Five Sullivan Brothers

Saving Private Ryan, the Academy Award-winning (including Best Director - Steven Spielberg) 1998 film, can be divided into two parts.  Part one deals with the D Day (June 6, 1944) landing at Normandy portrayed in realistic graphic detail.  The remainder of the film is about a team of American soldiers led by Captain John Miller (Tom Hanks - nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor, but lost to Roberto Benigni in Life is Beautiful) who are ordered to locate (elsewhere in France and bring back safely) another American soldier, Private First Class James Francis Ryan (Matt Damon) from Iowa. 

Private Ryan is considered special because his three brothers had all recently been killed in action.  Saving Private Ryan is fiction.  However, on November 13, 1942,  five Sullivan brothers (George, Frank, Joe, Matt and Al) from Waterloo, Iowa were all killed in action when their ship, the USS Juneau, was sunk.  The five Sullivan brothers had all enlisted in the U.S. Navy on January 3, 1942 with the stipulation that they all serve together.  

The USS Juneau, a United States Navy light cruiser, was sunk by a torpedo from a Japanese submarine at the Battle of Guadalcanal.  Six hundred eighty-seven sailors, including the five Sullivan brothers, perished.  

When letters from her sons stopped arriving, their mother reached out to the Office of Naval Personnel in January of 1943.  A few days later, three U.S. Navy uniformed representatives arrived at the Sullivan home to give them the horrible news.  

"As a direct result of the Sullivans's deaths, the U.S. War Department adopted the Sole Survivor Policy" in 1948.  An example of this policy is as follows.

In 2009, Jeremy Wise, a former Navy Seal and then a military contractor, was killed in Afghanistan.  In 2011, his brother, Ben Wise, an Army Special Forces Combat Medic, was also killed in Afghanistan.  As a result, the third brother, Beau Wise, a marine deployed in Afghanistan in 2011, was "immediately relieved of combat duties and returned to the United States."   

The 1944 film, The Fighting Sullivans, starring Thomas Mitchell (as the father), was based upon the lives of the five Sullivan brothers and their family.  It was nominated for one Academy Award (Best Story), but lost to Going My Way.