So rather than go through all the effort of installing Entourage and then configuring user accounts on 10+ workstations, or even finding a handy little program to do a batch conversion to something all of us could access, I wondered if, .eml being a packaged file of some sort, maybe Stuffit Expander could help out ... and hey, presto! It worked!
By simply dragging all of the .eml files onto Expander, it generated a separate folder in the Finder for each .eml file. Into that folder, it expanded all the relevant attachments (as files), plus a copy of the message body text. The only drawback I've noticed so far is that none of the header information is copied into the message file.
I have only tested this hint with Stuffit Expander versions 9 and 10. Other versions remain untested. I hope this helps some other poor soul out there like me.

