On Nov. 13, 1942, the light cruiser U.S.S. Juneau (CL-52) steamed into battle off the coast of Guadalcanal, the largest of the steamy, tropical Solomon Islands.
Five brothers named Sullivan were aboard, United States Navy sailors from Waterloo, Iowa, who had enlisted earlier that year to fight in the Second World War. The ship was part of an armada that included the U.S.S. San Francisco, the U.S.S. Helena and the U.S.S. Portland.
Six American warships were lost that day. Among them was the Juneau, which took two hits from Japanese torpedoes before exploding and breaking apart.
Between the ship’s destruction, the harsh elements and intermittent shark attacks, only 10 members of the Juneau’s crew were alive when rescue teams recovered them more than a week later. None of the five Sullivan brothers were among those who lived.
Bill Overstreet was sworn into the Navy that same day, he told members of a planning committee for the U.S.S. Juneau memorial ceremony at an informal meeting Friday. He went on, he added, to serve aboard the Portland, alongside many sailors who told horror stories of the battle for Guadalcanal. Years after that, in the 1970s and early 1980s, he wound up serving as mayor of Juneau, the namesake of the ship that met such a bitter end in that battle.
This Nov. 13 will be the 70th anniversary of the Juneau’s sinking, and Overstreet and others want to give it a grand salute. They discussed their ideas at the committee meeting in the downtown Juneau Public Library, traded stories and talked about ways to expand the memorial for the future.
“It’s a great start with what we have, but it could be so much more,” said Christopher Mertl, whose enthusiasm for the notion was palpable throughout the meeting.
Mertl suggested an ad hoc committee begin meeting after the anniversary to figure out how to improve the memorial as part of a “long-range vision.”
Assemblymember Randy Wanamaker, facilitating the meeting, was in favor of that idea.
“I’m going to be a volunteer for that first ad hoc committee to get the appropriate-size memorial underway,” said Wanamaker, who described his vision of the memorial improvements as being a cooperative effort between the City and Borough of Juneau and some sort of a private foundation.
For Overstreet’s part, he said of the memorial, “I always thought it was a nice little marker, but I’m very pleased that someone wants to make a bigger deal of it.”
For the anniversary itself, Overstreet presented attendees with stapled copies of the late U.S.S. Juneau officer Lester Zook’s declassified first-hand report on the ship’s demise, which the University of Alaska Southeast’s interim Egan Library Director Elise Tomlinson said she could have bound.
Meeting participants also discussed the idea of displaying artifacts related to the Juneau, drawing upon resources including the Juneau-Douglas City Museum, the Alaska State Museum, the Juneau Public Libraries, the American Legion and others, potentially even Waterloo’s Grout Museum District.
“There’s probably a lot of stuff scattered around the community that no one knows about, in attics and boxes or on people’s walls,” Mertl said. To complement the memorial service on the actual anniversary of the event, he added, “I would set up a month-long exhibit in the City Museum.”
Port Director Carl Uchytil proposed using the new downtown Visitor’s Center “as a potential spot for displays,” such as of models of the Juneau and other ships that participated in the Naval Battle of Guadalcanal.
Wanamaker responded, “That’s a good idea. The Visitor’s Center’s a great place to display a model of the Juneau.”
Hearkening back to the ideas expressed by Mertl, Wanamaker and Overstreet of reaching out to the community for the memorial and event, Tomlinson suggesting using fliers, social media and the newspaper as ”different ways of getting that out as a call for your stories or your memorabilia or whatever you might have.” She said she could create a Facebook page for the U.S.S. Juneau as a way of attracting interest and gathering material.
A chaplain’s prayer, music and wreath-laying at the memorial are also planned for the memorial ceremony on Nov. 13.
Docks and Harbors is keeping the memorial in storage for now, but Uchytil said it will be back outside by the day of the anniversary.
“The plan right now is to put it in what we call the ‘bump out’ along the seawalk between Franklin Dock and the Taku Dock,” said Uchytil. “That’s the plan that we’re proceeding with to reinstall the flagpole and these three brass plaques, and we will have that in place by the 13th.”
In response to the discussion between Mertl and Wanamaker at the meeting about improving the memorial after the anniversary, Uchytil remarked, “Maybe it’s best to call it the temporary flagpole memorial, you know. That might give it some legs, too, the idea that the permanent memorial is something (else).”
Friday’s meeting was the second for the informal planning committee. Another meeting was held Thursday evening at the Mendenhall Valley Public Library.
• Contact reporter Mark D. Miller at 523-2279 or at mark.d.miller@juneauempire.com.
Comments (8)
Add commentSolomon Islands WWII Memorial
Upon a tall hill overlooking Honiara, there is a U.S. monument dedicated to "those who paid the ultimate sacrifice for the liberation of the Solomon Islands."
I visited this memorial in 2006 and it was a humbling experience. There are four walls with each of the battles inscribed, detailing all the ships lost. Considering the Solomons is among the poorer nations in the Commonwealth, it was remarkable to see how well maintained the site is and how well the dignity of the area is respected.
Just a thought, but perhaps Juneau and Honiara could develop sister-city status considering the historic link between us.
Mike
Yukon they all died on the Juneau
http://www.history.navy.mil/faqs/faq72-1.htm
GOOD to see USS Juneau remembered.
Former Juneau resident Steve Andereggen did a lot of research on Juneau and helped organize the visit of the 5 survivors in 1982(??). I'll send him a link to the article.
Some may remember that I just started designing my cardstock paper model ships, when I was in Juneau, but - ironically - I still haven't done two of my favorite ships: USS Alaska and USS Juneau (CL-52). (There are free plans for a few other ships on my two webpages, and I am planning on publishing a book with over 30 World War 2 ships/plans. The theme of my webpages is "The more we learn about the Second World War, the better our chances it will be the LAST world war.")
There *have* been plastic model kits of the Juneau/Atlanta class cruisers at 1/700 scale.
If I get USS Juneau/Atlanta designed by November, would the Empire like me to license it to publish the plan? (I would want to retain all copyright and publication rights to it and have it printed only in paper in the Empire - not online.)
Ted Stevens and I tried to get the very large commissioning model of the USS Alaska "loaned" to the State Museum, but the Navy wouldn't part with it. Last I heard there is a model of the 2nd USS Juneau (CL-119), light cruiser/antiaircraft, at the Naval Academy in Anapolis, but the Middies wouldn't part with theirs either.
Glad to see Bill Overstreet is still sailing. :-)
I might add that my Juneau-born daughter Rebecca now has a degree in archaeology from Colorado State and is put her drawing abilities to good use with it and that my Juneau-born son Robert got his degree in aerospace engineering from Illinois and has a dream job in that field as well.
I am now over here in Norway, helping to look after my second son Rohan (4) and daughter Johanna (2). The climate and topography is the same as Juneau's (although Oslo is a degree farther north), except no earthquakes. And since pre-Viking times, the locals have had productive farms in often unimaginable terrain.
Some may remember my activeness in public discourse, and over here on Feb. 3, I mounted a 1-person demonstration outside our Embassy (in the absence of a local Congressional office) opposing the dictatorship clauses of the National Defense Authorization Act 2012, which Romney has endorsed and Obama is trying to get re-instituted - why?? - after Federal Judge Catherine Forrest's brave ruling against those clauses as being grossly unConstitutional.
All the best to everyone.
GOOD to see USS Juneau remembered.
Followup question: DID Juneau ever re-vote itself to become a U.S. Navy Homeport? I remember wondering what the original Juneau's crew would have thought, when the initiative was voted down when I was still over there.
It would be another way to show remembrance - and gratitude.
Some historical additions/corrections.
The Juneau wasn't sunk in the First Naval Battle of Guadalcanal (along with 4 of our destroyers). Although it was torpedoed during that night battle, it was again torpedoed and sunk by a Japanese submarine's torpedo the following morning, when the damaged surviving ships were sailing back south to their base. Of over 700 men and officers, an estimated 100 survived the catastrophic forward magazine explosion which hurled one of the twin 5" gun turrets a hundred or so feet into the air.
Only the eldest of the 5 Sullivan brothers, George, survived the explosion, and he died during the long wait for rescue. Only 10 men ultimately survived, and failure to rescue within a reasonable time was the fault of the theater commander - Adm. William F. Halsey, who was gambling everything to save the Marines and GIs on Guadalcanal - not that of the senior surviving officer (Capt. Gilbert Hoover of the Helena, who was following doctrine by getting the rest of the ships out of the submarine-infested area), whom Halsey scapegoated and had relieved and sent home.
(Bull Halsey apparently later regretted this and tried to make amends to Hoover, but Hoover spurned him coldly. Under Hoover's captaincy, Helena had fought effectively and safely in the previous Guadalcanal Battle of Cape Esperance and in this battle. She was sunk after he left her in the following year, in the Battle of Kula Gulf up the Solomons chain. Most of *her* crew were saved by vastly improved rescue measures, including those of the brave Australian coastwatchers covertly operating on Japanese held islands.)
Lester Zook was a Signalman 1st Class, not an officer.
There is a wonderful and poignantly funny film done during the war, The Fighting Sullivans, about the brothers when they were growing up as Irish Catholic kids in Waterloo, Iowa. It is a great family film, and the brothers' wartime death is not shown explicitly.
One result of the Sullivans' deaths was a Navy regulation requiring brothers to be in separate commands. Bob Pavitt, longtime Juneau resident and R&D director under Gov. Egan, once told me that he and his brother were having an idyllic war, flying PBY Catalina flying boats on anti-U-boat patrols out of a warm South Atlantic island with great beaches, and then the reg came down. They were both reassigned to carriers. IIRC, Bob's brother was wounded during the North African landings and Bob got shot up flying off the USS Saratoga in the Pacific!
Former Lt. Gov. Red Boucher was a young sailor on the famous carrier USS Enterprise (CV-6), by the way, and of course former Gov. Jay Hammond flew the big, powerful Corsair fighter as a young Marine during the war.
When I was a librarian in the State Library, I saw the Navy Department photos of the Juneau and her crew we had acquired. The one that haunts me the most is of her commissioning on Valentines Day 1942 in the New York Navy Yard, showing all her officers and crew then on her in a group photo on her fantail.
To look at all those faces of those young kids and realize that within a year virtually all of them would be dead, really gets to you and makes you stop and think about war and that war should only be a LAST resort which we should NOT be starting.
I hope the Juneau Empire will republish a largescale reprint of that photo on November 13th.
A couple more thoughts:
What happened to Steve Andereggen's superb - indeed, perfect - largescale 1/96 model of the Juneau, which was out in the airport terminal?
Here is an incredible animation of the previous/26Oct42 carrier Battle of Santa Cruz, wherein the Juneau was highly effective in her role as an antiaircraft cruiser. The first American carrier being attacked (and finally torpedoed) is the Hornet, which the Juneau was helping to defend, so the antiaircraft cruiser accompanying it in the animation must be the Juneau.
The animation starts after the first 3 minutes and the 2nd in the series of 3 videos is the one showing Juneau.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2QvNQS7HLYE
Finally, here is a sad article about the national World War 2 bubbleheads' ... er, submariners' ... veterans organization disbanding because of member attrition and disabilities.
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2012/09/23/world-war-ii-submarine-veterans-for...
The World War 2 generation may have been The Greatest Generation for us who were their children, but objectively speaking they weren't the *greatest*, and the decisive leadership role/contribution of the World War 1 generation during World War 2 is commonly overlooked.
And in its leadership role during the Viet Nam War, the WW2 generation didn't do so well.
Indeed, the Greatest Generation hoopla seems to have been in part a cynical means to get the WW2 generation's influential support for our recent, unjustified and (strategically and economically) DISASTROUS misadventures in the kind of Asian land wars of attrition our wiser strategists have always warned us against ... and which Congress should have had the courage and integrity to vote against.
USS Juneau
I have been collecting stories and items from the USS Juneau for years. My interest stems from meeting a woman who lost her fiancee in the sinking. I promised her I would never forget their story, and have set about to record as mush information as I can gather. Please if anyone has any information to give me, or have any question I might be able to answer, please contact me.