“It went straight down like the Titanic, right before our eyes,” Tougias said, quoting one of the Coast Guardsmen. Minutes later, while the rescued men lay nearly frozen in the bottom of the raft, the bow of the Fort Mercer reared up and sank. The cutter backed away from the Mercer in the hope that the rope would tear on the other end, leaving the raft roped only to the cutter. The men on the Mercer secured the messenger line to the crippled ship, but once they reached the raft they were unable to cut or untie the line still attached to the Mercer. Attached to the line was a rubber life raft tethered to the cutter by another rope. To save the final two men, the cutter’s crew fired a thin rope, called a messenger line, out of K-guns with depth charges toward the Mercer. But the seas smashed the lifeboat into the Mercer, forcing it to retreat. In daylight, the cutter launched a 26-foot wooden lifeboat, which rescued two of the four remaining men. All four drowned, and the cutter had to back off to await the dawn. One man was swept overboard, and four more leaped into the water in the hope of reaching lifeboats that extended from a Coast Guard cutter. The first attempt at rescuing the men on the bow of the Fort Mercer, which was listing badly in the heavy seas, failed miserably. The captain and eight crew members were trapped on the bow of the ship, and 34 were on the stern. The Fort Mercer split apart at midday on February 18, while trying to ride out a gale. The Fort Mercer, like the Pendleton, was a T2-SE-A1 tanker, built on the cheap during World War II. “Here, the control comes back to me again, so you’re telling the stories the way the guys lived it,” he explained. Tougias’s presentation, sponsored by the Vermont Humanities Speakers Bureau, connected audiences to the stories he’s collected from the people who experienced them. In a talk in Lower Waterford in Vermont’s tiny Davies Memorial Library, Tougias narrated the rescue of the Fort Mercer, the other tanker that foundered in the storm. In the movie, Webber reminds his shipmates of the Coast Guard’s 1899 unofficial motto, “You have to go out, but you don’t have to come back.”īut the rest of the story is no less dramatic. Tougias understands that movies often have to simplify more complex stories, and the Pendleton rescue, undertaken by a 36-foot Coast Guard lifeboat piloted by a brave young man named Bernie Webber, had all the drama a movie could hold-a stoic hero, a romance, a demanding boss, selfless action, and impossible odds. The Coast Guard’s daring rescue of the men aboard those ships became the subject of The Finest Hours, a 2009 book written by Michael Tougias and Casey Sherman.Ī recent Hollywood movie of the same name, however, focused solely on the rescue of 32 men from only one of the doomed tankers, the Pendleton.
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