Rescue Warriors

by David Helvarg

  For their efforts the Pea Island crew received the Gold Lifesaving Medal, the highest award for lifesavers. Unfortunately, the medal wasn’t awarded until 1996, a century after their action. The belated recognition came as a result of the efforts of a Coast Guard reservist, two graduate students, and a fourteen-year-old North Carolina girl, Kate Burkart, who wrote letters of inquiry about the rescue to her state’s elected officials.

  The toughness that was demanded of station keepers and surfmen like Richard Etheridge was reflected in the 1899 Blue Book Regulations of the Life-Saving Service, which read in part, “The statement of the keeper that he did not try to use the boat because the sea or surf was too heavy will not be accepted unless attempts to launch it were actually made and failed.”

  This inspired Cape Hatteras station keeper Patrick Etheridge (no relation to Richard) to tell one nervous young surfman as they prepared to launch on yet another seemingly impossible rescue: “The Blue Book says we’ve got to go out, and it doesn’t say a damn thing about having to come back.”

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  he coming of the twentieth century was marked by a series of marine and maritime disasters. The year of the century, 1900, brought one of the costliest when the wealthy Victorian port town of Galveston, Texas, built on a sandy barrier island, was devastated by a storm-driven sea surge that killed more than six thousand people, about a third of the town’s population.

  Four years later in New York, the excursion steamboat General Slocum caught fire, burned, and sank in the East River. Of the 1,350 or so passengers on board at the time, 1,021 died as a result of the fire. A presidential commission found that lack of fire drills and boat drills, a complete failure of onboard fire hoses, defective life preservers, and inefficient inspections by the Steamboat Inspection Service all contributed to the tragedy. The service was cited for failing to meet even minimal requirements for testing hose pressure, engine, boiler, and hull worthiness and for being too close to the industry it was supposed to regulate.

  That kind of corruption and incompetence was the bane of the new Progressive movement that saw preventable disasters such as the General Slocum fire, urban slums, industrial monopolies, and unsanitary food, air, and water as part and parcel of a political economy in need of scientific and professional reform. Efficiency was a byword of this often contradictory movement that opposed child labor but frequently failed to support trade unions, embraced women’s rights but excluded Jews, Catholics, and blacks, and saw both social work and alcohol prohibition as equally effective ways to improve society. Leading Progressives ranged from muckraking writers and journalists like Ida Tarbell, Lincoln Steffens, and Upton Sinclair to political leaders including William Jennings Bryan, Wisconsin’s Robert La Follette, and New York’s Theodore Roosevelt.

  The Life-Saving Service’s Sumner Kimball certainly fit the Progressive mold, as did George Putnam, appointed by President William Howard Taft to head the newly created Lighthouse Service in 1910, and Capt. Ellsworth Bertholf, appointed captain-commandant of the Revenue Cutter Service in 1911.

  George Putnam was an engineer from Iowa who as a U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey scientist helped establish the Alaska-Canada border line, examined the world’s largest meteor with Robert Peary in Greenland, and directed the first coastal survey of the Philippine Islands. During his twenty-five-year tenure as the Department of Commerce’s commissioner of lighthouses, he worked tirelessly to make the service a model of efficiency. During his time, the number of aids to navigation (ATONs) doubled, and he created a retirement plan for lighthouse personnel, oversaw the electrification and initial automation of lighthouses and other ATONs, and introduced a range of new safety technologies, including radio beacons, lighted buoys, and foghorns.

  “The lighthouse and lightship appeal to the interests and better instincts of man,” he argued, “because they are symbolic of never-ceasing watchfulness, of steadfast endurance in every exposure, of widespread helpfulness.”

  After participating in the Overland Relief Expedition in Alaska, the square-jawed, bald, and ruggedly handsome Ellsworth Bertholf traveled in Siberia and commanded the Bear on Bering Sea patrol before being appointed head of the Revenue Cutter Service. Raised in New York City, a graduate of the Revenue Cutter School of Instruction, he was also the the service’s first officer to attend the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. This was at a time when the work of one of its faculty, Capt. Alfred Thayer Mahan, was electrifying the Navy and the nation. In his book The Influence of Sea Power Upon History (1890), Mahan rejected the naval traditions of commerce raiding and brown-water coastal defense as less than worthy of a great power. America’s navy, he argued, should be a blue-water force able to engage foreign fleets in direct battle. Bertholf couldn’t have failed to notice how this might leave the role of coastal patrol and defense in the hands of the Revenue Cutter Service.

  Ironically, his service almost fell victim to the Progressive movement. At the beginning of 1912, President Taft’s Commission on Economy and Efficiency recommended the service be abolished and its missions and vessels be distributed to other agencies for a savings of at least a million dollars a year. Whether this would have come to pass and the Coast Guard never come into being cannot be known. What is known is that the Revenue Cutter Service was rescued by yet another famous tragedy.

  On April 14, 1912, nine days after President Taft sent his commission’s report to Congress, urging its recommendations be enacted, the White Star liner Titanic, owned by American industrialist J. P. Morgan, hit an iceberg in the North Atlantic and sank with the loss of some 1,500 lives among its 2,224 passengers. As survivors reached New York on April 18, more than forty thousand people jammed the city’s docks to witness their arrival. They were swarmed by press and newsreel photographers, their faces splashed across newspapers and later appearing in “flickers”—movies—across the nation.

  Follow-up investigations and hearings into the tragedy, led by Progressive Senator Robert La Follette, among others, resulted in a number of changes in maritime practice, including mandated lifeboat space for every passenger on a ship, regular evacuation drills, better lookout systems, twenty-four-hour radio watches, and the establishment of the International Ice Patrol.

  In the immediate wake of the tragedy, the Navy sent two cruisers to patrol the Grand Banks of the North Atlantic to look out for icebergs and warn off shipping but also made it clear it didn’t have the vessels to spare for this type of work. The Revenue Cutter Service, with its vast experience in the ice floes of Alaska, quickly stepped forward to take on this new role, beginning in 1913. Today the Coast Guard continues the Ice Patrol using C-130 aircraft, although in the near future it may rely solely on remote sensing satellites to watch the drifting bergs.

  President Taft’s secretary of the treasury, Franklin MacVeagh, fighting to defend his turf, which included the Revenue Cutter Service, recommended Captain Bertholf and Sumner Kimball work together on a proposal to combine it with the Life-Saving Service into a new more efficient service. The seventy-eight-year-old Kimball and forty-six-year-old Bertholf proved a good team, drafting a workable proposal for a hybrid new agency, the type of multifaceted maritime operator Alexander Hamilton would have approved of.

  After Woodrow Wilson was elected president in 1912, the merger proposal was sent to Congress, where it found great favor. The Senate adopted it on March 12, 1914. With encouragement from President Wilson, the House voted for it 212 to 79 on January 20, 1915. On January 28, President Wilson signed the Act to Create the Coast Guard into law. It would “constitute a part of the military forces of the United States . . . under the Treasury Department in time of peace and operate as a part of the Navy, subject to the orders of the Secretary of the Navy, in time of war or when the President shall so direct.”

  For the civilian-oriented Life-Saving Service, this would prove more of a stretch than for the already militarized Revenue Cutter Service. It would take some years for the two cultures of lifesaving and law enforcement to t
ruly merge, if in fact they ever have. Meanwhile President Wilson named Ellsworth Bertholf as captain-commandant of the Coast Guard, a position he would serve in until his retirement in 1919.

  Seven weeks after Wilson established the new agency, just before dawn on March 17, 1915, the three-masted schooner Silvia C. Hall, carrying a load of cypress logs from Florida to New York, wrecked on Cape Shoals, North Carolina.

  As waves began breaking over the ship, a crew from Station Cape Lookout, under the command of keeper Fred Gillikin, ran the half mile to their new 36-foot motor surfboat. The foundering ship was too far offshore for a line shot, so they launched into stormy twenty-foot seas in below freezing temperatures and better than forty-knot winds.

  After several hours, they were able to maneuver close in to the wreck. Then a couple of waves broke over the surfboat, flooding its engine and injuring one of Gillikin’s men. After pulling into deeper water and trying to out-wait the storm, they were forced to head back into shore.

  Returning before dawn on the eighteenth, they used the motorboat to tow a 26-foot surfboat closer in to the battered schooner. A team of surfmen then rowed through the outer break. Amid piles of floating wreckage, they were able to get two of the survivors on board the ship to rig a line to the jib boom and then slide down to the surfboat. Only after they’d pulled away were they told there were three more men still aboard. Less than happy with this news, the surfmen took another run through the breakers and debris, back to what was left of the schooner, where they retrieved the last of the Silvia C. Hall’s crew.

  As the motor lifeboat towed the rescue boat, surfmen, and survivors toward shore, a crowd of fishermen and townspeople who were gathered on the beach let out a mighty cheer. The U.S. Coast Guard had carried out its first major operation. Its greatness and its story were only just beginning.

  CHAPTER 4

  Calling All Boats

  “With oceans to the east and west and friendly neighbors to the

  north and south, the United States has been untrammeled by enemy boots

  on our ground. Those carefree days are now over.”

  —FORMER COAST GUARD CDR. STEVE FLYNN, AMERICA THE VULNERABLE

  “Most of our talk and everything now is homeland security. It’s kind of

  become an industry, really.”

  —SENIOR CHIEF ROSS FOWLE, COAST GUARD CUTTER LINE

  History has a tendency to come up and bite you when you’re least expecting it. Coast Guard Station Battery Park at the foot of Manhattan is a three-story brick and faded blue Kleenex box of a building that inspires shivers of disdain from the area’s historic restoration crowd, though Robert Moses would have liked it. It houses the Regional Examination Center (the Coast Guard acts as a salty DMV, licensing merchant sailors), the bridge inspection program, and Sector New York’s public affairs office, among others.

  Public Affairs Chief Petty Officer Brandon Brewer went up on its roof on a bright September morning in 2001 right after he heard that an airplane had struck the World Trade Center a few blocks away.

  “There wasn’t a lot of smoke at that point. There was some papers and debris floating down from the top of the building, and then we heard this really loud noise, so we turn around and this airplane flies right by us so close we could see people in the windows. It flies up through this canyon of buildings, and I’m thinking it’s coming in to take a closer look, and I’m thinking this guy is cutting it awful close, and it doesn’t click for me what is going to happen, and then we see it hit. It seemed to take place in slow motion from when the nose of the plane hit the tower to when it exploded and you realize people and their things are now exploding out of the tower.”

  Just off Governors Island, Petty Officer Carlos Perez was at the helm of a 41-foot utility boat sent from Staten Island to check out the initial report of an airplane hitting the World Trade Center when that second hijacked plane, United Flight 175, flew directly over him. He looked up at its aluminum underbelly and watched it fly into the South Tower and the giant orange fireball that followed. He thought it was like something from a Steven Spielberg movie. He then took his boat closer in to Battery Park and watched through his binoculars as people on the upper floors of the towers began jumping to their deaths.

  At Cape Cod Air Station in Massachusetts, CO Capt. Richard Yatto watched the second plane strike the South Tower on TV and knew America was under attack. He also remembered a hotel fire in San Juan, Puerto Rico, where people had been trapped on the roof and couldn’t get off. At full speed it would take his HH-60 helicopters about an hour to reach New York. He told his operations officer to call the district command in Boston for permission to launch two birds. By now F-15 fighter jets were screaming off the tarmac of the adjacent Otis Air National Guard base, their afterburners blazing like dragon tails. When he couldn’t get clear directions from Boston, Yatto cursed and ordered the helicopters launched on his own authority. They headed south at over 150 knots.

  As the lead helicopter reached Long Island Sound, its crew tuned in to emergency radio channels and heard that the South Tower had just collapsed. They were continuing toward the North Tower when New York air traffic controllers ordered them to land immediately.

  “We’re the rescue helicopter!” one of the pilots argued. They were told Air Force F-15s were clearing the skies over Manhattan and would shoot down anyone they encountered. After some more arguing, the Coast Guard helicopters landed at Gabreski Airport on Long Island. Their pilots went to the control facility to get on the radio and keep arguing. There they saw the North Tower burning on TV. A few minutes later it collapsed. The crews and their CO, Richard Yatto, believe they could have saved a number of lives if they’d been allowed to proceed on to the roof of the North Tower that morning.

  The Coast Guard Captain of the Port of New York, Adm. Richard E. Bennis, was at his doctor’s office that morning for a follow-up exam after brain surgery. In his absence his deputy ordered the harbor closed to all vessel traffic at 9:10 A.M., seven minutes after the second plane struck. Coast Guard boats loaded with armed responders were launched from Staten Island, from Rockaway, Queens, and from Sandy Hook, New Jersey. They were well positioned to secure the city’s borders. New York is a maritime town, and 80 percent of the city is separated from the U.S. mainland by bodies of water.

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  n Washington, DC, Coast Guard vessels closed down the Potomac following Al Qaeda’s attack on the Pentagon, where the Navy Command Center, overseen by Coast Guard Adm. Jeffrey Hathaway, was destroyed, killing forty-two people, twenty-seven under his direct command. In Boston Harbor, they refused to let an LNG tanker dock for fear it might be used as a weapon of mass destruction. In LA, Houston, Seattle, and San Francisco, Port Security Units made up of Coast Guard reservists with M-60 machine guns took to the waters on highly maneuverable 25-foot Boston Whalers. In Virginia, half a dozen 38-foot 65-knot antidrug raider boats were taken out of their winterized plastic wrap and placed on trailers and were on New York’s waterways by the next morning, as was a larger cutter, the Bainbridge Island, flying an oversized American flag as its battle ensign.

  On maps showing the location of Coast Guard cutters on September 10 and September 12, you see what looks like a belt being cinched tight around the continental United States as the service quickly shifted from a peacetime to a wartime footing.

  After contacting his boss, the secretary of transportation, and asking for permission to mobilize five thousand reservists, Coast Guard Commandant James Loy received an unusual call from the chief of naval operations asking what the Navy could do to assist the Coast Guard. It was decided that placing Coast Guard cutters in New York Harbor would reassure the public in a way that putting Navy ships of war there would not.

  During those first minutes and hours of 9/11, the Coast Guard’s surge response depended largely on the bottom-up capabilities and top-down trust of its people in the field and on the water.

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  uartermaster Bruce Dickinson, in addition to
working at Battery Park Station, was also a volunteer fireman. As soon as the first plane struck, he ran the six blocks to the towers and worked with firefighting crews until the building fell. Barely escaping with his life, he headed back to the water and got on board the Coast Guard Cutter Hawser, a 65-foot tug that was the first command vessel on scene. From there he helped evacuate civilians, transport emergency workers, and direct water traffic. He then transferred to his old patrol boat, the Adak, to do armed security work.

  September 11 was Lt. Rob Mutto’s first day as an accident investigator on Staten Island. After the second plane hit the towers, he directed people and vehicles to the Staten Island Ferry at the St. George Terminal. “We inspected the ferryboat and took it across with a fire brigade aboard. As the first tower collapsed, this cloud enveloped the upper bay, and the ferry entered the cloud and the captain had to use his radar to land. We got off at Old Whitehall Terminal, and everything looked like ash, like a volcano had gone off.”

  By now thousands of people were swarming the Battery to escape the collapsing towers and their choking dust clouds.

  “I was looking out the front window and watching this cloud coming down and saw this couple with two small children go between these cars, and they huddled over the children as the dust caught up to them. We got them inside, and they turned out to be German tourists,” recalls Herb Haeger, an older Coast Guard Auxiliary volunteer who was working at the station that morning. “One of our admirals [retired Adm. Richard Larrabee, who escaped from the sixty-second floor of the North Tower and went to the Marriott Hotel just as the tower fell on top of it] was let into the building covered in white. It was like it had been snowing. You couldn’t even recognize him.”