When one contemplates the Navy’s combat action in World War II, one mostly thinks of the naval war against imperial Japan, with only passing attention given to how our warships took on Germany’s submarines or the aircraft of the Luftwaffe. Writer and researcher James Sullivan addresses this imbalance in Unsinkable, his new study of the USS Plunkett, one of the Navy’s “fightin’-est ships.”
The Plunkett’s story began on March 1, 1939, in Kearny, New Jersey, as one of the 66 Gleaves-class destroyers built between 1938 and 1942. It was launched a year later, on March 7, 1940. The United States committed 414 destroyers to battle in World War II; 71 were lost. Since the advent of submarine warfare in World War I, destroyers had taken on an increasingly important anti-submarine role. In 1914, a German U-boat sank a British warship with an “automotive” torpedo, a first for such a weapon. Surface ships responded with depth charges and hydrophones that could track underwater movement. That same year, pilots started dropping bombs from the cockpits of their aircraft, and aerial bombing was born. Navy planners responded by outfitting destroyers with anti-aircraft guns. By World War II, destroyers could thus handle adversaries on the sea, under it, and in the air. It is worth noting, however, that even with all that armament, the destroyer was still a thin-skinned vessel: The Plunkett put to sea with a three-eighth-inch-thick steel hull — hence the nickname for Greaves-class destroyers: “tin cans.” The steel hull of a battleship, by contrast, was 1 foot thick.
But the story of the Plunkett is really the story of its crew, and in this respect, Sullivan’s writing stands out. He focuses on five crew members, from the skipper, Edmund Burke, a Naval Academy graduate and All-American football player who would eventually win the Navy Cross, to a young gunnery officer, and to a 17-year-old seaman who is trying to hold on to his hometown sweetheart. Their tales and others are told with humor and compassion. And it is both enlightening and disappointing when Sullivan reveals that many U.S. leaders, such as President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, believed at the outset of the war that the young men they were sending into battle had been “mollycoddled” at home. He finds an equally bleak assessment from an unnamed Army general: “I’m afraid the Americans of this generation are not the same kind of Americans who fought the last war.” These quotes both rub the wrong way, as my late father was a crew member on the USS Savannah, a light cruiser that supported Operation Torch, the invasion of North Africa in which the men of the Plunkett also fought.
The Plunkett earned five battle stars and participated in the following operations: Torch, in North Africa (November 1942); Husky, in Sicily (July ‘43); Shingle, in Anzio (June ‘44); Overlord, France (June ‘44); and Dragoon, Southern France (August ‘44). Sullivan deftly moves his narrative from place to place and time to time, from Overland, Missouri, to Casablanca and from Thornton, Colorado, to Sicily. You may be in Salerno in 1943 one instant and, a page later, be back in Missouri in 1944.
In writing Unsinkable, Sullivan did a great deal of research and contacted many of the survivors of the Plunkett and their families. In the book’s last section, entitled “Aftermath,” he shares with the reader a particularly emotional moment from a trip he made to the cemetery in Nettuno, Italy, where many of those who died in the various Italian campaigns are buried. He had arranged to travel with both his family members and a survivor of the Plunkett for Memorial Day. Ken Brown, one of the survivors, recalled Memorial Day at the cemetery in May 1945. Several senators, as well as Gen. Lucian Truscott, a past commander of U.S. forces in Italy, were in attendance for the dedication ceremony. Truscott stepped onto the stage, where he “turned his back on the living” and “addressed the dead men under the crosses.” The general apologized to the men. He said he hoped they would forgive him for any mistakes he had made, though he knew that was asking a lot. He told them he wouldn’t refer to them, then or ever, as the “glorious dead” because he didn’t see much glory in getting killed when you were a teenager or in your twenties. In the future, he promised them, if people started talking like that around him, he would “straighten them out.”
The crew of the Plunkett, the men who went ashore on beaches all over the world in the 1940s, are part of the cohort accurately described by newscaster Tom Brokaw as “the Greatest Generation.” Reading Sullivan’s fine book makes their greatness easy to understand. But, sadly, the members of this generation are leaving us. We must do everything we can to honor and remember them. Buying and reading this book is a good way to start.
Chris Timmers is a freelance writer in Columbia, South Carolina. He is a West Point graduate and specializes in books on military affairs and history.
