AUGUST 1943
Friendly fire was the elephant in the wardroom. After the invasion of Sicily at Gela, the beast lumbered into the memory banks of officers who commanded batteries that took out twenty-three Allied troop transports, and squatted. Ken did not have to dwell on what part Plunkett might have played in that “screwup”—they’d got word and had checked fire—but now he had that plane over Palermo with the “wobbling” wings to haunt him.
It was August now. After months of little to no drama and calls to general quarters that were routine and uneventful, there had been since Gela three weeks earlier the possibility of something at large every dawn and every dusk, and sometimes in between. Days and nights marked by action that Irvin Gebhart declared early on he would never forget merged into a stream of shore bombardments, nights at general quarters, and exhilarating bursts of action like the time they went after marauding Italian motor torpedo boats. “We gave them a run for their money,” Gebhart declared after Plunkett finally gave up the chase.
German bombers were picking off destroyers all around them. As Plunkett patrolled the entrance to Palermo Harbor two days after their arrival, the ship’s crew watched German bombers work over the anchorage for an hour, dropping sticks of bombs that blew up targets from materiel on the piers to ships, including the destroyer Shubrick. Two bombs in a stick of three straddled that ship, and one hit, penetrating the main deck and detonating between an engine room and fire room. Nine died immediately, and seven of the seventeen wounded would die later, some from the skin-boiling effects of six hundred pounds of pressurized steam spurting from ruptured lines. A Junkers Ju 88 straddled another destroyer, Mayrant, killing two destroyer men and wounding thirteen, including the president’s son Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Jr. Some destroyers would go down suddenly, like Maddox at Gela, but more often than not, like Mayrant and Shubrick, they’d take a hit, stay afloat, and leave the damage control parties to cope as best they could. It was becoming clear, too, that the “sympathetic” consequences were as much to dread as the initial explosion—the scythes of steam that could literally slice off a limb; the ship’s own depth charges, if not set to safe, exploding at prescribed depths when the ship went down; the magazines in the bowels of a ship kindled by an enemy bomb and erupting with a ferocity that was oftentimes exponential to the initial hit. Sympathy hurt.
Some men went into shell shock, such as the sailors on Shubrick who’d collected parts of their torpedo officer under the tubes on the main deck, on the after stack of the ship itself, and on the machine guns, too. Officers succumbed to the yank of madness as well. One of the stories making the rounds on Plunkett that early August concerned a ship in their squadron that had shot up one of their own seagoing tugs, by accident. The CO believed he’d been wounded in the action. He called for a pharmacist’s mate to put him down for a Purple Heart, but the wound, as Jim McManus had it, turned out to be an “infected pimple.” By the time Dooley finished shaping his story, they’d had to remove the CO from the ship in a straitjacket. There’d been a pharmacist’s mate on Plunkett who’d crowed about the ferocity of the war in the Pacific, where he’d been, and who denigrated the European theater as a sideshow. Traumatized by the action he then experienced on Plunkett, he, too, was removed from the ship in a straitjacket, according to McManus. Dooley had a knack for turning up the heat on a story and subscribing to the wildest possibility as explanation. When the black gang emerged from the engine rooms and fire rooms after general quarters, and asked Mac for details on what they could only hear below deck, Mac would describe the trajectories of bombs that didn’t merely straddle Plunkett but would slant between the stacks of the ship.
Two weeks after General Patton took Palermo and set his sights on Messina, orders dispatched Plunkett to Ustica, an island thirty-seven miles north of Palermo that harbored an enemy penal camp and a concentration camp for political prisoners. What kind of opposition they’d meet was vaguely surmised. They might meet 80 Italian soldiers with three light machine guns and, possibly, 108 German soldiers with heavy machine guns, though it was believed the Germans had already fled. Plunkett’s squadron commander, George Menocal, was to “demand and accept without conditions the enemy military force there stationed.”
The ship steamed out of Palermo in the morning with a British major—who would take charge of the island after its surrender—and the island’s Italian mayor on board. As a matter of public consumption, the Italians were still fighting alongside the Germans, but a nascent government was already maneuvering with the Allies to swap sides, a move that wouldn’t be made official for another month. In the meantime, Ustica was enemy-occupied territory, and had to surrender.
Plunkett and Gleaves took station off either bow side of a “love charlie item,” as Plunkett’s orders referenced the landing craft, infantry (LCI). If there were prisoners to be had on Ustica, they’d ferry them back. After three hours’ steaming, the two destroyers and the LCI neared their destination at Santa Maria Bay and sounded general quarters. The island was the top of an extinct volcano and had been named Ustica (burnt) by the Romans for the black rocks dominating its expanse. There wasn’t much water on the island, but that didn’t stop Mussolini from cramming the place with thousands of political prisoners, including Slavs and homosexuals who wasted away in the early years of the war from malnutrition and tuberculosis.
Twenty minutes after coming into the bay, Plunkett lowered the squadron commander’s gig with Bill Maners, a lieutenant on the squadron commander’s staff, and eight enlisted men, three of whom could speak Italian. They motored for the town’s mole under a white flag. As the gig pushed off, Ken stood in the director with his five-inch battery trained on the island. The British officer and the island’s mayor, the podesta, idled on one wing of the bridge with Burke, and watched the gig motor toward shore, its canopy fluttering with the breeze. Maners stood behind the squadron commander, who was gripping one of the canopy’s poles. His arm might have been shaking from the wind, but Maners didn’t think so. The squadron commander hadn’t earned much admiration from the crew. While Burke strode onto the exposed wings of the bridge during air raids that were becoming a regular part of their daily fare, scuttlebutt was the squad dog sought shelter under tables in the wheelhouse.
As soon as Plunkett’s gig made the mole, a group of men, including the garrison’s Italian commander, met them waving white sheets. They were hungry, they said, patting their stomachs. They were thirsty. They’d been rationing water since Palermo had fallen, and there were eleven hundred civilians on the island. They had no medical supplies. The Germans were long gone, having decamped on the day the Allies invaded Sicily. The Italians were glad the Americans had come. And so they surrendered.
A signalman in the landing party broke out his flags and communicated the surrender by semaphore. The British major and the podesta now made preparations to land. Jim Feltz, who’d been repositioned at general quarters from the hole in the fantail to a repair party topside at midship, looked to one of the signalmen for a translation.
They’d embarked on this mission with zeal, like men from the Age of Discovery bent on subjugation, or better yet, the Pacific, where the islands bristled with enemy. This was the Plunkett’s moment, they’d thought, conjuring visions of dauntless men storming ashore, but the whole thing had petered out as a farce.
Remembering the signalman’s pronouncement, Jim recorded the day’s anticlimactic depths with a simple phrase in his diary: “We just took a island.”
With the Allies now in command of Palermo, and the Germans long since persuaded that the only thing to do about Sicily was get off it, the chase was on. The Germans slogged across the northern reach of the island, heading for an escape valve onto the European mainland at Messina, fighting rearguard actions against Patton’s troops all the way. Patton had come into war as a skeptic of the Navy’s effectiveness to complement the Army’s efforts. Just prior to the landings in North Africa the previous fall, he’d said he doubted the Navy could land troops on schedule. The Navy proved him wrong, landing as planned at Casablanca, Fedhala, and Oran. Then, at Gela, with Patton’s troops pinned down by swarms of German and Italian tanks, he watched Navy guns pummel enemy positions. He’d become a believer.
A week after they’d arrived in Palermo, Plunkett and the ships of its squadron and the larger task force sortied for points along the shallow scooped northern coast of Sicily to conduct a series of leapfrog landings. Plunkett screened cruisers and other destroyers, who’d soften up the shores for Patton’s troops, and then Ken Brown’s battery would weigh in with its five-inch guns. On deck with the midship repair party, Jim Feltz watched his ship’s guns bear down on the tanks and trucks of the retreating Germans. He didn’t much care that they were at general quarters night after night. He liked that they were engaged behind enemy lines, and he liked that they’d crept up on the Germans without the enemy knowing it.
The first of their leapfrog landings, at Terranova, was especially gratifying to the crew, who tuned in to the radio the next day and learned they’d “made out very good,” as Gebhart put it. He concluded that what they were doing to the Germans now with these surprise leapfrog landings was the “slickest trick” they’d pulled off since the Allies had dropped a dead-tramp decoy off the coast of Spain and then gobsmacked the Germans on Sicily. One night they went out to duel with one of the Germans’ 88mm guns, mounted on a train car. The 88’s reputation as a tank-killer and a plane-downer preceded Plunkett’s sortie. They knew what it was to go up against a Ju 88, but this 88 was like going into the ring against a southpaw: You couldn’t know what to expect. By the time Plunkett moved into position for its assault, they learned the Army had knocked out the big gun. “Thank God for that,” Jim declared that night.
Two hours after getting underway from Palermo on August 7, Plunkett was making eighteen knots, steaming off the starboard bow of the cruiser Philadelphia, when one of the lookouts spotted something in the water two miles distant. Jack Collingwood was at the conn, and he changed course to investigate. He steamed up to the edge of a generous buffer between his ship and what turned out to be a small yellow life raft with a CO2 canister strapped at the rear, occupied by a single man, a German.
Finding men in the water, dead or alive, was something they were getting used to. On the Atlantic Seaboard, they’d been merchant marines, undone by U-boats. After the invasion at Gela, their squadron picked up a dead German airman. They took his papers and, dipping colors, buried him at sea. They were adversaries, but up close, they were men like themselves whose end warranted some gesture of respect.
Jack Simpson had been up all night, standing watch as officer of the deck from midnight until 4 a.m., had been deprived of shut-eye again for general quarters from 5:05 a.m. to 6:29 a.m, and had only just now had the opportunity to dive down for some deep sleep, when the bridge roused him. As first lieutenant, it would be his job to retrieve the man from the raft.
Jack and a crew of enlisted men, including Jim McManus, lowered one of the ship’s whaleboats and motored for the raft. They’d taken their first island, and now they were about to take their first German prisoner. As the boat closed on the raft, Jack leveled his pistol at the survivor who, it became clear to Jack, was prepared to offer no resistance. One of Plunkett’s crew extended a bow hook to the prisoner, and he surrendered his weapon to the hook. The German airman didn’t speak English, but Jack could hear thankfulness and relief in the young man’s voice as he climbed into the whaleboat, mumbling something.
Jim McManus wasn’t about to remember the capture of this German prisoner with this little drama. For Jim, errant captains came off their ships in straitjackets and “sons of the Führer” wouldn’t surrender until they tried to kill you first. When Plunkett’s whaleboat got to the raft, what Jim remembered was that the airman had pulled his gun on the crew. But the pistol clicked and wouldn’t fire because the saltwater had taken its toll on the firing mechanism.
Whether Jim’s version or Jack’s version was closer to the bone of truth, one thing was clear: Everyone wanted the airman’s gun. As soon as they’d pulled the hook with the gun back into the whaleboat, the coxswain said, “I’ll have that pistol.” Then Jack Simpson, according to McManus, pulled rank on the coxswain and, like a character in a B-grade farce, said, “I’ll have that pistol.”
Back on the ship, McManus noted that the captain would have that pistol. Burke took possession of the gun and summoned one of the crew who spoke German, Irving Diamond, from the ship’s store. They learned the twenty-one-year-old German sergeant, Karl Sebald, had been in the water for five days. He’d been flying a Junkers Ju 88 as an observer during a raid on Palermo. The plane had crashed after a steep dive over the anchorage, and two of the plane’s crew had drowned.
John Putis, the ship’s chief pharmacist’s mate, treated the pilot for shock, exposure, and injuries he received in the crash, and they quartered him in Ken’s stateroom, with Diamond as guard. When they discharged the pilot to an Army ambulance in Palermo later that afternoon, Sebald removed his wristwatch and gave it to Putis in gratitude. The war was over for the German sergeant, but the odyssey of his pistol had only just begun.
The desire for plunder that had fired the Achaeans sitting by the ships near Troy was no less fervent among Plunkett’s crew. A gun was the preeminent trophy. A few days after the capture, Captain Burke called McManus to the bridge, asking the gun captain if he might do anything about this pistol that wouldn’t fire. McManus was establishing a reputation for himself on Plunkett as the go-to man for guns needing repair. He had a knack for zeroing in on problems, from faulty valves to gunked-up barrels, and the captain knew it.
Mac and one of the ship’s torpedomen took the airman’s pistol apart, cleaned it, oiled it, and got it to fire. Turning the gun back over to Burke, McManus suggested the captain clean and oil the gun several more times in the coming week, until all of the rust was gone. Another gunner’s mate later offered to clean the captain’s pistol and left the gun to drip dry in an ammunition storage room. That’s when it went missing. Burke ordered inspections of all the gunner’s mates’ lockers, and then called for a moratorium on movies, hoping that might help incentivize the gun’s return. It did not. The suspicion fell most heavily on McManus, who was now the beneficiary of taunt after taunt: “What’d you do with the old man’s pistol, Dooley?”
By the middle of August, Karl Sebald’s gun was buried in John “Annie” Oakley’s cache, though no one knew it at the time. Burke couldn’t sustain his prohibition against movies and he relented after several days. They took in a show on the afternoon of the 16th, capping an eight-day stretch of shore bombardments and amphibious landings. After that movie, as the men began scattering for watches, they learned Sicily had fallen.
The Allied campaign for Sicily concluded thirty-eight days after the Operation Husky landings on the south coast. The British and the Americans had suffered an equal number of men killed, 2,700 for the Brits and 2,800 for the Americans. One of every five American dead was a sailor. There wasn’t any formal capitulation of the island to the Allies, but Sicilian ports and airfields were now in Allied hands. With plans for the invasion of France still ten months from fruition, the next major Allied move would be to the Italian mainland. Plunkett was about to strike the first blow.
The ship’s work—Burke’s role in particular—on the Husky landings, the leapfrog landings, and the Ustica surrender merited commendation from Rear Admiral Lyal A. Davidson, who had managed shore bombardments from his flagship, the cruiser Philadelphia. “Your calm judgment, untiring devotion to duty and prompt appreciation of your tasks under difficult and hazardous conditions contributed materially to the early fall of Messina,” Davidson wrote to Burke. The elevated language notwithstanding, it was a pat on the back, nothing more.
Since he’d come out of the Academy, Burke’s commanding officers had rated him as a man fit for promotion, whether for command of submarines or an expedition, a squadron or a classroom. More than any other attribute, he impressed his superior officers with his ability to carry on under any and all circumstances. He wasn’t going to be put down. No one expressed reservation about his ability to succeed. He was levelheaded and quick to react in emergencies. “He is the type I would particularly desire to have serve under me during war conditions,” one of his submarine commanders noted early on. Under Burke’s command, said one of Plunkett’s squadron commanders, the ship was a beautifully run destroyer.
As soon as they’d heard Sicily had fallen, Plunkett got underway in the early evening to sweep the northwest coast of the island. Through the small hours of the morning, the crew stood at general quarters while the ship zigzagged at twenty-seven knots. There was nothing to be had of the sweep. The Germans and their Italian allies were gone, and Plunkett started back toward Palermo, relieving the crew from battle stations just a few hours before dawn.
Burke left the ship in the morning, motoring away to conference with Rear Admiral Davidson and the commanding officers of two cruisers and three other destroyers. When he returned that afternoon, he carried orders for a shore bombardment of the Italian coast. They would fire one hundred shells onto a railroad bridge at Gioia Tauro, an assignment that would fall to Ken Brown up in the director.
Plans on the table, Burke looked at Ken. “Don’t try to tell me how to do this,” he said.
Ken hadn’t said anything, but Burke had an idea he needed to pre-empt input from Brown.
They steamed on all four boilers for the Italian coast under a gondolier’s moon, together with the cruisers Philadelphia and Boise, and destroyers Gleaves, Niblack, and Benson. The crew came to general quarters for a couple of hours after dark, stood down for an hour, and were back at battle stations again just before midnight.
From the observation hatch of the director, Ken looked out at the Italian coast, which was little more than a smudge to the east. A searchlight on Point Scilla groped for targets on the open water, but Plunkett was out of range now, having dropped one of the cruisers and the other two destroyers to move farther north with Philadelphia and Benson.
On each of Plunkett’s four five-inch guns, one of his captains stood by, waiting on word from the gun boss as Burke moved Plunkett into position. At the end of the day, this was Plunkett’s principal purpose. Say what you will about convoys and screening, the ship was first and foremost a floating gun platform, light and nimble to be sure, and not nearly the kind of platform that a battlewagon was with its sixteen-inch guns, but a platform nevertheless. All war was a matter of putting ordnance on a target. It all boiled down to that.
Seven men crowded the turret at each mount—a pointer, a trainer, a fuse setter, a projector man, a powder man, the gun captain, and a hot shell man who wore asbestos gloves and whose job it was to yank the brass shell casings from the breach and toss them out the hatch onto the deck. Below them in the handling room, four more men prepped the shells and powder, and below them in the magazine, four or five men would pass up the powder and the fifty-two-pound shells. Moving as fast as they could move, the crews could send up twenty shells per minute.
A 1:30 a.m., Plunkett ceased zigzagging and steamed at fifteen knots to its firing area. Twenty minutes later, Burke called up to the director, and Ken signaled his men to commence firing. Niblack and Philadelphia uncorked their gunnery as well, and soon the Italian mainland was under fire—the first time American ships had ever bombed continental Europe.
Ken kept his gun captains firing at a slow but steady pace as he worked on the bridge at Gioia Tauro, hoping to inhibit an Axis escape. Eventually, a fire sprung from all that shelling. He believed he’d found his target, and he brought his guns to bear on that faint light. Six or seven minutes into the bombardment, Burke called up from the bridge, asking how many rounds he’d fired.
Ken heard the question, and his mind blanked for a moment as he considered his response. He looked at his trainer, and unconsciously pumped his thumb, as if he had a clicker. How many shells? he mouthed silently.
His trainer shrugged.
Ken told Burke he didn’t know.
Burke told him to find out.
Find out, Ken thought. How was he supposed to find out? And what the hell was it about commanding officers that they wanted you to count everything, from cans of peas to five-inch shells?
Ken called down to Jim McManus in gun no. 3. He wanted Mac’s hot shell man out on the deck, counting spent shells?
Mac couldn’t believe the request.
Then Ken called Richardson in gun no. 2, Wikstrom in no. 1, and Jaffee in no. 4. While the hot shell men hopped out of their hatches and started counting, Philadelphia and Benson continued to pound the Italian coast. Ken knew he had to deliver a hundred shells, and he had an idea when to stop. It was going to be a sixth sense that got him there in lieu of technology.
In the yawning gap of silence from Plunkett Burke was back on the squawk box, asking what the hell was going on. Why weren’t they firing?
Ken told him they were counting shells.
Now Burke couldn’t believe it, and his order for the gunnery officer to resume firing, as if he were a nitwit who needed to be told what to do every step of the way, cut Ken to the bone. He didn’t think Burke knew much about gunnery; if anyone should have been told what’s what, it was Burke. And so Brown couldn’t help what he said next, or the way he said it, the way he declared compliance.
“Aye aye, sir,” he said, the first aye and then the other aye each sounding with an inflection that was anything but routine. He’d swerved a boatload of other communication into those three words. And the other men in the director knew it. So did the men on the bridge, Ken’s voice sounding loud and clear on the squawk box.
The gun boss set his captains to firing again, and a few minutes later, at 2:02 a.m., they were done. The hot shell men scrambled out of their hatches and tallied the 109 shells they’d fired. Burke called for steam and started Plunkett into a zigzag at twenty-five knots. Fifteen minutes later, they skirted the searchlight at Point Scilla, and shortly afterward, Plunkett secured from general quarters and Ken came down off the director.
Burke was waiting for him on the bridge. “Brown,” he said to Ken. “Go to your quarters. And stay there. For the next five days.”