USS Juneau

The Vessel

USS Juneau (CL-52) was a light cruiser of the Atlanta-class, commissioned at the Federal Shipbuilding and Drydock Company at Kearny, New Jersey, on 14 February 1942. She was 165 metres long, 6,718 tons standard displacement, and carried sixteen 5-inch dual-purpose guns in eight twin turrets; she was designed specifically as an anti-aircraft light cruiser to screen the fast carrier task forces. Her design speed was 32.5 knots.

The Atlanta-class was one of the most distinctive American warship classes of the Second World War. The class displaced the traditional light cruiser role onto a specialised anti-aircraft escort platform; the eight twin 5-inch turrets (four fore, four aft) produced a main battery weight of 128 rounds per minute against aircraft, approximately five times the contemporary American heavy cruiser rate and ten times the battleship rate. The class was intended to provide, at each point in a task force formation, an equivalent of 24 additional 5-inch guns on aircraft defence duty.

Her commanding officer in November 1942 was Captain Lyman K. Swenson, 49, a career naval officer. She carried among her crew the five Sullivan brothers from Waterloo, Iowa: George (27), Francis (25), Joseph (23), Madison (22), and Albert (19). The five brothers had enlisted together on 3 January 1942 under a specific agreement with the U.S. Navy that they would serve aboard the same ship; the Navy, which had previously discouraged same-family assignments to the same unit under the assumption that multiple family losses would be avoided by separation, had approved the Sullivan request as a morale-building exception.

The Voyage

Juneau was assigned to the Pacific Fleet in August 1942 and reached the Solomons theatre in October. She served through the October and early November operations in support of the Marine ground forces on Guadalcanal. On 12 November 1942 she joined the task force of Rear-Admiral Daniel J. Callaghan, five cruisers and eight destroyers, screening the amphibious shipping at Guadalcanal against the approaching Japanese naval reinforcement run.

At 01:50 on 13 November 1942 Callaghan's force entered Savo Sound in complete darkness to engage the Japanese force of Vice-Admiral Hiroaki Abe: two fast battleships (Hiei, Kirishima), a light cruiser, and 14 destroyers. The subsequent naval engagement, the First Naval Battle of Guadalcanal, was fought in the same waters as the August 1942 Savo Island disaster, in conditions of near-total darkness, and at ranges as short as 1,000 metres. It was one of the most confused surface engagements in American naval history.

Juneau was struck by a Japanese Type 93 Long Lance torpedo at approximately 02:00 on 13 November 1942. The torpedo hit her port side forward, below the waterline, causing extensive flooding. She listed heavily to port but remained afloat; her captain decided to withdraw toward Espiritu Santo for emergency repairs. Along with the other damaged American ships of the task force, she proceeded south at 13 knots after the engagement ended at 02:30.

The Disaster

At 11:01 on 13 November 1942, the task force was approximately 45 nautical miles southeast of San Cristóbal Island when the Japanese submarine I-26 (commanded by Commander Minoru Yokota) fired a two-torpedo spread at the American ships. One torpedo missed; the second struck USS Juneau on her port side amidships at exactly the location of her forward main magazine.

The magazine detonated. Juneau disintegrated in a single catastrophic explosion. Her bow and stern sections, separated by the magazine blast, sank within 42 seconds of the torpedo strike. The explosion was observed by the nearby destroyers and by the cruiser USS Helena, which was approximately 800 metres away at the moment of the blast. Observers on Helena reported that the cloud of smoke from the explosion rose to approximately 300 metres and that no part of Juneau was visible above the water surface once the smoke cleared.

The task force commander, Captain Gilbert Hoover of Helena, decided not to stop to search for survivors. Hoover's reasoning, later documented in his post-action report, was that the presence of a Japanese submarine in the area made stopping the task force unacceptably dangerous; the remaining damaged American ships, including San Francisco and Portland, were at risk of being struck by further submarine attack if they halted. Hoover ordered the task force to continue on course. He signalled the American Pacific Fleet headquarters with a report of Juneau's destruction and a note that no survivors had been visible in the debris.

Approximately 115 men had survived the initial explosion. They had entered the water injured, many of them severely, and had clung to debris in the tropical Pacific for what became a sequence of survival failures. Search aircraft were ordered by the Pacific Fleet two days later, after belated decoding of Hoover's original report. Eight days after the sinking, on 20 November 1942, a United States Navy search PBY Catalina located ten survivors. Of 115 who had survived the initial sinking, 10 survived the eight days in the water. 105 died of exposure, dehydration, or shark attack, or drowned when the debris rafts disintegrated in the swell.

Of the Juneau's 697 crew, 687 died in the sinking or in the subsequent days adrift. The five Sullivan brothers were all aboard; all five died.

The Legacy

The loss of the five Sullivan brothers became the most widely-reported American military casualty event of the Second World War. The Waterloo, Iowa, community received the casualty notices in late December 1942 and early January 1943 in a sequence that produced immediate national press coverage. President Roosevelt wrote a personal letter of condolence to the Sullivan parents on 10 January 1943; the parents subsequently travelled the United States on war-bond tours through 1943-44, speaking at more than 200 shipyards and factories.

The Sullivan case produced direct changes in the U.S. Department of War's family-assignment policies. The Sole Survivor Policy, formalised in 1948 under Army Regulation 614-200 and subsequent Navy directives, prohibits assignment of the last surviving son of a family that has lost previous sons to combat to a combat zone. The Sullivan name became the specific reference for the policy; the policy is sometimes referred to in American military literature as "the Sullivan rule".

The American destroyer USS The Sullivans (DD-537), a Fletcher-class destroyer commissioned on 30 September 1943, was named for the five brothers by specific direction of President Roosevelt. She served through the Pacific War and the Korean War and is preserved today as a museum ship at Buffalo, New York. A second USS The Sullivans (DDG-68), an Arleigh Burke-class guided missile destroyer, was commissioned in 1997 and is currently in active service. The name "The Sullivans" is the only American warship name that is a direct reference to individual enlisted sailors lost in a single incident.

The wreck of USS Juneau was located on 17 March 2018 by Paul Allen's research vessel Petrel at a depth of 4,200 metres in the Solomon Sea. She lies broken into three sections on the abyssal plain, her forward and amidships sections approximately 200 metres apart, with a debris field of individual hull plates and fittings extending across 500 metres of the seabed. The pattern is consistent with a single catastrophic magazine explosion at the moment of her sinking.

The 687 dead of USS Juneau are commemorated on the Tablets of the Missing at the Manila American Cemetery and at the USS Juneau Memorial in Juneau, Alaska (the ship's namesake city). The five Sullivan brothers are commemorated separately at the Sullivan Brothers Iowa Veterans Museum in Waterloo. Their single stained-glass window at St Mary's Church in Waterloo, installed in 1944, remains the most-visited war memorial in Iowa.