Unsinkable

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From The Wall Street Journal:

On Jan. 24, 1944, the destroyer USS Plunkett found herself offshore Anzio, Italy, supporting the embattled Allied beachhead there. The ship had had an eventful year, participating in the invasions of North Africa and Sicily. Like all destroyers, Plunkett was fast and well-armed for her size. She had many roles, including shepherding other ships and patrolling, but destruction was her natural job. On this day in the Tyrrhenian Sea, the men aboard were disappointed that some much-anticipated shelling of German positions ashore had been canceled.

At around 5:15 p.m., the ship’s doctor spotted a couple of German bombers, Dorniers, in the early-evening sky, fairly high up. The Anzio roadstead was thick with Allied ships, but the Germans owned the skies. “Looks like a little business coming up,” said the doctor almost to himself. “I think I’ll go down to the wardroom.” As James Sullivan tells us in his stirring “Unsinkable: Five Men and the Indomitable Run of the USS Plunkett,” the destroyer’s wardroom—the officers’ mess, at sea—did double duty in battle, serving as the dressing station for the wounded and dying. It would prove to be a busy place that evening.

Soon after calling his crew to battle stations, Plunkett’s captain, Ed Burke —one of the five men that Mr. Sullivan follows from the 1940s through the ends of their lives—could see the glide-bombs from the far-off Dorniers floating his way. What followed over the next 25 minutes may have been the most intense aerial attack on a single ship of any navy in World War II.

Soon the Dorniers were joined by dive bombers shrieking in, while torpedo planes came in “low and slow” to drop their sinister payloads that barely moved faster through the water than Plunkett herself. Capt. Burke successfully zigged toward the glide bombs, zagged to run parallel to a torpedo, dodged dive bombs that were landing as close to 20 yards away, and through it all, whenever he could, put the ship broadside on to the planes so his guns would have a chance. Eventually Plunkett was ablaze, but her guns kept firing with coordination and accuracy until the Luftwaffe had to call off the attack. Plunkett’s “bag” that day was impossible to verify, but it likely represented a quarter or more of the force that attacked her. The ship’s casualty list would include, apart from the scores of wounded, 29 men forever “missing in action.” These numbered more than the dead whose bodies could be identified. Plunkett managed to limp back to Palermo, saw action in Normandy on D-Day and ended her war in the Pacific.

. . . .

Certain stories we need to tell regardless of their size. One of Mr. Sullivan’s achievements is to remind us why. “Unsinkable,” a fine narrative in its own right, is also a reflection on the nature of storytelling itself, as well as a valuable and entertaining contribution to the record. It is good to learn the history of the American destroyer, with its origins in the response to the torpedo warfare that began on the Roanoke River in 1864, or to learn how the depth-charges and sonar worked on a vessel of the Gleaves class 80 years later. To make such details compelling reading is an accomplishment. More significantly, Mr. Sullivan takes pains to illuminate and honor a lost world.

He pores over a photograph of a Ship’s Party in March 1943 at the Hotel St. George in Brooklyn. There are the “USO girls, recruited for the party and minded by chaperones.” There is the sailor who looks 14 years old, the towering perms and the crisp uniforms with white carnations, and, “if you look closely enough,” the sound of Benny Goodman on the clarinet.

Mr. Sullivan reads the hundred letters that made their way to and from Plunkett between teenagers Jim Feltz and Betty Kneemiller, who met when Jim was sweeping the floor at Mr. Siegal’s five-and-dime store back home in Overland, Mo. “I still call you mine,” she writes at one point, “but I’m not as definite on that being the truth.”

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal (PG apologizes for the paywall, but hasn’t figured out a way around it.)