"My goodness sakes, that was something. It wasn't too long after that that they enlisted in the Navy," Katherine said.

Katherine and Albert hadn't yet been married two years when Albert and his brothers enlisted, and they now had their son. Albert, with a young family and older brothers enlisting, had the option of not going. Katherine encouraged him to go.

"They really wanted to go, those boys. They wanted to be together. He wouldn't have been happy at all with his brothers gone in the service. You don't think anything is going to happen to them," Katherine said. "That's the sad part of it. Being young you don't know what it means to be in war. You think, 'Oh they're going to be back.' And all of a sudden, they're not back."

Katherine recalled the day a military officer notified the family the brothers were missing.

"They came to the house," she said. That was January 1943. "It wasn't too long after we got the news that they were gone, dead."

A surviving shipmate, Nebraska native Lester Zook, wrote the family of the brothers' demise before the family received official military notification.