A defining feature of James Sullivan’s childhood was the gathering of his extended family every Fourth of July. The stars of these get-togethers, especially for a young lad, were his numerous great-uncles. They had all fought in the Second World War, and most had a tall tale – repeated year-in, year-out – with which to salute it. It was not “the horror and the anguish” they talked about, but rather “the funny or improbable.” His great-uncle Frank’s story, in particular, stuck with Sullivan because of its “serendipity and pathos.”
Cover courtesy of Scribner/Simon & Schuster
Frank Gallagher was in Naples as an army medic. His brother John was a gunner on board a destroyer, USS Plunkett, just arrived in the harbor. One night, Frank sneaked out of camp, bought some wine and commandeered a local fisherman to row him out to his brother’s ship. On discovering Frank, the captain sent him below “to bunk with your brother” while he decided “what we’re going to do with you.” Frank was duly put ashore, and the next day saw the start of the Anzio operation, which John Gallagher did not survive.
Sullivan, who runs an international PR firm for resorts and hotels and lives in Scarborough, carried these memories around for four decades. A family trip to Italy provided the spark that set him googling Plunkett. By that time, 2016, the annual reunions of the crew were a thing of the past. Armed with the names of those who had attended the last one, he started calling, having first checked the obituaries, “more often than not finding one.”
But occasionally, someone would answer, tentatively at first. Then, with the magic word, Plunkett, Sullivan found he had “touched a chord that vibrated back decades and resonated with the signal experience of a life.” He had extended conversations with three veterans, in particular. Together with the official record of Plunkett’s irascible but dauntless captain and the family lore surrounding his great-uncle John, these men’s reminiscences make the blocks upon which the author builds his saga. The cement is USS Plunkett, thought to be the only major warship to have participated in every Allied invasion in the European theater.
The defining battle for its crew, however, was Anzio, and it is toward that moment that Unsinkable hurtles relentlessly. On January 24, 1944, a half-hour encounter with the Luftwaffe left 53 of her crew dead and the ship crippled. The personal memories of the action Sullivan collected make his heart-pounding account a classic evocation of a modern naval battle.
They are also testament to the faith and confidence these nonagenarian veterans placed in him when sharing the hopes and fears of their younger selves. A particularly touching episode concerns the interior thoughts of a young man as he watches a Ouija board spell out his fate. (In the event, the planchette got it wrong.)
Sullivan can have a great way with words. His descriptions can be tellingly evocative. His family used to gather on Independence Day, “with dented metal coolers, crockpots, and foil-covered casserole dishes, in Bermuda shorts and head scarfs, with webbed lawn chairs and Polaroid cameras.” “Friendly fire was the elephant in the wardroom.” “The uniform and clothing shops… stood between the bars like caesuras in the hubbub.” He also deftly uses the naval vernacular – “cans” for destroyers, for instance – inherited from his interviews, adding color without sounding phony.
At times, though, the writing is strained, if not clunky. During his first battle, the gunnery officer “stitched anxiety in the plate at his feet.” Or as John says goodbye to his brother, “Platitudes might have tried out for a shot on the stage” of his tongue.
But then a pure, almost poetic, sentence slips out. After dinner with one of the survivors: “I wondered that we were still capable of this much grace in America, at this table by a window in a restaurant on a still warm October evening.”
After the climactic engagement at Anzio, Unsinkable fast forwards, tying up the loose ends of the war and the lives of those that survived it. The reunions only started when “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.”
This last chapter is as moving as the one preceding it was gut-wrenching. Nowhere more so than when the author visits the grave of his great-uncle John in the military cemetery at Anzio, and delivers a message to him from an old shipmate: “Hello, Johnny.” For Sullivan, the happy memories of those long-ago barbecues have come full circle.
Thomas Urquhart’s new book, Up for Grabs, a history of Maine’s Public Reserved Lands, will be published in May.
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