The Coast Guard's "Finest Hours"

The Finest Hours, Walt Disney Studios, 2016. 

W. E. Smith, Editor, The Social Democrat

In February, 1952 an historic winter storm struck coastal New England. Snow accumulations in excess of two feet knocked out power and left hundreds of motorists stranded on roads across the region.

Off the coast conditions were no better. With raging winds whipping the Atlantic into mountainous waves, thickly falling snow reduced visibility to near nothing for mariners unlucky enough to be caught in the gale. Among them was the crew of the SS Pendleton, a 503-foot tanker carrying heating oil and kerosene from Baton Rouge to Boston. The ship had reached Boston Harbor on the evening of February 17, but unable to make out the Boston Light through the white-out, the Pendleton’s captain, veteran New England seafarer John Fitzgerald, ordered the ship back to sea to ride out the storm.

Near dawn the following morning, those of the Pendleton’s crew still in their bunks were jolted from sleep by a tumultuous roar, followed by a violent lurching of the gargantuan vessel. Under the battering force of the storm’s wave action, one of the welds holding together the massive steel plates of the ship’s hull had ruptured. More perilous, within minutes the giant tanker had split completely in two. Most of the ship’s crew—the ordinary seamen—were in the ship’s stern section. These watched helplessly as Captain Fitzgerald and the rest of the ship’s officers floated away into the storm on the severed bow.

The rescue of the Pendleton crew by four young Coast Guardsmen manning a 36-foot motorized lifeboat is considered the most remarkable small-boat rescue in Coast Guard history. With a striking degree of fidelity to the spirit of this extraordinary example of courage and self-sacrifice—making allowance for the usual Hollywood tropes—The Finest Hours, directed by Craig Gillespie, brilliantly immortalizes the stirring tale. The film features an excellent lead turn by Chris Pine (multiple Star Trek, Wonder Woman, Into the Woods) as well as fine and even riveting performances by the superb supporting cast.

At the heart of the action is soft-spoken minister’s son Bernie Webber (Pine), the 24-year-old boatswain’s mate who would command the lifesaving mission. In 1944, abandoning his father’s plans for a life in the ministry, Webber had joined the merchant marine and served on a tanker running fuel to American warships in the Pacific Theatre. After the war Webber joined the Coast Guard, and in 1952 he was posted to the Chatham Light Station on Cape Cod. By the time of the Pendleton disaster he had already seen considerable experience in the legendarily treacherous waters off the New England coast.

The film’s open finds Webber and his best friend Gus meeting two young women for a blind date. While the relationship of Webber and his real-life wife Miriam is partially fictionalized for the film, its inclusion adds a personal dimension that not only humanizes Webber, but lets us understand that when mariners risk their lives at sea, entire families and communities face the terrors with them. Webber’s reluctance at first to get to close to Miriam, we see, is driven by his fears of an early death on the water. But Miriam is persistent, and when the historic February storm comes to blanket New England with white, Webber and Miriam have become engaged to be married.

Celebration must wait, however, because the 32 crew members trapped on the Pendleton are in desperate straits, and Bernie Webber is tapped by the Chatham station’s commander to lead a crew into the raging ocean to save them. Three Coast Guard seamen, all younger than Webber, volunteer to accompany him: Richard Livesy, Andy Fitzgerald and Ervin Maske, the last of whom was just passing through Chatham en route to his normal assignment.

If facing 40 to 60-foot seas in a 36-foot boat were not daunting enough, Webber and his crew must first clear the notorious “Chatham Bar,” a field of shifting shoals across the Chatham Harbor where giant waves are generated by the meeting of incoming and outgoing tides. Treacherous enough even under normal seas, in the epic storm of February, 1952, the bar was all but impassible. What’s more, the Bernie Webber character is haunted by an incident the previous year, when during another storm he was unable to get over the bar in an attempt to rescue a stranded fishing crew. (This story is a fictionalized version of a real-life incident in which a small crew including Webber had tried unsuccessfully, capsizing multiple times in frigid winter waters, to reach a sinking fishing boat.) A side plot featuring lingering recrimination from the drowned men’s families is also an invention of the scriptwriters, but helps portray the terrible stakes involved. The beloved movie meme of the hero redeeming past failures with present courage, it must be admitted, adds totemic force to the story.

As Bernie and crew prepare to embark, the local salts who have gathered at the Coast Guard station to keep track of the ongoing drama at sea cast dubious glances, while others on the pier suggest that Bernie “get lost out there” rather than risk crossing the bar in such dangerous conditions. We are made to understand, that is, by those who best know the dangers of the Chatham Bar, that Bernie and crew are embarking on a suicide mission.

The film shifts continually between the rescue mobilization on land and the men aboard the stern section of the truncated Pendleton. Though their half of the boat is still seaworthy, it is taking on water at a rate with which the pumps cannot keep up. Character portrayals of key crew members—the jolly and rotund cook, actually true to life; the able and hardy merchant veteran Popo; the deep, silent ship’s engineer Sybert who must, in his steady efforts to keep what’s left of the Pendleton afloat, battle the hysteria and fears of the ship’s least-balanced crew members’—invest us in the fate of the trapped men. The efforts of the crew, led by the brainy but misunderstood Sybert, to steer the rump ship into a shoal to stabilize it, rigging an improvised rudder from a giant I-beam, as well as a near mutiny by hotheads who want to launch rowed lifeboats into the fatal waters, are entirely fiction. But the story-telling is superb, and the action keeps us engaged in the Pendleton crew’s struggles.

The Finest Hours is one on level simply a triumph of modern filmmaking technology. Aerial shots of the giant tanker floundering in the wash, with building-high waves cascading over its ruined decks, and especially the harrowing sequence during which Webber and company navigate the Chatham Bar through surf that a North Shore Oahu surfer would think more than twice about, are stunning in their realism. The stoic steadiness of Webber and his young crew as they face up to these dangers is both gripping and inspiring.  The original score, by Cohen brothers veteran composer Carter Burwell is by turns somber, ominous, elegiac or harrowing.

A spoiler alert is in order here, though having already called this the most remarkable small-boat rescue in Coast Guard history—not rescue attempt—we should not be giving too much away to say that Webber and his crew reached the Pendleton, although they lost their compass in the tumultuous crossing of the Chatham Bar and were flying blind. The rescue scene at the ship is white-knuckles again, as the crew members must leap from the ship’s high deck into the freezing waters in order to be plucked out by the boat’s crew.

The 36500 rescue boat commanded by Bernie Webber was designed to carry a maximum of 12 passengers. After Webber and crew had loaded all but six or eight of the Pendleton’s 32 men, with the rescue boat riding almost to its gunwales in the pitching waves, one of Webber’s crew suggests taking in the survivors already on board and coming back for the others. “The ship won’t last that long,” Webber replies, and after a moment of contemplation quietly announces, “We all live, or we all die.”

The spirit summed up in that moment gives the lie to those who claim—as do proponents of laissez-faire capitalism—that we are only motivated by self-interest, as does the outpouring of support from the townspeople, who wait around the docks for Webber and crew’s return, anxious for the safety of their neighbors. It is upon this simple fact of human nature—that we are tied to one another through indissoluble bonds of caring—that the practice of social democracy rests.

W. E. Smith