The Coast Guard gets no respect. Just ask 84-year-old Andy Fitzgerald.
A few years ago, a man in church asked the former engineman if he’d been in the service. When Fitzgerald said he’d been in the Coast Guard, the man laughed, claiming that wasn’t the service. Fitzgerald walked away.
“Then I thought, ‘He’s wrong,’ ” Fitzgerald says. “I went back and said, ‘Here’s why I went into the Coast Guard. You guys are trained to kill people. We’re trained to save people.’ ”
Had that man known what Fitzgerald faced one stormy day in February 1952, he might’ve never opened his mouth.
Fitzgerald and fellow Coast Guardsman Richard Livesey, Ervin Maske and Bernie Webber — piloting a 36-foot wooden boat — braved treacherous, 60-foot seas and 80-mile winds to save 32 crewmen trapped on a sinking tanker off the coast of Massachusetts. The mission is considered the greatest small-boat rescue in Coast Guard history and is the premise for the movie “The Finest Hours,” in theaters Friday and based on the 2009 book of the same name.
Chris Pine plays Webber, who was ordered by his superior (Eric Bana) to attempt a rescue when a tanker, the Pendleton, cracked in two during a massive storm. The captain and seven crewmen on the bow were ultimately lost. The stern stayed afloat and was tossed on turbulent seas as engineer Ray Sybert (Casey Affleck) and 32 others fought to keep it from sinking.
Webber asked for volunteers and three men stepped up. Livesey (played by Ben Foster) was a young seaman who joined the Coast Guard at 17 when told there was a wait list to get into the Navy.
Maske (John Magaro) wasn’t even based at the Chatham, Mass., station, but happened to be there while waiting for transportation back to his own ship. Fitzgerald (Kyle Gallner) was the station’s junior engineer.
“This was my first big rescue,” says Fitzgerald, now living in landlocked in Colorado. “[Typically,] I’d go out when people were stuck on the sandbar. I just wanted to find out what a real rescue was like.”
A local fisherman suggested the team just motor around the harbor and tell their boss they weren’t able to make it out to sea.
“There was no way we were going to do that,” Fitzgerald says. “Our job was to go out and try to save someone.”
Waves pummeled the small rescue boat as Webber attempted to pilot it over that sand bar, busting out the craft’s windshield and destroying its compass.
The crew navigated by luck and memory to the spot where they thought currents should have carried the tanker. When Fitzgerald switched on a spotlight, by some miracle, there she was.
The survivors quickly clamored down a rope ladder thrown over the Pendleton’s side as the seas rocked the wreck.
Down below, Webber worked the engine to keep his craft from being smashed against the Pendleton’s hull. One by one, 32 survivors jumped aboard the rescue craft, built to carry at most 12.
As the last man descended the swaying ladder, he lost his footing and plunged into the ocean. George Myers was gone.
As Webber motored away, the Pendleton capsized. Through the driving snow, he headed towards shore, somehow reaching it with his overstuffed boat.
Fitzgerald, who didn’t even think to tell his wife of the rescue, says the only aspect of that day he dwelled on was Myers’ death.
“I thought of him for several years after I got out of the Coast Guard,” he says. “I didn’t think of the rescue as much as that guy dying. We missed him.”