The impossible rescue mission
Coast Guard veterans recall saving 32 from storm-battered oil tanker
“The Finest Hours” relates the stuff of nautical legend, a drama about what happens when a small Coast Guard rescue boat motors out of Chatham, Mass., harbor in gale-force conditions to search for survivors after an oil tanker, the Pendleton, breaks in two at sea.
Chris Pine stars as coxswain Bernie Webber, the man piloting the rescue boat. Among the crew is Andy Fitzgerald (Kyle Gallner), an engineer, second class, who takes the place of Webber’s usual engineer, Mel Gouthro (Beau Knapp), who is too ill to take part in the mission. Also starring in the movie is Casey Affleck, who plays oil tanker engineer Ray Sybert. Sixtyfour years after the real-life Feb. 18, 1952, incident, Fitzgerald and Gouthro are the last men standing from that day.
“It was exciting,” says Fitzgerald, who was 21 at the time. “I’d been hanging around, getting bored in the clubhouse, and it was good to go help people who needed rescue.
“I knew there was going to be a rescue, and I was saying, ‘How do I get to go on this rescue boat?’ I was an engineman, second class, and I didn’t get to go on many rescues.”
Gouthro remembers that Monday well. He was 20 years old and in his fourth year in the Coast Guard. With a nor’easter descending on the area, he was part of a crew sent to make sure the rescue boat kept at the Chatham fish pier was ready if needed and to help the fishermen secure their boats. Later, the crew patrolled the beach in an amphibious duck to see if they could spy any boats in trouble, but all they could see was pounding surf and storm.
“It was just a typical, rotten New England winter day,” Gouthro, 84, says.
Gouthro had been feeling lousy all day and felt even worse by the time he got back to the Coast Guard station. He was sleeping when the news about the Pendleton broke.
“I remember Bernie coming to the foot of the stairs — I was on the second floor — and he called me by my nickname, ‘Gus.’ He said, ‘Gus, we got a call,’ ” Gouthro says. “I said,
‘Yeah.’ That was the end of that. A short time later, he came back and said, ‘Gus! Let’s go!’ Andy Fitzgerald — Fitzie — was my roommate. He said, ‘Gus is sick as a dog. I’ll go.’ ”
Just getting past the Chatham outer bar, where the surf tossed the boat around like a toy, smashing the windshield and destroying the compass, was a death-defying action. Finding 33 men on the Pendleton, far more than the 12 people (including crew) than the boat was designed to carry, and getting an overweight vessel back to shore presented more challenges that threatened all their survival. But Fitzgerald, who joined the Coast Guard as an alternative to the draft because he liked the idea of being trained to save people rather than for war, says he was never afraid.
“I had absolutely no thought in my mind that we were going to die,” says Fitzgerald. “We had a really good boat. For that type of a boat, we had probably the best coxswain in the Coast Guard. I thought we would be able to be successful.”
Fitzgerald was stationed at the bottom of the Pendleton’s ladder during the rescue and still remembers vividly the crewmen scrambling down and the one, George “Tiny” Meyers, who didn’t make it.
“He disappeared when he jumped and hit the boat,” Fitzgerald says. “I guess he floated away. I said, ‘Tiny, come here.’... He was a big guy. I said, ‘We can pull you up into the boat,’ but then he disappeared. It was sad. I thought about him, oh God, for I don’t know how many years afterwards, because I was looking right at him when he disappeared.”
Webber did the seemingly impossible that night, steering an overloaded boat without compass or stars to guide him. But he found the Chatham fish pier. Fitzgerald — who, along with the rest of the crew, received the Treasury Department’s Gold Lifesaving Medal for his actions — remembers it was late by then, and he was surprised at what they found as they docked.
“When we get to the fish pier, it was absolutely loaded with people,” he says. “The people from Chatham were just lining that fish pier. They knew we went out, and they were hoping we’d get back and be successful in our mission.”
Gouthro adds a postscript: “It’s my understanding that after the boat was restored, they took it down to the Coast Guard Academy in New London, Conn., and they tried to put 36 men on it — 32 survivors and four crew members. They couldn’t fit them ... 36 people on a boat designed for 12, but that’s what heroes are made of.”
Pam Grady is a San Francisco freelance writer.