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By Root 1805 0

officer at Great Lakes Naval Training Station. He and his enlisted helpers sorted wheat from chaff, assigning recruits to advanced training based on their tested aptitudes. Giving six lectures a week to thousands of boots, he explained what water tenders did, and gunner’s mates, and yeomen. The tests would determine whether a kid saw colors well enough to be a signalman, or discerned tones sharply enough to be a radioman. Hagen and his staff collated the results and reviewed each applicant’s preferences. Those with the highest scores were routed to specialty training that filled the Navy’s most acute needs. Now and then a mandate would come down from on high. Once Hagen was told to find men to be pharmacist’s mates. Then the call came to fill out some newly forming construction battalions. Kids who had come of age on farms driving trucks found themselves in demand and quickly wore the chevrons of senior petty officers.

Hagen’s commanding officer was out of the office on the day that five tall youngsters were ushered in before him. “I thought I was in a forest,” Hagen said. “These big oak trees, they were all over six feet, probably.” They told him they had all been promised duty in the same ship. Their names rang a bell with Hagen, because the paper in his hometown of San Francisco had carried news of their enlistment. The five boys were from Waterloo, Iowa, the sons of Alleta and Tom Sullivan. George and Frank were four-year veterans already. Discharged before Pearl Harbor, they reenlisted after the attack and lobbied to serve together with their three younger brothers, along with two pals from their hometown motorcycle club. Ahead of their arrival at Great Lakes in January, George wrote the Navy Department, “As a bunch, there is no-body that can beat us.… We would all do our best to be as good as any other sailors in the Navy.… We will make a team together that can’t be beat.”

Five brothers serving on the same ship seemed like an awful idea to Hagen. With all the finesse of a twenty-two-year-old who was quite sure of his judgment, he sent the Sullivans away, saying he couldn’t help them. “I didn’t think much of it,” Hagen said, “but a couple of days later my boss came up with smoke coming out of both ears.” The commander told Hagen that the Navy’s well-publicized promise would be honored. All branches of the service were hungry for recruits. The Sullivan boys held all the cards.

“Well, this doesn’t make very good sense to me,” Hagen said. The commander turned on his uppity ensign and said, “Hagen, do what you are told to do in the Navy. You are twenty-two years old and you don’t have to think.”

The Sullivans were mediocre students, standing apart in Iowa’s Protestant cornrows largely by virtue of their Catholicism. But with their wicked talent for pranks and an untroubled outlook that seemed out of step with the Depression that had limited their prospects, they were more at home at the pool hall than in catechism. At home they were toughs, sons of a hard-pressed Irish railroad worker. They kept the east side of Waterloo “straight and clean,” said one resident. “Police didn’t go in our area much, but the boys took care of everything.” Their impulse to enforce justice had been triggered anew by the attack on Hawaii. The Japanese had killed one of their own there: a kid named Bill Ball from Fredericksburg, just forty miles up U.S. 63. Every family had its Bill Ball, a personal loss inflicted by an alien enemy an ocean away. The Sullivans resolved to deal with the Japanese like they had their rival thugs on Adams Street. “I guess our minds are made up, aren’t they fellows?” the oldest brother, George, said. “And when we go in, we want to go in together. If the worst comes to worst, why we’ll all have gone down together.”

At Pier Two in the New York Navy Yard, they found their new home, the USS Juneau. She was a sleek light cruiser of the new Atlanta class, lightly armored but fitted with a formidable array of antiaircraft guns. The first four Atlantas would all fight in the Solomons. At the commissioning, the Sullivans