What Happened to the Mother Who Lost All Five Sons?

[00:00:00]In January 1943, a mother in Waterloo, Iowa, sat down at her kitchen table and wrote a letter to the United States Navy. A rumor was moving through her town, whispered at the shops, repeated outside church that her sons were dead.

[00:00:17]Not one of them, all of them. Five brothers, one ship, one terrible night off Guadal Canal. She wrote to Washington asking with impossible dignity whether it was true. The answer came back signed by the president of the United States himself.

[00:00:34]This is the story of a letter Sullivan, the five boys she gave the Navy and the letter Franklin Roosevelt could not let anyone else write. No American family before or since has lost what the Sullivanss lost in a single stroke of the war. George, Frank, Joe, Matt, and Al, five brothers raised in one small framehouse in Waterl, Iowa. All five sailors, all five aboard the light cruiser USS Juno when she went down. The Navy's own rules discouraged brothers serving together. The Sullivanss had demanded it made it their one condition for enlisting, and the Navy needing men in the desperate winter after Pearl Harbor had agreed. The condition that kept them together in life kept them together at the end. That is the terrible symmetry this story lives inside. To understand what those five names meant and what their mother did with the weight of them, you have to go back to the beginning to a railroad man's house in Iowa to a friend of the family killed at Pearl Harbor and to five young men walking into a recruiting office together with one non-negotiable demand. We stick together, the Navy said. Yes. The story of what followed, the ship, the the knight, the raft, the letter, and the mother who turned unbearable grief into a weapon of war is one the country half remembers. It deserves to be remembered whole. Thomas Sullivan worked the Illinois Central Railroad, and he and a lettera raised six children through the depression in a plain house on Adam Street in Waterloo.

[00:02:15]The five boys, George, Frank, Joe, Matt, and Al, the youngest, ran together, worked together, rode motorcycles together, and fought anyone who troubled any one of them. Their sister Genevieve grew up in the middle of the pack. When a Waterloo friend, Bill Ball, was killed aboard the Arizona at Pearl Harbor, the brothers made their decision at the kitchen table. They would enlist together to settle the account for Bill.

[00:02:44]On January 3rd, 1942, all five walked into the Navy office as one. The Navy's policy frowned on siblings crewing the same ship. For exactly the reason this story exists, the brothers refused to be split. We stick together, George wrote in their enlistment request, the motto they had lived by since boyhood. The recruiters, staring down a two ocean war, granted the waiver. That spring, the five Sullivanss reported aboard a brand new light cruiser, the USS Juno, bound for the South Pacific, five sets of the same grin in one crew of nearly 700. Their mother christened their going with pride and a mother's arithmetic of dread, five sons, one hull, one torpedo away from the unthinkable. The Juno sailed into the most vicious naval campaign of the war, the fight for Guadal Canal, where the US and Japanese navies mowled each other night after night in the black waters the sailors called Iron Bottom Sound. In the early hours of November 13th, 1942, in a chaotic close-range brawl, the Juno took a torpedo and staggered away at dawn, wounded but alive. Hours later, a Japanese submarine found her. The second torpedo struck the magazines, and the Juno simply ceased to exist, vanishing in a single catastrophic blast. Of nearly 700 men aboard, perhaps a hundred went into the water alive. What happened in that water and what happened afterward in a kitchen in Iowa are the two halves of this story, and the second is harder than the first because the Navy, fearing to reveal fleet losses to the enemy, said nothing for weeks. No telegram came to Adam's street. Instead, came the rumors, a neighbor's cousin, a sailor's letter, a whisper that the Juno was gone, and the Sullivan boys with her. Alita Sullivan endured the crulest month a mother can be handed hope and dread twisting daily until she did the only thing left. She wrote to Washington and asked for the truth. The truth was past bearing. Frank, Joe, and Matt had died in the explosion. Al drowned the following day. And George, the oldest, the one who had written, "We stick together," survived the sinking and reached a raft, where for four or five days he searched the water and called his brother's names, weakened by wounds and grief and the sea. He was gone before rescue finally came for the handful who lived, 10 men out of nearly 700.

[00:05:29]The survivors carried the memory of George's searching for the rest of their lives. The Navy now had to carry the news to Waterloo. And history records exactly how that morning went. On the morning of January 12th, 1943, three men in Navy uniforms walked up the steps of the house on Adam Street.

[00:05:51]Thomas Sullivan, dressing for his railroad shift, met them at the door. I have some news for you about your boys, the officer said. Which one? Tom asked.

[00:06:01]And the officer gave the answer no American father has heard before or since. I'm sorry, all five. A letter was called down. Genevieve stood in the doorway. And then Thomas Sullivan, having heard it, put on his coat, walked to the yard, and took his freight train out on schedule because the war's trains had to run. and grief that morning had nowhere else to go. Days later, the answer to Alleta's letter arrived, and it did not come from a bureau. The president of the United States has learned of the loss of your five sons.

[00:06:36]It began, and it was signed, Franklin D.

[00:06:39]Roosevelt, the commanderin-chief, wrote to her, as one parent to another, of a sorrow so crushing the whole nation shared it, of the fact that her boys had fought side by side as they had lived.

[00:06:53]The first lady wrote as well, "In an ocean of 200,000 wartime condolences processed by machines and clerks, the Sullivanss arrived over the personal signature of the most powerful man on earth. Because some losses outrank the machinery, and here is where Alleta Sullivan becomes more than the war's most grieving mother, she refused to disappear into the grief. Within weeks, she and Tom were on the road for the Navy, touring shipyards and war plants, more than 200 of them before the war ended, standing before hundreds of thousands of workers, and saying in her plain Iowa voice that her boys had given everything, excuse, and the least the rest of us could do was build faster, work harder, and finish it. Production lines wept, and then broke records. Five gold stars hung in her window on Adam Street. She carried them into every factory in America. In April 1943, the Navy commissioned a new destroyer and broke its own tradition to name her for five men at once, USS the Sullivanss.

[00:08:03]Aetta swung the champagne against the bow herself, launching the ship that carried her son's name back toward the enemy, and the crews that manned her painted five stars on her stack and made we stick together the ship's creed.

[00:08:17]Genevieve, the sister, enlisted in the Navy's waves that summer, the sixth Sullivan to wear the uniform. The family the war had emptied kept filling the ranks. It is even 80 years on almost impossible to comprehend where they found it. The loss changed the rules of the American military forever. The services moved to separate siblings and after the war, Congress wrote it into the sole survivor policies, the protections that decades later would frame the story of the Niand brothers and inspire saving. Private Ryan. The every family since that has been spared a second telegram owes something to the five grins from Waterloo. The Fighting Sullivans became a wartime film while the war still raged and the name became shorthand for the outer limit of what a family can be asked to give. The country made sure no one would ever be asked again. The war ended. The crowds went home and the Sullivanss returned to the quiet of Adam Street to a house with five empty rooms and a service flag no one could bear to take down. Thomas worked the railroad until his health gave out and died in 1965, a father who had taken his train out on time the morning the Navy came and carried that morning inside him for 22 years. Alleta lived on to 1972.

[00:09:45]Three decades a gold star mother answering letters from strangers, attending launchings and reunions.

[00:09:52]Keeper of a grief the whole nation had adopted but only she had to live in.

[00:09:57]Neither parent ever had a grave to visit. The sea kept the boys, but the name refused to sink. When the first USS, the Sullivanss, retired, the Navy built another, a modern destroyer, commissioned in 1997, sponsored by Al's granddaughter, Kelly, and she sails today with the five stars painted proudly and the old motto on her crest, we stick together. In Waterlue, the convention center and the Veterans Museum carry the brother's name, and the town has never let a generation grow up without the story. two warships, a museum, a policy, and a film, all flowing from one Iowa kitchen table where five young men decided in January of 1942 that nobody fights alone. The question their story still asks has no easy answer. Should the Navy ever have let them serve together? The rule existed precisely to prevent what happened, and the waiver turned one torpedo into a family's extinction. But the brothers were adults who knew the stakes and demanded the right to face them side by side. And there is a case that the country had no business overruling that kind of love. Split them across five ships and perhaps five men come home. Or perhaps five telegrams arrive over 3 years instead of one.

[00:11:22]Protection or paternalism? The Navy chose one answer in 1942 and the opposite ever after. Where the right line sits, the Sullivans still make us decide. George Thomas Sullivan, 27.

[00:11:37]Francis Henry Sullivan, 26. Joseph Eugene Sullivan, 24. Madison Abel Sullivan, 23. Albert Leo Sullivan, 20, a husband and a father, lost with USS Juno off Guadal Canal, November 13th, 1942, together as they insisted. and Alita Sullivan of Waterloo, Iowa, who answered the worst loss in American family history with 200 factory floors and a champagne bottle against a destroyer's bow, who died in 1972 with five gold stars still in her keeping. Their story is told at the Sullivan Brothers, Iowa Veterans Museum in the town that raised all six of them. Franklin Roosevelt commanded the largest war machine ever assembled. And of all the letters that machine generated, the one history keeps returning to is the one he signed himself to a railroad man's wife in Iowa. Because the war, at its truest scale, was never fleets and fronts. It was five grins in one crew, a father taking his train out on time, a mother reading a president's handwriting at her kitchen table, and a small word the brothers turned into a creed together.

[00:12:54]The Navy has kept a ship named the Sullivans on the water for 80 years and means to keep one there forever. Some debts are not payable. They are only rememberable. If your family hung a blue star in the window in those years or a gold one, if your father, your grandfather, your uncle, or your aunt served anywhere in that war, leave their name and what they did in the comments below. Don't just leave. Leave the name.

[00:13:23]Tell us one thing about them. One thing they did, one thing they said, one thing you remember. The men and women who were there deserve more than a name in a database. They deserve to be remembered as people. Subscribe if you want the next story.