Len Whitmore was already exhausted when he reported for duty in the radio room of the Coast Guard ice breaker Eastwind at 8 a.m. on Feb. 18, 1952.
The Eastwind had been at sea off Cape Cod for three days in stormy weather, searching for a missing fishing boat.
"Everybody was seasick and banged up," Whitmore, of Newburyport, recalled. It was so rough, the cook couldn't prepare food and the crew members couldn't sleep because of the violent rocking.
As soon as he went on watch, Whitmore received an SOS call — not from the fishing vessel, but from an oil tanker called the Fort Mercer. The ship was breaking up in the pounding seas.
Whitmore relayed the message to the Eastwind's bridge, and the 300-foot-long ice breaker headed for the Fort Mercer.
The 19-year-old descendant of Newburyport shipbuilders and privateers didn't know it at the time, but he had just launched one of the largest and most dramatic rescues in the history of the Coast Guard.
Fast forward to 2004. Franklin-based writer Michael Tougias was doing research for a book called "Fatal Forecast" about a 1980 storm at sea when he came upon a Coast Guard casualty report about the Fort Mercer incident.
Tougias read the report with a growing level of astonishment.
"I was just shocked," he said.
He was stunned, not only by the magnitude of the rescue operation, but that somehow it had been lost to history, memorialized only by an obscure Coast Guard report.
It turned out that not one but two oil tankers were in trouble in the howling storm that day, threatening the lives of no fewer than 84 crew members.
While the Fort Mercer radioman was calling for help, another tanker, the Pendleton, was foundering in the seas that reached 60 to 70 feet. Both ships split in two, but the Pendleton's radio was disabled before it could send out a distress signal.
Coast Guard rescuers were unaware that they were dealing with two disabled vessels until a Coast Guard airplane flew over what the pilot believed was the Fort Mercer, although it was far from the location he had been told.
Flying closer, the pilot made out the name Pendleton.
"He said, 'Chief, this is unbelievable. We've got another one broken up,'" Whitmore said. "We knew nothing about the Pendleton. That was the shocker for us."
Some of the crew members of both ships were in the bow sections, others in the sterns.
Fourteen crew members on the two ships perished in the raging storm, but the Coast Guard managed, almost miraculously, to save 70 others.
The rescue of the crews of the Fort Mercer and the Pendleton became the basis for "The Finest Hours," by Tougias and co-author Casey Sherman. The book was published earlier this year by Scribner.
Subtitled "The true story of the U.S. Coast Guard's most daring sea rescue," much of the action is based on Whitmore's view of the events that unfolded 57 years ago: Feb. 18 and 19, 1952.
Tougias posted an appeal on a Coast Guard veterans Web site for eyewitnesses to the Fort Mercer/Pendleton rescue. The first reply he received was from Whitmore, the retired, former longtime owner of Newburyport's Montgomery Ward store.
"A good chunk of the story is told from Len's perspective," Tougias said. "Len's ship became a floating command post."
While the Eastwind steamed toward the Fort Mercer, Whitmore tried to boost the morale of his counterpart on the stricken tanker.
"I was saying things like, 'Keep your chin up, we'll be there,'" he recalled.
But at 11 a.m. — three hours after the initial SOS call — the Eastwind lost radio contact with the Fort Mercer.
The most dramatic event of the operation occurred not at the Fort Mercer, but at the Pendleton.
A Coast Guardsman named Bernie Webber and a crew of three managed to pull 32 survivors onto their 36-foot lifeboat, a vessel that was built to hold no more than 16 people.
Whitmore remembers the storm and the seas as the worst he had ever seen.
"I've been on the water a lot, and I never saw seas like that," he said. "I never saw anything like it before, and I never have since."
Whitmore spent a total of six years in the Coast Guard before coming ashore for good.
He and his wife owned and operated the Montgomery Ward store, first in Port Plaza and then in the Newport Plaza across Storey Avenue, until it closed in 1985. Now 77, he is retired and living in the James Steam Mill.
When Tougias discovered the record of the Fort Mercer/Pendleton rescue, he knew he wanted to tell the story. When he learned that Sherman was also working on a book about the rescue, the two decided to join forces.
The research took more than four years, in part because the events happened so long ago and the eyewitnesses were scattered, Tougias said.
He said he felt a sense of urgency about chronicling those two turbulent days, before the memories were lost to time.
"There was a ticking clock in the back of my head, the thought that the eyewitnesses weren't getting any younger," Tougias said. "Ten years from now, this story will be gone."
