Orphans of the Storm

Orphans of the Storm Coast Guard headquarters in Boston braced for battle as the tanker Fort Mercer, 29 miles off Cape Cod's Pollock Rip lightship, sent out an S O S. The worst nor'easter of the winter was burying New England in gale-blown snow and raising pure white hell offshore. Blinding snow, 50-ft. waves, and winds up to 90 miles an hour smashed the distressed tanker as the Coast Guard cutter Yakutat and the Navy cargo ship Short Splice hunted her. Just after noon, she broke in two.

As the storm roared on, a Coast Guard radar station at Chatham, Mass. picked up a strange "target" -- the halves of the ship seemed to be washing about in Chatham shoals 25 miles from where they were supposed to be. A low-flying search plane investigated, and read the name Pendleton on the broken vessel's bow. Only then did the Coast Guard realize that a second tanker--a sister ship of the Fort Mercer --had also split in two. The ship's radio was dead and the sections had been drifting for hours.

The twin rescue jobs which followed will be long remembered among New England mariners. A Coast Guard boatswain's mate named Bernard Webber lashed himself to the wheel of a 36-ft. open power lifeboat and went out to the Pendleton. Eight men had been on the Pendleton's bow; all were lost. But in the light of flares, Webber and his lifeboat snatched 32 seamen on her stern from certain death. A 33rd was drowned.

Meanwhile, the Yakutat rescued four men from the Fort Mercer's bow. Thirty miles away, the cutters Eastwind and Acushnet took men off the stern. By the time the storm subsided, 14 men from the broken tankers were lost. Of the four pieces of two ships only the Fort Mercer's stern remained afloat. It was taken into Narragansett Bay with 1,470,000 gallons of oil still in its tanks, the cargo pumped out, and then towed to Brooklyn.

Both ships were World War II T-2-type tankers, whose welded hulls tend to crack in two when subjected to low temperatures and hammering seas. Of 523 T-2s built between 1943 and 1945, eight had split before the Pendleton and Fort Mercer. Seamen could only guess how many more might break in years to come.

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