so the allies are ashore now and they've been ashore in September.

00:31:39.220 They came ashore at Salerno.

00:31:40.260 But they can't get up the Italian boot.

00:31:43.300 If you picture Italy, think about, you know, a line that's cut right across the middle of of Italy.

00:31:49.740 That was the Gustav line.

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.

00:32:11.460 So Monte Cassino was too tough.

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.

00:32:29.260 It's two beaches.

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.

00:32:47.680 And so they anticipated it.

00:32:49.040 They got ready.

00:32:49.920 And when the allies came, they plugged them for five months.

00:32:53.440 They couldn't move off that beachhead.

00:32:55.460 And by beachhead, I mean a swath of land that was maybe five miles deep and 10 miles wide.

00:32:59.560 The allies couldn't break out of that.

00:33:01.140 But so so that was the that was the the plan.

00:33:04.540 The run up to Anzio was was a way to sort of do an end run around the Monte Cassino.

00:33:09.080 And it just it didn't work out as planned.

00:33:11.500 And so what was the Plunkett's role in all this?

00:33:13.780 Why were they there?

00:33:14.820 So the Plunkett was part of the task force.

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.

00:33:34.140 It's it's the destroyer's job.

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.

00:34:13.640 It was two days after that landing.

00:34:15.920 And that's when that's when things really turn south for the Plunkett.

00:34:20.300 And what happened?

00:34:20.880 Was it like what were the Germans doing?

00:34:23.140 Were they they bring in ships?

00:34:24.300 Was it airplanes?

00:34:25.060 What happened?

00:34:25.880 They were planes.

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.

00:34:34.580 There was Salerno.

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?

00:35:54.220 Were they manning guns?

00:35:55.220 What were what were they?

00:35:56.500 How are they responding?

00:35:57.920 Sure.

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.

00:36:17.920 They were controlled.

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.

00:37:22.300 The torpedo bombers swept in close.

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.

00:37:44.100 Jim Feltz, meanwhile, is in the fire room.

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.

00:38:37.120 So he kind of breaks protocol to go.

00:38:39.660 He does. He does. He's, you know, 19 minutes into this battle, they have dodged a couple of torpedoes.

00:38:47.740 Two is what some of the accounts say.

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.

00:39:24.140 In that explosion, the ship was in flames.

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.

00:39:37.940 I mean, he distinctly remember that.

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.

00:39:46.140 And it came back to the surface.

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.

00:40:07.220 He sticks his head out.

00:40:08.020 The ship is in flames.

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.

00:40:29.460 And it's true. 0.56

00:40:30.140 Nine of the 10 men on that repair party were killed.

00:40:32.720 So he does what he's not supposed to do.

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.

00:40:46.440 This portable pump weighs about 100 pounds.

00:40:48.820 He's trying to pull it out of this locker.

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.

00:41:07.340 He's 18 years old.

00:41:08.460 His ship is burning.

00:41:09.780 They know that if that fire gets to the magazines, that the whole thing is going to go up.

00:41:14.300 They saw it happen with the Rowan.

00:41:15.740 They saw it happen with the Maddox.

00:41:17.360 They knew that it was it was only a matter of time.

00:41:20.380 And so Jim is fighting that fire.

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.

00:41:33.140 The depth charges need to be set on safe.

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.

00:41:44.720 All right.

00:41:44.800 So the last of 24 minutes, 29 men were killed.

00:41:47.780 Did Americans back home know about this battle?

00:41:51.660 Did they make the papers?

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.

00:42:20.180 He said he did his whole life.

00:42:21.560 I have no reason not to believe him.

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

00:42:44.520 they were coming down on the beachhead.

00:42:46.600 So it was just it was all evening long.

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

00:43:11.840 to say before he died.

00:43:12.960 But but that was how the Americans at home did find out several days after after the after the battle.

00:43:20.500 How old was your uncle John when he died?

00:43:23.540 He was he's born in 1916.

00:43:26.940 This was 44.

00:43:28.940 So he was 27 years old.

00:43:31.840 I think he was going to turn 27, 28 that year.

00:43:34.780 So 27 years old.

00:43:36.320 Did he have a family like wife, kids?

00:43:38.280 He did not.

00:43:39.280 And, you know, he was he was single.

00:43:42.180 Frank was single.

00:43:43.640 John had he was he was his correspondence was going with this this woman that I was never

00:43:50.680 able to find out anything about.

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.

00:43:59.120 Frank did, too.

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.

00:44:13.720 Yeah.

00:44:14.340 So, I mean, thanks to the actions of these guys, the plunket was able to be salvaged.

00:44:18.940 They were able to fix it up.

00:44:20.040 They continued to serve throughout World War Two.

00:44:22.340 What other roles did it play there?

00:44:25.220 Well, you're right.

00:44:26.200 It did survive.

00:44:27.660 It limped into Palermo.

00:44:28.800 They buried their dead in a temporary.

00:44:30.660 There were 24 dead.

00:44:31.800 They were covered.

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

00:45:07.920 massing for the invasion at Normandy.

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

00:45:21.700 Africa and all five in the European mainland.

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.

00:45:35.060 He's a chief petty officer in the Navy.

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.

00:45:48.300 He hung out with the enlisted men a lot.

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.

00:46:12.740 They were at the rear of the convoy.

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,

00:46:23.720 their hull in the sand of the beach.

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.

00:46:34.860 That opened up a port.

00:46:36.540 The Allies, until that time, were landing all their material on the beaches and in these,

00:46:41.600 you know, these harbors.

00:46:42.900 But once they got to Cherbourg, they were able to bombard the Germans into submission there.

00:46:49.060 That port opened up and now here we go.

00:46:51.380 You know, now the land war in Europe begins.

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?

00:46:59.700 When was it retired?

00:47:01.660 No, it was decommissioned in 1946.

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.

00:47:12.220 So it was time for Japan. 0.91

00:47:13.860 But they got, at the time they got to Japan, the war was over.

00:47:17.000 Jim Phelps was ready to go home.

00:47:18.780 It comes into port in South Carolina.

00:47:21.060 He got his papers.

00:47:22.240 And to this day, he regrets that.

00:47:24.120 He said, I got those papers.

00:47:25.760 I still have this thing going with Betty.

00:47:27.860 And he said, I didn't say goodbye to anybody.

00:47:30.460 I got my papers.

00:47:31.420 I got off that ship and I got on a bus and I went home.

00:47:35.780 The plunket was decommissioned in 1946.

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.

00:47:53.220 What happened to Ken Brown after the war?

00:47:54.960 Well, Ken, he got command right after the war.

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.

00:48:18.660 It was just completely different.

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.

00:48:31.040 But Ken was a guy who never, he was outspoken.

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.

00:48:44.860 And for his sins, they sent him to Vietnam. 0.85

00:48:48.240 The Navy was not prepared to end a tradition like that.

00:48:51.660 And so they sent him to Vietnam.

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,

00:49:08.140 when he retired after 30 years.

00:49:10.740 So that was Ken Brown.

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.

00:49:26.720 But that was Burke.

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,

00:49:59.860 knocks on the door.

00:50:01.400 And he remembered the first two words that he said to her when she opened the door.

00:50:04.900 Surprise, surprise.

00:50:06.080 He said she didn't know he was coming.

00:50:08.260 They got married.

00:50:09.420 He started dancing.

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.

00:50:19.400 And poor Jim, he had to bury his wife.

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.

00:50:27.340 So that's them at the end of the war.

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

00:50:39.900 rest of their lives?

00:50:41.060 Yeah, you know, it's a good question.

00:50:42.920 I asked Ken Brown once.

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

00:50:55.200 was the defining experience of his life.

00:50:57.800 He had this great, deep, granite voice.

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.

00:51:07.220 It was disconcerting and really interesting.

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. 0.99

00:51:19.860 And then he said, no, maybe it was when I was a squadron commander picking up downed

00:51:24.780 pilots in Vietnam.

00:51:26.100 Then he thought of something else.

00:51:27.660 And he avoided that one thing.

00:51:29.960 But it occurred to me after Ken died that sometimes, you know, we can't articulate or

00:51:35.100 define what it is.

00:51:36.460 You know, if any of us are asked, what is the defining experience of your life?

00:51:39.200 How can we know?

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.

00:51:50.100 And it was the Plunkett.

00:51:51.480 And, you know, there was only one job recognized on that same stone.

00:51:54.840 And it was Gun Boss.

00:51:55.800 So I think that, you know, that day rippled through the rest of his life.

00:52:00.620 And it did that for all of the men.

00:52:03.100 You know, I think that the destroyer is a little bit of a different ship in the Navy.

00:52:07.400 There were only 250 men on that ship.

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.

00:52:19.660 I mean, this goes back to early man.

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

00:52:28.180 drink.

00:52:28.460 That's, that's the most that we can maintain.

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

00:52:37.880 little bit like family.

00:52:39.020 You know, they had that kind of intimacy.

00:52:41.440 And then you had, you had the shared experience of, of war, the most cataclysmic event of the

00:52:48.660 20th century, maybe of all time.

00:52:50.300 And then you had what happened to them at Anzio, you know, that bomb really galvanized

00:52:55.520 this connection with them.

00:52:57.600 And, and I think those three things together forge something that it's just hard to imagine

00:53:02.820 those of us who haven't been through it.

00:53:04.420 And it became, it became for many of them, I think the defining experience of, of their

00:53:09.520 lives.

00:53:10.000 And even as they drifted into the rest of their lives, you know, they, they, they were going

00:53:14.200 to lose touch, but, but they never lost grip.

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

00:53:34.720 and Ken, what did you take away personally?

00:53:37.660 What did you learn anything about what it means to be a man, like talking to these guys and

00:53:42.240 interacting with them?

00:53:44.640 Yeah.

00:53:45.140 You know, it, it, it, it's a question that, that would, would percolate in me as I was

00:53:49.520 going through this.

00:53:50.480 I, I, I did not wear the uniform.

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

00:54:02.340 that never really leaves you maybe.

00:54:04.300 And, um, and, and I, I remember asking that of Ken and of Jim, you know, how did you get

00:54:11.960 through this?

00:54:12.600 You know, because from, from where we sit today, we look back on this thing, you know,

00:54:16.620 this cataclysm.

00:54:17.620 I mean, 2000 years ago, you know, what was it?

00:54:20.680 The Trojan war was 3000 years ago.

00:54:22.200 We're still talking about that war.

00:54:23.920 You know, one can only imagine how long we're going to be talking about this one.

00:54:27.260 And they were part of that.

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

00:54:50.020 were, was plenty of opportunity for fear.

00:54:52.740 How did you get through that?

00:54:54.300 And, and they both said the same thing and they said that they said it the same way all

00:54:58.540 the time.

00:54:58.860 Jim would always talk about it as work.

00:55:00.640 He said, you know, it was just a matter of doing your job.

00:55:04.280 You didn't have time to be afraid.

00:55:06.320 You only, we were trained.

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.

00:55:14.800 They didn't think of it as combat.

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

00:55:24.860 things.

00:55:25.220 Um, you know, don't, uh, we don't extrapolate and provide too much perspective.

00:55:30.020 We stay focused.

00:55:30.860 We do what we're supposed to do.

00:55:32.180 And that's how we get through.

00:55:33.680 Yeah.

00:55:33.960 That idea.

00:55:34.580 I mean, you ask a lot of World War II veterans, the ones that are still around, but they would

00:55:38.260 say the same thing.

00:55:39.240 You know, how did you do it?

00:55:39.860 Like, I'm just, I just did my job.

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.

00:55:48.740 They wouldn't talk about it.

00:55:49.860 Then you ask like, man, how did you do that?

00:55:52.000 Amazing thing.

00:55:52.460 Well, they just said, I was just doing my job.

00:55:54.760 That was it.

00:55:55.360 That's right.

00:55:55.900 That was it.

00:55:56.440 Yeah.

00:55:57.200 It just seems so ordinary to them.

00:55:59.020 I mean, we look at it as, is completely extraordinary, but you know, they were just doing what they

00:56:04.120 had to do.

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.

00:56:11.620 The book has a website, ussplunkett.com.

00:56:14.720 And there are lots of pictures up there.

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.

00:56:23.020 There is even up on that website.

00:56:24.720 There's some video.

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.

00:56:44.700 Fantastic.

00:56:44.920 Well, Jim Sullivan, thanks for your time.

00:56:45.900 It's been a pleasure.

00:56:46.700 Thank you very much, Brett.

00:56:47.540 My guest today was Jim Sullivan.

00:56:49.780 He's the author of the book Unsinkable.

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,

00:57:01.900 where you can delve deeper into this topic.

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.

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00:57:48.760 but put what you've heard into action.

The Art of Manliness - May 26, 2021

The Men and Mission of WWII's Unsinkable U.S.S. Plunkett

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