Rescue Warriors

by David Helvarg

  “There was a helicopter on scene, but we couldn’t get him up into the basket in those conditions, so we took the boat back to Tillamook and had an ambulance waiting and when they were taken off in the ambulance I went to the locker room and—it was such an adrenaline thing, I think—I started just crying.

  “Later the father was released from the hospital and thanked us, and he broke down crying, thanking us for saving his son. I felt bad that maybe if we’d been there five minutes sooner we could have also saved his dad, who went under, but you can only do what you can.

  “It was pretty strange. The other time I sort of heard that voice was a few years later. We had these divers go missing southwest of Tillamook by the Netarts River in Netarts Bay, and we kept updating Tillamook but couldn’t find them, and it was getting dark, and we were told to return to station. We were heading back in another 30-footer and something told me, something said to turn back around, to look one more time because they were there. I went back, and the station calls for our location, and we say we’re heading back to Netarts. When we get there I tell the crew to turn off the engine and shut the boat down, and I start yelling and then hear people yelling back, ‘Yeah, we’re over here!’ There were the four of them bobbing at night off this rock, hundreds of feet offshore and not knowing where they were, out of air except for their buoyancy vests. So we pull them out, and we call back to station and say, ‘We’re heading back with four divers aboard,’ and I guess that’s the difference between being applauded and getting reprimanded is that we found them. It feels like I always get these things happening to me, though, that voice that told me to take that course or to turn back for those divers. Or maybe it’s just we have this messed-up gene that makes us who we are.”

  Everyone Volunteered

  If it’s a recessive gene, it could have been inherited from a host of earlier surfmen such as Joshua James, Rasmus Midgett, or Bernie Webber.

  Joshua James was called “the best-known lifesaver in the world,” during an era in which the Life-Saving Service rescued over 150,000 people.

  James was only ten in 1837 when he saw the schooner Hepzibah capsize, taking his mother and baby sister to their deaths. At fifteen he snuck aboard a Massachusetts Humane Society surfboat and helped rescue the crew of another stricken vessel, the Mohawk. He would spend much of his life as a mariner and volunteer lifesaver until, in 1876, the Humane Society appointed him full-time keeper of their lifeboats and mortar (line-throwing) station in Hull, Massachusetts. Among the countless daring rescues he carried out, one of his most famous occurred on the stormy days and nights of November 25 and 26, 1888, during which he braved blizzards, sleet, rain, and mountainous waves to lead his crew in the rescue of twenty-nine men from six different ships.

  It started on the afternoon of the twenty-fifth with the three-masted schooner Cox and Green trapped in the surf. James’s crew dragged a mortar and surfboat half a mile to the site. James fired the line to the ship and soon had rigged a breeches buoy that brought all nine crewmen safely ashore. Just as they were finishing that rescue, the schooner Gertrude Abbott slammed into the rocks a little farther up the beach in wild surf beyond range of the line-throwing mortar. James asked for volunteers to man the boat. Everyone volunteered, although the risk of a watery death was quite real. Several times their boat filled with seawater and was tossed back onto the beach before they were able to fight their way through the shorebreak. Finally they reached the bow of the ship, where eight sailors, timing themselves to the rising and falling of the waves, managed to jump into the rescue boat. Heavily overloaded, the boat hit a rock and nearly capsized two hundred yards offshore. Approaching the beach, a giant wave took the boat “over the falls,” smashing it to pieces on the cobble shore. Amazingly, everyone escaped injury. It was now nine at night. Shocked, exhausted, and hypothermic, James and his men continued their beach patrol.

  At 3:00 A.M., another schooner, the Bertha F. Walker, grounded in the surf. Horses and volunteers dragged a new surfboat to the site of the wreck from a station four miles away. James, at the sweep oar, led his crew in the rescue of the seven sailors aboard. The captain and another crewman had earlier been swept away. As they were bringing the survivors ashore, a man on horseback brought them the less than thrilling news that two more ships were in distress five miles down the beach. By the time they’d dragged their boat to this next scene, two other rescue crews had managed to foul their shot lines in the rigging of the schooner H. C. Higginson. James’s crew silently launched their boat, only to be driven back ashore forty-five minutes later holed in two places. After patching their ruptured boat they launched again, almost flipping over backward off the near-vertical faces of the waves.

  The crew of the Higginson had been lashed to the rigging for fourteen hours and could barely move by the time Joshua James and his crew reached them. They had to pry their hands free of the wooden masts and spars before returning them to the small rescue boat and bringing them back through the crashing surf safely to shore. The other wrecked ship was stranded high enough aground not to need their help. Still, on the long march back to Hull, James and his crew had to launch their boat yet again to pull two salvagers off the grounded brigantine Alice that had slipped its moorings in Gloucester the day before. James and his men would be awarded Gold Lifesaving Medals for their work and also allowed to sleep in the next day.

  Sumner Kimball waived the retirement age requirement in order to let Joshua James become keeper of the Point Allerton Life-Saving Station in Hull at the age of sixty-two. In 1898, at seventy-two, he led Humane Society and Life-Saving crews in the rescue of twenty men from four ships during the famous “Portland Gale” that took five hundred lives. In 1901, just before turning seventy-five, the white-bearded waterman won admiring praise from the Boston Globe for passing the service’s rigorous physical exam with better scores than the twenty- and thirty-year-olds under his command.

  The following year, panicked merchant sailors and big seas led to the loss of a crew from the Monomoy Point Life-Saving Station on Cape Cod. Determined not to see anything like that happen at Hull, Joshua James assembled his crew for a boat drill off Stony Beach across from the Allerton station.

  After an hour’s workout in rolling, windy seas, he directed them back to the beach. Stepping onto the wet sand, he looked once again out to sea. “The tide is ebbing,” he noted, then fell dead upon the shore, a fitting ending to a legendary life.

  A

  t dawn on August 18, 1899, Surfman Rasmus Midgett carried out one of the more extraordinary rescues in the annals of Coast Guard lifesaving. During a wild hurricane with howling 100 mph winds, the barkentine Priscilla grounded and broke in two three miles south of the Gull Shoal Life-Saving Station on North Carolina’s Outer Banks. Surfman Midgett was on a sand-blown beach patrol that he’d begun in the dark when he spotted flotsam in the water and then heard cries of distress from somewhere beyond the thundering surf. Looking out across the breakers, he saw a group of men clinging to the wreckage of the Priscilla. He decided there was no time to make the three-mile trek back to the station. He’d have to save them himself.

  Timing the lulls between the big whitewater breakers, he waded into the ocean close enough to the wreckage to where he could shout orders to the men. He had them jump into the water and then dragged them back through the thundering surf to the beach. This worked for the first seven men, but three of them were too weak to get off what was left of their ship. Struggling to its side, he hoisted himself aboard, lay exhausted on the buckling deck for a time, then threw the first sailor over his shoulder, dropped back into the sea, and carried him to shore through the pounding surf, ducking under crashing torrents of water. He repeated this effort two more times until all ten men were safe upon the beach. For his morning’s work he received the Gold Lifesaving Medal.

  Rasmus was part of a long-established family of Outer Banks mariners, pirates, and fishermen, more than 150 of whom would go on to become lifesavers and Coast Guardsmen. />
  On August 16, 1918, other members of his family would win Gold Lifesaving Medals. That day, Chicamacomico Lifeboat Station Keeper John Allen Midgett heard a powerful explosion and spotted the British tanker Mirlo sinking after being hit by a German U-boat torpedo. He and his crew spent almost seven hours battling heavy surf and burning oil to pluck dozens of survivors from the sea. Five of the six-man rescue crew with him that day were named Midgett.

  “Back then, there wasn’t much to do down here,” one of the family later explained. “You could either set around and fish, or you could go out and save lives. The Midgetts chose to save lives.” Today, in keeping with the changing tides of history, a couple of Midgett brothers have become Outer Banks real estate brokers.

  Y

  et another hero of the Coast Guard, and model for its “act first, call me later” management style, was Bosun’s Mate First Class Bernie Webber.

  At 5:30 A.M. on February 18, 1952, during a wild nor’easter with billowing snow and up to sixty-foot seas, the crew of the 503-foot-long T-2 tanker Pendleton, heading south off the tip of Cape Cod, heard the explosive crackling noise of rivets coming undone like a giant zipper. Their ship, loaded with 122,000 barrels of kerosene and heating oil, lurched suddenly before breaking in two. The bow section, with the captain and seven others aboard, floated off into the night. The stern section, with thirty-two men on board, also stayed afloat, its lights, machinery, and rudder control still functioning. No one had had time to radio an SOS. Now the bow had the radio, and the stern the power to operate it. Strangely, the Pendleton wasn’t the only World War II–built T-2 tanker to break apart off Cape Cod that night.

  In the morning, the Coast Guard surf station at Chatham, Massachusetts, got word that a ship, the Fort Mercer, had broken in two and launched a 36-foot motor lifeboat to join two larger cutters and Coast Guard aircraft searching for it. Then word came that half a ship was drifting off of Orleans, more than twenty miles from the reported breakup of the Fort Mercer. An experimental radar system at Chatham confirmed two targets that would later be identified as the bow and stern sections of the Pendleton. Twenty-four-year-old Bernie Webber was ordered to sea that night with a volunteer crew of three.

  As they took off from the harbor into the dark, storm-tossed night, his crew began singing “Rock of Ages.” Then they hit the thundering sandbar, and a wave tossed their 36-foot lifeboat into the air before it crashed down into the trough. The next wave broke over them, smashing their windshield and compass and soaking them in freezing seawater. They were then knocked down, and the motor stalled, but the engineer was able to get it started again. By now they were beyond the bar, climbing mountainous waves and surfing down their back sides, reversing power to keep from fishtailing out of control.

  No one was sure where they were. Then something large loomed out of the night ahead of them. Their searchlight illuminated the black, gaping interior maw of the Pendleton’s exposed stern section, groaning weirdly as it rocked through the waves, heaving up and then settling down in a “frothing mass of foam,” as Webber later described it.

  They spent the next forty-five minutes maneuvering along the port side of the stern section, seeing no signs of life. As they rounded the stern, lights appeared on the deck and a crewman far above began waving frantically. Soon the rail was lined with people. Webber thought they looked a lot safer than he felt. Then a Jacob’s ladder dropped down the side of the ship, shocking Webber into a “Good Lord!” as he realized they wanted to get onto his small rescue boat. The first sailor down the ladder got dunked in the sea and then, still hanging on to the ladder, shot up fifty feet as the half-ship rolled with the heavy seas. Webber timed his boat’s position with the waves. Coming in close, he saw that same sailor drop hard onto his deck, then backed the 36-footer away to avoid having it smashed against the ship with the next wave. He kept repeating this maneuver, even as the sailors on the rope and wood ladder swung free and were smacked back against the side of the ship with each rolling wave.

  Soon the lifeboat was filled up, its freeboard sinking toward the waterline, but Webber decided he’d have to take all the survivors aboard to avoid panic and death. Five missed the boat, falling into the sea, where Webber’s crew hauled them out like tuna. The last man down the ladder was the ship’s 350-pound cook, George “Tiny” Myers. He jumped too soon, missed the boat and, after going under, surfaced by the stern, clinging to one of the eleven-foot propeller blades. Easing toward him, Webber’s boat was picked up by a giant wave. The young boatswain tried to back the engine off, but to little effect, as the rescue boat smashed Myers hard against the Pendleton. When the next wave drove the motor lifeboat away, Myers was dead. A few moments later, the entire stern section of the Pendleton rose up and rolled over.

  Now Webber and his heavily overloaded lifeboat, with thirty-six men crammed in every space, including the engine compartment, had to find a way back to shore. He got on the radio, and “every cutter within earshot had orders for me, wanting me to deliver my cargo out to them no matter where they were,” he later explained to maritime author Dennis Noble. He heard “arguments going on between units as to what we should do, and in typical government service fashion, who was responsible for what and who outranked whom.” He reached over and turned off the radio, thus ensuring his immortality among the enlisted ranks and all those who trust on-scene initiative now and forever.

  He told his crew and the Pendleton sailors he was heading toward land and planned to ground the boat on the nearest protected beach he could find. They all agreed to his plan.

  Despite a following sea that kept breaking over them so that they were often chest deep in icy seawater, he actually managed to bring his “cargo” safely back into Chatham Harbor, an amazing feat of seamanship.

  A cutter and a second boat reached the bow of the Pendleton later that night. One sailor jumped off but was not recovered. No other signs of life were seen. Later a body would be removed from the bow. The next day, four survivors were rescued from the bow of the Fort Mercer and twenty-one more from its stern, with thirteen others electing to stay aboard while it was towed into port. In total seventy-one people were saved and six lives lost between the two tankers, including Tiny Myers, whose death would haunt Bernie Webber for the rest of his life. Bernie and his three crewmen were all awarded Gold Lifesaving Medals.

  Station Golden Gate

  “You should have been here this morning!” Chief Kevin Morgan tells me as I arrive at Surf Station Golden Gate just below the famous bridge. “We had fourteen- to sixteen-foot waves outside the Gate. We broke the windshield on the flying bridge on one of the 47s. We had both of them in the surf zone off Ocean Beach to see if we could hook a towline in theory, but . . .” He grins. They weren’t training so much as surviving and having a great time of it.

  I’d spent the morning touring the Coast Guard’s Pacific Strike Team at some old airplane hangars in suburban Novato. I got to see lots of trailers and oil containment booms, plus big eighteen-wheelers (the Coast Guard has a squadron of licensed commercial truckers) loaded with safety gear and ready to respond to any spill or disaster. They even gave me my own copy of the U.S. Coast Guard Incident Management Handbook. Still, I’m beginning to feel like the gods of big surf have turned against me.

  Station Golden Gate is located in a red-roofed, two-story yellow wooden building at Fort Baker on the Marin headlands, a short jog around Horseshoe Cove from their boathouse with its three 47s and two 25-footers. It’s the busiest search and rescue unit on the West Coast, with some six hundred cases a year and a crew of fifty-four, including eight surfmen. In the hallway I’m greeted by a golden retriever named Wallace and a four-month-old black Lab pup named Sierra, the station mascot.

  There’s a map on the hallway wall of San Francisco Bay, the Golden Gate Bridge, and the Pacific with color-coded stickpins for different responses. Crossing the Gate it’s thick with black pins—suicide jumpers. Along Crissy Field just inside the bay is an even larger clump of pink
pins—wind- and kite-surfers who get in trouble and have to be rescued before the tide drags them out to sea. Fewer and more scattered are other colored pins, including green for disabled vessels and blue for “taking on water/capsized,” some of which are stuck in the turbulent “Potato Patch” that stretches several miles offshore.

  “Don’t talk about the bridge jumpers, that’s the guidelines,” Chief Morgan informs me, as has the district public affairs officer.

  “Because there are so many?”

  “It happens something like thirty to forty times a year. We pull up [about] half, and that sucks. You have to recover and do CPR on them, but survivors are few and far between [which is why they call the litter they use for recoveries the “dead sled”]. It [the Golden Gate Bridge] is 220 feet high, like jumping off a twenty-two-story building, and the same as hitting cement. We’ve had two people live I know of. One kid was seventeen or eighteen. One of our station guys saw it [the jump] driving home over the bridge. Usually someone sees it and calls the bridge sergeant on an emergency phone and then he calls us, but our guy got on his cell and called us, and we were already under way a half mile from there, and the kid landed next to an ER doc who was surfing off Fort Point and who dragged him on his board. He started CPR, and we were there in a minute and pulled the kid and the ER doc aboard, and again, just this amazing alignment, there was a Highway Patrol helicopter passing over, and the helo came down and landed on the parade field, and that young guy was probably in the ER five minutes after he jumped. The second one who survived had a broken arm. He was messed up, but that was basically it.”