Disney Puts the Coast Guard's Finest Hours On Screen

This month, Disney Pictures is releasing a dramatization of the loss of the Pendleton, “The Finest Hours,” memorializing one of the brightest moments in the history of search and rescue.

Recreating the disaster and the heroic lifesaving effort that followed was a long undertaking for director Craig Gillespie, with 1,000 CGI shots, a year of post-production, a floodable mock-up of the Pendleton's engine room and an 800,000 gallon wave tank, in addition to months of filming in cold and wet conditions. The movie is based on Michael J. Tougias and Casey Sherman's 2009 book of the same name, and reviewers suggest that it will give a close reenactment of historical events.

In a gale the early hours of February 18, 1952, the T2 tanker Pendleton snapped in half amidships and separated off Cape Cod, Massachusetts, leaving deck house and engine room separated by ever-higher seas. The generators were astern and the bow section lost power, leaving her crew without a way to radio a mayday. The two halves drifted apart.

The crew on the bow all perished, but the crew on the stern section, led by Chief Engineer Raymond Sybert, were still afloat, and by afternoon they could see the shore.

At Chatham Lifeboat Station, the nearest Coast Guard detachment, the officer in charge ordered serviceman Bernard Webber to pick a crew and take a 36-foot wooden motorized lifeboat across the bar and out onto the seas to rescue the crew of the Pendleton. Coast Guard history records 60 foot seas and 70 knots of wind. Webber knew the risks, but he selected a crew of three, crossed the bar and maneuvered skillfully to the Pendleton despite rolling over and losing propulsion several times.

On arriving at the Pendleton's stern, Webber said that he envied the men on the “inviting” hulk as having the better ship for the weather. Despite the limitations of his small boat, the high seas and the severe rolling of the wrecked tanker, he and his crew took 32 of the 33 survivors aboard. The stern capsized shortly thereafter.

Webber and his crew were awarded a Gold Lifesaving Medal for “extreme and heroic daring” in the rescue.

Over five hundred of the 16,000 dwt T2s were built during World War II, with construction times measured in weeks from keel to commissioning. More than a few suffered the same fate as the Pendleton – hull fracture amidships – and authorities eventually concluded that the problem lay in the steel used in their construction, which could become brittle and crack in cold conditions.

The T2 Fort Mercer had the same broken hull in the same storm as the Pendleton, leaving four tanker halves for the Coast Guard to locate on the same day (and leading to some confusion when rescuers misidentified the bow of the Pendleton as the Fort Mercer).

Fort Mercer would later be rebuilt with a new bow section, twice, first as the San Jacinto, which broke in half in an explosion in 1964, and again as the Pasadena. The T2 Schenectady cracked in half at the pier just after sea trials, right through the keel; and the Sackett's Harbor is said to have cracked twice, once in Australia and again off Adak, the second time all the way, leading to the legend of a most unusual self-rescue.

Disney's “The Finest Hours” will be in wide release January 29.