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“An eagle to scour the
seas”
A noble World War II record
Bombing practice in Portland,
Maine
The sinking of the Eagle
56
“An eagle to scour the
seas”
Approximately 200 feet long, with a 33-foot beam, the
Eagle PE-56 was hardly a state-of-the-art ship during
the Second World War. In fact, she was a vestige of World
War I, when, in June of 1917, President Woodrow Wilson summoned
Henry Ford to Washington and asked the mass production expert
whether he could convert his auto production lines to shipbuilding.
Wilson urged Ford to build antisubmarine vessels to combat
the German U-boat menace in World War I. “What we want
is one type of ship in large numbers,” Wilson had said.
No facilities were available at the Navy yard to build the
new craft; thus, Wilson and then Secretary of the Navy Josephus
Daniels asked Ford if he would undertake the task in his Detroit
factories.
Ford agreed, and in January of 1918, the United States government
issued a contract for Ford Motor Company to build 100 PE (Patrol
Escort) class boats by December 1 of the same year. It was
actually a misnomer to call the
USS PE 56 the USS Eagle 56, though it was
done often; the “Eagle” moniker for this entire
PE class of vessel came from a December, 1917, Washington
Post editorial calling for “an eagle to scour the
seas and pounce upon every submarine that dares to leave German
or Belgian shores.” Ford set up production at his 1,700-foot-long
enclosed assembly line on the Rouge River in Dearborn on the
outskirts of Detroit.
The first of the cookie-cutter Eagle boats was launched on
July 11, 1918, and six more boats were completed on schedule.
But succeeding ships did not follow as rapidly. Ford’s
initial estimates that he could fulfill the Navy’s expectations
proved overly optimistic, due mainly to the inexperience of
his labor force and supervisory personnel in shipbuilding.
When World War I ended and the armistice was signed in November
of 1918, only 60 Eagle boats were completed and the contract
was suspended. Of these, seven were commissioned in 1918,
and the remaining 53 were commissioned in 1919.
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A noble World War II record
The Eagle 56 (the Eagle class boats were numbered
1-60) was commissioned on October 22, 1919, and launched on
the Detroit River on November 13. Like many of the Eagle boats,
she reached the North Atlantic by way of the Great Lakes’
canals and the St. Lawrence River. On the way, according to
Seaweed’s Ship Histories, she was held up by
ice in Quebec until May 8, 1920, and finally reached the Portsmouth,
New Hampshire, Navy Yard one week later. She was assigned
to the District of Columbia Naval Reserve Force in November
of 1921, and in 1926, was transferred to Baltimore, Maryland,
where she continued duty as a Naval Reserve training ship.
The PE-56 was one of only eight of the original 60 Eagle Boats
to see service with the U.S. Navy during World War II.
The Eagle 56 had a noble World War II record. Early
in the war, her crew had rescued survivors from the USS Jacob
Jones II after the destroyer had been sunk by torpedoes
from a German U-boat, the U-578, off the Delaware
coast. The date was February 28, 1942, less than three months
after Pearl Harbor; the Jacob Jones was the first
U.S. warship sunk by a German U-boat within American coastal
waters in World War II. Of the nearly 200 crew members aboard
the Jacob Jones, only about two dozen escaped the
doomed ship in life rafts, and several of those men were killed
when their ship’s depth charges exploded as she sank.
The other surviving crew members were spotted by an Army
observation plane in the early morning hours of February 28,
1942. The pilot reported their position to the Eagle 56,
which was then stationed at Cape May, New Jersey, as part
of Inshore Patrol. Her crew fought rising seas — and
the knowledge that a U-boat was in the area — to reach
the stranded Jones crewmen, and two hours after the plane
had spotted the life rafts, the Eagle 56 radioed
back to Cape May: “Am picking up survivors from the
USS Jacob Jones – details later.” The
details were few; the Eagle 56 had rescued 12 survivors
and one of them died on the way back to shore. For the next
two days, planes and ships searched without success for other
Jacob Jones survivors.
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Bombing practice
in Portland, Maine
The PE-56 did other important work. In May of 1942,
she reported to Key West, Florida as a sound training school-ship
conducting exercises in anti-submarine warfare tactics. In
1943, she had participated in the development of the Navy’s
top-secret “homing mine,” or anti-submarine torpedo
by acting as an acoustic target during testing trials.
Portland, Maine became the Eagle’s home base
in late June of 1944, and the “old girl” or the
“tub” (as the crew affectionately referred to
the 25-year-old vessel), was relegated to towing a green cylindrical
target float, which was mounted on a sled at the end of a
500-yard cable, off the coast of Cape Elizabeth. The green
float, nicknamed “the pickle” by the crew, was
used for bombing practice by Navy “Avenger” torpedo
bomber aircraft from the Navy Air Station in Brunswick, Maine.
The Navy and Marine flyboys needed the practice before they
shipped out to battle the Japanese in the Pacific.
This was important work, but it was not considered tough
or hazardous duty. In fact, many of the Eagle’s
crew members had seen action in the Pacific and off the coast
of North Africa, and had been transferred to the Eagle
56, which was considered much less dangerous, and a “plum”
location to finish the war. The ship was armed with depth
charges, but by 1945, the PE 56 had her Y-gun removed
to accommodate target-towing gear and her aft four-inch deck-gun
had been replaced by a single .50 caliber machine gun. In
short, her days of taking part in any real combat were over.
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The sinking of
the Eagle 56
On April 23, 1945, shortly after noontime, while on a routine
target-practice session, the Eagle 56 exploded just
a few miles off the coast of Portland. Forty-nine of her 62
crew members perished; the survivors became known as the “Lucky
Thirteen.” The official Court of Inquiry decision ruled
that a boiler explosion had doomed the ship.
It wasn’t until 57 years later that the U.S. Navy reversed
the decision and conceded that the U-853 had torpedoed
the Eagle 56 and sent her to the bottom.
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