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A lost sea tale from World War II LUNENBURG — On the 65th anniversary of Pearl Harbor, the Lunenburg Historical Society invited Stephen Puleo, author of “Due to Enemy Action: The True World War II Story of the USS Eagle,” to share his thoughts. “Sixty-five years later, the incredible reach of that war still goes on,” said Mr. Puleo. “In September of this year, the first rabbi was ordained in Germany since the Holocaust. It’s the war that never ends.” Mr. Puleo took his father, an 82-year-old WWII veteran, to the World War II memorial dedication in Washington, D.C. in 2004. “There were a thousand veterans from all over the country, but my father couldn’t tear himself away from the memorial. We closed the park for two nights. By the third day, he was having long conversations with those vets,” said Mr. Puleo.
Mothers who were in the WACs, the defense industry which was an offshoot of the war, the nation’s interstate highway system which was built to transport men and equipment quickly to either coast, women working outside of the home in defense factories…all of these things changed the country. Mr. Puleo’s book is the about the story of a patrol escort sub-chaser, the USS Eagle 56. The 200-foot-long ship was a built during World War I in a converted Ford automobile factory in Michigan in 1918. “The tub,” a moniker given to her by her 62-member crew served as a training ship, helped in the development of the Navy’s top-secret homing mine, or anti-submarine torpedo, by acting as an acoustic target, and was used a bombing target for the training of Navy and Marine pilots during WWII. The ship and its crew rescued survivors from the USS Jacob Jones II after the destroyer had been sunk by German sub torpedoes in 1942. By the end of the war, the ship had been assigned to Portland, Maine. The ship was armed with depth charges, but by 1945, had only a single .50 caliber machine gun on her deck and was assigned to routine maneuvers. In April 1945, two weeks before the war ended in Europe, the Eagle 56, at a dead stop, exploded just off the coast of Maine. Of the 62 crew members, 13 survived, and later were known as the “Lucky 13”. Much to the shock of these survivors, many of whom worked in the engine room and were responsible for the upkeep of the boilers, a naval court of inquiry found that it was a boiler explosion, not an external explosion, that caused the sinking of the ship. Several of the survivors testified during the inquiry that the explosion was an exterior one and of seeing a U-boat surface after the explosion, to no avail. After a Brockton lawyer delved into the case for relatives of the crew, the Secretary of the Navy overturned the court of inquiry’s decision, a first in naval history. All of the crew members, living and deceased, were awarded Purple Heart medals and exonerated in a ceremony held in 2002, 57 years after the fact. The wreckage of the Eagle 56 has never been found despite four excursions with modern technology and divers. Mr. Puleo’s book delves into the lives and memories of the widows of the crew members, as well as the history of the Eagle 56. “The love and strength they had touched me. They were tremendously relieved when the truth came out,” said Mr. Puleo. The South Weymouth author has also written a book of the Boston Molasses Flood of 1919 and is now working on a third, a history of the Boston Italians.
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