Unsinkable: Five Men and the Indomitable Run of the USS Plunkett - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

James Sullivan was born and raised in Quincy, Massachusetts, and has an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He has written for The New York Times and National Geographic Traveler, the magazine. He lives with his family outside Portland, Maine, 3.4 miles from the birthplace of film director John Ford, who steamed into Omaha Beach on Plunkett.

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Chapter 1: The Goddamned Harbor

1: THE GODDAMNED HARBOR

JANUARY 1944

Every year on the Fourth of July through the early 1970s, my extended family gathered in the backyard of our house in Quincy, Massachusetts. They came with dented metal coolers, crockpots, and foil-covered casserole dishes, in Bermuda shorts and headscarfs, with webbed lawn chairs and Polaroid cameras, from jobs as union pipe coverers, tool-and-die mechanics, and subway car drivers (the men) and housework and child-rearing (the women). They’d bang the earwigs out of the aluminum tubes of their lawn chairs, set them in a great circle, and call for the younger kids to fetch cans of Schlitz and Narragansett. My great-uncle Frank Gallagher used to call for his whiskey with two thick fingers waved overhead, as if giving the signal to move out, and some obliging niece or nephew would pour him a neat one from the gang of bottles on our porch. Most of the great-uncles, like Frank, had gone away to World War II, which was a circumstance of personal history so ordinary in that backyard on those languorous afternoons that the details hardly qualified as something to talk about. Little was said, for example, about the shell that blew my grandmother’s youngest brother, Eddie Martin, out of a foxhole after he’d waded ashore at Omaha Beach and fought his way into Normandy. (They recovered Eddie upside down in a tree, good to go for another thirty years, albeit with one leg missing.) As a boy, I’d have liked to have heard that story, or what it was like for my great-uncle Billy Lydon to burst into Bastogne on a tank during the Battle of the Bulge. Billy saw more combat than any of us, my great-uncle Leo Meehan told me after Billy died, shaking his head over what he knew. Instead in those days, rather than remember the horror and the anguish of what they’d seen and experienced, they talked about what was funny or improbable. One great-uncle’s most frequently told story involved an ice cream machine he’d dropped in the Pacific when he was trying to transfer it by haul line from his supply ship to another Navy vessel. Another great-uncle liked to tell about how he’d tapped an electrical circuit in a colonel’s bunker so his crew in the neighboring bunker, on a godforsaken beachhead, could also have light. And then there was the time Frank Gallagher slipped from camp and made his way into Naples, Italy, one day in January of 1944…

It was before sunset, and a U.S. Navy destroyer, the USS Plunkett, lay at anchor in 32 fathoms (180 feet) of water. From the bridge, the officer of the deck had recorded the ship’s position in the deck logs with respect to several local landmarks. Fort Dell’Ovo, a modular fifteenth-century edifice known in English as Egg Castle, rose sheer from the water’s edge about a half mile distant. Clockwise through twenty-five degrees of arc that included the storied seaside neighborhood of Santa Lucia was Nuovo Castle, a more archetypal citadel with rounded, crenellated towers. And farther still to the right was the mile-long reach of the harbor’s principal pier, or mole as they called them along the Mediterranean seaboard. Seven other U.S. Navy destroyers were moored nearby, embedded in a larger contingent of the Allied fleet, preparing for the greatest invasion of the war thus far.

After the Allies had come ashore at Salerno four months earlier, the march on Rome had ground to a halt at the Germans’ Gustav Line near Monte Cassino, halfway between Salerno and Rome. The Germans commanded the high ground here above two valleys the Allies had not been able to punch through, and needed to, if they were to take Rome. Ever the man for military micromanagement, Winston Churchill concocted a scheme to do an end run around Cassino with an amphibious landing. In Naples, which the Allies had taken three weeks after the Salerno landings in September and whose port was funneling the American Fifth Army into the war on the Italian mainland, everyone knew an invasion was imminent—just how imminent no one could say. Every day more vessels crowded the harbor. They were on the verge of something.

Late that Sunday afternoon, Private Frank Gallagher stole away from his camp, without a pass, and made his way into Naples, half-filling a jerry can with Italian red wine along the way. They’d been telling everyone to stay out of Naples, the typhus was running rampant, but Frank figured “that was the shit.” At the harbor’s edge, he walked along the mole, scanning a panorama of ships for hull number 431.

A medic in the 36th Infantry Division of the Fifth Army, Frank had come into Italy from North Africa at Salerno, on a beach so hot German Panzer tanks had rumbled right down onto the sand in the midst of the American assault. The beachhead was tenuous for a week after the initial landing, prompting the Fifth Army’s commander, General Mark Clark, to think about evacuating back out to sea. If this next invasion was to be anything like Salerno, Frank wanted to see his brother John one more time.

On shore, no one Frank asked could tell him whether Plunkett was among the anchored vessels. At the Navy task force’s flagship—the “admiral’s ship,” Frank called it—he addressed one of the topside sailors, asking whether Plunkett was out there. It was in the area, he was told. There wasn’t any way out among the ships from the mole, so Frank walked the edge of the harbor until he came into the neighborhood of Santa Lucia, which inspired a song that Neapolitan immigrants carried to America in the late nineteenth century. The lyrics of the song invite a boatman to shove off in his boat to enjoy the cool of the evening. “Come into my nimble little boat,” the song goes. “Oh, how beautiful to be on the ship!” The boatman Frank encountered was offering no such palliative.

Instead, after coming down a stairway from the Santa Lucia promenade onto an ample stone terrace jutting into the water, Frank hopped into a little boat, a bumboat, tied to one of the terrace’s cleats, and told the boatman to row him out. The man protested, arguing back in Italian that was Greek to Frank.

“No,” Frank said, cutting him short. “Row out in the goddamned harbor.”

At a glance, Frank didn’t appear physically intimidating. He was of average height and build, his face square and no-nonsense. He was naturally abrupt, and skeptical, but ever alert for the possibility of a little fun. He’d been hauling off that can now and then, and he was already a little glorious with the wine this afternoon.

The Italian worked his oars, and the boat jerked from behind a crescent of breakwater stones and headed out among the moored Navy vessels. Frank directed the boatman to steer for the telltale profiles of two-stacked destroyers, casting about for the hull number that would identify the ship as the one he wanted. “And don’t you think I saw the Plunkett,” he said.

The destroyer was as long as a football field plus most of its end zones, big but by no means titanic. It had four boilers, two propellers, thirteen ship’s officers, plus seven additional squadron officers, and 265 sailors, including a twenty-seven-year-old water tender from Boston’s Dorchester neighborhood whose day job on the ship was in the aft fire room, but whose battle station at general quarters was on a 20mm machine gun, one of six...