OCTOBER–DECEMBER 1943
The gush of letters from Betty Kneemiller dribbled off to a trickle through summer and into the fall of 1943. There hadn’t been anything in July. Two came Jim’s way in August, and there was one in September with news that Mickey had broken her engagement to Joe Jaye for reasons that went unsaid and that might have had everything to do with the war, or perhaps reservations her family had about his being an Italian fellow. Some things could not be overcome. Families could be like that. Betty had quit her job, and all of the girls at the dime store had quit theirs, too. They “got wise to themselves,” Betty had written, and found new jobs that paid much better, understanding there was more important work to do elsewhere, and that it wasn’t necessary to make “Jack for a Jerk.” About Jim, she’d written, “I still call you mine, but I’m not as definite on that being the truth.”
There was no telling what he’d read in the next letter, and mail call became something to both pine for and dread—just like October. One day in Palermo, he received a letter from a nurse off the Newfoundland, who thanked him for his part in the recovery of her possessions. “You’re a luggage-saver,” she wrote. That was all. There wasn’t any return address, and nowhere to write back, but consolation, at least, in the fact that he’d got a reply.
Gallagher’s news that fall wasn’t as welcome. The Army had called up his oldest brother, Tom, which meant his mother was putting a fourth blue star in her window.
“They would get him sooner or later anyway,” John wrote home, after getting the news. “I am glad he took the Army for it’s ten times better for a guy than the navy.”
John had had no news from Frank since Salerno. All he knew for sure was that the men on the far right flank, where Frank went ashore on Red Beach near Paestum, had caught it worse than anyone. Whatever apprehension he harbored over his brother’s situation, he kept that to himself. Writing home, he said nothing of the nine thousand Allied casualties in the ten-day struggle for Salerno or what he’d heard about the assaults on Monte Cassino or the fighting along the Rapido and Volturno Rivers.
“I know about where Frank is and am pretty sure I will meet him again if they give us liberty,” he wrote to Sophie. “Tell [my mother], Frank is in a swell place and not to worry. I am OK also but would love to hit the States and have my ration of good American beer.”
In the meantime, there might be beer in Palermo, and if not then vino. But first he had to get Jimmy Feltz to cover his watch in the aft fire room. Jim was spending a lot of time in the hole these days, blindfolded no less, and his grasp of the ship’s power plant was firm, and impressive. Would he do it?
They’d been neighbors for a year now, Jim in the bunk just beneath John’s, and had come into a familiarity born of close quarters and shared experience. Jim could recognize Gallagher from the peculiar depression of the man’s weight in the berth above him, as telltale as a silhouette, and from the modulation of John’s breathing in sleep. They’d waded ashore on liberty together, from Norfolk to North Africa, bumming about like tourists, shooting bull all the while. Once, after a new man had come into their quarters, drunk and catching flak for the perm he’d put in his hair, the man had pulled a knife on Jim. John rolled out of his bunk, literally, and collapsed on top of the threat, laughing all the way. John was always smiling, as happy-go-lucky as they come, without an enemy on the ship.
Sure, Jim told him that afternoon in Palermo, I’ll watch your fire room.
The ship was nestled up to two other destroyers on the dock at Palermo, with the no. 4 boiler in the aft fire room supplying power to the other idle cans. The aft fire room was an operational twin to his own but as different in appearance as a nonidentical twin. He climbed through the hatch and started down the ladder, understanding right away he had a problem. Something down in the hole was clacking in rhythm and loudly.
He descended past the top-watch, who’d be the only other man in the hole with him for the next four hours. At the bilge plates, the bump man he was relieving started up the rungs as soon as Jim relieved him.
“Gland’s loose in the water pump,” he told Jim, looking over his shoulder, but it should hold for now.
The hell it would, Jim thought.
Shutting down that pump would have shut down power to Plunkett, and the other two cans, and it would take at least two hours to bring power back.
Jim went over to the auxiliary pump and looked at the thing. Two ears, each pinned with a five-inch bolt, held down the pump, except that they weren’t doing a very good job. The gland was loose, the packing bore out, and every time the piston came down, the gland moved and clacked.
“Go get the chief,” Jim called up to the top-watch. “Tell him we got to switch fire rooms ’cause this gland’s going to bust off.”
He looked back to the pump, the racket louder now. The gap that shouldn’t have existed was a half inch, maybe three-quarters. There was no way of tightening that thing while they were running 150 pounds of steam.
He’d been down in the hole for the better part of a year, and could listen through the myriad hisses, clacks, and roars of the fire room for the discordant note. He knew how things fit together, and how to keep them together, and what there was to do came effortlessly to him now. He was going to have to shut that pump down and get some caulking in there, some hemp rope, and then tighten it.
The top-watch hadn’t been gone a minute when Jim decided he might not have another minute. He got on the phones and rang the bridge. “I’m shutting down,” he yelled.
The gland beat him to it. No longer able to hold against the action of the piston, the gland blew, and steam spewed from the pump at 150 pounds, which wasn’t 600 pounds—a jet of high-pressure steam powerful enough to cut your arm off—but harsh enough. The steam filled the room magically fast. Steam at 600 pounds of pressure would fill the fire room at 500 degrees in 4.5 seconds. They’d timed their escape runs up the ladders from the burners, and the best anyone ever managed was 6.5 seconds.
Jim scrambled up the eight rungs to the grating on the upper level and went for the water first. He spun the wheel, shutting down the supply of water, then looked to the steam drum, which was hardly visible in the fogged room. There were 250 valves in the fire room.
His dungarees and T-shirt were soaked already and scalding hot. He grabbed the wheel on the drum and spun that with both hands, shutting down the steam. The fire room was now as unnavigable as a cloud, and the only bearings he had were a matter of knowing where the drum was in relation to the ladder. But how many steps? He stretched out his arms as tentatively as a man in the dark and stepped forward. The heat burned his hands, and they started shaking wildly. Before he could see it, he felt it, the two narrow, flat rungs of each step up the ladder, the metal wet and hot. He grabbed an upper rung, felt his foot slip, and compensated by pulling himself up. One by one, nine more rungs to the top, where the hatch was shut when he started but opening now as the deck crew realized they were having a problem.
Jim levered himself out in a burst of white exhaust and rolled away from the hatch like a man on fire. The heat on his exposed skin seared all of sudden, the darkest hour just before dawn. He drew his knees to his chest, sitting up, and only then opened eyes he’d clenched on his way up the ladder. His hands were still there, but beet-red. He looked up to see Gallagher in his dress blues, ready for liberty, with his arms crossed over his chest, grinning at what may have ranked as the funniest thing he’d ever seen.
“You blew up my fire room,” he said.
That fall, the Navy officially commended Burke for his work on the leapfrog landings and awarded him the Legion of Merit for the Salerno invasion, referencing what Plunkett did to repel aerial assault, what they did to render the Newfoundland salvable, and what they did to screen the transport area and cruisers. The language of the commendations was elevated but somewhat stock—“fearless leadership” and “gallantry and intrepidity”—and at times pointed: “Commander Burke contributed in large measure to the repulse of strong enemy counterattacks at the Salerno beachhead and the protection of assault shipping during unloading operations in support of the invasion forces.” The squadron commander, James P. Clay, who had taken over from Menocal that fall after service in the Pacific, was immediately impressed by what he found after a short time aboard. “I consider the Plunkett one of the most efficient DDs in the U.S. Navy because of the leadership and alertness of Com’d’r Burke.”
Nights now, Plunkett was running patrols to Ustica, that island they’d taken, and the Aeolian Islands, prowling for U-boats and E-boats. One night, they picked up a surface radar contact at sixty-five hundred yards. Jack Oliver called general quarters and cranked the bell for twenty-five knots to close on the target.
When they’d secured earlier, the bridge kept half the ship at battle stations, including Ken Brown and his crew in the director and Jim McManus’s crew in gun no. 3. Mac was taking a break and sleeping through the summons when a shipfitter shook him awake and told him the gun boss wanted him on the phones.
Mac hustled up to the no. 3 gun and climbed into the turret. His fuse setter was approximating a horrible Boston accent, pretending to be him as they tried to sort a problem with the rammer. Mac pulled on the phones to hear Ken Brown sounding at high volume: “McManus, get that goddamned gun trained out and loaded.”
They couldn’t have any light in no. 3 because of its canvas tarp, so Mac made do with the glow shed by a breach light and deployed a trick he knew, and that everyone in the mount knew he knew, to keep the gun from jamming.
“Don’t shoot till I give you the word,” Ken said.
Plunkett dialed down off its twenty-five knots as they closed on the vessel. Ken was out of his hatch, phones on with a direct line to the assistant gunnery officer who was on the torpedo deck, ready to fire.
All of the guns and the torpedoes were now trained on the target. The thirty-six-inch searchlight was blasting a tunnel of light through the darkness. Lying to five hundred yards off the port beam was an Italian fishing vessel, all of the men topside and waving anything white.
The Allies had taken Naples on October 1, but not before the retreating Germans had blown up the spaghetti factories. They’d polluted the water. They’d torched the city’s archives. They were desperate times, and one of every three women in the city was prostituting herself to men who had a tin of food to fork over.
The ship escorted convoys into Naples as the Allies worked their way up the boot from the beachhead in Salerno. They conducted night patrols and lit things up with their searchlight—local fishing vessels, British ships that didn’t respond to their challenges, and wreckage, which they’d sink with their machine guns. If aerial assault had been the principal threat through the summer, the maneuverings of U-boats were to be guarded against that fall. Regularly now, they dropped depth charges on sound contacts but turned up nothing.
If they weren’t on patrol in the Tyrrhenian Sea, they were in Mers el-Kebir or Naples or Palermo, where they got their teeth filled and sat for movies projected onto seawalls, some of them, like The Fleet’s In, again and again. “Very good show,” Gebhart wrote after one viewing of The Fleet’s In. “That makes the sixth time I saw it.” The men went to beer parties and tried to make hay with colonial French girls. The officers did their own drinking in their own clubs, and like sleep itself, the advent of night was no longer the main impetus for a drink: Being off watch or off your battle station was.
Ken Brown returned to the ship one afternoon after a couple hours’ liberty, sailing a sheet or two to the wind, but not all three, not now when the whistle was liable to kindle the klaxon off the bridge any time of day or night. You could afford to get tight, but not wedged in. Still, Ken was literally wedged in this afternoon. In addition to his work as gunnery officer, he was still handling the commissary, the job like a hangover. He’d had stores hauled on that afternoon, cigarettes and candy and sundry supplies better left under lock and key. Not that you had thieves on Plunkett. With the exception of the missing German pistol, and a loaf of fresh bread that might go missing at night when the bakers weren’t looking and the snipes were hungry, everything stayed exactly where they left it. Destroyers were like that. But cigarettes and candy in unlocked space? That was too much temptation, and so Ken stored the crates in his stateroom. He returned to a bunk shelved with stores, and he transferred them all to the floor. The room was so crowded, he wondered, heading down for the count, whether he’d left enough room for oxygen. It was October 9.
In the forward fire room, Jim Feltz was just trying to get through the day. They’d come in from a Lipari patrol and had been more or less moored as before since they refueled. Half the crew had been perched at general quarters all the while, which he didn’t necessarily like, but it couldn’t be helped. At three o’clock they got word from the bridge to fire up the no. 2 boiler.
Why we firing up? Jim wanted to know.
The burner man removed a tip with the smallest orifice, put it in the barrel, and shoved it back in the burner. No one asked why they were firing up. They were getting underway. That was life.
Jim lit the torch and shoved it deep in a hole at the bottom of the boiler box, and they had combustion. You’d think we might just sit tight for a while, he thought. Except that rarely happened.
The anchor chain started hauling, and Plunkett was underway. A minute later, the bridge rang down to engineering for the no. 1 and no. 3 boilers.
In the after fire room, Gallagher fired his two boilers, and a half hour later, with instructions from the bridge, he cut each of them in on the main line. The boiler boxes breathed out suddenly, a funny thing that seemed so unlikely for carbon steel and never ceased to surprise any of them. A bell rang in the engine room, and the dial on the ship’s speed jumped from standard to full. The burner men replaced the tips on their barrels, enabling more flame and higher heat and more steam. The bridge rang again, and they went to the tray for still-larger tips, and now they were at flank, a call that hadn’t ever come down to the fire rooms when they had four boilers lit.
The ship leveled into a smooth run, bow up and proud, stern buried, digging for speed. The boilers roared as the burners spewed oil that fashioned a conical flame at twenty-eight hundred degrees. Normally, a fire room was no louder than a truck at 40 mph, but now they were submersed in a steady roar that made communication by voice all but impossible. With no more to give, and no more to say, Gallagher settled into the run, listening to his boilers and to the propellers thumping all they had. Word had come down to them soon after they’d cut in their two burners. Another destroyer, the Buck, had been torpedoed some hours earlier, and they were going out after survivors.
His watch over, Jim climbed out of the hatch and made his way to the fantail for a look at the ship’s rooster tail. A towering wall of water chased them like some sort of biblical portent, capable of breaking over the deck should the ship suddenly give up a few knots. They’d never run at flank on all four boilers, not off Sicily, not off Salerno, not in evasive action against the Luftwaffe.
Plunkett ran at flank for more than two hours, and then throttled down to twenty knots as they came into the vicinity of Buck’s bad luck, forty-three miles southwest of the Italian mainland at Point Licosa. The disconcerting crank of the manila line on the davits finally roused Ken from the deepest sleep he’d had in a while. Staring off his bunk, he waited for the data to come in. What time it was. What day it was. Where the hell he was. Sometimes you just couldn’t be sure of anything in a stateroom on a ship at sea. But something was up. He swung out of bed, grabbed his hat, and found himself barricaded into his room, the crates having shifted during the run out. He removed the stores to his bed and got up to the bridge.
“Why didn’t you wake me?” he asked Collingwood. Outside the bridge windows, he could barely make out the bow guns for all the fog.
“We couldn’t open the door,” Jack said.
A nearby British ship, HMS Dehli, reported they had one survivor on board. Gleaves had better news. They’d flashed visuals to Plunkett to say they’d picked up two officers and forty men thus far. At 7:50 p.m., they sighted an object in the water off to starboard, and the first lieutenant took out the ship’s whaleboat to investigate. Minutes later, they cranked the whaleboat back up with Buck’s assistant engineer on board, a lieutenant (jg) from Needham, Massachusetts, named James Anderson. In the wardroom, they treated Anderson for lacerations on his ankle and his head and noted the distinct possibility of internal injuries. Then he started talking. He told them they’d picked up a radar contact at about five thousand yards just after midnight. The Buck rang general quarters, and Anderson went topside to his battle station on the ship’s platform just ahead of the forward stack. The bridge rang full ahead, and they charged after the contact, black smoke spewing from the ship’s funnels, looking out for a challenge from the unknown vessel. It never came. Just as the ship came up to speed, an ensign on one of the Buck’s 40mm guns felt the ship hesitate, as if she’d had a collision. She had, with a torpedo that slammed into the starboard side of the ship near the forward fire room and exploded. The pressure in the ships’ steam lines fell from 560 pounds to nothing, but she retained power for a spell.
“I was blown over the side by the explosion,” Anderson told Plunkett’s officers.
The explosion knocked down an ensign on the 40mm gun and raked him with flying debris while a foot of water surged over the deck. The ensign got to his feet and ran to the fantail, yelling for the crew to set all of the depth charges to safe. He glanced back for sight of the stacks or the bridge and saw neither. Either the ship was cut in half, or smoke and steam from the forward fire room blocked the view. Another lieutenant was now on the fantail, also calling for all of the depth charges to be set to safe, so they would not explode if the ship sunk.
In the forward engine room, the crew secured live steam leaks and made their way up top past a blazing fire room where they believed one of the boilers had exploded. The rent in the midst of the ship levered the stern quickly aloft to a forty-five-degree angle.
The need to abandon ship was obvious, and they made quick work of it, releasing life rafts when possible, shucking shoes if they could, and plunging into the sea. The stern sunk, dragging down all of the depth charges that had been set to safe, and one, a three-hundred-pounder in a K-gun, that had not. When that ash can sunk to 100 feet or 150 feet, or to whatever depth they’d set for the explosion, the TNT burst from its shell, doubling down on the carnage.
The concussion brutalized the men in the water. The explosion ruptured pneumatic life belts and hit survivors like kicks to the stomach and pelvis. The blast perforated the membranes of their abdomens, bruised the loops of their intestines, and opened lesions on their lungs. It was hell on the viscera. Those who weren’t killed immediately were so traumatized they drifted to death through the small hours of the morning. Fifty men who’d grouped on one life raft after the stern sunk dwindled to thirty by dawn. It rained in the morning, and when the sun came, it blinded them. They’d seen planes all over the area the previous day, but nothing today until late in the morning.
With Anderson now on board Plunkett, the lookouts spotted a group of objects that proved to be three more survivors, clung together. One of the three came aboard with a broken ankle, another with pain in the abdomen, and a third, a pharmacist’s mate, wiped out from holding up his two shipmates through the night. When the lookouts heard shouts off the port bow, Jack Simpson scrambled back into the whaleboat to retrieve five more men from the sea. Each of them was smeared black with oil, and it was a slippery, frustrating business hauling them into the boat, and even onto Plunkett’s deck. The men who could talk wanted to talk, and they did in the wardroom as oil drained from their ears and noses and buttocks.
A man named Lukasiewski had had the phones on just before general quarters sounded. Last word he heard was this: “Surface contact seventeen hundred yards.” Zuick had just relieved the watch in the after engine room. “Ship was hit just as she got up to speed.” Wieder had been asleep when general quarters sounded, and he hustled up to his battle station at the 40mm director. After the torpedo hit, he saw the “radar antenna down on the deck by the loading machine.” He couldn’t see the mast, stack, or bridge, but he could hear several voices shouting for the depth charges to be set on safe. One man didn’t say anything. He was black, a steward’s mate named Goodson, and he was cut up bad.
After they brought these five men on board, they resumed listening for the shouts, and wondering that the men in the water didn’t have whistles, a simple piece of equipment that now seemed so obviously essential.
Plunkett crept along at one-third, cutting a wake that muffled the ability of anyone to hear much of anything. The lookouts were yanked repeatedly to look in one direction or another as they thought they heard the cries of survivors.
Burke nudged the ship into thick fog and watched his lookouts for signals, but none heard the same thing. There were men in the water and they couldn’t be heard for the depth of the fog and the churn of Plunkett’s propellers. Burke had no choice. “All stop,” he said.
The helmsman rang the engine room, and a moment later, Plunkett’s bow settled as its screws whined down. The reassuring thrum of the ship underway gave way to a silence made all the more deep by the muffling fog, and that was dreadful to every sailor topside and below deck. They may as well have heard the ticking of a bomb. You might lie to inside a submarine net, but you wouldn’t want to in contested waters, and you especially did not want to in the vicinity of a torpedoed ship. A U-boat liked nothing so much as a return to the scene of a crime, where the pickings might be good.
They were still two hours shy of midnight. It was October 9, “OCT 9” from the Ouija board, and Jim Feltz was on deck when the engines went still and the searchlight cut into the fog, lighting the departures of the ship’s two whaleboats until the fog consumed them. He could hear, or thought he could, the ping of the ship’s sonar sounding for a sub. The sonar signal bounded away from the ship, and with each dispatch Jim found himself listening for a corresponding beep echoing back from contact.
After the action off Gela, in Palermo, and at Salerno, he marveled at how little fear he’d actually felt in those places, in that action, so much so that he sometimes wondered whether he was immune to it, that he might be one of those guys to come out the other side of the war sure of his courage, that it would always be there, himself phlegmatic. Except that it was flapping now. He was afraid. His heart was telling him so, racing ahead of every ping of the sonar to still, poised and vigilant, anticipating the corresponding beep of contact with a sub. The energy bottled up within him required some sort of action, and so there was nothing to do but reach a hand to the back of the neck and rub it vigorously, to drop into a squat like an athlete to loosen the stiffness before a race, to inspect the handy billy pumps in the lockers, anything to quell the onset of nerves that might embarrass him if he didn’t camouflage the energy with other measures.
In the dark, he could just make out the gun crew in the no. 2 tub, the gunner leaned back casually in his harness, the loader and the handler pitched forward over the apron like boys on a bridge, a lazy summer day flowing beneath them. They were just as vulnerable as he was. That was the thing about being on a ship at sea: Everyone was equally at peril, no man more so than another, every officer as susceptible as the grimiest snipe. In the infantry, one bullet might find one man, but it didn’t work that way in the kind of combat Jim was engaged in. What might get him was a torpedo or a glide bomb, and if it got him, it was going to get a boatload of them. If the Ouija board had it in for him it had it in for all of them. He listened to the soft chatter of men topside, a sound you never heard at sea because casual talk was always embedded in the baseline of noise emanating from the engine. This sudden recognition of communion calmed him. He wasn’t out there on his own alone. They were with him.
The whaleboat’s faint, distant motor strengthened, and soon one of the gigs resolved out of the darkness, with men standing but silent. The deck force went to the davits and cranked up the boat. Two Plunkett sailors were engaged in artificial respiration bent over two lifeless men. The third man, like his two lifeless shipmates, was smeared with oil. He retched as they negotiated him out of the whaleboat, and then doubled over on the deck. They got him to the wardroom, the man calling for help for his stomach. Plunkett’s new doctor, Wesley Knaup, administered morphine that did little good.
Jack Simpson went down into the whaleboat again, and a short time later returned with a torpedo man, a cook, and a water tender, all complaining of stomach pain. “We thought we got them all,” torpedo man Chester Smith said of the depth charges after they’d brought him aboard.
In the mess hall, Jack went to the black steward they’d pulled from the sea earlier, Goodson. The man was in and out of consciousness, and when he came to, Jack raised the man’s upper body and helped him to a spoonful of chicken soup. The man took the first spoonful, and for the next two hours Jack remained vigilant and managed to get down three more servings. There wouldn’t be a fifth spoon. Goodson died while Jack held him.
Plunkett had fifteen men from Buck aboard now. Burke started the ship’s engines, and they resumed their search in a new area. It was near midnight, and Jim was with the men they’d brought on board. William Loggie from New Haven, Connecticut, was hanging in there, but they gave up on Howard Hill after forty-five minutes, and a machinist’s mate named Smith after an hour. They carried Smith and Hill to the fantail and laid out the men beside the ash cans, then covered them with canvas. Dutch returned to the wardroom, but Jim stayed on the fantail. It was just after midnight, October 10.
Later that morning, they brought four more men onto Plunkett, Charles Rupp and Jack Robinson and Jean Sumner and one man they weren’t ever going to identify because all there was to the trunk were the two legs and one arm. Ken Brown watched them hoist the gig and remove the men, and then parts of men. Their work was largely done by then, and the cook had sent sandwiches up onto the deck for men who’d labored through the night.
One of the young deckhands was eating a sandwich as they emptied this last gig, when Dutch Heissler, who was still in the gig, called for him to lend a hand. The sailor hopped to and waited for Dutch, who lifted from the belly of the whaleboat a last severed limb, this one with the bone exposed. He extended it to the unwitting young sailor. Ken Brown remembered that the kid stiffened, as if catatonic, and stayed that way while Dutch continued to hold the arm out, a gesture that took on the coloring of black humor and that was, if anything, one way to deal with the horrible consequences of a torpedo.
Jack Simpson went into a whaleboat once more that morning to investigate “a large floating object” they could not identify from the bridge, perhaps because the bow of a destroyer is never supposed to assume such an angle. The bow was intact as far as the second sound dome, which sent out the sound waves that “listened” for subs. Ken had the gunners on his 1.1-inch put twenty-two rounds in the bow, and the wreckage went down.
They arrived back in Palermo late in the afternoon, sidling up next to Pier 5, where ambulances were waiting to transfer the survivors and the dead to an Army hospital. In his diary, Jim noted they’d picked up 20 men from Buck. Gebhart had the number right at 19. There’d been 260 men in her originally. Ninety-seven survived, 163 had not. Reckoning the numbers mattered to the men on Plunkett. They’d tallied the dead on Buck and Newfoundland and Savannah and Rowan and Maddox and noted as well the numbers of men who survived. They reckoned the number of decks a radio-guided bomb could pierce when it hit a ship, and how many dead men floating they found. They recorded the number of times they were summoned to general quarters, and how many shells they exhausted, and they erred on the side of hope when they noted how many planes they’d knocked out of the sky. They didn’t write how any of it made them feel; the math would have to do. Three days after a U-boat got the Buck, another U-boat got another Gleaves-class destroyer, Bristol, and the men had a new number of dead for their diaries—fifty-two.
That was the same day Burke finally let Jack Simpson go. The orders for Jack’s transfer had come in from the Bureau of Navy Personnel in August, but it wasn’t until the team had come in from another night patrol in October that Burke signed off on Jack’s departure.
He’d been aboard Plunkett for nearly two years, and he was getting the thing he’d wanted since he’d emerged from midshipman’s school—the Pacific. He didn’t know it then, but he was on his way back onto a “happy ship,” where the food would be good, as it was on Plunkett, and where the captain also cultivated bonhomie, from the wardroom to the bridge. Burke didn’t do that. But he was, Jack said, “totally fearless” and a “beautiful ship handler.”
Before leaving, he made his rounds on the ship to say goodbye, to his Dead End Kids, to the officers in the wardroom, and then down to the chief’s quarters. Ken trailed him down there, understanding he was on the verge of losing touch with his first roommate, though he suspected they’d never lose grip.
One of the chiefs stood to shake Jack’s hand. “You were the best chief boatswain’s mate we ever had,” he told the first lieutenant.
A boatswain’s mate was an enlisted man’s rating, but the demotion was an honor conferred. “He was that,” Ken said later. “All of that.”
At an airfield in Sicily, Jack boarded an Army air transport and lifted off in a plane he remembered chiefly for the skirt around a hole in the floor they used as a latrine. Though Jack would dodge the bombs and torpedoes that were coming for Plunkett, he was going to see more than his fair share off Okinawa on the USS Morrison (DD-560).
Some days after Buck’s sinking, and Bristol’s three days later, Dr. Wesley Knaup doled out cotton and adhesive tape for every man to carry at GQ. Whatever the protocol, few men bothered paying attention to the doctor’s actual instructions if there were any; scuttlebutt had instead repurposed the adhesive and cotton as the butt of a joke. The idea was this: If Plunkett started to go down and the crew had a question about whether they’d set all their ash cans to safe, then what they had to do, while treading oil in the wreckage, what they had to do was shove a piece of cotton up their ass, then grab the adhesive tape and secure the cotton with the tape. Every time they explained their version of the procedure to one another in the wake of this directive, they laughed and laughed.
Through the rest of that month, they operated mostly out of Palermo. The Catholics went to Mass on Brooklyn and, like the tourists they wished they were, visited the “prettiest little church in the world” and Palermo’s catacombs. They shifted their base to Mers el-Kebir on November 1, and some of the crew went to a beer party in Oran that wasn’t very good. One of the crew came back drunk and started harassing Jim. “We had an argument,” Jim wrote in his journal that night. “Finished it in a fight.” They had turkey on Thanksgiving, which was good, and watched Betty Grable in Coney Island the day after. She was always very good, both on-screen and when you needed a little company in the afterglow. The ship’s black gang played a game of baseball with a team off the destroyer Edison. Their roster included one of the ship’s stewards who was such a good pitcher, Edison sometimes parked its center fielder on a chair in the midst of the game. Plunkett nearly gave as good as they got, losing 12–10.
The fun they cooked up with each other gave way to reminiscence about the fun they had at home, and the friends they’d left behind. “They were always a good bunch of guys down the corner,” Gallagher wrote shortly after the disappointing beer party. “I will always like them all and never forget them. Boy, we all had swell times together, didn’t we? We have a lot of fun too but it’s nothing like the old gang.”
At the beginning of his service, he declared in letters home that “I am not much for writing letters to anyone,” but by that fall, he was corresponding with thirty different friends and family. When he was laid low and put on the sick list one day, whacked by a virus that also got Jim Feltz and 41 other crew, he’d bang out a dozen letters at a time. “I am writing this letter in my bunk, but don’t think I would do any better if I had an office of my own.”
They idled for days on end in Mers el-Kebir, roused every now and then for a run up to Bizerte or to Naples. But mostly they stayed in the Algerian port town late that fall, basking in the North African sun and even a little bit of adulation. On November 1, three officers from the Buck penned a letter to Burke to express their gratitude for what the men on Plunkett had done.
“The opinion of the survivors, who were rescued by the PLUNKETT, is that the prompt and efficient work of her officers and men was a positive factor in saving the lives of many of the BUCK’s crew… all possible aid was rendered to them and this letter is an expression of their gratitude.”
One day in the middle of December, after taking on more than one hundred thousand gallons of fuel oil, Plunkett steamed over a buoy chain that ripped a six- by twelve-inch gash in the hull, something they didn’t realize right away. But the next day, a shipfitter found water in one of the magazines, flooding five-inch and 20mm shells. Even with a gash in the hull, there shouldn’t have been water in that magazine. Pretty soon, it was found out that the gunner’s mate responsible for cleaning that magazine was John “Annie” Oakley, who’d recently moved into McManus’s gun turret. When Mac had showed Oakley how to manage the magazines, where he’d turned to for two years, he cocked a wrench at him and said you had to dog down each of the six nuts on each hatch when securing the compartments. That, Mac told him, was how you ensured a watertight seal.
That, according to Annie, “was a bunch of bull.” He wasn’t about to dog down each and every time.
“Do it any way you want,” Mac said. “I’m just ‘going by the book.’ ”
Running over a chain and opening a seam in the hull and having the sound dome carried away was one thing. Burke wasn’t going to can anyone for bungling that. But this about the flooded magazine was something else.
Who’s in charge of the magazines? is what Burke asked the gun boss when he learned of the flood.
“Oakley, gunner’s mate second class,” Ken said.
“You mean Oakley, gunner’s mate third class.”
The Allies hadn’t made much progress on the ground since the Salerno landings in September. The Germans’ Gustav Line stretched across Italy from sea to sea south of Rome, and its linchpin on the flanks of Monte Cassino was to blame. The Allies couldn’t break through. “We’d got as high as Naples, and then a little higher, but we couldn’t get around Monte Cassino,” Frank Gallagher said. “There was the Volturno River and the Rapido River, and we had to keep crossing them. Then we had to go up a mountain. The Germans were always on top of the mountain. Down and up, down and up. That son of a bitch [American General] Mark Clark was a butcher.”
It was then that Churchill hatched a plan to conduct an end run around the Gustav Line. The Americans were already fixated on Operation Overlord, the D-Day landings at Normandy scheduled for the spring of 1944, but at the end of December in 1943, Roosevelt acceded to Churchill’s request to maintain a fleet of landing craft in the Mediterranean for “the big Rome amphibious operation.”
Jim Feltz got word that week that his battle station at general quarters would no longer be amidships with the repair party. Plunkett’s engineering officer was about to elevate Jim’s rating from fireman first class to water tender third class, which was a petty officer’s rating, and they’d determined his highest and best use was down in the hole.
Now that he’d be weathering action in the bowels of the ship, Jim surveyed the aft fire room in the light of pending darkness. He’d managed to shut down the plant after the gland on the auxiliary pump blew, but there’d been too much luck to the success he’d had then. He could do better, and George Gainey could help him get there. With Plunkett since its commissioning, George was a plank owner and a prank player. On Jim’s first watch in the fire room a year earlier, George and another snipe, Bob Cavany, had put Jim on the top-watch long before Jim thought he was ready. At eleven o’clock that night, with Jim on the upper grate, the fire room’s exhaust ports started backing up and throwing steam. Jim yelled for the burner man to go get Bob; he had no idea what was happening. What was happening was that George was shutting down the return exhaust lines for a look at Jim under pressure.
Underway and on watch, Jim knotted a rag at the back of his head and called for George to simulate a hit on the ship. George feigned an explosion, noting they’d been hit forward. Jim consulted the schematic of the fire room that had taken root in his head and started toward the first valve, one of his fellow firemen hovering at his side lest he make a misstep. Hit forward, he moved aft to open his oil lines. First things first, you couldn’t have water in the oil. That would cause the boilers to start panting, and you wouldn’t want that.
Scenario after scenario, Jim groped his way about the fire room, reaching for valves he saw in his mind’s eye until he got to them as fast as he wanted. The Navy didn’t require this kind of intimacy of its engineers, but Jim had a hunch this kind of knowledge would serve him, that it would pay to be able to function a little like Helen Keller, albeit in a war zone.
Gallagher was likewise on the verge of promotion to water tender, but his battle station at general quarters would remain the same—in the gun tub. In letters home, he refrained from reference to his work at general quarters, partly because that kind of detail would be censored by the ship’s engineering officer but moreover because he would just as soon keep his family from worrying. Still, two years to the day after the Japanese struck Pearl Harbor and John decided to enlist, he sounded a note of weariness. “I was glad to get in, but boy will I be much gladder to get out after the war. This is alright for a kid about seventeen, to do a few years, but I’m getting older every day and better get out soon. I am twenty-seven now, but this life makes me feel around fifty-seven.”
At Christmas, the men of the Plunkett feasted on their own ship, and then went to a party whose sailors included only those who came off the cans. They’d enjoyed a great, recuperative stretch in Mers el-Kebir after skirting disasters that struck so many of their sister ships—the Maddox, Rowan, Shubrick, Buck, Bristol, a list that kept lengthening and was bound to stretch further. The Germans still commanded the high ground at Monte Cassino. The Allies were months away from their cross-channel invasion. There was so much more war to be fought, and they all knew it. In the meantime, and for as long as could be had, there was rest. They played more baseball, and had their teeth fixed and ate ice cream and went to Mass. They’d trimmed a tree topside at Christmas and had a “swell dinner” that made Jim Feltz, for one, “very happy.” A girl friend from home sent John a pair of silk panties for the holiday. “They’re a little small but if I keep eating the way I do now, I’m sure they will fit,” John wrote in gratitude. A few days after Christmas, following a morning patrol in which they’d practiced firing their five-inch and their 20mm, they watched Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland in Girl Crazy.
As they rung in the New Year in Mers el-Kebir, Russ Wright watched the men come back to the ship from celebrations in their North African backwater and noted their situation this way: “Moored starboard side to in Mers El Kebir / From Ye Olde Berth One we start the New Year / Boiler #4 is lit off and so is the crew.”
They’d been lighting it up at the Destroyer Club in Mers el-Kebir. More and more, they understood themselves to be a breed apart, as men who didn’t deign to mix with other species of sailors. They were destroyer men. Other men in the Navy didn’t have it so good. GIs loathed sailors off the troop transports that deposited them in battle and retreated, the bastards, and would just as soon fight them as drink with them, but the same GIs celebrated the men on the tin cans, as several of Plunkett’s crew learned at a bar soon after the Salerno invasion. “You guys are not leaving till you’re falling down drunk,” one GI said to men off Plunkett. “You guys saved our ass with your gunfire.”
This evening, McManus had shore patrol duty, which meant he was carrying a sidearm and a cartridge belt. At the Destroyer Club, the chief petty officer on duty put Mac at the door with his .45-caliber pistol and a nightstick, and orders to shoo away the Arab kids, and anyone else Mac deemed undesirable. You had to be off a can to get in the club, but Mac decided to let in one sailor who worked in the motor pool, who only wanted to play a bit of craps and who promised Mac gasoline anytime he needed any.
Settled into the Destroyer Club, the crew was looking forward to their return to Italy, partly because a signorina was better than a mademoiselle any day of the week. The French, they had a habit of lording it over you. Even after they had collapsed like a house of cards when the Germans knocked on their door, they still thought they were something. The guineas, though, were not holier than thou.
It made no difference to Jim Feltz. After learning from Betty that she didn’t know whether he was still hers or not, he knew now that he had to declare what was what, and not with mush, but something even better. And so prior to Christmas, he sent home money to his brother Charlie and asked him to buy an engagement ring for Betty that Christmas. That New Year’s Day, he’d be getting a petty officer’s rating and a sizable jump in pay, as well as an upgrade on his left sleeve. Where previously he’d only sported the red branch of a fireman, he and Gallagher would now be entitled to flaunt an eagle, a propeller, and one red chevron.
Jim McManus bided most of the evening at the door. The man who relieved him did not have a gun, so Mac loaned him his and wandered over to the craps game to see how it was going for the kid he’d let in and for Dutch, who was having a grand time. Dutch was on his hands and knees, readying another throw, when the kid called out the chief as a cheat. Which was a true enough thing. But Jesus.
Dutch landed a punch on the kid, who responded with a knife, a jerk, and a swipe that drew blood on the Dutch-man’s face. Dutch went after him, but Mac got to him first and yanked him away. Mac in the middle was no deterrent to Dutch, who swung for the kid and missed. Mac let him go, and pushed the nightstick in Dutch’s gut, folding him up like a pretzel, as Mac would remember it.
Then Mac allowed the other chiefs to restrain Dutch while he went to the door for his gun. The kid still had his knife. He wasn’t off a can, but he was in a Destroyer Club, where he’d just wounded one of their own.
“Hand over the knife,” Mac said.
The kid wouldn’t.
Mac pumped a round into the gun’s chamber, like a character in one of the movies they played on the ship’s forecastle. “Either hand over that knife or I’ll blow your legs away,” Mac said.
The kid turned over the knife.
Mac then took charge of Dutch’s situation and, not for the last time in his life, shepherded the wounded chief petty officer down to the pier, where the Medical Guard were flying a Mike flag from their ship, meaning the vessel was stopped and making no way. The doctor had been watching a movie and was none too pleased about having to deal with Dutch, who informed a doctor that Plunkett was winning the war.
Back on Plunkett, Mac decided to call on Ken Brown. It was a fiasco, all that business at the Destroyer Club, and the other chiefs in the club had berated him for how he’d handled the situation, for having let the kid in in the first place and for surrendering his weapon.
“You did the right thing,” the gun boss told Mac. To hell with what those chiefs thought.
By four o’clock in the morning on New Year’s Day, Russ Wright had the ending for the year-end reflection he’d put in Plunkett’s deck logs. There were 265 enlisted men serving on Plunkett as they steamed into 1944, and 20 officers, for a total complement of 285. Thirteen of the ship’s officers were attached to the USS Plunkett, and seven others were attached to Destroyer Squadron 7, of which Plunkett was the flagship. Ninety-five of the enlisted men had advanced in rating over the previous quarter, and two of them, including Oakley, had lost ground on their rating. The ship had lost sixty-four man-days to men who’d been sick during the quarter. Only six men had been late getting back to the ship after liberty, and just three men dared to go on liberty without a pass. Plunkett was a well-run ship.
“Our gang’s set to go now—44’s just arrived,” Russ wrote in the small hours of January 1. “Let’s hope there’ll be Peace before ’45.”