On a freezing January morning in 1943, three uniformed men walked onto a porch in Waterloo, Iowa, and told a railroad conductor that they had news about all five of his sons. This episode tells the story of the Sullivan brothers, George, Frank, Joe, Matt and Al, whose refusal to be separated led to one of the most catastrophic single-family losses in American military history. It begins with the family’s Irish immigrant roots, the parish that anchored them, and the personal motive for enlisting: their sister’s boyfriend Bill Ball had been killed aboard the USS Arizona at Pearl Harbor.

The episode explains why the Navy set aside its own sibling-separation policy in early 1942 to put all five brothers on the light cruiser USS Juneau, a ship carrying at least 30 sets of brothers. It reconstructs the naval battle of Guadalcanal in November 1942, the torpedo that broke the Juneau’s keel, and the stray torpedo from submarine I-26, aimed at the USS San Francisco, that detonated the ship’s magazines and blew it in half in under a minute. It then follows the chain of command and communication failures that left roughly 100 survivors adrift for eight days, the fate of each brother, the information blackout that tormented their mother, and the policy changes that followed.

• Why Captain Gilbert Hoover chose not to stop for survivors, and how a B-17’s radio silence and a lost report meant no rescue was mounted for days
• The fates of the brothers: three killed instantly, Al drowned on the second day, and George lost to delirium from salt water dehydration after days on a raft
• Aletta Sullivan’s desperate letter to the Bureau of Naval Personnel and the reply from Franklin Roosevelt that arrived one day after the knock on the door
• How the parents toured defense plants and shipyards promoting war bonds as the Fighting Sullivan Brothers became a national rallying cry
• The sole survivor policy, two destroyers named The Sullivans, the first Navy ship named for more than one person, and the motto We stick together