Seventy-five years after sinking in the Battle of Guadalcanal, the U.S.S. Juneau still affects how the Navy operates.<\/p>\n
When the ship went down in 1942, taking the five Sullivan brothers with it, it changed forever how the Navy places siblings.<\/p>\n
With the USS O\u2019Kane visiting town for the week, Commanding Officer Colby Sherwood reminded a crowd of about 50 of the importance of the capital city\u2019s namesake ship at a commemorative \u201claying of the wreath\u201d for the USS Juneau on Wednesday.<\/p>\n
\u201cTheir entire family, lost. Five sons. There was no more of that family. That changed the way the Navy was going to allow sailors to take positions,\u201d Sherwood said.<\/p>\n
The ceremony took place at Juneau\u2019s memorial site for the ship, a concrete memorial adorned with a plaque and flag a few minutes walk south of the Mount Roberts Tramway.<\/p>\n
The USS Juneau, the first war vessel named after an Alaska city, was christened by the wife of Juneau\u2019s then-mayor, Harry I. Lucas, in 1941 in New Jersey.<\/p>\n
When taking part in the Battle of Guadalcanal, the Juneau was hit by two torpedoes from the Imperial Army of Japan on Nov. 13, 1942. Suffering catastrophic damage, the ship sunk in just 20 minutes, taking the lives of 600 of its 700 men with it.<\/p>\n
The 100 left stranded suffered from dehydration, exhaustion and predation from sharks in the eight days they waited for rescue. Only 10 survived. It is considered one of the largest losses of life in a single event in U.S. Navy history.<\/p>\n
Attending the ceremony was 89-year-old Steve Sztuk. Sztuk, pronounced \u201cstuck\u201d is an \u201cold SOB,\u201d in his words; he\u2019s one of Juneau\u2019s fast-shrinking corps of World War II veterans.<\/p>\n
He doesn\u2019t remember as much as he used to about the era, but small things still stick with him, among them that the U.S.S. Juneau was \u201ca beautiful ship.\u201d<\/p>\n
The last remaining survivor of the U.S.S. Juneau, New Jersey native Frank Holmgren Sr., died in 2009.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Seventy-five years after sinking in the Battle of Guadalcanal, the U.S.S. Juneau still affects how the Navy operates. When the ship went down in 1942, taking the five Sullivan brothers with it, it changed forever how the Navy places siblings. With the USS O\u2019Kane visiting town for the week, Commanding Officer Colby Sherwood reminded a crowd […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":31647,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":4,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-31646","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31646","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31646"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31646\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/31647"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31646"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31646"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31646"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=31646"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}