{"id":49369,"date":"2019-09-25T19:45:30","date_gmt":"2019-09-25T19:45:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/one.sightlinemg.com\/navytimes\/uncategorized\/2019\/09\/25\/inside-the-hunt-for-eagle-56\/"},"modified":"2026-08-08T08:10:48","modified_gmt":"2026-08-08T08:10:48","slug":"inside-the-hunt-for-eagle-56","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/one.sightlinemg.com\/navytimes\/off-duty\/military-culture\/2019\/09\/25\/inside-the-hunt-for-eagle-56\/","title":{"rendered":"Inside the hunt for Eagle 56"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Like many really good sea stories, naval historian Paul Lawton\u2019s begins with shots of 100 proof whiskey chased down by bottles of Budweiser.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 1998, the Massachusetts man was teaching a course on German U-boat operations when one of his students helped reunite him with a pair of long-lost friends, Bob and Paul Westerlund<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Over drinks, their chitchat turned to the wreck of the U-853<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The brothers blamed that submarine for sinking their father\u2019s warship, the Ford Motor Company-built Eagle PE-56, during the closing days of World War II.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

More than two decades later, Lawton told Navy Times that he was baffled by that conversation because he vividly recalled childhood visits to their home and seeing their dad.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He soon realized, however, that the man from his early memories was their stepfather. Their biological dad went down with 48 other crew members and officers, and his watery grave off the coast of Maine remained undisturbed over the span of decades.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt was a sinking that I was not familiar with,\u201d Lawton said, \u201cand I was familiar with every <\/i>German U-boat operation and sinking.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That\u2019s because in 1998 there wasn\u2019t a incident recorded in the U.S. Navy\u2019s official files of a German boat sinking Eagle 56, a sub-hunter that had been towing targets for other warships.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Its sinking was blamed on an April 23, 1945 boiler explosion that cleaved the hull and spared only 13 survivors, the Navy\u2019s greatest loss of life in New England waters during the war.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI went back to some of my German sources, and realized that one of them mentioned the sinking of this small surface ship, the Eagle 56, and the fact that the U-853 was operating in the area and might have been the culprit,\u201d Lawton said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So the submarine sleuth commenced solving the mystery of Eagle 56\u2032s disappearance, a story the Smithsonian Channel is bringing to television in a three-part series<\/a> about what it calls \u201cthe Holy Grail of missing World War II warships.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

THE NAVY GOT IT WRONG<\/b><\/p>\n\n\n\n

When Lawton dusted off the Navy\u2019s 1945 report about Eagle 56, it was littered with red flags. The biggest was a crucial miscalculation about how ships were built in the early 20th century.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cModern ships with steam turbines don\u2019t just explode,\u201d Lawton told Navy Times.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cA boiler explosion was something that could have happened in the 19th century, but with modern duplex safety valves and so forth, which were built from World War I and on, that type of explosion did not happen.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\t