For most of us, it's an unfathomable trauma: A son's military unit has come under attack, and in the hours or days that follow parents wait for news, to learn whether he has lived or died. Impossible, then, to imagine such pain and anxiety multiplied—two or more sons in the same peril, their fates unknown.
Precisely this circumstance arose in the aftermath of one of World War II's most familiar episodes. When USS Arizona was attacked in the early hours of Dec. 7, 1941, 38 sets of siblings were on board, brothers serving on the same doomed vessel. For 38 families, the horror of Pearl Harbor and the agony of the wait for news would be doubled, or worse.
This is the framing for “Brothers Down,” a book that Walter R. Borneman says he wrote because “the Pearl Harbor story has never been told through the eyes of the many brothers serving together aboard the Arizona.” His book invites us to imagine from yet another perspective the loss of that tragic morning. “All aboard the Arizona were figurative brothers in arms,” he writes, “but these men were literal brothers in blood.”
Among the siblings serving on the Arizona in early December 1941 were Gordon and Malcolm Shive, a Marine and a Navy man from Laguna Beach, Calif.; naval gunners Jake and John Anderson, twins in a family of 10 from Dilworth, Minn.; and the three Becker brothers from rural Kansas—who were happy for one another's company at sea. “They had always taken care of one another growing up,” Mr. Borneman writes. “For the Becker brothers, it really was a family affair.”
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