History rewritten for ship torpedoed off Maine coast Man’s quest disputes Navy on 1945 sinking

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BROCKTON, Mass. – The package arrived on his doorstep in the morning mail. There was no return address, no indication where it had come from or who had sent it.

Inside was the file he had spent nearly two years fighting for, the one that, over and over, the U.S. Navy insisted was missing.

Finally, he held the key to proving the case that had become his obsession.

Finally, he could expose the truth – and rewrite history.

Paul Lawton’s quest began in a dark Brockton bar on a cold March night in 1998. Warmed by Budweisers and shots of Yukon Jack, he listened as two brothers told the tale of a U.S. warship blown to pieces just south of Portland, Maine, and of their father, a 32-year-old seaman who perished in the blast.

Vividly the brothers, Bob and Paul Westerlund, recalled the sadness of the time – the shadow of the Navy chaplain at the door, the tears and disbelief of their widowed mother with four small children to raise alone. And they remembered the Navy explanation: A boiler explosion had split in two the 200-foot submarine chaser, the USS Eagle PE 56.

A terrible accident, the Navy said, all the more tragic because it happened just two weeks before Germany surrendered in World War II.

But Phyllis Westerlund never believed the official version. And so she told her children what survivors had told her – that moments after the explosion, as they were scrambling off the decks and diving into the frigid water, they glimpsed something a few hundred yards away, something dark and sinister.

It rose to the surface for only an instant, but they would never forget the sight – a submarine conning tower painted with a mischievous red horse trotting on a yellow shield. It seemed to dance momentarily on the surface before plunging back into the depths.

Sitting in the bar, Lawton gasped. The prancing horse was the insignia of the U-853, a German U-boat nicknamed the “tightrope walker” for its ability to slip from Allied grasp.

Lawton, a lawyer and military historian, is obsessed with submarines. As a child, he spent hours drawing intricate replicas of U-boats and battleships.

He has taught courses in U-boat history at a local college. He goes scuba diving on military wrecks. He can recite every warship, every U-boat, every commander, every detail of every battle and loss in the Atlantic.

But Lawton had never heard this story before.

Bob and Paul Westerlund are like older brothers to 39-year-old Lawton – he has known them all his life. He knew their father had died on a ship torpedoed by the U-853.

But he always assumed it was the USS Black Point, a civilian coal tanker that had been making its way to Boston when it was attacked off Narragansett Bay on May 5, 1945. U.S warships sank the German U-boat the next day.

Puzzled, Lawton questioned his friends. The records say the U-853 sank only the Black Point, he said.

No, the brothers insisted. The U-853 also sank the USS Eagle – on April 23.

Lawton’s head was reeling. Forty-nine men died in the Eagle disaster. If they had died in enemy action, they were entitled to Purple Hearts. They were entitled to recognition. They were entitled to more than being written off as victims of a freak accident.

Back at his apartment, Lawton pulled out his U-boat “bible,” a 2-inch-thick book by German historian Jurgen Rohwer that documents Axis submarine successes. A footnote, on page 195, contained a reference to the USS Eagle and to its probable sinking by the U-853.

“I just couldn’t believe it,” Lawton said. “Why would the Navy say it was a boiler explosion?”

His father, a retired judge and ex-Army paratrooper who had been awarded a Medal of Honor for his exploits in Germany during World War II, had his own theory.

“It was just too embarrassing,” Jim Lawton said. “Such a huge loss of life, so close to shore.”

Someone has to get to the bottom of this, he told his son.

So Paul Lawton started digging through the archives, calling military historians, writing letter after letter to the Navy. He requested the report from the court of inquiry that investigated the sinking, witness statements, war diaries, deck logs.

Sorry, the replies came back; the files were missing, presumed lost.

Lawton’s appeals, under the Freedom of Information Act, were denied on the same grounds. Frustrated, Lawton tried a different approach. He requested the records of other ships operating in the area, including the USS Selfridge, a destroyer that had rescued 13 men from the sinking Eagle.

Buried in the military jargon of the Selfridge’s deck logs he found references to sonar detections, and to a hunter-killer task force of destroyers and bombers assembled immediately after the sinking.

The Navy wasn’t putting together a hunter-killer force because of a boiler explosion, Lawton thought.

He kept digging.

Mountains of documents piled up in his apartment. But six months into his research, Lawton told the Westerlunds he was getting nowhere.

Furious at the way their friend was being treated, the brothers took matters into their own hands. They placed a small notice in The Boston Globe, saying they were looking for survivors of the USS Eagle.

In Peabody, Mass., John Breeze’s daughter spotted it and phoned her father in Seattle.

Breeze, a former naval engineer, hadn’t talked about his boat’s sinking in many years, hadn’t really given it much thought. He was just grateful to survive the war and get on with his life.

But mention of the Eagle brought the memories flooding back. Over the phone Breeze told the Westerlunds, and then Lawton, his account.

It was shortly after noon. The 22-year-old seaman was working on a crossword puzzle with his best friend, Oscar Davis, when a thunderous explosion lifted the boat out of the water, hurling them into the bulkheads and sending them scrambling up the pitching decks.

Breeze remembered the terror, the bloodied bodies floating among the debris in the oil-stained water.

And he remembered Davis stopping him for just a moment, before they leaped overboard. “Look, Breezy,” Davis shouted. “A sub.”

“I saw a dark silhouette in the distance,” Breeze said. “And then it was gone.”

Breeze didn’t remember much more, just the bitter cold as he clung to a piece of wood praying to be rescued, the warm glow when he was finally wrapped in blankets.

What about the Court of Inquiry? Lawton asked. How was it conducted? What were you asked?

Breeze described the gloom of the naval dispensary in Portland where survivors were taken. There was no formal court setting. Those like himself, who were not badly injured, were interviewed individually.

Others were questioned in their hospital beds. A young woman, a WAVE, took notes.

“I never really cared about the outcome,” Breeze said. “The war was nearly over. I just wanted to move on.”

He was silent for a long time on the phone when Lawton told him the official Navy explanation.

“Boiler explosion!” Breeze exclaimed. “We all knew it was a sub. How could the Navy deny it?”

In Reading, Mass., Alice Hultgren said the same thing.

Hultgren had also spotted the notice in the Globe. Like Breeze, just the mention of the USS Eagle transported her back to April 1945 when she was a 23-year-old WAVE taking notes at a Portland naval dispensary.

The survivors had one explanation, Hultgren said. “The fellows all said there had been a sub.”

Even at the time, Hultgren was uneasy with the naval court’s conclusion, but she assumed officials must have other information. “I certainly never thought it might not be true.”

Neither Hultgren nor Breeze knew of other living survivors. But they agreed to meet with Lawton a few weeks later in Boston to give sworn depositions about the Eagle.

Their testimony filled 18 pages – eyewitness accounts Lawton thought couldn’t be ignored. But his letters to the Navy continued to be dismissed.

“The cause of the sinking has been determined to be the result of a boiler explosion,” was the reply he received, again and again.

“I was beginning to feel that even if we had actual photographs of the sub sinking the ship, it wouldn’t make a difference,” Lawton said.

Then one morning in October 1999 the package arrived, a thick manila envelope stuffed with 76 pages and dated June 1, 1945. The Court of Inquiry report, the formal record that the Navy insisted was missing.

Lawton would never know for sure who sent it. Trembling, he opened the first page. For hours he sat in his office, absorbing every sentence.

Over and over, survivors stated they had seen a sub.

As telling as the eyewitness accounts was the convoluted conclusion. Although the report states that the blast “might have been an enemy mine or an enemy torpedo,” it concludes it “was the result of a boiler explosion, the cause of which could not be determined.”

To Lawton, it was clear. Top naval officials knew the Eagle had been sunk by a German submarine. They just couldn’t bring themselves to admit it publicly.

Elated, Lawton showed the document to his father and to the Westerlunds. Surely the Navy could ignore him no longer.

But nothing changed. Months passed. A year. Lawton continued writing to everyone he could think of – the Navy, the secretary of defense, the White House. He continued to be told that nothing could be done.

Lawton grew increasingly disheartened. His father became incensed.

Jim Lawton is a big, ruddy-faced man of 77 with a no-nonsense manner, proud of his family’s legacy and name. After a lifetime on the bench and in politics – Lawton served 10 years as a Democratic state representative and later became state registrar of motor vehicles – he knows how to use his connections.

And so Lawton called his old friend, Rep. Joseph Moakley. He buttonholed White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card, son of another old friend.

Just read the research, he asked them. And see what you think.

The response was immediate.

In late fall 2000, Moakley petitioned the Navy to reopen the investigation into the USS Eagle. Card weighed in with a letter to the Navy. For the first time, top officials took notice. The Navy didn’t agree to Moakley’s request, but it did forward Lawton’s research to the Naval Historical Center – a move Lawton initially viewed as a brush-off.

It turned out to be a lifesaver.

At the historical center, Lawton’s research landed on the desk of Bernard Cavalcante, a genial, bespectacled archivist with a zeal for digging through old documents.

For 10 years after the war, Cavalcante had worked with Rohwer, the German historian who was one of Lawton’s heroes. Using classified documents from both countries – including maps, codes and military war diaries – they had pieced together a list of all military activity on the Eastern Seaboard.

The USS Eagle was on that list, along with its sinking by the U-853.

But Cavalcante never had any reason to do further research on the Eagle. So he had no idea that the official record stated it had been sunk by a boiler explosion, or that the victims had been denied Purple Hearts.

Cavalcante read Lawton’s work in shock. He was appalled by the Navy’s response. Whatever the justification in wartime, Cavalcante thought, it was time to set the record straight.

He picked up the phone and called Lawton.

It took a few moments for Lawton to grasp what he was hearing. Finally someone in the Navy who not only believed him, but who was equally passionate about setting the record straight.

“Cal made me believe that we could rewrite history,” Lawton said.

For the next few months, that is what they tried to do. Cavalcante dug up personal notes from his research with Rohwer as well as declassified war records that Lawton hadn’t had access to – records that documented the U-853 operating off the coast of Maine at the time the Eagle went down.

Lawton hurled himself back into his quest. He tracked two more Eagle survivors: Harold Petersen of Rochester, N.Y., and John Scagnelli of Morris Plains, N.J. Like Breeze, both remembered being torpedoed by a sub.

In May 2001, Cavalcante sent a letter to Navy Secretary Gordon England. He enclosed a synopsis of Lawton’s research, witness statements and documents backing up the case. And he enclosed a rare and historic recommendation – that the record be changed to state that the USS Eagle was sunk as a result of enemy action.

The ceremony was simple and solemn, tinged with sadness and with triumph. Aboard a naval museum ship in Quincy on a steamy day last June, the families of the men of the USS Eagle, gathered for a final tribute, and a final reckoning.

The top Navy brass was there, sitting next to widows and sisters and brothers of the men who had died. The Westerlund brothers were there, along with their mother, Phyllis, 87, frail and nervous and full of memories, especially when she met the three survivors – the last men to have seen her Ivar alive.

One by one, the names of the dead were read aloud. One by one, family members stepped forward and accepted Purple Hearts.

And when the ceremony was over and the speeches were done, three old men wearing USS Eagle caps approached Lawton.

Tears in their eyes, they handed him a plaque, cherrywood with a gold trim. It was engraved with a picture of a warship exploding, followed by a description of the “forgotten disaster” and of one man’s quest to set the record straight.

It ended with the words, “We thank you from the bottom of our hearts.”