The Finest Hours (11 page)

The capsized bow of the
Mercer
was deemed a hazard to navigation, and the
Unimak
later received the go-ahead to sink the half-floating hulk. Gunnery officer Ben Stabile recalled that he first fired the ship's 40-millimeter antiaircraft gun at the
Mercer
's bow, just above the waterline “to see what would happen.” Stabile was thinking that maybe the oil would leak out of the cargo holds and be replaced by water, which is heavier than oil, or that the high-explosive incendiary projectiles they shot would make the oil tanker explode and sink. When the hulk didn't move, the
Unimak
's skipper, Captain Frank McCabe, said, “Ben, let's fire the K-guns with depth charges.” Stabile had never fired live depth charges—explosives designed to detonate underwater—and the K-guns could push the explosives out only about 75 yards; all the crew wondered if this was too close for comfort.

After much discussion, it was decided that the
Unimak
should be going at full steam when Stabile fired the K-guns. That way, the cutter would be putting distance between itself and the depth charge before it exploded.

The depth charges were shaped like teardrops to better propel them through the water. They measured approximately 24 inches long and 18 inches across at the wide end. The K-gun would fire the explosives in a long arc through the air, and if all went well, they would drop into the ocean close to the hulk. They were preset to explode when they reached a depth of 50 feet.

When everyone was ready, Captain McCabe wound up the engine, and the
Unimak
came flying toward the hulk at a speed of 18 knots (21 miles per hour). When the cutter was adjacent to the tanker's hull, Stabile discharged all three guns. A few seconds passed and then the charges exploded underwater, sending huge plumes of spray into the air. The
Unimak
shuddered violently, despite being a safe distance away, but the hulk of the
Mercer
barely moved.

After watching the half tanker float in the same position for 30 minutes, McCabe decided to repeat the procedure. “This time was different,” said Stabile. “The hulk rose up in the air and then down she went. We breathed a big sigh of relief. We didn't want to be near that thing with night closing in. It was so hard to see. Even with radar, I worried we might hit it and become its last victims.”

 

14

A MANEUVER FOR THE AGES

One half of the
Fort Mercer
now lay at the bottom of the sea. The other half, the stern, was still afloat and being driven southward by the wind and waves. The 31 men on board felt the full range of emotions, their mood and outlook rising and falling like the half ship they were trapped on. When the tanker first broke apart, fear and confusion reigned on the stern. Arguments broke out over what to do, and the confusion showed signs of escalating into full-blown panic and chaos, especially because the men's leader, Captain Paetzel, had drifted away on the bow section of the tanker. Some talked about immediately abandoning ship in the lifeboats, while others argued the lifeboats must be a last resort. Quartermaster Luis Jomidad hedged his bets, later saying, “I went up to the boat deck and climbed into a boat with a hatchet. The release was outside the boat, and I wanted to be sure it would work, that is why I took the hatchet. One guy was crazy and screamed, ‘Let's jump overboard,' but I said, ‘No, wait until it sinks and then we will jump.' For the next four hours, I sat in the lifeboat with the hatchet in my hand, ready to cut the rope to release it.” The quartermaster, frozen to the core, finally went back inside, but stayed up the entire night, just in case. “If it was going down,” he said, “I wanted to be on the outside.”

Although the
Mercer
's stern could capsize like the bow did, the men on board were lucky that their section of the ship still had power. That meant they had operable lights, pumps, and a functioning heating system. Unfortunately, there was no radio on the stern section, and the crew had no way to communicate with the merchant ship
Short Splice
, which was standing by. The survivors had made it through Monday night, and now, on Tuesday morning, they prayed the coast guard would arrive and that their fractured ship would stay upright a little longer.

*   *   *

The storm that threatened so many lives was far from over, and on board the cutter
Eastwind
, radio operator Len Whitmore lay restless in his bunk as the ship pitched and rolled. He was on break from radio duty, but between the ship's motion and the dramatic events of the day, sleep was next to impossible, so he got out of bed, dressed, and went topside. Len learned from another crewmember that the
Mercer
's radioman, John O'Reilly, with whom he'd been communicating prior to the tanker splitting, was dead.
Will there be more loss of life
, he asked himself,
before the
Eastwind
even arrives at the action?
He knew the cutter's crew could make a difference after all their endless training, if only they could get there in time.

With the
Eastwind
almost at the site of the
Mercer
's stern, Len peered into the gray skies over the storm-tossed seas and wondered how Captain Petersen would go about the rescue. Len had listened in on the
Yakutat
's radio communications as that ship attempted to rescue the men trapped on the
Mercer
's bow, and he knew about the lives both saved and lost.

Ensign Larry White, also aboard the
Eastwind
, was equally aware of the
Yakutat
's mixed results, and he hoped the
Eastwind
's crew would be able to get each and every man off the
Mercer
's stern. But he was also concerned with the manpower aboard the icebreaker, because many of the men were seasick. “We had lightened up the ship a couple weeks earlier,” recalled Larry, “to get up the Hudson River to break ice. And now the
Eastwind
was really pitching and rolling. Having literally been up the river, we didn't have much time to acclimate ourselves to the sea, and a fair share of the men were too sick to perform their duties, so others had to do double work.”

Larry himself was not seasick, and when the
Eastwind
was within visual range of the
Mercer
, he watched how the waves swept over the jagged end of the tanker, cascading off in waterfalls. The young ensign realized he and his shipmates would have their work cut out for them. He was surprised to see smoke coming out of the tanker's stacks, but noted how the rear of the stern sloped upward so that its propeller could be seen each time a wave swept by. As the
Eastwind
drew closer, both Larry and Len saw several of the tanker's crew standing along the deck rail, frantically waving at them. Slowly the
Eastwind
maneuvered upwind of the hulk, not wanting to be in a position where the
Mercer
could drift into the icebreaker.

Captain Petersen's first onsite decision was to establish communication with the
Mercer.
To that end, he instructed that a line with a “monkey fist” (a piece of lead or steel to add weight to the end of the line) be shot to the tanker. At the end of the line was a portable radio in a watertight container, which the seamen on the tanker were able to haul aboard. Once they removed the radio from the container, they could begin talking to the cutter. Chief engineer Jesse Bushnell, of Pasadena, Texas, the highest-ranking sailor on the tanker's stern section, told Captain Petersen that some of the men had decided to take their chances remaining on the hulk while others wanted to get off immediately. Petersen responded that he would have a rubber raft sent over. His crew fired another messenger line over to the tanker. Attached to it was a heavier line with the life raft tied in a fixed position. The other end of the line stayed with the coasties on the
Eastwind.

When the survivors pulled their end of the line to the point where the life raft was alongside the vessel, three men immediately jumped into the sea and scrambled aboard the raft. It was not a smooth trip to the icebreaker. The seas were still on a rampage, and the
Eastwind
rolled so much that the line rode way out of the water, lifting the men and the raft high in the air. Then the raft would crash back down into the water, loosening the survivors' handholds; maintaining a good grip was the only thing that kept them from certain death in the frigid sea.

A cargo net was lowered from the
Eastwind
, and three coast guardsmen, John Courtney, Roland Hoffert, and Eugene Korpusik, volunteered to man the net, waiting by the waterline to assist the survivors. Each time the
Eastwind
rolled, the volunteers were totally dunked, but they held firm. When the raft was alongside the icebreaker, the coasties were able to tie lines around the survivors and pull them on board.

During the rescue, a second coast guard cutter, the
Acushnet
, arrived on the scene, having steamed for 24 hours into the teeth of the storm from Portland. Coastal Maine had been hit especially hard, with the Portland
Herald Press
reporting in bold headlines
STORM PARALYZES STATE: STORM EQUALS WORST IN WEATHER BUREAU HISTORY
. The
Acushnet
had been docked in Portland for repairs, and half its crew was scattered and marooned ashore, including its captain, John Joseph. He had been at his home in South Portland when he got the phone call about the
Pendleton
and
Mercer
: “Commander, this is the
Acushnet
calling. A message from headquarters in Boston came in. Two tankers have split up off Cape Cod, and we're to go to the rescue.”

Joseph knew he'd have trouble locating his crew and responded, “Try to get the crew by telephone. If you can't get them by phone, call the local radio stations and have them broadcast a message. I'll be right there.”

Easier said than done. Joseph's car stalled in the snowdrifts at Portland's Vaughn Street Bridge. It would have taken hours to walk to the pier where the
Acushnet
was docked, so he called the South Portland CG Station, and they dispatched a picket boat, which came up the river, met Joseph at the bridge, and took him to the cutter. Other crewmembers struggled through the snow, but the entire crew eventually made it, and the 210-foot
Acushnet
nosed out of Portland Harbor and headed south into the storm.

On board were two young coasties, John Mihlbauer and Sid Morris, both of whom later recalled a very rough ride to the
Mercer
and were thankful to have Captain Joseph in command. “I sure was glad to see Captain Joseph come aboard,” said Morris. “He had commanded the ship admirably in several fishing boat rescues off the Grand Banks, and there was a unanimous feeling of trust and confidence by the crew for our captain, a coast guard veteran of 25 years. I knew it was going to be a bad trip, because it was difficult to maintain an upright position while we were still in the harbor. And as we sped out into open water and came abreast of the Portland Lightship, anyone who thought they might get seasick this trip was—and the others were beginning to think seriously about it.” Normally the trip from Portland to the
Mercer
's position near Nantucket took 18 hours, but because of the enormous seas, it took an additional six hours, giving everyone on board plenty of time to be seasick.

Morris remembered how he gaped in awe when he saw the
Mercer
's stern. “I could see gigantic, jagged slivers of broken steel at her midsection, and a group of frantic, pleading sailors clutching the rails.” John Mihlbauer remembered arriving just in time to watch the
Eastwind
haul the life raft with survivors back toward the cutter. “We could see the trouble the
Eastwind
was having with the raft,” recalled Mihlbauer. “The raft was flying up, then down, and spinning too. My heart was in my mouth, knowing there were men in that raft.”

Captain Joseph also watched, thinking how lucky the men in the raft were to have made it to the
Eastwind
alive. It was about this time that he started to think of another way to perform the rescue. “The way the sea was raging,” said Joseph, “it looked like the stern section would soon join its forward half in Davy Jones's locker. Something had to be done fast. I went to the radio room and signaled the commander of the
Eastwind
, saying, ‘Commander, I'd like to take the
Acushnet
in alongside the tanker so the survivors can jump to our deck. It's risky, but I think we can do it.'”

On the
Eastwind
, Captain Petersen, who was the on-scene commander for the entire rescue operation, hesitated before answering, weighing the risk to both the survivors and the
Acushnet
itself. The
Acushnet
, a coast guard oceangoing tug, was smaller and more maneuverable than the
Eastwind
, but still, the tactic was highly unusual, particularly in a storm. If the vessels collided due to the wildly heaving seas, the crew on the
Acushnet
could find themselves in almost as much peril as the survivors on the tanker. Captain Petersen was aware of these dangers, as well as the scrutiny he'd be under if the maneuver failed, but they were out of options. He radioed back to Captain Joseph to give it a try.

Joseph outlined his plan to his helmsman, Harvey Madigan, instructing him to turn the
Acushnet
in a semicircle, approach the tanker from the rear, and glide alongside it until ten feet remained between the two ships. Then, when the
Acushnet
was abreast of the tanker, they would stop the engines and let the cutter glide a bit closer so the survivors could jump on the fantail. Joseph added these words of caution: “Harvey, we can make it, but you've got to be careful. Don't let the bow swing into the tanker. If you do, we'll be smashed against her, surer than hell. Keep her pointed out, and we'll be okay.” Both men took another moment and silently studied the current and the wind, trying to determine how fast they would drift when the propellers stopped turning.