“I cannot even now
Altogether disengage myself
From those men”
GEORGE OPPEN, OF BEING NUMEROUS
Jim Feltz started reckoning the losses in his journal right after the battle. “The men killed in the engineering force were…,” and then he started a list, with the surname of a man each on his own line below: “Gallagher—on 20mm gun, Alverson—on a 20mm gun.” Winger, Giardi, Sipes, Thorsten—each on the 1.1 gun. Smoothie, Fisher, Dedovich, Bellman—all trapped in the engine room. He remembered that Eckert had been on the 1.1 gun and recorded his name. Burren was on the searchlight. Snyder and Anderson were in the no. 2 repair party—his old repair party. They each got a line. He ran the math, and he was right: fifty-three dead and missing, the same number of men Betty Kneemiller feared had been lost on Plunkett a year earlier.
That evening when they arrived in Palermo and relocated to the Liberty ship, Jim was lying on his bunk, looking up at the depression in the springs above him, when a man come around with a basket, asking if he wanted some fruit. Jim sat up and looked down into a wicker basket of what looked like oranges, except that one of them was cut open to reveal pulp that was anything but orange. It was as red as blood. They were in Sicily now, and blood oranges were a specialty there.
Jim peeled the orange, and ate it slice by slice, listening to the unfamiliar sounds of this vast compartment, the squeak of beds as the crew shifted for sleep, and the lucky sonorous sound of men already into it. He lay back down on his bunk, looking up again at the depression, until he wasn’t sure what he was looking at. He got out of bed and stood up to look at the shape of a man he’d hoped to recognize but didn’t, who was off Plunkett but not of the black gang.
In Overland that day, Betty Kneemiller stopped at the dollar store after work to buy a small pane of glass. Strangely, when she’d awakened that morning and come out to breakfast, she’d found that the glass in the framed picture she kept of Jim on the family piano had cracked.
While the ship was still in Palermo, a telegram came to Oakton Avenue in the afternoon, its message in all caps: “THE NAVY DEPARTMENT DEEPLY REGRETS TO INFORM YOU THAT YOUR SON JOHN JAMES GALLAGHER WATERTENDER THIRD CLASS USNR DIED OF WOUNDS FOLLOWING ACTION IN THE PERFORMANCE OF HIS DUTY AND IN THE SERVICE OF HIS COUNTRY.” It was January 27, 1944, a Thursday.
Bernice was across the street at her mother’s that afternoon when the telegram arrived. They’d seen the messenger stop in front of No. 58—Bernice and her mother, and her sister Rita, who was living at home—and they all teared up because they all knew why a messenger stopped at a house with four blue stars in its window. After a while Bernice did what she knew she must do. She left the kids with her mother and walked through the unlocked door to be with the Gallaghers.
Later that afternoon, she left little Charlie and Mary with her mother and walked back up the street to her three-decker apartment building, timing her arrival to coincide with her husband’s return from the shipyard. It was a terrible thing she was carrying, both for herself and her husband. She climbed the stairs to the third floor and let herself in. There was water running in the bathroom. He washed, and he shaved, too, when he came home from work. She could hear the incidental little noises, of the water in the porcelain basin and the banging of his razor as he tapped out the whiskers, little noises uninformed by the weight of what she had to tell. This bad thing was out there in the world, but not known by her husband, and oh, how she wished it might have stayed that way. What a distance there was between where he was now and where he was about to go. John was his sidekick and, moreover, a representative of what was best about all of them. They believed that about him even before they’d lost him.
Charlie had heard her come in, and had said nothing at first, waiting for her or for the sound of the kids, and then he called out, “Bernice.”
She went to the partly open bathroom door. She hadn’t thought of what she had to say until she said it, not opening the door but standing outside it.
“I have some bad news to tell you, Charlie,” she said, adding his name to the end of the sentence, a thing she wouldn’t ordinarily do and that cut him to the bone—the invocation of his name.
The water stopped and he waited a beat for her to fill the space with words. “What?” he asked impatiently. He opened the door, and there was Bernice, twenty-four years old.
“Some bad news about your brother John. He was killed.”
He gripped her with his eyes for a moment. The magnitude of that word, “killed,” rendered him speechless, and he was incapable of language. He stared at his wife long and hard, confirming the truth of what she had said by the glistening in eyes that were red from weeping intermittently all afternoon, and then a wild thing sprang in his chest and in his steps as he made heedlessly for the doorway. He plunged down the stairs of the three-decker. He ran up Oakton Avenue, past the historic old Pierce House, up the front stairs, through the front door, up the grand oak stairway, to the room where his mother lay in bed. His sisters, Helen and Gert, were with her, and they were dealing with this enormous, new thing that had come into their lives. Charlie went to his mother. “I cried like a baby,” he said about that night.
Grief consumed them for hours. “I didn’t see him again until two-thirty or three o’clock that morning,” Bernice said later.
Tom and Joe Gallagher would find out in time, and Frank would, too, in a letter from Helen while he was holed up in Anzio. But Frank already knew part of what had happened. He’d seen the ship hit, and he knew it was Plunkett. “I was worried, but I couldn’t get any information. Then I heard from Helen, who wrote me a letter.”
Later, when Frank landed with the infantry in Southern France, he spotted Plunkett’s hull number again, the way he’d spotted it in the Bay of Naples earlier that year. And he went to the ship again. He met some of his brother’s shipmates, and they gave him three pictures from Palermo.
Plunkett buried its dead on January 26, the day after they’d arrived in Palermo, in U.S. Military Cemetery No. 4, located on the outskirts of the city, hard by the elevated berm of a railroad line. A barren-topped mountain loomed in the near distance, and a handful of trees shaded a growing congregation of crosses in this temporary graveyard. The dead lay in twenty-six wooden coffins that looked like packing crates, in two rows before a flagpole where the Stars and Stripes flew at half-mast. Why twenty-six, when they’d only been able to account for twenty-four men dead, is not known. Some of the coffins rose only to the height of the knees, some to the thighs, all were draped by a flag. A Navy chaplain named Bordenave spoke over the men while one of Plunkett’s officers stood by with a sword. Dozens of men from the ship who were able stood a respectful distance back from the coffins, Burke front and center among them. They stood bareheaded, with their hats clasped against their chests. When the chaplain’s remarks were over, a rifle company of nine enlisted men from Plunkett raised their rifles and fired a three-shot volley. Someone took three pictures of the service. Prints were made and clutched by the crew for decades afterward in photo albums where they saved images from the war.
Two days after the service, they gathered John’s possessions from his footlocker and prepared to send them home. He’d been especially well endowed with light undershirts and socks, with thirteen of the former folded in his locker and eight pair of the latter rolled up. He had four dollars in his wallet, and a small collection of foreign coins. He’d kept a watch, even though it was broken. He had two rosaries, and two catechisms, four notebooks, two writing sets, a passel of personal pictures, the ship’s picture with eighty-five signatures of his shipmates on the back, a World Almanac, five white hats, three pairs of blue trousers, two pairs of white trousers, and no dungarees. He was wearing the dungarees when he was killed. Lieutenant Thomas, who’d run for the fantail at Burke’s orders after the explosion, attested to the inventory, and they inventoried the lot for shipment, at some point, back to Oakton Avenue.
John Gallagher was making $93.60 per month when he died. His base pay was $78 and he got $15.60 per month for sea and foreign service duty, effective from June 16, 1942, which was the same day he had been absent over leave six hours and got into a fistfight on shore. The Navy sent home six months’ gratuity pay of $561.60 on April 6, 1944.
One thing they’d forgotten to collect from John’s locker, a thing Jim Feltz noticed when he was back in their quarters and steaming for the States, was a little aluminum tag, they’d had made on Sands Street in Brooklyn a lifetime ago and used as a substitute dog tag and as an ID tag for their lockers. They’d removed all of John’s stuff to the supply office in the base at Palermo, and so Jim removed the dog tag as a memento that he planned to return to John’s family someday. He’d also stashed a fragment of the bomb that hit the ship.
When Plunkett came out of dry dock in Palermo and steamed east for home, men tapped secret stores of booze in their compartments, wine mostly, risking what they wouldn’t risk when steaming as before, and drank themselves into a state. Burke tolerated this behavior until he could no longer tolerate it. He walked through every compartment of the ship one evening, accompanied by two deckhands carrying a bushel basket, collecting bottles of wine.
“Next guy I see with a bottle, he’s going to meet me on the fantail,” Burke said. “If you don’t believe me, try me.”
He had to say the same thing in all of the ship’s compartments.
They steered for Bermuda first, then changed course on February 17 for the home stretch. They plowed into one storm that slowed them to eight knots, and then got whacked by another with 85 mph winds and swells that rolled the ship in the middle of one night to fifty-two degrees. In Brooklyn, the yard workers were waiting for them, like men in a pit crew, backed by antidotes to Plunkett’s problems. They’d already requisitioned a new engine for the one they’d lost, turbines, a stack, a 40mm gun as a replacement for the 1.1-inch, and deckhouses. It was all crated and stored on the pier. They were going to have to cut a lot of the ship away to rebuild her, and the Navy was granting passes, not measly three- or four-day passes as was usual, but seven- and even fifteen-day passes.
The ship’s engineering officer gave Jim something he’d never seen before, would never see again, and didn’t know of anyone else on Plunkett getting: a thirty-day pass. “Maybe he knew something about me I didn’t,” Jim said.
At the Navy Yard, the paymaster gave Jim McManus $887 in back pay, including eight one-hundred-dollar bills. Mac put $500 in a bank in Brooklyn, then boarded a train for Fall River. Fall River knew three of its sons had been downed on Plunkett at Anzio. One had reportedly been killed in action, one was missing in action, and one was wounded in action. Before Jim returned home, the parents of the three had contacted one another, asking for information beyond the confines of the telegram they’d each received, but no one learned anything more until Mac stepped over the threshold of his family home. Some of the crew had written letters home after Anzio. Mac didn’t. He knew he’d be getting leave, and he didn’t want to worry anyone. He hadn’t known there’d been a telegram and hadn’t thought his family would have known what happened to his ship before he told them.
At home, he gave a one-hundred-dollar bill to his mother, who’d never seen one before, then headed to the hospital where his father was recuperating from a heart attack. He stopped at the sign shop on the way, and a bookkeeper advised him to call ahead to the hospital. Don’t just show up on your father, she told him. He’s just had a heart attack. The last word Mr. McManus had had from the Navy was that Jim had been wounded in action. Full stop.
Mac went into the hospital unannounced. His boyhood friend, Henry O’Melia, who was himself home on leave after being shot down in Sardinia, tagged along for the ride. The elder McManus, when he saw his son walking at the foot of the beds in the ward, raised a ruckus in the bed, shouting and crying at the same time. A nurse came running to his bedside and berated Mac for whatever he’d done to the patient.
“He’s my father. Is that a problem?” Mac asked.
She apologized, and Jim’s father came to after a moment. When he’d seen Jim come into the ward, he’d thought he was hallucinating. When he saw Henry behind him, he trusted what he was seeing—hallucinations weren’t that real—though he still couldn’t handle it.
During his leave, Mac dreaded the visits he was obliged to make to the homes of the other two men from Fall River. He preferred drinking with Henry and hanging out in the sign shop. There was one other survivor from Fall River on Plunkett, Tom Casey, but Casey wasn’t home yet, and so the responsibility of those visits fell to Mac. Still, it took some nudging – “moral support,” Jim noted—from the mailman Eddie Monarch one day at the sign shop before he could bring himself to visit Bill Carey’s home. The mailman went with him. They walked to Robeson Street in the Ruggles Park neighborhood and sat for a while with Bill’s family. Bill was missing in action, which meant he’d been obliterated, not that Jim would say as much. Bill’s wife had been a cheerleader in high school. She was blond, of Polish extraction, and had been crying so much since they’d learned of Bill’s status that Jim barely recognized her.
“I want you to come and see me before you go back,” Bill’s mother said to Jim when he was leaving.
Jim said he would.
Eddie Monarch ushered Jim out of the Careys’ and shepherded him to Louis Patten’s house, in the southern part of town. Louis was an only child, and his father was away in the Merchant Marine when Jim visited.
Was he hurt badly? Mrs. Patten wanted to know.
Jim had dreaded this visit especially. He never knew what happened to Bill Carey and had no picture in his mind of that shipmate’s fate. But he had bent over Louis’s body, and lifted the hand to read the graduation date on the ring. What he told Mrs. Patten was that everyone on the ship had got “banged up.” It all happened so fast, no one knew what hit them. He couldn’t tell her what he’d seen when he looked up from Louis’s ring to confirm that this was Louis. “How can you tell a guy’s mother he had his head blown off?” Mac wrote.
He did stop by the Careys’ again before his leave was over. He was in his uniform for the train trip back to Brooklyn. One of Bill’s brothers was there, and Bill’s wife, and Bill’s father. Mrs. Carey told Mac that whenever Bill was returning to the ship, she’d give him a little bag of goodies—some candy and gum, some cigars. She handed Mac a little brown paper bag and smiled at him faintly.
Jim wanted to say something but was incapable of saying anything. Bill’s wife then stepped up and gave him $5. “I want you and Tom Casey to go to a bar and order three drinks, one for you, one for Casey, and one for Bill.”
Back in Brooklyn, the gun boss was waiting for Mac, and started haranguing him for information beyond Jim’s ken.
“Where’s the chief gunner’s mate?” Ken asked, evidently irked, and persuaded, it seemed to Mac, that Jim McManus ought to be in the know.
“How the hell would I know?” Mac said. He was tired, having stood on the train all the way from Providence.
Ken grinned until Mac got it. “You’re the chief now.” Ken shook Mac’s hand, and then told him to get his men to turn to in the five-inch handling rooms. He wanted them chipped and painted white.
The elation of this sudden promotion, and all that it meant—the new, spacious quarters with the other chiefs, the boost in pay, the bragging rights, and the possibility of a deeper future in the service—all of that was subsumed by the prospect of that much drudgery. Dooley stood up. “You can’t chip that paint.”
Ken turned and looked at him. “Do it,” he said.
Plunkett had come into the Navy Yard in Brooklyn like a cue ball, scattering its crew to barrooms far and wide as the men tried to put more distance between them and Anzio with the intervention of a bottle. One night shortly after they returned, Ken Brown and Captain Burke were drinking in the same officer’s club. They’d never been out drinking together overseas, and hadn’t come out to this club together, but they found each other nevertheless. Burke had heard that one of the officers off Plunkett was in a fix on the ground floor of the bar. He went downstairs to where Ken was on the floor, regarding a puddle of vomit he’d deposited. The “local gentry,” as Ken dubbed them, were coming down on him pretty hard when Burke “more or less picked me up off the floor.” He brought Ken back to the hotel they’d both checked into for the night and negotiated the junior officer to his room. While Ken retreated at once for the toilet bowl, Burke lost his own steam and flopped on the other bed in Ken’s room. It was a putrid scene in the morning, each of the men a miserable casualty of the night before.
They hadn’t discussed what had happened to them at Anzio. They didn’t need to. They’d developed a quiet, undiscussed fraternity they hadn’t had before. The Navy was going to award Burke the Navy Cross for his actions at Anzio. “When his ship was subjected to the simultaneous heavy attacks of enemy bombers and torpedo planes, Captain Burke maneuvered his vessel with extreme skill and directed intense and accurate anti-aircraft fire on the hostile planes,” the citation read, the language stiff and formal and hardly capable of carrying the esteem the crew would carry for Burke in the wake of that action. For all of his complicated feelings for Burke, and no matter the slighter commendation he’d had for having taken out those planes, Ken acknowledged that Burke’s handling of that ship at Anzio was a remarkable achievement—the evasive action and bombs dodged to be sure, but moreover the wherewithal to maneuver the ship so that Ken’s battery could address the fighters. At Pearl Harbor, 90 percent of the damage done was accomplished between 0755 and 0825, a mere thirty minutes. Consider that twelve to fourteen planes bore down on Plunkett for twenty-five minutes, and that the ship would live to fight another day, and Burke’s accomplishment comes into high relief. Ken recognized as much after he’d emerged from the director at Anzio. With regard to Burke, he was a changed man. If they’d come to some sort of accommodation at Anzio, that didn’t necessarily mean they’d forgotten who they’d been. Ken woke first that morning in their hotel room. Burke was a mess, mired in his own effluvium, an image you’d never want to escape the clutch of your own black hole. “Of course,” Ken said, “everyone found out.” If this hadn’t changed in Ken, neither had Burke given up his inclinations. He stirred out of sleep eventually and suggested they head to the gym.
For what? Ken asked.
With thirty days’ leave, Jim Feltz took the train home to Overland, and he went to Betty. This was the time, Jim said, when “everything came together.” In a melodramatic rendering of Jim’s homecoming, they’d have gone out to Tunetown and Jim would have made good on his promise to dance. He’d have taken to the floor like he was born to it, and Betty would have dropped her arms and stood stock-still to gaze in wonder at this metamorphosis. That didn’t happen. Jim still couldn’t bring himself to the dance floor. And it didn’t matter.
At the end of his leave, he flew back to New York. During a layover, when the whole thing came together, he phoned seventeen-year-old Betty Kneemiller and told her to come to New York and marry him. There wasn’t any bended knee on his offer, no mush. Indeed, “I never did ask her,” Jim said. “I called and told her to come to New York.” Her father, the colonel, had a fit, never having resigned himself to her marrying a “stock man,” but Betty paid no mind. She came to New York; they took their blood tests, and then got waylaid by bureaucracy and missed getting permission from the Navy and so were married at Madison Baptist Church on 4/5/44, a day after the sequence of numbers they’d wanted, a day that might have been foreordained by a fortune-teller or a Ouija board. Jim paid $1.25 for a room in the Hotel Astoria that night, and then, for their honeymoon, they relocated to the Century, where the room cost 75 cents.
When he’d detached from Plunkett, Jack Simpson had been assigned to a new Fletcher-class destroyer in the Pacific, commissioned USS Morrison shortly after he met the ship in Seattle. They’d been waiting on him a long time due to Burke’s reluctance to part company.
“Where the hell have you been?” his new CO asked.
“Fighting Germans,” Jack said.
Where the Army was at center stage in the European theater, the Navy was the keel of the American effort in the Pacific. The things he’d experienced in the Mediterranean found amplification in the Pacific, seemingly in the same way that the Pacific was a bigger body of water than the Med. The most significant fire he’d fought after Newfoundland was on Princeton, a carrier hit by a five-hundred-pound Japanese bomb in the Battle of Leyte Gulf, the largest naval battle of the Second World War. Morrison’s skipper brought his vessel up against the carrier’s starboard side, as Burke had closed on Newfoundland, and deployed his firefighters. Jack, who was by now the ship’s executive officer, volleyed back and forth between the bow and the fantail, directing the firefighting. All the while, the aircraft carrier plunged up and down in heavy swells, grating against the destroyer. The up-and-down abrasion worked on the port side of Morrison’s bridge, demolishing its windshield, pelorus stand (mounted compass), torpedo director foundation, flag bag, and lookout seat. The forward stack was bent at its base and loosened. Eight feet of the after stack was sheared off. The rubbing eventually split the superstructure and sprung the main deck. “Cargo lights, search lights, radio signals and other communications were smashed bit by bit as the Princeton surged up and down against the smaller ship.” Morrison managed to pull away several minutes before an explosion ruptured in the bowels of Princeton and ripped off a third of the carrier.
After repairs at Pearl Harbor, Morrison steamed back into the fray and was off Okinawa on a bright morning in early May. While posted to the first position in a picket line, the ship engaged several dozen enemy planes before one of them penetrated the flak and crashed into the ship’s forward stack, just aft of where Jack was working in the ship’s combat information center. Three more planes struck the ship with glancing blows, none so severe as the first, but the damage had been done. The ship’s communications were cut, but it was clear the ship was going down.
Jack retrieved his life jacket from his stateroom, just across from the combat information center, and started aft to assess the damage. Two of the ship’s junior officers told him there would be no getting out in that direction. Another told him the captain was dead. By the time Jack got to the bridge, he could see the ship’s fantail in the water. The bow was rising, and the ship was listing, then rolling. “I stepped over the railings, and walked on the bottom of the ship,” Jack said. He was right above the ship’s sound room, and though everything was happening so fast, he sat down beside the sonar dome and put on his kapok life jacket. It was a curious moment of calm for Jack, before the consequences of all that had happened tallied its toll. He knew then that dozens of men, and probably many more, were trapped in the hull beneath him and would not survive. He’d been on the bridge of Morrison when a data report had come in noting Plunkett’s fate, and he’d since learned that fifty-three were lost on his first ship. The toll was to be triple that on Morrison. In the Pacific, Jack found what he’d wanted, a war where most of its intensity was happening on the Navy’s front lines, and more than that its picket lines. He stood on the hull a moment, the last man on Morrison. Then “I stepped off as she was sinking, and swam away from the ship, afraid some of the depth charges might not be set.” One of the first men he encountered could barely keep his face out of the water. It was the ship’s captain, not dead. Jack summoned a nearby swimmer, who was in decent shape, and ordered him to stay with the captain. Then he swam away through the flotsam and oil, pairing wounded with non-wounded as best he could. He encountered another man in a life jacket, one of the ship’s ensigns, who was sounding an alarm about sharks, though none had come and there was nothing to be done if they did.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Jack told him. “Sharks won’t come near oil.” He felt for the sheath on his belt where he still had the knife he’d made on Plunkett.
“I’m glad you told me that,” the man told Jack three hours later after they were plucked from the sea by a landing craft. “I didn’t know that.”
“I didn’t know that, either,” Jack told him.
On May 5, 1944, Plunkett came out the other side of its repairs in the Brooklyn Navy Yard and got underway for Belfast, though the crew wouldn’t know as much until the 11th, when Jim Feltz scribbled in his journal: “Found out where we were going (Bellfast [sic] Ireland).”
From Belfast, the rumblings of something major pinballed all over the ship. The invasion of Europe was imminent, they all knew that, but that was all they knew for sure until May 29, when Jim wrote this in his journal: “John Ford Movie producer and chief come aboard to take pictures of invasion we think.” They all knew of Ford, the man behind How Green Was My Valley and The Grapes of Wrath and the documentary short The Battle of Midway. He’d had a million dollars’ worth of camera equipment hauled aboard Plunkett and a handpicked crew of Coast Guard photographers to deploy as much. All that equipment, and the presence of the legendary director, was a catalyst to wild flights of scuttlebutt. If Ford was on board, they were headed into something epic. On June 3, Plunkett got underway at two o’clock in the morning with four battleships, four heavy cruisers, and ten destroyers. “Don’t know where we’re going to hit as yet,” Jim wrote.
Ford spent a good deal of time on board Plunkett with the chief petty officers and the enlisted men, playing cards. Bill Souza, who’d come aboard Plunkett after Anzio, used to talk with Ford while he stood watch on the torpedo deck, and got to know the director well enough to ask for the man’s address. Ford complied. “I was thinking when I got out of the Navy I would go to California,” Bill said.
One of Plunkett’s sailors might have told Ford about the time his grandmother won the lottery and took her family up to Peaks Island in Maine, to Sunnyside, in fact, the cottage where John Ford spent his summers as a boy. Perhaps he remembered that visit? That sailor’s grandmother and John Ford’s mother were cousins, but Ford wouldn’t hear this story from anyone that day, because it was John Gallagher’s story.
At seven o’clock in the morning on June 4, underway for Normandy, the men on Plunkett learned the invasion had been postponed twenty-four hours to let the worst Channel storm in forty years blow through. The ship, and hundreds of others, turned off course, Plunkett to head back the way they’d come. At seven o’clock that evening, they turned back for Normandy, the invasion on again. “All you can see is ship,” Jim Feltz wrote, referencing the awesome panorama around him. “Don’t know how many.” Jim was scribbling it all down in a three-by-five notebook, his third book of the war, squeezing out a hundred words per page, understanding that history was being made around him.
On Monday, June 5, Plunkett veered away from the battleships to pick up the attack transports, which they’d screen going to the beaches. Then the klaxon started, with calls to general quarters at 1921, at 1951, at 2030, at 2230. John Ford was up on the bridge at one of those calls, chatting with one of the ship’s lookouts, who told the famous movie director that he was scared. “I am, too,” Ford told him.
At one o’clock in the morning, Plunkett arrived offshore between Le Havre and Cherbourg. Indeed, the ship was off Omaha Beach, though Jim didn’t have that name when he was getting it down in his journal. As they bore down on the beach, Ford noted the ship’s position at the rear of one convoy, but then after a quick maneuver by the flotilla, he found Plunkett in the lead.
“I am told I expressed some surprise at leading the invasion with my cameras,” Ford told The American Legion Magazine in 1964.
Jim Feltz noted the aerial bombardment of the beaches that morning, and then the naval bombardment, and then at 6:30 a.m. it was H hour, and the GIs streamed for shore in their landing craft. Ford watched the landing craft pass by the ship, the sailors bailing out their boats against the heavy seas.
“I could even hear [the infantrymen] puking over the noise of the motors and waves slapping flat bows all the way to the beach,” Ford said.
At the time, Plunkett was patrolling a buoyed channel swept by minesweepers, screening the troop transports. No matter the sandy bottom threat to the ship’s hull, Ford wanted more proximity to the landing. He “was on the C.O. to get close to the beach so he could get some good pictures,” McManus wrote. The exasperated captain “told Ford he was going to put the whaleboat in the water [so] he could get as close to the beach as he wanted.”
The battleship Texas pounded shore targets with direction from artillery observers already on shore and from recon planes flying overhead. The Talk Between Ships poured a play-by-play account of the battle into Plunkett’s wheelhouse, and for a while all looked swell from this one perspective on the invasion. The Germans held their fire, according to Ford, and there was an idea that “they were going to make it without any opposition from the coast.”
Then the Nazis opened fire. Plunkett was so close to the action that Ford said he watched troops jumping out over the sides of the landing craft rather than risk the streams of incoming machine gun fire when the bow ramps dropped.
“From the Plunket [sic], I recall vaguely seeing a landing craft off to my right hit a mine and suddenly go up, and another tangled in an underwater obstruction swinging around in crazy, uncontrolled circles. Most of the kids on board got off and waded ashore.”
While the infantry emptied out of landing craft onto the beach, Plunkett weighed into the fray with its battery. Ken Brown targeted a stone building just behind the beach and started pumping five-inch shells into it. Ford didn’t think much of that target.
“I wouldn’t think the Germans are stupid enough to stay in there,” Ford said to Captain Outerson. “It’s too prominent. I bet if you raised your guns and fired at that little house back up there, you might stir up something.”
In time, Ken moved his fire off the stone building onto the little house.
With fire from Plunkett, said Ford, “the place spewed German troops like a hornets’ nest. It erupted.”
Ken Brown, who’d been handling targets on shore since they’d come into Gela eleven months earlier, had no recollection of Ford’s advice.
What Ford was doing on D-Day has always been a matter of debate. He said Outerson put him and his camera crew into “duck” boats in mid-morning, some four hours after the invasion began, and that he positioned his crew “behind things” so they could expose their film. He recalled seeing the dead in the water and looking back offshore to see the destroyer that brought him there.
“I… remember being surprised at how much closer the Plunket [sic] looked from shore, much closer than the shore had looked a few minutes earlier from the Plunket [sic]!” he said.
The ship’s war diaries make no mention of Ford, or of his anecdotes from D-Day. It’s not likely that Ford transferred from Plunkett to shore, as he claimed, and more likely Ford was printing another legend with little regard to the facts. More authoritative histories say Ford transferred from Plunkett to another ship in the task force later on D-Day and did not go ashore on the first day of the invasion.
In the midst of an air raid near midnight on June 6, Plunkett fired on a Ju 88 bomber. The next day, Ken Brown’s battery pumped eighty-two rounds of five-inch at a target on shore to no effect. They chased down a sub. On D-Day plus two, they had more success, and took out a target at a road junction on shore. The Army called for Plunkett to put more shells on a concentration of German infantry, and Ken dispatched 179 shells. The results, according to the shore fire control party, were “perfect.”
The results were less than perfect a week after D-Day when Plunkett addressed the German E-boat menace with a number of shells that struck a British cable-laying ship, HMS Monarch, killing two men in a friendly fire incident. Mostly, though, Plunkett got it right in Normandy. The ship bombarded positions all along the coast and then, at the end of June, worked with several other destroyers and two battleships to bombard Cherbourg and open up that city’s harbor to the Allies.
They moved back into the Mediterranean that summer, and shot down another plane, the fifth of Plunkett’s five confirmed during the war. In the middle of August, they bombarded the southern coast of France near Nice during the ship’s fifth and final invasion during the war. For the rest of the year, they patrolled the Med, bombarding enemy positions, and spent Christmas in Mers el-Kebir, where Jim Feltz was “very homesick” and disappointed with the “Lousey Chow.” They got underway for the United States on December 28. Except for one run back to England in May of 1945, Plunkett was done with Europe, and with fighting. They patrolled the East Coast all spring, and then headed to the Pacific and Japan, arriving just after the Japanese called it quits.
In a memoir worked up right after the war was over, one of the ship’s officers noted that during the war Plunkett had fired 9,285 rounds of 20mm, 1,842 rounds of 1.1-inch, 1,248 rounds of 40mm (the gun that replaced the 1.1-inch after Anzio), and 1,480 rounds of five-inch. The ship “participated in every major invasion of Europe, and it is believed to be the only major warship so distinguished.”
In February of 1954, the United States transferred Plunkett to Taiwan, where she rendered service to that nation’s Navy with a new name, Nan Wang, and a new hull number, 17. In 1972, the ship was stricken, and in 1975, thirty-five years after its launch in Kearny, New Jersey, Plunkett was scrapped, somewhere in Taiwan.
After the war, Jack Simpson stayed in the Reserves, and the Navy called him back for Korea. At the Boston Navy Yard, where he’d boarded Plunkett in 1941, he reconnected with Dr. David Bates, and they talked about the day that Bates had extracted the shrapnel from Jack’s ankle, without morphine. Bates had been on one of the ships off Iwo Jima during the landings and told Jack he’d needed all of the morphine he had there.
Jack crossed paths with Ken Brown during Korea, too. They’d steamed into the war together on Plunkett, and Ken remembered Jack as a man who’d exhibited a maturity far greater than anything Ken decided that he himself had achieved at that age. Jack was a deliberate thinker, and people liked him. That was what Ken remembered, and he told Jack when they met that he was the kind of man he’d like to have worked with, or have worked for, or have had work for him. “If he stayed in the Navy, he would have gone quite high,” Ken said. Neither of the men in their dotage looked back on all of the men they served with in a halcyon light. Being frank and true about this or that person seemed to be as necessary as waxing nostalgic about others. It is true that fine feeling flowed both ways between Jack and Ken. “I was always disappointed that he didn’t get into any other kind of work after the Navy,” Jack said of Ken. “He was real bright and energetic.” For the private sector, Jack said, Ken’s decision to play a lot of tennis in retirement was “a loss of talent.”
Ken also met Burke once more after the war, at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, when Burke was in command of the cruiser Des Moines and Ken was in command of the destroyer Cassin Young. They were both in the midst of refresher training courses. At the officer’s club one night, Ken ordered a drink at the bar and noticed Burke at a table with his wife. Drink ordered, he referenced Burke to an officer at his elbow. The man knew of Burke and asked if Ken was off the Des Moines. Before Ken had a chance to say anything, the man answered his own question. “You couldn’t be. You’re smiling.”
Ken hadn’t seen Burke since Plunkett more than ten years earlier, and so he made his way across the bar to say hello. In the wake of a handshake, Burke launched their reunion this way: “How many times did I throw you in the hack?”
“Just once, sir,” Ken said.
Burke swilled his drink and gulped a swallow, then steadied a gaze on Ken and said what he’d written in a letter of commendation: “You were the best damn gunnery officer in the fleet.”
Long before they had their first reunion, the desire to come together again was brewing in some of the men. In the mid-1950s, a petty officer off a destroyer escort boarded the Cassin Young and told the officer of the deck he’d like to pay a call on the ship’s captain. A messenger escorted the petty officer to Ken Brown’s quarters. The door was ajar, and Jim McManus knocked.
“Yes?” Brown said, without turning from his desk.
McManus knocked again.
“Yes,” Brown said.
McManus knocked a third time. Ken spun in his seat, slightly miffed, then sprang from his seat and grabbed McManus by the neck. “Get in here, you Irish bastard,” he said.
Ken rang the steward for coffee and proposed that he and Mac summon the men off Plunkett for a reunion.
Mac quickly ran the math. “You can’t do that as long as you’re on active duty,” he said. “You won’t know where you’ll be in six months.”
Ken acknowledged this was so, but now that he’d made contact with one of the men off Plunkett, he didn’t want to lose him. “Here’s what I’m going to do. I’ll have you transferred aboard and make you chief master of arms, then we’ll square this ship away.”
Mac liked the idea. He liked Brown. But Mac was married, and he knew Cassin Young, unlike his destroyer escort, sortied for long spells away from home. Ken confirmed as much. In ten days, they would be off on an eight-month world cruise.
“Forget it. My wife will divorce me,” Mac said.
All of Ken’s enthusiasm for getting back together deflated all of a sudden, but he had this, at least, to offer Mac: After the cruise, he was to be stationed in Washington and would be in a position to redress wrongs if anyone gave Mac any crap.
Mac warmed to the affection. Brown had been one helluva man to serve under. Nevertheless, he told the old gun boss, “You know nobody gives McManus any crap.”
When Plunkett steamed into South Carolina in January of 1946, the Navy detached Jim Feltz, nearly three-and-a-half years after he had boarded Plunkett in Brooklyn. He’d known, well before they docked, that the Navy was letting him go, and he was packed and ready to go as the ship tied up. He was a petty officer then. He owned his own fire room. He was making $350 per month, and when they told him he was good to go, “Man, I was gone.” He left without fanfare, without any of the routine goodbyes to the men he’d served with, so desperate was he to get home to Betty.
In his blues, he rode a Greyhound that was half filled with men coming home from the war. The bus broke down en route to St. Louis, and he, like all of the other servicemen on board, strung out along the road with his thumb in the air. Each of them was taken, Jim said, immediately. He arrived in St. Louis at 6 a.m. and phoned home to his sister and brother-in-law, asking would they pick him up. He hadn’t told anyone he was coming home. They dropped him off at Betty’s and he knocked on the door. She opened it. “Surprise, surprise,” he said.
They settled in St. Charles on the Missouri River. He and Betty had three sons, and he built a business in truck parts. The colonel got over his reservations about Jim’s prospects, and they became friends.
Discharged into an employment field crowded with veterans, Jim had got a job making $225 per month at the truck parts company. He later bought the business from the firm that hired him and built a company that employed a dozen people and thrived for decades. As successful as he was, Jim never thought of himself as anything but a “parts man.”
In the late 1960s, with his business well established and Betty’s interest in dancing unabated, she persuaded him to take some classes. He learned how to dance to swing music, and how to jitterbug. He became proficient in the rumba and the foxtrot, and he especially liked a variation on the jitterbug that, in St. Louis, they called the imperial style. For the rest of their lives, until Betty succumbed to muscular dystrophy and moved into a wheelchair, they danced all the time.
For decades after the war ended, Jim Feltz didn’t talk about his time in the service. But then in 1980, there was a small reunion of Plunkett sailors on the East Coast, organized by George Gainey in Charleston, South Carolina, and as coincidence would have it, another small reunion on the West Coast. The men were retiring now, or on the verge of it. They’d made what they could of their chances postwar, and had begun casting back now into their past, at last more intrigued by where they’d been than where they were going.
Those first two efforts at getting together were undertaken by the black gangs. But they knew, after that first get-together, they had tapped something that had been gathering steam within them for decades. At least one man, before they started the reunions, had made it a point to call on any old shipmate whenever he and his wife traveled. Sometime in the 1970s, Jim Shipp phoned Ken Brown one day and told him he was coming to Dago, as they referred to San Diego: Could he stop by and say hello? By all means, Ken said. He couldn’t picture Shipp clearly from their time on Plunkett, though he knew about the man’s crawl from the wreckage of the searchlight to the bridge. Shipp knew Ken, as they all knew the gun boss, as one of the men who’d saved the ship, not merely for having commanded a battery that took out three or maybe four of the twelve to fourteen planes at Anzio, but as the man who’d kept that Luftwaffe squadron at bay while the ship was blazing. When Shipp came into the house, the recognition of this man as a shipmate triggered a response that Ken, at the time, didn’t know he was capable of in such circumstances. He started to cry.
“Oh no,” said Shipp’s wife, Liz, who’d accompanied her husband on several of these visits. “Not you, too.”
They came together for the first time in a major way in 1982 at a Falls Church, Virginia, hotel, not far from Washington, gathering in one of the ballrooms that had been set up as a venue for their party. Most of them were seeing each other for the first time since the war. That alone was enough to rouse emotion in any of them, for they’d been sailors once and young. They’d been on the same ship. They’d been through war together. Beyond the wistful contemplation of these shared histories, and how that united them, they were bound by cords that tremored with the memories of the fifty-three men they’d lost. This was a thing that would never be quiescent within any of them.
One man’s arrival into the mix was representative of what they were all going through now in their own way. This was Edwin H. Baechtold, who’d plunged into the ship’s fire and found the valves that opened the water lines that, according to John Oliver, “saved the ship.” Ken Brown remembered Baechtold’s arrival this way: “He came through the door to where we already were—more than crying, he was weeping, and he rejoined us.”
Once they started, they couldn’t stop. They’d spend liberally to fund trips in the wake of Falls Church, to Charleston, Buffalo, and Branson, to Minneapolis and San Diego. They’d hire a photographer to take candid pictures of their dinners and their excursions in these cities, and formal pictures of themselves with their wives, and they’d publish commemorative booklets after the reunions.
In the spring of 1992, with Plunkett’s reunions a fixture on his calendar, Ken Brown thought to memorialize those twenty-five minutes at Anzio with a painting. The most dramatic moment of the afternoon occurred as the bomb slammed into the 1.1-inch gun mount. But they wouldn’t want that remembered in watercolor. Ken, in consultation with the crew, decided to picture the downing of an enemy plane. He contacted a seasoned nautical painter, Richard Moore, who himself had served as a junior officer on a destroyer after the war, and Ken worked on a prospectus, describing as many details of the ship and the setting and the moment that he and his shipmates could dredge from memory. And then Dick Moore went to work for $1,000.
In his painting, he sought a depiction that would bear “looking at over a long period of time” and that would not “do great violence to the facts,” understanding that some concessions would have to be made to “artistic considerations.” He emphasized the ship itself in the watercolor, for Gleaves-class destroyers “were good looking ships compared to some of the newer ones.” Unlike a carrier, a destroyer was a ship that looked like a ship. He let the ship be lighted by the natural light of dusk, and highlighted portions with muzzle flashes. To bring out the light of the ship, he deepened the darkness of the sky and the sea. Initially, Ken wanted as much of the action in the picture as possible, but a torpedo wake was not possible in Moore’s chosen moment. At the angle he’d selected, the torpedo wake would be invisible. The painting comes onto Plunkett off the ship’s port bow and shows two bomb splashes, at midship and the stern. All of the movement in the picture flows from the ship’s battery of four flashing five-inch guns, as well as the Mark 37 director, all trained on a torpedo bomber that’s “being splashed” in the upper left corner.
Ken reproduced 431 of the watercolors and sold 72 prints at the next ship’s reunion for $60 a piece. Jim Feltz bought one and won another in a raffle. Over the next five years, as more of the prints were sold, Ken produced a series of financial reports and mailed rebates to his shipmates as the cost came down. He sent out small, meaningful checks on a regular basis until, in the end, they’d each paid $11 for this image of their ship at Anzio. “A fine acquisition at a great price, one which will grow in sentimental and dollar value,” Ken wrote in his “final report,” having watched too much TV in his retirement perhaps.
However triumphant Plunkett was in that one moment at Anzio, it was a fleeting gesture by Ken, who, for as long as I knew him, dwelled more on all the things he might have done but didn’t. He knew that he’d put John Gallagher on that 20mm gun, and on several occasions he addressed that fact in a way that surprised me. That first time, we were standing in his kitchen, drinking maple-flavored whiskey that his daughter Kerry had brought back from a recent trip to Alaska. The taste was somewhat exotic for him, all that maple, but he liked it and looked at the amber in the glass and thought then of all the times he’d drunk whiskey during the war, and what he might have done instead of that.
“You would be perfectly within your rights, Jim,” he said to me then, “as family of one of the men who died on Plunkett, to say, ‘Brown, why the hell didn’t you work your gunners more than you did? Why did you spend time in a gin mill when you might have been training those men? And if I had, Jim, then maybe you’d have got to know that uncle.”
For my part, I couldn’t admit his criticism as worthy of retrospective consideration, though I believed he himself most certainly believed it was. He was capable of cognitive dissonance. At the same time he took pride in what he’d done in the director, he was haunted by what he’d failed to do. He’d have liked to have thought that what he’d done in the director was heroic, and he let himself believe as much sometimes; other times—more frequently, I think—he rued his liabilities.
The image of Ken Brown at Anzio that endured for me was of a twenty-three-year-old young man, perched in the highest part of a Navy ship, shoved out of his hatch and completely exposed to a swarm of German bombers, slewing his guns to do what he could to keep enemy aircraft from hitting his ship. And doing it well, as good or better than anyone might have hoped. If he read what I’ve written here, and he never will, he’d probably remind me he wouldn’t want to be called out for having done any more than his fair share at Anzio. “Let’s not horse around, Jim.”
Year after year from 1982 on, they would set a date for the next reunion, cast that appointment into the near future like an anchor, and then haul themselves hand over hand toward one more chance, maybe the last, to float on the most buoyant memories they had.
Dutch Heissler was a man they’d have liked to see again. In retrospect, his name couldn’t be mentioned without kindling a chuckle, and a concomitant admission of awe. While the Dutch-man played fast and loose with his dice and his cards and was as liable to precipitate all kinds of alarums and excursions, he’d earned the gratitude of his shipmates for his willingness to do anything and go anywhere to get them fed, to get them fixed, and to save their lives, when the time called for it. At the end of the day, all of the shipmates I talked to who remembered Dutch agreed with Dr. Knaup that the man had been “magnificent.”
By 1948, Dutch had amassed twenty years in the regular Navy. He then embarked on ten more in the Reserves. He and his wife, Ginny, divorced after the war, and then remarried. They divorced again, and then remarried. His niece, Carla, believes they were divorced and married four times. There were shenanigans, and rumors circulated among Plunkett’s crew that Dutch had been tossed in the brig for a spell, which would have surprised no one if it was a matter of scheming or cards. Eventually, Ginny relocated to Mexico and disappeared from the radar screens of Dutch’s family. The man himself settled in Compton, California, and died there in 1972.
Jack Collingwood spent most of his career in the Navy on destroyers, including a two-year stint as captain of the USS Smalley in the 1950s. Collingwood was well liked on Plunkett, and lived up to the Smiling Jack moniker, but it was a personality trait that might have collided with his ambitions as a naval officer. His son, Jeff, said his father told him he had not been well liked by his men in the 1950s. Maybe he’d started cultivating a persona that didn’t come naturally, understanding that a more dour regard of the world would send you further up the Navy’s ladder. He’d tried to get command of a cruiser in the 1960s, understanding that he wasn’t going to make rear admiral unless he did, but the Navy passed him over. He captained a hospital ship in Vietnam, and when he retired after thirty-two years in the Navy, he divorced his wife and married a nurse off that ship. In 2001, dying from prostate cancer he knew he couldn’t beat, he “ate the business end of shotgun,” as Ken Brown put it, and died in his backyard on his own terms.
John Oliver, who succeeded Jack Simpson as the ship’s damage control officer, transitioned from the Navy to the State Department, and then into the CIA, where he worked as an analyst. Oliver had come from a well-established family in Pittsburgh. His father was publisher of the Gazette before it was the Post-Gazette. And his grandfather had been a U.S. senator. When he retired in 1980, the onetime captain of the squash team at Yale ended up in Vermont. He died in 2010 at the age of 91.
Ken Sahlin, who’d had his appendix removed on the way to Salerno, joined the U.S. Forest Service and died in the early 1960s after his spotting plane crashed in Arizona.
Lyle Hollister, whom Burke called out of the radio shack several weeks before Anzio to relay the news that his twin brothers had been killed on a carrier in the Pacific, was among the missing at Anzio. A year after he went missing, the Navy finally and officially notified Mr. and Mrs. Howard J. Hollister of Robbinsdale, Minnesota, that Lyle had been killed. In the span of three months, they’d lost all three of their sons. Mrs. Hollister was a night worker at an ordnance plant, and Mr. Hollister drove trucks for a living. In a living room that contained bookcases and lamps made by her sons, the forty-two-year-old mother received a visit from a newspaper reporter, who noted the pronounced streak of gray shot through her otherwise dark hair. “Well,” she told the reporter just days after getting official notification from the Navy, “that’s the last of the Hollister boys.” In October of that year, with $230 raised by their neighbors, Mr. and Mrs. Hollister took a train to Seattle, where Mrs. Hollister broke a bottle of champagne against the bow of a new 2,220-ton destroyer that would be commissioned the USS Hollister, DD-788.
Jim McNellis, who’d stood with Gallagher, Feltz, Zakrzewski, and Irvin Gebhart in that Casablanca picture, came to the first reunion with a baseball cap that named the ship and its hull number, one of those black hats that were just coming into fashion among vets then. Jim Feltz expressed an admiration for the cap and was surprised when McNellis took it off his head and gave it to him, though McNellis declined to share news about the cancer that would kill him within a year.
Zakrzewski stayed with Plunkett all the way to its decommissioning in 1946, where he’s pictured on the ship’s forecastle with forty-eight of the ship’s officers and crew. Ski is squatting at the front of the group photo and grinning while he points a pistol at the head of an unwitting officer just in front of him.
Ski stayed in the Navy Reserves until 1954. He met his wife on a blind date in 1952 and raised his family just south of Boston, in Braintree. He worked for Raytheon, a defense contractor, until retirement in 1983, all the while painting and wallpapering on the side. “His one goal in life was to be a family man,” said his daughter Gail Johnson. “He took us everywhere, even just running to the store to get the paper. He never bought a brand-new car and he turned his paycheck over to my mother every week.”
Like so many veterans, he buried the stories of his service with the war, which seems like an affected gesture until you remember that service during World War II was the default position of so many young American men. Making much ado about something like that was akin to putting on the high hat when everyone else rated a high hat. His kids pinned his medals to their shirts when they played Army as kids, but they never saw the pictures of his time on Plunkett until after he died. He never told them what had happened to the ship at Anzio, and they only learned about it after he died.
The daughters of men on Plunkett impressed me as the more fastidious custodians of their fathers’ legacies. Such a generalization sounds like bias, except when you think of how we have Daughters of the American Revolution, not Sons, and when I remember how Kerry Haygood and Bonnie Reavis could recount their father’s stories about the war note for note, and how I repeatedly tried to get two sons of men on Plunkett to call me back and couldn’t.
Bonnie Reavis, when talking about that moment her father, Jack Simpson, sat down on the overturned hull of Morrison with more than half his crew dead, paused as her father paused. It couldn’t have been a long pause for Jack; his ship was on its way down, after all, but there was a glottal stop in his momentum, a moment fraught with weariness and resignation when all of his past might have stirred to rush before him as the old cliché says, with men having lost their lives and about to lose their lives all around him. “And then,” Bonnie told me in a voice choked with emotion, “my father put on his life jacket and stepped into the water.”
Doris Putis Warren had no memory of her father, John Putis, who was the chief pharmacist’s mate on Plunkett and who was killed at Anzio. Doris had been born four months before the action at Anzio, and her father had been glad she was a girl. “War is hell,” he wrote to his wife. “I’m glad it’s another daughter.”
Many children of the men lost on Plunkett clung to men who survived and who would talk to them of their fathers. Jim McManus became one of those men for Doris, and for others, a surrogate of sorts. She learned from him that her father never went off ship at liberty, that he was always reading, and that he was better at what he did than many ships’ doctors.
After Anzio, Doris’s mother “never went out with anyone else,” Doris said. Even though her husband was not among the missing, Doris’s mother still waited for him to come home. When Doris married, she married a man who served on a destroyer in Vietnam.
Seventy-two years after her father’s death, she was still yearning for a man she never knew. She’d lived all of her life with a fervent belief in afterlife, and a dream she’ll meet him someday. It’s plausible, she always figured, but she didn’t want that plausibility to be merely an abstraction. She puzzled through the ways and means of how she might one day meet her father. She didn’t believe there would be any kind of corporeal meeting, but would it happen? She’s hoping.
Irv Gebhart returned to Delaware and to work as a machinist for DuPont. He raised two sons and told them little about his time on Plunkett. “We were too scared to ask,” his son Steve said. Not that Irvin was a dour man. “He was talkative, he loved to drink a beer, and he always wanted you to stay and have one more. He was always the life of the party, and he worked three jobs all his life.” When there were major events, family and friends called on Irvin to hire the bands, procure the beef, and make sure there was beer. He lived long enough to attend two Plunkett reunions, and died in 1985.
Jim McManus, who’d tried so hard to get into the Navy in the 1930s, stayed there for twenty years. He was retired, or “piped over the side,” as a chief gunner’s mate in 1961. He returned home to Fall River and worked for the city and then for the state, for a while as the driver of a bookmobile. Which seems just an incredible thing—that a man in a gun mount under a swarm of German aircraft could one day be a man who sits in the driver’s seat of a bookmobile. In his spare time, he made lamps from the blocks or pulleys he’d become familiar with during his days at the sign shop—lamps that eventually found their way into the homes of his shipmates on Plunkett and their families. Doris Warren had one. Ken Brown had one. Jim Feltz had one. People were getting more block lamps than they needed, but Mac kept on making them. He made more than two hundred block lamps in his lifetime. He died in the late spring of 2008, at eighty-nine.
Not long after we’d started talking, Jim Feltz told me he wanted to send me some things. He’d been scrupulous about finding homes for artifacts he and Betty had collected through the years—leaded glass chandeliers, antique toy planes and helicopters, a 1951 Magnavox television in a console. Knowing they’d be in good hands when he was gone meant something to him, and so one day, I opened a cardboard box on a spent 20mm shell he’d taken from Plunkett, an aluminum dog tag inscribed with the name “JOHN JAMES GALLAGHER” in all capital letters, and a fragment of the bomb that had killed the same.
After Ken received the 431 prints of the Plunkett watercolor, he sent one to Captain Burke’s only child, a daughter, in the fall of 1992. She answered his gift with a letter that told Ken she knew very little about her father’s time in the war. “I know my dad brought back a ship that had been severed in half and the men in the other half perished,” she wrote. “I remember his anguish at writing letters to their families.”
The Navy detached Burke from Plunkett as soon as the ship returned to the States. Officially, they transferred him on February 15, but he wouldn’t leave the ship until they docked in Brooklyn February 26. He would not command another ship during the war. A week before the end of the conflict in Europe, the Navy promoted Burke to full captain, one rank below rear admiral, and then sent him to Berlin as a naval advisor. He did a brief stint as a college professor, teaching naval science. Then he went back to sea, first as commander of a hydrographic survey group, and then in April of 1954 as commander of the cruiser Des Moines. If they gave you a cruiser, they were also going to make you a rear admiral in due course.
Burke wore his stature well. His rank called for participation in diplomatic missions, and he rose to the occasion in his dress whites and blues, like a character from central casting, the personification of American postwar might—powerfully built, no nonsense, capable of a cigar and a cocktail, and of sitting down to affix his name in a ledger when occasion called for it. When he retired in the mid-1960s, they made him a rear admiral.
His one daughter had four children, the oldest of whom she named for her father. Ed Gipple inherited his grandfather’s name, but not the carriage. “He’s more of a hippie,” Gipple’s wife, Karen, told me when we met in Annapolis.
In the last year of his grandfather’s life, Ed was seven and eight years old, and just coming into an appreciation of a grandfather who was in many ways larger than life. One day in Washington, D.C., Ed Burke was visiting his daughter when he noticed his grandson outside playing football with the neighborhood kids. He went outside and called for the ball and told them all to “go deep.” They did, but it wasn’t far enough. He sent them across the street. Then up the hill. Then down the block. And then the onetime all-American tossed a ball that soared over the heads of all those kids.
“The kids on the block talked about that for a long time,” Ed said.
He presented each of his two oldest grandsons with boxing gloves, and when he visited, the first order of business was always some training and a bout. Once when they visited him at his retirement home in Sarasota, he taught his two grandsons how to swim by heaving them into the deep-water part of the backyard pool, a commonplace story to be sure, except for the part where Burke’s elegant daughter, with a martini glass lifted high in one hand and a cigarette high in the other, jumped in the pool in her dress and with her accouterments to retrieve her sons.
He was a grandfather who flexed muscles that had atrophied as the father of a daughter who would not play football, or box, or go to the Academy. But there was a soft side, too, a man who would take his grandsons on clandestine runs to the toy store and who’d tell stories. When he was dying of emphysema in 1967 and staying with his daughter so he could be near the Naval Hospital in Bethesda, he’d beckon his two grandsons and they’d climb up into bed and listen to his stories. Ed Gipple does not remember his grandfather telling him what he may have most liked to hear, about the time he forced the surrender of an island off the coast of Sicily, or the time he tried to save a burning hospital ship, or picked up sailors off a torpedoed destroyer, and he never told them about those twenty-five minutes off Anzio when he played defense and offense at the same time, the way he had at the Academy all those years ago, and how he’d nearly won the day. That was how he was remembered in his obituaries in August of 1967, for what he’d done for the Newfoundland and Buck and for Plunkett. Before he died, he told his grandsons in one of those bed-top chats that he was going to leave them two things that were really special to him. Ed’s brother got that man Burke’s graduation ring from the Academy, and Ed got his pocket watch. When Burke was detached from the ship, the crew did come together on a telegram of sorts. On the back of the watch, there was this inscription:
Presented To
Comdr. E.J. Burke
U.S. Navy
From
the Officers and Crew
U.S.S. Plunkett
431
Late on a Friday afternoon in the fall of 2018, my phone rang while I was driving on the highway. Clasped in a holder stuck to the air vents, the phone’s screen pulsed a name with the ringtone: Ken Brown. I was struck once again by this weird disconnect between the Ken Brown who’d come alive for me as a twenty-three-year-old junior officer, and this voice on the other end of a cell phone. Knowing where he’d been and what he’d done on Plunkett, and then talking to him today, was a little like having a statue give voice to what’s put him on a pedestal. I picked up, of course. You didn’t send a statue to your voice mail.
Usually, I phoned Ken, or he called me back after receiving documents I’d unearthed and sent to him for elaboration. There was no specific pivot to this call. Instead, he said he hoped all of the time we’d spent together, in my visits to Colorado and on the phone, had been of some value to me. His voice had the same distinctive depth, but there was a weariness in it I’d never heard before.
I knew then he was calling to say goodbye. I told him the time we’d spent talking had been of great value to me, both from a professional standpoint and from a personal one, too. Even if I hadn’t been trying to do something about Plunkett, the richness of the relationships I’d developed with Ken and with Jim and with Jack was something unexpected, and rare. Many of us sound a desire now and then, to have a beloved relative back for just one day. What I wouldn’t give. No matter how much work it was in the end. Just one hour. I was getting that with Ken and Jim. I understood that then, and felt bad, understanding that this would be it with Ken, and that soon he’d be one of those people I’d dream of having back for the hour. It was a short, three-minute call. I was driving through New Hampshire on I-95. It was near dusk.
The following Sunday, I got a text message from Kerry. The phone flashed momentarily with a thumbnail of a picture she’d sent me two-and-a-half years earlier, of her father at sea in the 1950s, perhaps when he was captain of the Cassin Young. One of his elbows was on the gunnel, and his eyes were narrowed against the light as he gazed ahead. There was only one reason I was seeing this picture now. I pulled over to read the text. “My dad passed away this morning at 11am,” Kerry wrote. “He was ready to go.…”
I’d asked Ken once whether what happened at Anzio was the defining experience of his life. He mulled this a moment, never having considered the question, and said it had not been. He went on to say that getting command of his own destroyer escort in 1946, as a twenty-six-year-old, had been the moment he most cherished. Or maybe, he went on, it was getting command of the destroyer Cassin Young in the 1950s, or his later work as a squadron commander. But Ken was wrong in the way we can be wrong about ourselves and what most defines us. Or maybe he was not wrong, but the thing that was greatest within him was freighted with something beyond articulation and definition and recognition. Pivots are hard to identify, even in retrospect. But look no further than the marble stone that stands above his grave. There’s only one ship noted there, and one phrase to define who he was on that ship: “Gun Boss.”
Frank Gallagher hunkered down at Anzio for all of the months of the siege, making the best of a miserable situation. He was the great-uncle who cut into the electricity that supplied a colonel’s quarters so he could have light in his bunker. He had a little kitchen down there, and a wine cabinet, and he’d found a wineglass, too.
When the Allies finally bombed Monte Cassino, the road to Rome opened. Frank’s unit went into the city the day before the Allies landed in Normandy. In Naples, he’d commandeered a bumboat; in Rome, the once and future streetcar driver commandeered a city trolley. “I drove that goddamned thing all over the city,” he said. The goddamned harbor, the goddamned trolley. His unit camped on the grounds of the Vatican, where nuns gave him the first milk he’d had in a long while. Pope Pius addressed a huge assembly of troops, including Frank, in St. Peter’s Square.
All the while, Frank snapped photos with his Brownie. He took one of the landing craft on the day of the invasion of southern France. He took another of an American pilot laid out on the wreckage of a plane that had just crashed and was still in flames. At Dachau, his unit was part of the first group in, and he took pictures, of bodies not stacked like cordwood but in a jumble, before the stacking. Another one of his pictures showed a German naked from the waist up, standing with his hands in the air. The man had run among the prisoners when the Americans came into the camp, and he might have made it but for a tattoo of the SS on the underside of his arm. “An American brigadier general, he was so mad at what happened at Dachau, he put him in a little round cement blockhouse and put fifteen bullets in him.” The general, Frank said, “had gone off his rocker.” Then again, he said, they all had. “We almost died when we saw what we saw.”
For the rest of his life, Jewish groups in Boston invited Frank to “their times,” as he called them. He would go and tell them what he’d seen. He bristled at nothing in the news so much as people who would deny the Holocaust.
After the war, Frank returned to Boston’s streetcar network, the MTA, and parlayed his personality into a leadership position within the carmen’s union. He moved into a house four or five doors away from the house he’d grown up in, and he became a regular again at the pub John Gallagher told all the guys on Plunkett about—Callahan’s. Frank was a regular at Callahan’s from the time they pulled the plug on Prohibition in the 1930s, through the bar’s expansion into the dry cleaner’s next door and its expansion as the Eire Pub. When Frank died in 2012, the year before he was to turn one hundred, the Eire Pub put a plaque on the back of a barstool for Frank Gallagher. He’d told a lot of stories on those stools, and he saw to it that the city of Boston named a square for his brother in the 1990s.
But for the jottings in his logbook about when he’d seen John at Arzew and then again in Naples, Frank never wrote anything about his brother, or tried to make any sense of the loss. He told the same story over and over again, more for himself than for any need to have his listeners comprehend. Because in the telling for Frank, it was always January 22, 1943, and Plunkett hadn’t gone in yet.
The city of Boston rededicated that square to John Gallagher in the spring of 2018—they were rededicating all of the veterans’ squares twenty-five years after the fact—and I phoned the Eire Pub to tell the owner, John Stenson, that a whole bunch of Gallaghers would be coming in after the ceremony. I didn’t know Stenson, but with my reference to the Gallaghers, he launched into his own memories of Frank, a man he missed, and then started telling me this one story—did I know it?—about a time in Naples right before the invasion of Anzio when Frank jumped in a little boat.
That first night after Betty died in 2004 was a curious one for Jim Feltz. He’d gone back into their bedroom and lain down on his side of the bed, but he couldn’t sleep, not alone in that place where he’d had someone beside him for sixty years. There was in that house a room that Jim had anchored with his memories of Plunkett, a room he’d started work on after the reunions started in the early 1980s. There was a print of the Dick Moore watercolor framed and hung above a wooden mantel over a gas fireplace. An American flag that had flown over the Capitol in commemoration of Plunkett was folded into a triangle and housed in a wooden box below the painting. There was a black veteran’s baseball cap, like the one Jim McNellis gave him, in one of the mantel’s cubbies. A framed picture of the Ship’s Party at the Hotel St. George hung from the wall, as did reference to all of his commendations. There was a recliner in one corner, facing the mantel. That night, after coming home from Betty’s funeral, Jim got up from his bed and went to the easy chair in his den and pulled the lever into a recline and went to sleep. Every night for the past fifteen years, though there is a bed in that house with sheets he keeps clean, he has passed the night in the berth of that easy chair.
In my first call with Jim after I’d caught him at the home show, he told me he’d been troubled by something for years—decades, in fact. Later, when I talked to his daughter-in-law Pat for the first time, she said the same thing, that there was one thing from the war that bothered him a great deal and that he couldn’t ever figure out: John Gallagher’s family had not brought him home after the war. It was a hard thing for Jim to fathom because John had been such a well-liked fellow. He knew that personalities like that didn’t just happen; he suspected John had come from a good place, and from good people. But why hadn’t his family brought him home?
At the end of the war, the military exhumed the dead from their temporary graveyard in Palermo and presented a choice to their families. Option no. 1, as the military form phrased it, allowed families to have the remains reinterred in a permanent American military cemetery overseas. Option no. 2 would send the remains home. Martha Gallagher had lost her mother when she was two, and her father when she was four, and then a daughter as an infant, and then her husband when she was a young woman, but none of these losses had rendered her stronger in the broken place. Martha’s eldest daughter conferred with the doctor after they learned there had to be a choice, and they talked about what to do next. The doctor told Martha’s children he didn’t think she would survive John coming home that way. Her blood pressure was a significant problem, and she might not make it through all that would be ceremoniously necessary in bringing him home. And so John’s brothers and sisters told their mother they thought it would be better for John to lie with his shipmates. He should remain buried in Italy, they said. Martha agreed to Option no. 1.
That was what I told Jim Feltz. I told him that, and there was that silence on the other end of the phone again as Jim digested all of this. “I sure am glad you told me that,” he said.
In Nettuno, Italy, about twelve miles as the crow flies from where a 550-pound bomb hit Plunkett in the late afternoon of January 24, 1944, we debarked from the 9:42 a.m. train out of Rome at an unassuming little art deco train station that had been built during the war. There was a sign in front of the station, pointing toward the Sicily-Rome American Military Cemetery, and we walked for it in bright sun through un-touristed streets.
My wife detoured into a fruit shop with my mother and my brother Jeff, to load up on olives, nectarines, peaches, tomatoes, a melon, and half of a big round loaf of white bread. My two kids and I plodded on and came to a roundabout named for 9/11 and waited outside the main gate for the rest of our party to catch up. Across the street on the 9/11 roundabout was a McDonald’s.
Inside the gate, though, there were thousands of serried crosses and towering pines groomed like those on Rome’s Palatino Hill. In the near distance, flanking a memorial built of travertine, the same material the Colosseum is made of, two American flags fluttered from on high.
They’d dedicated the cemetery at Memorial Day in 1945, which was a thing I didn’t know until Ken Brown asked me whether I knew as much one night at supper. Then he told me. There’d been thousands of American dead buried in the cemetery by the time the Germans surrendered in early May of 1945, and more would be coming from temporary graveyards all over. Several U.S. senators had come for the Memorial Day ceremony, and there was a great crowd gathered for this commemoration. General Lucien Truscott stepped up onto the stage. “And then,” Ken said. His voice choked up and he reached for the hand of his wife at the table beside him. I was sitting just to his left at a long table anchored on the other end by his daughter Kerry, and Ken stared for some time in silence. I’d glanced at him only long enough to notice the sheen in his eyes, and I looked down into the tumbler of my whiskey as moisture welled in my own.
“Truscott turned his back on the living,” Ken said, the words not so much spoken as exhausted one by one. “And he addressed the dead men under the crosses,” Ken went on.
The general apologized to the men. He wasn’t reading from any papers, but speaking from a deep place within him, and speaking in a way that was uncharacteristic of a man who was otherwise taciturn and hard-boiled. It wasn’t like Truscott to engage in theatrics. The general said he hoped the dead men would forgive him for any mistakes he’d made, though he knew that was asking a helluva 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, about the glorious dead, he would “straighten them out.”
Ken had tried to straighten me out by talking at length about all those things he believed he’d done wrong, at Palermo and Anzio, and off the coast of Normandy. And maybe he straightened me out some, but I couldn’t ever stop hearing the trumpets of a fanfare in the wake of my calls with him, and Jack Simpson, and Jim Feltz.
In the cemetery at Anzio, we walked toward John’s grave, carrying dirt from the backyard of his boyhood home on Oakton Avenue. The first three children that had been born to John’s brothers and sisters after the war were named for him. Two of them were girls, and had to make do with Joan, but then Frank had a son and he was named John Gallagher. Before the children came, though, John’s things came home. The war was over, and the Weatherstrip was now four years old and he knew that they were on the verge of a big day. John’s things were coming home, but in the Weatherstrip’s mind, it was to be his uncle. At the house on Oakton Avenue, when the family gathered around the box, little Charlie couldn’t believe how small a man his uncle had been.
Unlike other relatives we’d loved and lost, there was always something different in the affection we felt for John Gallagher, for this uncle we’d never known. He didn’t have a family of his own; we were all he had, and so he belonged to us. Each of us felt an individual responsibility to the maintenance of his memory, and to the name of his ship. The sounding of those two syllables—Plunkett—has always been holy in the halls of my family. There is genuflection in the way we broach Frank’s story about that night in Naples, and all of the other fragments we have of John Gallagher. We bring him back as best we can. Resurrection is a powerful thing, the kind of thing that can sustain a people a long while.
My uncle Charlie’s wife, Kathy, once pointed out the oddness of his feeling for a man who’d died when her husband was a toddler. “You never knew him,” she said, trying to get a handle on this thing.
“But he knew me,” Charlie told her.
When I told Jim Feltz we were going to Anzio with dirt from John’s backyard, he wept some on the phone. Jim didn’t break up much. He had lost his wife, and he’d talked to me about having lost all three of his sons, two from cancer, one from emphysema, and he’d been able to recollect those losses with composure. But it was different when he talked about the friends he’d lost when he was young, and they were young, and the futures they’d dreamed about and talked about were extinguished.
Jim had never been to the cemetery at Anzio. He’d once visited a World War II memorial in Missouri where the names of all the dead were inscribed on massive walls of white stone. When he got to the Gs, he walked for the wall with his forefinger pointing and landed his print not four inches from John Gallagher’s name. This time, the planchette almost got it all right.
If I got to Anzio, Jim said to me, which seemed an improbable thing to a man who’d lived through that night and that problem more than seventy years ago, the word “Anzio” not so much the name of an actual place anymore as a memory that hadn’t ever stopped smoldering, and that could still flare, he wanted me to deliver a message to his old shipmate. It wasn’t all that involved, but it struck me, as I carried the dirt from Oakton Avenue, that something hadn’t ever died in Jim, that the dead, like his sons who’d “gone to be with their mother,” and the shipmates he’d lost at Anzio and in the long run of years afterward, didn’t only exist in the past. They were alive in his memory, and accessible, removed to some other place for sure but not vanished. And I said what Jim asked me to say, sprinkling the dirt from Oakton Avenue on the grass, and giving up a message that I guess was as much from me as it was from a man who’d become a proxy for an uncle I’d never met: “Hello, Johnny.”