The Finest Hours — The Real Story
Posted on January 29, 2016 at 8:00 am
Photo credit: Copyright 1952 Cape Cod Community College.
“The Finest Hours,” in theaters today, stars Chris Pine and Eric Bana in the fact-based story of the greatest small-boat rescue in Coast Guard history.
In February of 1952, two tanker ships were in distress during a terrible storm off the coast of Massachusetts. They were the SS Pendleton and SS Fort Mercer. Disastrously, both ships split in two within hours of each other, with many crewmen killed and the rest in dire peril, and only three hours before the crippled vessel would sink in freezing, storm-tossed water, drowning the rest.
Coxswain Bernard C. Webber and his crew, Andrew J. Fitzgerald, Richard P. Livese and Ervin E. Maske, all under 25 years old, went out on a 36-foot wooden boat to try to rescue the remaining crew of the Pendleton, and the movie, from Disney studios, is their story. These young men were the ones left behind when the most experienced men were sent in other boats to rescue the crew from the Fort Mercer. Maske was just passing through the station and had never been on a rescue mission before. Fitzgerald was an engine man who joined because Webber’s usual partner had the flu. Another engine man who played a key role was the Pendleton’s Ray Sybert (Casey Affleck), who made key decisions that kept the crew alive while the rescue boat was on the way.
Webber’s boat was brutally beaten back by the storm, pushed over so that it was entirely on its site. Its compass was smashed. Communications with the shore and the Pendleton were impossible for most of the rescue operation. Webber and his crew brought back all of the survivors of the Pendleton but one, a man who fell from the rope ladder trying to reach the small boat. The last surviving member of the Pendleton crew was there to visit the set of the film.
And a group has raised a quarter of a million dollars to restore and preserve the boat used in the rescue.
The movie is based on a book by Michael J. Tougias and Casey Sherman called The Finest Hours: The True Story of the U.S. Coast Guard’s Most Daring Sea Rescue
Some of the film has been made more dramatic (Webber and his wife were already married when the rescue took place), but the heroics of the men involved are not in any way exaggerated, as this report from the Naval Institute’s Proceedings makes clear.
