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

By the time Plunkett went into Casablanca in the second wave of Operation Torch, Gallagher (lower right) and Feltz (between the dark-skinned French sailor and Irvin Gebhart) had joined the ships engineering crew. Vitold Ski Zakrzewski is squatting beside Gallagher.

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). Theyd 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 grandmothers youngest brother, Eddie Martin, out of a foxhole after hed 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, Id 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 theyd seen and experienced, they talked about what was funny or improbable. One great-uncles most frequently told story involved an ice cream machine hed 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 hed tapped an electrical circuit in a colonels 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 ships position in the deck logs with respect to several local landmarks. Fort DellOvo, a modular fifteenth-century edifice known in English as Egg Castle, rose sheer from the waters 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 harbors 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 imminentjust 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. Theyd been telling everyone to stay out of Naples, the typhus was running rampant, but Frank figured that was the shit. At the harbors edge, he walked along the mole, scanning a panorama of ships for hull number 431.