DUE TO ENEMY ACTION: The True World War II Story of the USS Eagle 56 by Stephen Puleo

Author:Stephen Puleo [Puleo, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HIS027100 HISTORY / Military / World War II
ISBN: 978-1-61187-310-8
Publisher: Untreed Reads Publishing
Published: 2012-04-20T00:00:00+00:00

27

May 9, 1945

With censorship rules relaxed along the East Coast now that Germany had surrendered, and next of kin notified, the news of the Eagle 56 and the Black Point sinkings finally hit the press the day after V-E Day, more than two weeks after the Eagle had exploded and four days after the Black Point went down. Some featured the Eagle story as a stand-alone account; others combined the two sinkings with the sinking of another oil steamer, Atlantic States, in which one man died, and ran headlines that said RECENT ATTACKS BY U-BOATS KILL 62 OFF ATLANTIC COAST.

The Eagle 56 ’s Lucky Thirteen had been interviewed in the dispensary, in the midst of their Court of Inquiry testimony, which they were forbidden to discuss. The Associated Press disseminated the story to several papers on May 9, 1945, and The New York Times ran its own original piece on the same day: 49 LOST OFF MAINE IN NAVY SHIP BLAST read the Times headline to its story, which ran inside the paper, and 49 DIE IN SHIP BLAST 3 MILES OFF MAINE shouted the larger Boston Daily Record headline above the AP story on page two. NAVY SEEKS CAUSE OF BLAST THAT KILLED 49 read another headline to the AP report; many newspapers ran smaller versions of the story. All three of these reports left the cause of the explosion in question.

Several papers carried hospital photos of the Lucky Thirteen or the solo photo of an exhausted and somber Scagnelli, his scalp and forehead covered in bandages. “It was the Navy’s greatest loss of life in New England waters in this war,” The New York Times reported somberly in its lead paragraph. “Publication of the tragedy was permitted tonight by the Navy Department after next of kin had been notified,” the AP dispatch read.

Both the AP and the Times accounts mentioned that some survivors reported seeing a submarine. “The Navy reported that [a] destroyer dropped depth charges, believing contact had been made with a submarine, but later it was thought a piece of the hull might have been encountered,” the Times reported carefully, then adding: “Survivors said the explosion, which they described as a vertical one, was so devastating that everything inside the ship fell apart.” The AP added: “So rapid was the sinking that the men ran from their quarters to the deck and merely walked into the water as the ship already had settled to bring the ice-cold water chest-high. Several performed heroic acts, but many were unable to stand the cold, rough water and slipped beneath the heavy ground swells within a foot of their shipmates. Others didn’t have a chance, for they were badly injured.”

The press interviewed Scagnelli extensively, “newsmen crowding around his bed…his head and right hand swathed in bandages,” and reported in detail on the lone surviving officer’s escape from the forward section of the ship. Scagnelli praised Harold Petersen “for his efforts to aid others in the water,” and he “stressed that all engines and boilers were in good condition and recently had been overhauled.

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