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 ...