Years later, when the whole world was to have Fords in its Future, and even a fifteen cent Sunday paper was but a memory, I called on my friend for what turned out to be one of the last times, but perhaps the most satisfactory. I had been away from the Cape for four years, in faraway places across the sea, and the face of much of the earth had been changed, and much of the earth would never be the same again. Even Cape Cod had undergone a change in the war years, and it was with rather strong emotions that I walked past the cluttered drug store windows and into the establishment of my friend. Thankfully he was there, a little older and a little grayer, but nevertheless there, behind the counter in his familiar white coat. His eye-brows raised in familiar greeting, and perhaps he looked up from swishing the soda glasses for a longer instant than normally. But when, after a moment he spoke, it was with the greatest casualness. “Hello, Allan,” he said, slowly. “What’ll you have? A coke?”
Then I knew that not all of the earth had changed, and I was glad of it as I felt the memory of four ugly years slipping quietly away into the shadows of the little store. Then, as was customary, he joined me in a coke, and we picked up the threads of our conversation, exactly where we had temporarily dropped them, in August of 1941. It was good to be home again.
MODERN HEROES OF THE SEA
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.