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

Sydney M. Williams“Unsinkable,” James SullivanJanuary 11, 2021“In the infantry, one bullet might find one man, but it didn’t work that wayin the kind of combat Jim was engaged in. What might get him was a torpedoor a glide bomb, and if it got him, it was going to get a boatload of them.” Unsinkable, James Sullivan, 2020Twenty-five minutes can seem a lifetime. In those few minutes, Plunkett, supporting the Anzio invasion in late afternoon, January 24, 1944, dodged five German torpedos and held off a dozen dive bombers, before one 550-lb bomb hit the destroyer, killing fifty-three sailors, mostly young and mostly instantly.Among the dead was John Gallagher of Dorchester, Massachusetts, great uncle to the author. Gallagher lived through the evening, dying at 1:00AM on the 25th. His last words were to his shipmate and fellow gunner Jim McManus: “I’m a tough Irishman. Those Germans can’t kill me.” “With that last pronouncement,” Sullivan writes, “it appeared that John had started back to Dorchester…and the broad veranda across the front of the house,” Thirty men were so obliterated they were listed as missing in action.The Plunkett (DD-431) was commissioned in late 1940. The destroyer, Mr. Sullivan writes, “is the ‘minute man’ behind the stonewall, the grunt on point in the jungle…” It was a ship that met John Paul Jones request of being designed to get in harm’s way. The author adds: “…the ship was first and foremost a floating gun platform…” By War’s end, according to a memoir by one of the ship’s officers, Plunkett had “participated in every major invasion of Europe [from Anzio to Normandy], and it is believed to be the only major warship so distinguished.” Thirty-five years after it was launched, and now named Nan Wang, it was scrapped, somewhere in Taiwan. Yet, for its heroic action in Anzio Harbor on a late January afternoon in 1944 its Captain, Edward J. Burke was awarded the Navy Cross.Mr. Sullivan takes the reader on an exciting, and personal, odyssey. Besides Gallagher, McManus and Burke, we meet (among others) Ken Brown, gunnery officer aboard Plunkett, first in January 1942 as a 21-year-old graduate of the Naval Academy, assigned to the ship, and then again seventy years later in Thornton, Colorado where he had retired. We first know Jim Feltz as a sixteen-year-old in Overland, Missouri when he had just met Betty Kneemiller. He joined the Navy at age seventeen. We meet him again, years later, back in Overland. At Anzio, Feltz was in the forward fire room when the ship was hit. Going topside, he was one of the first to hook up hoses and begin putting out the fires. In April 1944, while on leave back in the U.S., as the ship was undergoing repairs, Jim and Betty married, a marriage that lasted seventy years.Approximately 10% of the American population served in uniform at some point during World War II. Stories that James Sullivan heard as a child at family gatherings seemed “so ordinary…that the details hardly qualified as something to talk about.” Yet stories from those backyard picnics germinated in Mr. Sullivan’s mind and became the genesis of this book, which is far from ordinary. And that is because his tale is based on on-site and personal research, during which he read diaries and accounts, and then reached out to living veterans who had served aboard Plunkett in World War II – a riveting read.

As a bit of background, I served in the Navy for many years, in combat, and was aboard USS Providence CLG-6, in Vietnam when she was taken under fire and hit by NVA coastal artillery off Hon Matt island.I also served on another cruiser, an Essex-class aircraft carrier, and a destroyer (Gearing class). My credentials are solid.I thought the book was excellent, well-written, and not at all dry like so many other military books are.However, on page 344, author Sullivan notes the "…thousands of serried crosses…" he viewed at the Sicily-Rome American Military Cemetery south of Rome.I've been there, and I know he could have just as easily and more accurately written, "thousands of serried crosses and dozens of Stars of David..." that are also present.In fact, USS Plunkett crewman Irving F. Diamond, SK1C, whose battle station was at one of the gun mounts, and whose remains were never found after Anzio, would have likely been buried under one of those Stars of David.It may seem a small and unimportant omission to the reader. But, to me, it would have meant a lot had author Sullivan included those six extra words, recognizing some approximately 10,000 American Jews, including his beloved great-uncle's shipmate, who died in our military service during WW2.Otherwise, a wonderful read and truly written from the heart!

I was on a destroyer escort for 4 years and my father served in WW2, so I really looked forward to reading this book, but I found it a disappointing read.I get that this is meant to be a tribute to the brave men who fought in the US Navy during WW2. But there is not much about the war here and the naval action doesn't take place until around page 260. And for some reason I never felt like I was aboard a destroyer in spite of the many details like buttermilk pancakes and bacon for breakfast.Most of this book tells us in excruciating detail about the men and their families, their lives as civilians and lives after the war, endless descriptions of photographs, letters, long paragraphs telling us what movies and band leaders and songs were popular at the time, many journeys and side trips by the author to meet relatives (with tales of their journeys and side trips) and jumps from one person to another all too frequently, making the story seem somewhat incoherent, and some chapters seem like unnecessary filler.For instance, the first sentence of chapter 4 reads "That Sunday, Jim Feltz parked his black '34 Plymouth in front of the dollar store on the Woodson Road in Overland, Missouri, and stepped outside to wait for his manager, Ed, to return from lunch." Then its page after page of describing the merchandise in the store, from porcelain dolls to Philco phonographs, to cutlery and Christmas cards. In fact the whole chapter is about Overland, Missouri, which might be interesting to the family of those naval heroes and those living in Overland, but didn't really fulfill for me the words of praise given by other authors on the back cover, "thrilling, moving, harrowing, gripping, captivating."I just think all those details would have served better in a novel, not a naval history. Those men were undoubtedly courageous heroes, but the story seemed a lackluster read to me.