The Finest Hours

by Michael J. Tougias

  As the lines fell short of their target, Captain Naab and his crew began a dangerous dance of positioning the cutter nearer to the bow of the Mercer. As the cutter maneuvered closer, however, Naab realized that the Mercer’s bow was surging so wildly that both vessels could collide, killing them all. The captain decided to edge away, hoping the storm would soon subside a bit before trying another rescue. For the next five and a half hours, the Yakutat stood by the bow of the Mercer, keeping a close watch for any sign of change.

  * * *

  While the Yakutat had made it to the scene of what it hoped would be a rescue, the 36-foot motor lifeboat skippered by Ralph Ormsby, which had left Nantucket at noon, was having no such luck. “We couldn’t see anything,” said Ormsby. “There were snow squalls, and the seas were tremendous.”

  When night fell, their orders changed once again, and they were told to seek safety. Ormsby steered his vessel and its frozen crew to the Pollock Rip Lightship. He was entering some of the most treacherous waters on the East Coast, the shifting labyrinth of shoals between Nantucket and the elbow of Cape Cod. The tides play havoc in the shallows here, creating rip currents of churning, sand-filled seas that can be frightening even on calm days. And now with monstrous waves, wind, and current colliding, Ormsby’s small lifeboat was tossed about like so much flotsam. Should the boat capsize amid the breakers at the rip, he and his crew would be dead within minutes.

  Somehow Ormsby navigated through the maze of shoals and pulled up alongside the lightship. Crewmember Alfred Roy stood on the bow of the lifeboat and attempted to throw a line with a weight at the end to the crew on the lightship. Just as Roy made the throw, the 36-footer was hit by a wave, and Roy went airborne, hitting his face against the oak planks of the bow. Ormsby tried to steady the wallowing vessel while Roy got back on his feet and hurled the line once again. This time, the lightship crew grabbed the other end, and the lifeboat was secured against the larger vessel. The men climbed aboard, where Roy had the gash above his eye attended to.

  The second 36-footer sent out earlier that day, skippered by Donald Bangs, was having an equally harrowing mission. Bangs and his crew almost didn’t survive the first few minutes of their journey, because when they rounded Monomoy Point, they were assaulted by a huge breaking sea. The skipper thought that if he tried to maneuver the boat over the waves, his vessel stood a good chance of having its bow go straight up and then over the stern, capsizing the lifeboat. He only had a minute to make a decision, but he gunned the engine and forced his tiny craft to punch through the waves. When he and his men came out the other side, they were completely airborne and then, free-falling, slammed into the trough below.

  So far his mission had been one not only of danger but of frustration as well. He and his crew were originally sent to aid the Mercer. When they reached Pollock Rip Lightship, however, they were told to turn around and head back toward Chatham because the two halves of the Pendleton had been spotted there.

  Donald Bangs was a quiet, even-tempered man, but even he must have voiced his frustration at spending the last couple of hours fighting the seas toward the Mercer, only to be told they needed to head to a new location. Like Ormsby and crew, the men on Bangs’s boat had already suffered greatly. The open cockpit had no heat, and the men were repeatedly soaked by breaking seas and foam sheared from the crest of waves. Snow and sleet still fell, and the crew’s ears, fingers, and toes were numb from the cold. Water had filled the men’s boots, but the motion of the boat was so violent they couldn’t even empty them.

  At one point in the journey, one of the crewmen shouted to their skipper, “Are we going to make it?” Bangs, focusing on the next wave, shouted back, “How the hell do I know? I’ve never seen anything like this!”

  Bangs finally saw the Pendleton’s bow section come into view, eerily riding the seas with its forward end pointed upward into the dark night. The superstructure and the bridge at the front end of the broken vessel were awash with churning seas. The icy slope of the deck from that end to the tip of the bow was roughly 45 degrees, seemingly too steep for someone to climb.

  The bow was listing to port, and Bangs slowly circled the hulk, looking for any signs of movement or the flicker of a flashlight. Blasting his signal horn at short intervals, he hoped someone would appear on deck. He tried holding his lifeboat in one place, just downwind of the hulk. His crew listened intently for the shouts of trapped sailors. But there was only the wind; the bow appeared deserted.

  Where are the crewmen? Bangs wondered. Were they swept off the ship? Did they take to the lifeboats? There were no clues. The fractured bow appeared to be a ghost ship, wallowing in the heavy seas, ready to descend to the depths at any moment.

  And so the freezing crew of Bangs, Ballerini, Haynes, and Ciccone turned their vessel toward Chatham, thinking they could help locate the Pendleton’s stern. They were more than halfway to the stern when their radio crackled. The captain of the cutter McCulluch, which had recently arrived on the scene, shouted that he was at the bow of the Pendleton and they had just seen a light flicker—there were survivors on board after all!

  For the third time, Bangs set a new course, racing as best he could in 50- to 60-foot seas back to the bow. This time he moved even closer to the hulk, and as the wave crests carried his small vessel upward, he and his men were almost at eye level with the deck of the broken ship. That’s when they saw a lone man on the starboard wing.

  “We saw a man standing on the bridge,” recalled Bangs. “He was hollering at us, but we couldn’t hear a word. We went in close and could see that he was standing on the wing of the bridge. The wind and waves were pitching the ship at tremendous degrees. We tried to get a line aboard, but had to give up. The man was then seen to jump or fall into the sea. He came to the surface floating about a boat length and a half from us. Just as we were about to fish him out of the water, the biggest sea of the night broke over our deck.”

  Recovering from the blow, the skipper used his searchlight to try to find the man in the tumultuous seas. In the beam of the light, Bangs spotted him yards away, floating motionless on his back. Then the sea simply engulfed him, and his fight for life was over. Bangs and his crew searched and circled throughout the night, but they never saw the man again. Incredibly, the four coast guard men stayed out searching for survivors for several more hours, spending a total of 22 hours in storm-tossed seas.

  None of the other seven men known to be on the Pendleton bow, including Captain Fitzgerald, ever appeared at the railing, fired a flare, or flashed a light, and they were assumed to have been swept off the ship long before Bangs made his heroic attempt to rescue the man who jumped.

  * * *

  Aboard the bow of the Mercer, Captain Paetzel and his crew were becoming desperate. The front of the bow section was sticking completely out of the water, but the aft section of the hulk, where Paetzel and crew were trapped in the unheated chart room, was sinking lower into the sea. Just before midnight, they decided to try to move from the chart room to the forecastle room located at the very tip of the bow, where they hoped to escape the rising water.

  To do so, however, first meant somehow lowering themselves out of the chart room and onto the exposed deck, which was awash with spray, snow, and sometimes the sea itself. The door from the chart room to the deck was too close to the sinking end of the hulk, and the drop from a porthole to the deck was too great to risk jumping. And so the crew improvised, taking various signal flags and tying them together to create a line, which they dropped out the porthole on the forward side of the chart room. One by one, the men started out. First they lowered themselves down the signal flag line, then took the most harrowing footsteps of their lives as they headed forward on the upward-sloping, icy catwalk.

  The ship pitched and rolled, and the men ran toward the forecastle as seething white water surged around their feet. Radio operator John O’Reilly—who had been transmitting to Len Whitmore earlier that morning—slipped, lost his footing, and was swept ove
rboard, disappearing into the churning abyss. The other eight crewmembers made it safely to the forecastle. Captain Paetzel, who had been wearing his slippers when the tanker split, made the crossing barefoot.

  Captain Naab on the Yakutat had seen the men run across the catwalk, and he knew the tanker crewmen were desperate enough to do anything. He decided he had better make another attempt to get them off. He maneuvered the cutter windward of the tanker. His men then tied several life rafts in a row, dropped them overboard, and let the wind carry them toward the tanker. Lights and lifejackets were attached to each of the rafts.

  On the Mercer’s bow, the survivors watched the rafts come toward them. It was decision time, and what an awful decision it was. Each man had to make a choice in the next minute that might mean the difference between life and death. There was no one to give them guidance, assurance, or even the odds they faced, because no one on earth knew what would happen next.

  Three crewmembers on board felt the rafts were their best chance of escaping the storm alive. They crawled to the side of the deck and, one by one, threw themselves overboard and down toward the rafts. All three missed their target. The shock of the freezing water made swimming nearly impossible, and although they tried to get to the rafts, they disappeared from view. Captain Naab watched in horror as the mountainous seas buried the men.

  One of the tanker crewmen, Jerome Higgins, still on board the Mercer, saw how close the Yakutat was and made a fatal choice. He leaped over the rail, hit the water, and tried to swim to the cutter. In the howling darkness, the seas swept him away in a flash. Naab, not wanting to witness any more drowning, backed the cutter away to wait for dawn.

  Later, Naab would say that watching the crewmen jump from the ship and be taken by the sea was “the worst hour of my life.”

  There were only four men left on the fractured bow of the Mercer: Captain Paetzel, purser Edward Turner, third mate Vincent Guldin, and first mate Willard Fahrner. Huddling together for warmth, they sat in shock, not quite believing that five fellow crewmen were dead or dying alone in the freezing ocean.

  Naab on the Yakutat felt helpless. “There was nothing more we could do, so the operation was abandoned until daylight. We just kept praying the hulk would stay up.”

  9

  LOSING ALL HOPE: ON BOARD THE PENDLETON STERN

  Adrift now for nearly 14 hours, the men aboard the stern of the Pendleton still had food, water, and heat, but they were running low on hope. The rescue attempt for the Fort Mercer was fully under way, but the Pendleton crew had yet to hear anything on the radio about their own plight. Chief engineer Ray Sybert had become de facto captain of the stern section, and he was scared. He tried to keep his composure and conceal his dread from his men.

  The crew had obviously grown much closer during the time of their ordeal, but the tremendous strain was beginning to show on most everyone. Wallace Quirey wished he still had his Bible with him. He could hear his mother’s soft voice echoing in his mind. “Keep it with you always,” she had told him. “It will protect you.”

  One crewmember, however, maintained his confidence. George Myers had spent much of the day shooting off flares, hoping someone onshore would see them. Myers was a native of Avella, Pennsylvania, a coal-mining town less than an hour from Pittsburgh. He served as an oiler and part-time cook and no doubt enjoyed the taste of the food he helped to prepare. He weighed well over 300 pounds and was known affectionately as Tiny by the crew. He was such an affable fellow that one crewmember, 23-year-old Rollo Kennison of Kalamazoo, Michigan, had even gushed that Tiny Myers was “the greatest man on earth.” Kennison had watched his large friend lift spirits among the crew for much of the day, and now he was watching Myers point his flare gun up toward the dark, swirling winds. Myers shot off another flare and handed the gun to Kennison. “Keep that, kid,” he said with a smile. “I want it as a souvenir when we get to shore.”

  * * *

  Eighteen-year-old Charles Bridges periodically went out on deck, hoping to see a rescue boat approaching. One of these forays nearly cost him his life. “The spray had frozen on the decks, and when a big swell hit the ship, I lost my footing and started sliding across the deck. There was no way I could stop myself. I could see that my last chance was to grab the ship’s railing and that, if I didn’t, I’d be swept right under it and overboard. Luckily I got a hold of it. Had I slid toward the front, I would have gone right overboard where the ship had cracked.”

  Bridges said his spirits were at their lowest about mid-afternoon. “That’s when we hit a shoal and it stopped the drifting. Every time a wave slammed the ship, it pushed us over another inch. Soon the ship had a bad list, and men were talking about launching the lifeboats. A big discussion ensued about taking to the lifeboats. I said, ‘You’re crazy if you think I’m going in one of those. As long as this ship floats, I’m staying right here.’ I knew that if we got in the lifeboats, we probably couldn’t even get away from the ship. The waves would have crushed us against the hull. And even if the lifeboat got out from under the ship, where was the coast? No one knew how far it was, and no one knew if the coast would even offer us a place to wash up. Even though the deck kept sloping, no one ever did launch one of the boats.”

  * * *

  The full impact of the storm was now reaching the public as Monday evening newspapers reported on the ongoing ocean rescues as well as the onshore calamities. On the Boston Globe’s front page, a report stated that the storm had killed 15 people from New England in various accidents, mostly on the snow-covered roads or from heart attacks while shoveling. Over 1,000 motorists had been stranded in their cars on the Maine Turnpike since the storm first hit one night earlier.

  The storm dumped over two feet of snow in central Maine, and the Boston Globe reported 20,000 MAROONED IN 3 MAINE TOWNS, explaining that the towns of Rumford, Andover, and Mexico were cut off from the outside world by giant snowdrifts. Food and fuel were running low, and “volunteers are being sought to reinforce the already doubled snow crews working with all available equipment at hand trying to break through 10- to 12-foot drifts.”

  By the next edition of the newspaper, the death toll on land had more than doubled. The Globe reported, “New England was on its knees today after the worst snowstorm in years. The gale-driven northeaster left in its wake millions of dollars worth of damage and at least 33 deaths.”

  There were lucky people, however, as well as the unlucky. In Bar Harbor, Maine, three days after the storm, police were using long poles to poke through snowbanks, hoping to find a car that had been seen skidding off the road. While probing a particularly deep drift by the side of Route 3, police chief Howard MacFarland thought he heard a muffled yell from the snowy depths. MacFarland started clawing and digging the hard-packed snow away until he saw a car below him. He continued digging until he reached the driver-side door. Then, according to the Boston Herald, out stepped 20-year-old George Delaney, “stiff-jointed and blinking but otherwise apparently in good shape.” Delaney had been entombed for more than two full days.

  For Bernie and his crew, the storm’s challenge wasn’t snow but wind-driven waves as big as two-story houses. This blizzard was dangerous on land—but absolutely deadly at sea.

  10

  ALL BUT ONE: THE RESCUE OF THE PENDLETON STERN

  On board Bernie Webber’s lifeboat, the engine was dead, and the crew would be too if they couldn’t get it restarted soon. The sturdy vessel had one flaw: the engine stalled if the boat rolled too much while it was under way. Andy Fitzgerald began carefully making his way from the bow to the engine compartment. The CG 36500 continued to pitch and rear violently as Fitzgerald tried to keep a firm grip on the rails.

  He got to the engine room and crawled into the small space, made even smaller by the wet, heavy clothes he had on. Once inside the compartment, another heavy wave slammed into the lifeboat, bouncing Fitzgerald around the engine room. Andy cried out as he was thrown like a rag doll against the hot engine. Despite suffering bu
rns, bruises, and scrapes, he somehow managed to control the pain as he held down the priming lever and waited for the gasoline to begin flowing to the engine again. Andy restarted the 90-horsepower motor.

  As the motor kicked back to life, Bernie Webber noticed a change in the seas. The waves were more monstrous now, but they were also spread farther apart. This told him that he and his crew had defied the odds. They had made it over Chatham Bar.

  In many ways, however, their nightmare had only just begun. They were outside the bar, but Bernie had no idea of their exact location. He pushed the throttle down and headed deeper into the teeth of the storm. If only I can make it to the Pollock Rip Lightship, I think we’ll be okay, he told himself. He had no compass, and the radio was so tied up with traffic that it was utterly useless to him now.

  It was a dance of giants as the 60- to 70-foot waves rose and fell. The men’s senses were heightened; they were assaulted by roaring wind when their boat rode up to the top of waves, then enveloped in an eerie quiet as they plunged down into the valleys. All were soaked from the bone-chilling ocean, but so much adrenaline was coursing through them that they hardly noticed. Each time the boat plunged into a trough, icy spray and foam slapped them in the face, and Webber fought the wheel to prevent the boat from broaching. They kept their knees bent, trying to anticipate the impact of each oncoming wave. While Webber clung to the wheel, Livesey, Fitz, and Maske kept a vise-like grip on the rails, believing if they were hurled out of the boat, they would likely never be found.

  The storm grew stronger as they ventured farther out to sea, where the cauldron of wind and snow intensified even more. Webber’s only option was to ride the waves like a thunderous roller coaster. He let the CG 36500’s engine idle as they climbed slowly and steadily up toward the wave’s curled, frothing peak. Bernie gunned the engine to get them over the top of the wave, and they all held on as the lifeboat raced down the other side.