Due to Enemy Action: The True World War II Story of the USS Eagle 56

Description

Due to Enemy Action tells for the first time a World War II story that spans generations and two centuries, one that begins with the dramatic Battle of the Atlantic in the 1940s and doesn’t conclude until the Purple Heart ceremony aboard the USS Salem in 2002. Based on previously classified government documents, military records, and letters between crew members and their families, Due to Enemy Action is a saga of the courageous survival of ordinary sailors after their ship was torpedoed, and the memories that haunted them after the U.S. Navy buried the truth at war’s end. It’s the story of a small subchaser, the Eagle-56, caught in the crosshairs of a German Uboat, the U-853, whose brazen commander doomed his own fifty-five-man crew in a desperate, last-ditch attempt to record final kills before his country’s imminent defeat. This story is drawn from extensive personal interviews with major players: the three living survivors; a senior naval archivist who worked with German naval historians after the war to catalog U-boat movements; the son of the man who commanded America’s sub-tracking “Secret Room” during the war; and Paul Lawton, whose dogged efforts changed history. Due to Enemy Action also describes the final chapter in the Battle of the Atlantic, tracing the epic struggle that began with shocking U-boat attacks against hundreds of defenseless merchant ships off American shores in 1942, a bold offensive masterminded by German Admiral Karl Doenitz, father of the U-boat service, and ends with the last sinking of an American warship by a German submarine--the sinking of the Eagle-56.