Jim Downey
speaker
621 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 13 Jul
Jim Downey’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And in the moments of stillness, shellfire from the battleship Kirashima and two other Japanese vessels finds her bridge.
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Dan Callahan and his staff are killed.
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Around 2 a.m., victorious Vice Admiral Abe Hiroyaki orders his ships north, away from Guadalcanal Island and the Americans' precious airfield, to lick his fleet's wounds and heavy losses.
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He does so utterly unaware that the Americans are all but defenseless, that Henderson Field is, in fact, ripe for the taking.
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It's a lucky break for Uncle Sam.
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But there was nothing lucky about the loss of two light cruisers, four destroyers, and the death of two talented rear admirals.
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So many ships find their way to the bottom of Savo Sound that the Americans rename it Iron Bottom Sound.
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When the sun rises, men are still treading water.
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Small boats go out for survivors, but many Japanese sailors choose to drown rather than be captured.
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Damaged ships quickly depart for repairs.
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One of those ships, the Juno, limps along at just 13 knots, taking on gallons of water along the way.
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Just south of Guadalcanal, a Japanese submarine's torpedo detonates her magazines, triggering a catastrophic explosion, one so powerful that men aboard other ships are knocked off their feet.
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The Juno disappears into a giant yellow cloud across the Pacific sky.
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Since nothing seems to be left of the ship, it's assumed no one could have possibly survived.
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The assumption is mostly correct, and among the dead are five brothers, George, Francis, Joseph, Madison, and Albert Sullivan of Waterloo, Iowa.
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The Sullivan brothers enlisted together after Pearl Harbor and requested to serve on the same ship.
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It was a request that made sense right up to this moment.
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Their deaths will eventually prompt the Navy's sole survivor policy, ensuring no family again loses all its sons in a single engagement, even if, for the Sullivan's of Waterloo, the policy comes too late.
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But while the rest of the fleet is forced to move on, bound for necessary repairs, more than a hundred men resurface, stranded and drifting through the water, hanging onto a string of rafts.
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Slowly, over the coming days and nights, most of these men succumb to dehydration, drowning, or sharks.
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Showing 461–480 of 621 · page 24 of 32
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