1 In his senior year at the U.S. Naval Academy in 1928–1929, Edward J. Burke captained the Midshipman team that confronted Knute Rockne’s Notre Dame Ramblers before one of the largest sports crowds in history at Soldier Field in Chicago. Here he’s staring down the Rambler captain at left.

2 Frank, John, Martha, and Charlie Gallagher in their backyard in the Dorchester neighborhood of Boston in 1937, probably at Easter. Before the war, Frank worked as a streetcar driver and John was a machinist in a chocolate factory.

3 Ken Brown grew up in Glen Ellyn, Illinois, as the son of a man with outsized ambitions for his youngest. Attending the U.S. Naval Academy wasn’t Ken’s idea but his father’s: “I was going along for the ride.

4 Ken Brown, on his Youngster Cruise, a Naval Academy summer ritual for plebes who have completed their first year. He distinguished himself at Annapolis with a “yen for kidding” but that characteristic didn’t seem to compromise his emergence as one of the Navy’s most able gunnery officers.

5 As a representative of a new class of American destroyers, USS Plunkett (DD-431) made the cover of Popular Science in March of 1941. Before the country’s entry into World War II, the magazine celebrated destroyers for their ability to transport heavily armed Marine detachments to hot spots in the Caribbean.

6 Brown graduated from the Academy with the class of 1942, though the war hurried up graduation to December 19, 1941.

7 In 1941, Jack Simpson rode a Harley-Davidson motorcycle from Atlanta to Chicago to complete his training as a Naval Reserve officer. Later, he rode an Army Harley on trips through French North Africa.

8 Simpson requested duty in the Pacific at the outset of war, anticipating that the most significant naval engagements would take place in the Pacific theater. He would get there eventually, but not before he saw plenty of action in the European theater.

9 Jim Feltz persuaded to his mother to sign his enlistment papers shortly after he turned 17 in 1942. After training at the Great Lakes Naval Training Center, he was dispatched to New York City where he volunteered for duty on the USS Plunkett.

10 Home from boot training at Newport in Rhode Island, John Gallagher stood for a photo in the backyard of his family home shortly before he crossed town to board Plunkett on January 24, 1942, two years to the day before the ship went into action at Anzio off the western coast of Italy.

11 Plunkett as she looked on the day Jim Feltz joined her at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Note Ken Brown’s fire control director perched on the round barbette at the highest part of the ship’s superstructure.

12, 13 Menu for Christmas dinner on Plunkett, courtesy of Ken Brown and Dutch Heissler.

14 Plunkett had a number of Ship’s Parties at the Hotel St. George in downtown Brooklyn—on December 18 and 21, 1942, March 19, 1943, and March 11, 1944. The hotel was then the largest in New York City. Captain Edward Burke is front and center here, with his wife Adele to his right. Dutch Heissler is in front at left, with his wife Ginny to his left. Gallagher, Brown, Feltz, and Irvin “Dutch” Gebhart are also in this crowd.

15 In the spring of 1943, John Gallagher started gathering signatures of his shipmates on the back of an “Our Navy” photo of Plunkett. This image hung on the wall beside his purple heart on Oakton Avenue for fifty years.

16 After Plunkett’s first day in combat off the coast of Sicily on July 11, 1943, Irvin Gebhart wrote this in a journal he kept, surreptitiously, throughout the war: “Arrived in Gela. Landed troops. Had planes attack all day. We fired back at them. A day I will never forget.”

17 Frank and John Gallagher met twice during the war. The first time was outside Oran in Algeria on the eve of the Salerno invasion, aka Operation Avalanche, in September 1943. There is no picture to memorialize their second meeting on Plunkett on the eve of the Anzio invasion. It was the last the brothers would ever see of each other.

18, 19 Tom Garner was in the gun tub at Anzio with Gallagher, serving as his loader. He was wounded two ways at Anzio, physically and mentally. He’d told his wife that he’d seen one of his buddies mortally wounded at Anzio—indeed, that he’d “melted into his gun.” Jim McManus was asked to visit Garner in the hospital. Garner was so traumatized by what happened at Anzio that he couldn’t speak for three days. He killed himself in 1968.

20 Plunkett “splashing” one of the three or four German aircraft they shot down at Anzio. The watercolor was commissioned by Ken Brown for a ship’s reunion in the 1990s, with 431 prints authorized.

21 En route to Palermo, a ship’s photographer took a dozen images of the damage. They were to remain classified for decades. John Oliver (in garrison cap at right) inspects the wreckage in the vicinity of the blast hole. John Gallagher’s gun tub is draped with float netting at top center.

22 Anti-aircraft fire on the Anzio beachhead. Frank Gallagher was there and took this photo on the evening of January 24, 1944. It was under this same aerial assault that Plunkett was hit.

23 The ship buried two dozen of its confirmed dead at a cemetery in Palermo. Most were disinterred and returned to the United States after the war. Seven men were buried again at the Sicily-Rome American Military Cemetery in Nettuno.

24 After applying too late for their blood tests and thus missing the chance for a wedding on 4/4/44, Jim Feltz married Betty Kneemiller in New York City on April 5, 1944.

25 After the death of his wife, Feltz stopped sleeping in their bedroom. He sleeps now in an easy chair (not pictured) in this room that he keeps as a shrine to Plunkett.

26 John Gallagher’s gravestone at the Sicily-Rome American Military Cemetery in Nettuno, which neighbors Anzio. When the staff there know family will be visiting, they brighten the name on the stone with sand from the Anzio beachhead. The January 24 date on Gallagher’s stone is probably wrong. As Gebhart notes in his journal, his shipmate died at 0100 on January 25.