The Finest Hours (7 page)

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 overboard, 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 burns, 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.