War News: “Where Are They?” Alabama Newspapers and the USS Cyclops

May 11, 2018

Last week, Laura Newland Hill discussed the twelve Alabamians who were among the men lost aboard the ill-fated USS Cyclops in the spring of 1918. Newspapers in the Yellowhammer State published more than 100 stories about the ship’s disappearance that year. As the likelihood faded that the ship would be found, the initial curiosity turned into a mournful anxiety. “There is of course the faint hope that the vessel may still be afloat,” wrote the editor of the Albany-Decatur Daily, “but her silence indicates that she has gone to the bottom.”

004 Albany-Decatur Daily

“Where are they? What Happened?” asked the Troy Messenger on April 24, 1918, a month after the Cyclops was reported missing. “Many a ship has sunk or burned at sea, but only a few were swept from the water by a fate unguessed – by a power unknown.”

009 Troy Messenger

On April 26, 1918, Clay County’s Ashland Progress published a photograph of its native son Francis Olney Strong on the front page. In a short caption beneath Strong’s piercing stare, the paper noted the probability of his death at sea. A few weeks later, the Montgomery Times published a short wire report that J.P. Beggs, father of Hamilton Beggs, an electrician, second class aboard the Cyclops, had appeared before a Birmingham draft board and requested assignment. “I want to do something for my country,” the aging, bespectacled mechanic told them. The board placed him at a shipyard.

010 Ashland Progress

The Andalusia Star took particular note of the fate of the Cyclops. Seaman Lee Otis Battle’s father, Henry, was a well-known local physician. On April 14, 1918, the newspaper published on its front page a telegram the Battles received from the Navy. The ship’s disappearance “cannot be logically accounted for in any way, as no bad weather conditions or activities of enemy raiders have been reported in the vicinity of her route,” it read.

006 Andalusia Star

In an adjacent editorial, the Star noted that “the anxiety and uncertainty of it all, with the faint hope that news may yet come that all are safe, and yet with the still more probable likelihood that all went down with the ship, makes the situation all the more trying on the grief-stricken father and mother of this young hero…”

007 Andalusia Star

The newspaper’s final words about Lee Otis Battle bear quoting in full:

"We think of Otis as the bright, happy, and companionable boy – a favorite among his associates. We hope that news may yet come that he and all who are on board are still safe. But if what we fear shall prove to be true and it proves to be that Andalusia’s first victim was our own jolly Lee Otis, we feel assured that since we know he met duty like a true American we also know that he met death, if death has come, like a hero."