The only call for help from the USS Juneau went out by signal lamp. On the morning of November 13, 1942, the cruiser Helena flashed a message to a B-17 bomber passing overhead, reporting that the light cruiser Juneau had just been sunk, giving her last position, and asking the pilot to pass the information to headquarters. Helena and the battered ships with her then continued south toward the base at Espiritu Santo. Behind them, in a slick of fuel oil, roughly 115 of Juneau’s men were still alive, according to the Navy’s own figure.
Only 10 of them came home. The Navy did send someone. On November 14, Admiral William Halsey’s South Pacific headquarters ordered the destroyer Meade to pick up survivors. Meade did not begin searching until November 16 and broke off after one day.
The last man was pulled from the water on November 20. George Sullivan, the oldest of five brothers from Waterloo, Iowa, who had joined the Juneau together, was somewhere in that oil. His four younger brothers were already gone. The question remains why nobody reached these men for nearly eight days, when their position had been handed to an aircraft the same morning they went into the water, and a destroyer had been ordered toward them the very next day.
The most widely known version of the story blames a report left sitting on a desk. The Navy’s own paperwork adds that the destroyer was sent but then pulled away into a battle that was still ongoing. Both versions end with 10 men. Juneau was an anti-aircraft cruiser commissioned at the New York Navy Yard on February 14, 1942.
The Sullivan brothers had reported aboard 11 days earlier at their own request, and one of them had written that the five would make a team together that can’t be beat. Two months before her own sinking, Juneau had been on the other side of this exact situation. On September 15, a Japanese submarine put three torpedoes into the carrier Wasp about 2,500 yards away. As Juneau crossed the carrier’s wake, her lookouts saw men in the water, and she slowed down.
She was ordered to keep patrolling, while the destroyers went in for the swimmers. By nightfall, Juneau and the destroyers had 1,910 of Wasp’s people aboard. The big ship kept hunting for the submarine, and the small ships did the rescuing. A month later, on October 15, Juneau received her first mail in three and a half months, which filled 84 bags.
Then came the night of November 12 into 13, off Guadalcanal. Thirteen American ships ran into a Japanese force built around two battleships at such short range that the formations mixed together. A few minutes in, a Japanese torpedo hit Juneau on the port side near the forward fire room, knocking out her power and steering. She nearly ran into Helena.
By dawn, she was 10 to 12 feet lower at the forward end, running on a single propeller shaft, trying to hold 18 knots. At first light, she found the other ships that had come out of the fight still moving: the heavy cruiser San Francisco, whose admiral and captain were both dead, along with Helena and the destroyers Fletcher, Sterett, and O’Bannon. The senior officer left standing was Helena’s captain, Gilbert Hoover. At 7:25, Juneau put a whaleboat in the water and sent her doctor, Lieutenant Roger O’Neill, and three pharmacist’s mates across to San Francisco, which was full of injured men.
That boat trip is why the Navy counts 14 Juneau survivors instead of 10. At 11:01, the Japanese submarine I-26 fired three torpedoes at San Francisco. Two missed everything. The third ran past the heavy cruiser and hit Juneau on the port side near the first hit, and her magazine went up.
The Navy’s history of Juneau says she was gone in about 20 seconds, while the Navy’s history of the destroyer later named for the Sullivans says 42. Hoover now had a submarine somewhere nearby and a cruiser that had vanished. San Francisco’s radio gear had been wrecked in the night fight. O’Bannon had been sent off earlier to transmit Hoover’s battle report from a distance so that radio traffic would not give away where the rest of the group was.
That left Fletcher as the only ship in company that could still hunt a submarine, and everyone who watched Juneau go agreed that nobody could have lived through it. Depending on the account, Fletcher either turned toward the spot or asked to, and Hoover kept her with the group. Instead of breaking radio silence, he gave the job to the signal lamp and the bomber. He was right to keep moving, and the message deserved better than a lamp.
The bomber is where the accounts split. The Navy’s ship history says the B-17 tried to land at Henderson Field on Guadalcanal, was waved off, and flew on to Espiritu Santo. The crew put the news about Juneau in their routine report, and for reasons the Navy’s history calls unknown, it went no further. The desk story comes mostly from Dan Kurzman’s 1994 book Left to Die.
In it, the pilot, First Lieutenant Robert Gill, was under orders to keep radio silence and left the decision to the captain who had watched the sinking. Gill’s crew flew over the oil and counted as many as 180 men, black with oil except for pale patches on their faces where they had wiped it off. At Espiritu Santo, an intelligence officer put the sighting in a daily operations report, and nothing moved. At least one account says Hoover’s bomber and Gill’s were two different aircraft, and that Gill reported the men again on the 15th and on the 18th.
The Navy’s own files, pulled together for Juneau’s official ship history, do not fit the desk drawer version. On the morning of the 14th, Hoover told Rear Admiral Richmond Kelly Turner about Juneau over short-range voice radio, and when Helena reached Espiritu Santo that afternoon, he told Rear Admiral Aubrey Fitch, who ran the aircraft in the South Pacific. According to the ship history, the papers of both headquarters show the news about Juneau was known by the 14th. That same day, Halsey’s command sent a dispatch ordering Meade to Juneau’s last position, but the Battle for Guadalcanal was still going on.
Meade was pulled away to shell the coast, then sent to attack Japanese transports, and to pick up the crew of a plane that had gone down near her. Helena sent another formal message on the 15th, and Meade was told again to search off San Cristobal Island. She got underway at 5:15 on the morning of the 16th and searched all day until bad weather and low fuel made her break off just after dark. Aircraft kept looking and saw nothing.
The ship history gives no search area for Meade, and by the 16th the rafts had been drifting and paddling for three days. From what has been published, it is impossible to say whether she ever came within sight of them. The men in the water knew none of this. Allen Hein was a seaman second class on a light gun at the stern.
When the torpedo hit, a piece of steel came down across his right foot, and he went under with the ship holding a kapok life jacket in his arms. Somewhere down there, the steel let go, and the jacket carried him up. In an interview the Navy took down in 1944, he described oil about two inches thick, blueprints of the ship floating around him, and roll after roll of tissue paper whose dry middles the men used to wipe the oil out of their eyes. By nightfall, three of the big donut rafts had been tied together, and Hein counted about 140 men.
Bombers had come over low and waved, and everyone assumed a ship would come the next day. Lieutenant John Blodgett, the gunnery officer, took charge, strung the rafts out in a line, and had the fittest men paddle toward land while he steered by the stars. On the third day, a B-17 dropped a yellow rubber boat. Hein and a few others, among them Signalman Joseph Hartney and Seaman Jimmy Fitzgerald, paddled out to fetch it.
Lieutenant Junior Grade Charles Wang, the torpedo officer, whose right leg had been broken in two places by a falling radar antenna, asked Blodgett if he could go and was told yes. Hein told his Navy interviewer that by evening, the three men in the boat called back that they were going for land to send help, cast off the line, and paddled away while the injured men on the rafts shouted for them to come back. In another version, the two sailors volunteered to get Wang ashore and bring back help with the gunnery officer’s blessing. Both accounts have him approving it.
Where they part is on how the other men took it. After that, the sea got rough and the rafts drifted apart. Hein ended up on one with about a dozen men, and one of them was George Sullivan. Men who had lost their shirts burned raw in the sun, and at night everyone stayed low in the water to keep warm.
The sharks came nearer every day. Men who drank sea water became confused, and some decided the ship was sitting right under them with food aboard. A gunner’s mate named Stewart told Hein he had a case of peaches in his gun mount. Hein spent one afternoon holding up a shipmate whose heartbeat he could no longer feel.
When he said he was going to let the man go, Sullivan told him it was against Navy regulations to bury a man at sea without orders. Hein took it as delirium. On what Hein thought was the fifth night, the oldest Sullivan announced that he was going to take a bath, took off his clothes, pushed away from the raft, and a shark took him. That is Hein’s account.
The Navy’s history of Juneau says the story of the last of the brothers comes from him. It is not the only one. Lester Zook remembered sharing a raft with him and hearing him call out for his brothers. Arthur Friend remembered seeing Red and Al hurt but alive after the sinking.
The Navy’s own history of the destroyer The Sullivans says George died of his injuries a few hours after the ship went down. A seagull landed on the raft one morning, and the three or four men still with Hein caught it and ate it. In the end, he was alone. On what he believed was the ninth day, he saw men climbing out of the ship’s hatches with rifles on their backs, and he swam toward them twice before they disappeared.
The first sighting they counted came on the 18th. On the 19th, a Catalina flying boat found Zook’s raft with five men on it. The crew radioed for permission to land and got no answer, so they dropped a life jacket packed with food and a note telling the men to cheer up and sit tight. Seaman Wyatt Butterfield swam out past the sharks to get it and later received the Bronze Star.
The pilot, Lawrence Williamson, landed in the swell anyway. The only coffee aboard was brewed from that morning’s used grounds, and the survivors told the crew chief, Bill Anderson, that it was great coffee. Zook, Butterfield, Frank Holmgren, Henry Gardner, and Chief Gunner’s Mate George Mantear went to the hospital at Tulagi the same day. Wang, Hartney, and Fitzgerald reached land, according to the ship history on Santa Catalina Island, and according to other accounts on San Cristobal, after three or four days of paddling the rubber boat with a man aboard who could not stand.
Islanders took them in, and a Catalina later flew them out. On the 20th, the old destroyer Ballard, converted to carry seaplanes, went looking for the last two. She picked up Arthur Friend at 8:38 in the morning. He was alone on his raft and had been bitten by a shark a few hours earlier while trying to save a friend.
At 10:45, she reached Hein after a Catalina had circled him and dropped smoke floats, and he had taken off his shirt and waved it. That makes the famous figure harder to pin down than it looks. The Navy’s short summary says the 10 were rescued eight days after the sinking. The dates in the Navy’s own ship history give six days for the five on Zook’s raft and seven for Hein and Friend, but Hein told his interviewer he was picked up on the 22nd.
The man who told the story in the most detail counted more days than his rescuers did. Captain Hoover’s trouble started when Helena reached port. Halsey decided he had not acted properly, and at Noumea, Hoover was questioned by Turner, by Fitch, and by Vice Admiral William Calhoun. Halsey believed Helena’s captain should have put a screen around the wreckage, broken radio silence, and begun a rescue.
Hoover pointed to what he had actually had that morning: too few working ships, a submarine nearby, and enemy aircraft about. Admiral Chester Nimitz was more sympathetic and wanted him kept at sea after some rest. Halsey detached him from Helena on November 23, three days after the last survivor was pulled out, and sent him home to run the naval ammunition depot at Earle, New Jersey. Six months earlier at the Coral Sea, Hoover had earned the Navy Cross for bringing his destroyers alongside the burning carrier Lexington to take off her crew.
The night battle that led to his relief brought him his third. In 1947, Halsey published his memoirs and included what he called a confession of a grievous mistake. He wrote that he had reviewed the case, decided he had done Hoover an injustice, and told the Navy Department so. Hoover retired that same year as a rear admiral and died in Rhode Island in January 1980 at 85.
In Waterloo, the letters from the five brothers had stopped. The Navy kept the loss of Juneau quiet for security reasons, but word got around town anyway. In January 1943, Alleta Sullivan wrote to the Bureau of Naval Personnel about a rumor going around that her five sons were killed in action in November. On January 12, three men in uniform came to the house, led by Lieutenant Commander Truman Jones.
Accounts differ on what was said at the door, but the news was that all five were missing in action. From a naval hospital in Chicago, Lester Zook wrote to the parents himself, telling them that all hope was gone of your boys being found alive. Thomas and Alleta Sullivan and their daughter Genevieve, who joined the Naval Reserve, went on to visit more than 200 shipyards and factories. Albert, the youngest brother, left a widow, Katherine, and a son, Jimmy, who had been 22 months old when his father died.
In the late 1980s, the Iowa Humanities Board turned down a grant for public talks on the brothers on the grounds that their story was not significant enough history. Waterloo pushed back, and in 1988, the city renamed its Civic Center after them. Charles Wang came home on crutches. In 1947, he married his sweetheart, Marie, in Philadelphia, with Thomas and Alleta Sullivan as guests.
He became a pathologist. One of the two sailors who had paddled him to land said that the courage that man showed during those days was something to behold. After years of pain, Wang had the damaged leg amputated in 1980, and he died in 1985 at 70. Allen Hein spent about nine months in an Army unit on Fiji, then volunteered for submarines.
By the time of that 1944 interview, he had made a war patrol officially credited with five ships sunk and four damaged. Asked whether he wanted to go back to the same hunting area, Hein said, “It wouldn’t make any difference, as long as it’s out in the Pacific somewhere. ” He died in 1995. Frank Holmgren, the last of the 10 men who were aboard when she blew up, died in 2009.
Oral Cecil, one of the pharmacist’s mates who had crossed to San Francisco in the whaleboat at 7:25, was the last of all 14, and he died in 2010 at 90. The wreck itself was found on March 17, 2018, about 13,800 feet down off the Solomon Islands. Back in the spring of 1943, the Navy had given the family a ship. She had been laid down in San Francisco as the Putnam, and on February 6, 1943, she was renamed The Sullivans.
Alleta Sullivan sponsored her at the launching on April 4. She went to the Pacific with a shamrock painted on her funnel. In October 1944, she took 118 men off the torpedoed cruiser Houston, and on May 11, 1945, during the Okinawa campaign, she ran in toward the burning carrier Bunker Hill and picked up 166 men who had been forced over the side by the fires.