Andrew Fitzgerald

Last hero of a lifeboat rescue immortalised by Disney

Andrew Fitzgerald, the last surviving member of a Coast Guard crew that took a lifeboat into the Atlantic in a raging blizzard in 1952 and rescued 32 of 33 seamen clinging to a tanker that had split in half off Cape Cod, has died in Aurora, Colorado. He was 87.

Fitzgerald left the Coast Guard months after the rescue and spent most of his life as an equipment salesman in Colorado.

It is often called the greatest small boat rescue in the history of the Coast Guard, a feat of seamanship and courage that made international headlines and has been celebrated in books, magazines, documentaries and a Disney film, The Finest Hours, released in 2016.

“He doesn’t consider himself a hero,” Fitzgerald’s wife, Gloria, who learned of the rescue two years after her marriage, told The Boston Globe in 2014. “He’d say, ‘It was three hours of work that we were supposed to do.’”

Before dawn on 18 February, 1952, the 503ft tanker Pendleton, with 41 crewmen and a cargo of oil and kerosene bound for Boston, was engulfed off Cape Cod in a shrieking nor’easter, battered by blinding snow, 80mph winds and seas taller than a six-storey building.

By 4 am, huge waves were breaking over the stern. Hull plates groaned as the ship soared over the peaks and plunged into the troughs. Over the next couple of hours, explosive cracking noises shook the vessel, and at 5:50am, the Pendleton, six miles offshore, broke in two.

Separated amidships, the stern section rode the mountainous seas, spilling its cargo, but lost none of its 33 seamen. Many scrambled topside closing watertight doors as they went, which enabled the half-ship to remain afloat for more than 14 hours.

From the deck 40 feet above the waterline, seamen watched aghast as the bow section, with the bridge and radio shack, the captain and seven others, drifted away.

There had been no time for an SOS and there was no transmitter in the stern.

Over portable radio receivers, seamen in the stern learned that another tanker, the Fort Mercer, with 43 men aboard, had radioed an SOS from 20 miles offshore. Vessels and planes were on the way to the Fort Mercer but no one yet knew that the Pendleton had split apart.

Hours later, a Coast Guard plane found the Fort Mercer in two sections. As rescue operations began there, a radar station discovered that there were actually four hulks off Cape Cod. Aircraft soon identified the sections of the Pendleton, and a second rescue was mounted.

Four Coast Guardsmen at Chatham Lifeboat Station, whichwasnearesttothependleton, volunteered. They were Boatswain’s Mate First Class Bernard C. Webber, coxswain of the 36ft motorised lifeboat CG-36500, and his crew, Petty Officer 3rd Class Andrew Fitzgerald, the engineman, and seamen Richard Livesey and Ervin Maske.

Navigating by dead reckoning, Webber piloted the boat through darkness and turbulence. After an hour, he found the Pendleton’s stern.

Captain W. Russell Webster said in an official Coast Guard account: “The searchlight soon revealed a pitch black mass of twisted metal, which heaved high in the air upon the massive waves and then settled back down in a frothing mass of foam.

“Each movement produced a cacophony of eerie groans as the broken ship twisted and strained in the 60ft seas. No lights were apparent as coxswain Webber manoeuvered the small boat aft.”

Lights on the deck high overhead suddenly glowed. A man frantically waving his arms appeared. Seamen in life jackets then lined up along the rail, shouting unintelligibly.

Suddenly, a rope ladder unrolled down the hull and seamen began to descend. The first to reach bottom leapt onto the lifeboat’s bow and was pulled in by the crew as Webber struggled to hold his boat steady. A line of men clung to the rope ladder as it swayed perilously out and slammed back into the hull.

With every roll, Webber tried to get his boat close to let another seaman leap aboard. Many fell into the freezing sea, but struggled to the surface and grabbed a safety line rigged around the lifeboat’s shell.

Again and again, Fitzgerald, Livesey and Maske hoisted waterlogged men onto the deck and bundled them into the forward hold, the engine compartment or the wheelhouse. As the lifeboat filled, it became increasingly unstable and began shipping water. Finally, 31 survivors were packed in.

Two still on the stern were Raymond Sybert, who as chief engineer would be the last man off, and George Myers, the ship’s 21 stone cook, known as Tiny. Believing he would not survive, he had given much of his clothing to shipmates.

Shirtless, Myers climbed down the ladder. Near the bottom, he slipped or mistimed his jump and fell into the sea. He resurfaced, but Fitzgerald, Livesey and Maske could not lift him aboard. He was hit by a wave and they watched helplessly as he drifted away and was swallowed by the sea.

Moments later, the lifeboat crew pulled Sybert to safety just as the Pendleton’s stern rolled one last time and sank.

An hour later, the overloaded CG-36500 churned into Chatham Harbor with its exhausted crew and 32 survivors.

All eight men in the bow of the Pendleton were lost. Cutters rescued 38 seamen from the Fort Mercer’s stern, but five, including the captain, were lost in the bow section, which sank.

Fitzgerald left the Coast Guard eight months later and returned to the town where he had been born, Whitinsville, Massachusetts, on March 19, 1931, to Andrew and Edna Fitzgerald.

He worked at a machine shop, earned an associate degree in engineering at Worcester Junior College and in 1956 married Gloria Frabotta, who survives him.

He is also survived by a daughter, Dawn Huffman; a son, Michael; a brother, Bill; four grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren. ROBERT D MCFADDEN

“He doesn’t consider himself a hero. He’d say, ‘It was three hours of work that we were supposed to do’.”