- The Five Sullivan Brothers. Photo courtesy the National Archives and Records Administration.
On Memorial Day, it seems only fitting to remember the family most famous for its personal loss during a war. This family happens to be from my hometown.
As a native of Waterloo, Iowa, I grew up hearing the name of the ?Five Sullivan Brothers? just because we had a convention center named in their honor. It wasn?t until years later I realized why. Perhaps you already know the story?these five brothers enlisted in the Navy after the attack on Pearl Harbor with just one condition. They wanted to be able to serve together.
They were granted their request, and served together until they all died together, as well, when the U.S.S. Juneau was torpedoed by the Japanese and sunk in November 1942. Suddenly the Sullivan family of Waterloo, Iowa, was given the unwelcome distinction of bearing the largest single loss for a military family in history, a distinction they retain to this day.
In 2008, Waterloo opened the Sullivan Brothers Iowa Veterans Museum in their honor, just one portion of which lets visitors walk through a replica of the Sullivan home and flip through a scrapbook of their family photos and newspaper articles. It?s an intimate family atmosphere with a crackling radio program in the background. So even though my co-author, Karen Whiting, was writing the World War 2 stories for our book, she let me write this one contribution from my own hometown: Carrying On. (Read the excerpt here and find it on August 3 in the book.)
If you?re interested in the full story of the Sullivans, check out the book We Band of Brothers: The Sullivans and World War 2, or the movie, The Fighting Sullivans, made in 1944.
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