February, on the Cape or elsewhere in the north, is a poor month, an
in-between month, throwing the weather book at you when your resistance
is weakest, hurling cold winds, sleet and rain, grayness and wetness
enough to almost make you forget that spring is not so far away.
February can bring a vicious kind of day that is unknown in any other
month, a day when Main Street is deserted and battened down, when
hurricane winds lash the trees and pile huge breakers upon the shore
and you huddle indoors and are thankful for warmth and dryness and an
occupation that does not call you out. February brought this kind of a
night and followed it with this kind of a day on the seventeenth and
eighteenth of 1952. The wind howled in hurricane force and there was
snow and there was rain. The telephone wires screamed their resistance
and, listening to their radios which could blot out the rage of nature,
Cape people, for the first time, heard the names FORT MERCER and
PENDLETON.
No one who was not then on Cape Cod can appreciate the horror and the
heroism of that night and morning. No one who was then on the Cape will
ever forget the pride we had for the men of the Coast Guard, nor the
rather special pride for those Guardsmen who were Capers, carrying on
in the same great tradition as their forebears who followed the sea.
Even now it is difficult to sort out the facts of that terrible night
when the incredible happened, and two sister-ship tankers broke in half
off Chatham to become four separate derelicts, each with a partial
crew, and each at the mercy of fifty foot waves that, with each gust of
angry wind, threatened to sink them.
News flashes first announced that the Fort Mercer was in trouble,
thirty miles off Chatham light. Finally it was announced that she
had broken in half. Meanwhile, the Chatham radar screen had shown two
large objects about five miles off the beach. This, it developed, was
the Pendleton, which had broken in two some hours before and because
of a broken radio had been unable to wire her predicament. Even the
Coast Guard, which had promptly dispatched every available vessel to
the scene from as far away as Portland, could not, for a time, accept
the incredible fact that two, five hundred and twenty foot tankers
had broken up within an area of forty miles and a few hours. Even on
the treacherous shoals of Monomoy there was no precedent for such
an accident. Nor is it likely that some other macabre accidents of
that night shall ever be repeated. For example, some time after the
Fort Mercer had broken in two high winds caught up the truant bow and
threatened to hurl it with tremendous force at the stern section. The
stern section, fortunately, still had engines running and the order for
“Full speed astern” was immediately given. The broken stern responded
just in time to save the Mercer from a terrible and probably fatal
collision with her own bow.
Of the hundreds of brave men who answered the Coast Guard’s call to
duty that February night, none displayed greater courage nor greater
seamanship than the personnel of the Chatham Light Station. It was
they who, without hesitation, launched two of their thirty-six foot
open boats into the awful nightmare of Chatham Bars. Fifty-foot waves,
thirty-six foot open boats, visibility zero, near hurricane winds,
bitter cold with sleet and snow and the blackness of night. The small
boats were each under the command of Chatham boys, Donald H. Bangs and
Bernard C. Webber. Bangs, after a monumental trip across the outer
bar to the sea beyond, first made contact with the Pendleton. Webber,
through sheer will power and the help of God, forced his boat through
overwhelming seas to the Pendleton’s stern section. There, through the
most skillful maneuvering, he took off thirty three survivors of the
wreck. His trip to and from the wreck was accomplished with himself
lashed to the wheel and his crew clutching the bottom of the boat to
keep from being washed overboard. The windshield was broken on the way
out and water washed freely over the boat and her crew. How Webber
succeeded in bringing his heavily overloaded boat back to safety and
shore will never be known, but he did it. And meanwhile, other vessels
had been rescuing the crew of the Fort Mercer. The great storm, which
could easily have claimed the lives of eighty-four, had claimed
fourteen, a heavy toll, but one which would have been so much heavier
without the watchful eyes and skill of the Coast Guard.
There is a long history of friendly rivalry between Cape fishermen
and the Coast Guard. Capers, who are often as at home on the water as
ashore are apt to be critical of the spit and polish and new-fangled
methods of the government service. But there was no criticism on that
February night. The hats of the fishermen were off, in tribute to the
brave seamanship they had witnessed. In many a weather-beaten face of
Chatham the eyes were moist when it was known at last that “the boys
have made it in”.
There were medals later, presented at a Washington ceremony. But none
would shine as brightly as the new place the Coast Guardsmen had found
in the hearts of their Cape countrymen.