THE FINEST HOURS (PT 1): THE COAST GUARD RESCUE THAT INSPIRED THE BOOK & MOVIE
1001 Heroes, Legends, Histories & Mysteries Podcast
Jon Hagadorn
4.5 • 1.7K Ratings
🗓️ 4 October 2020
⏱️ 44 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Part One- Saving the crew of the Pendleton- On February 17th, 1952, a wicked nor'easter tore through New England, leaving 42 deaths n its wake. The cyclone winds, driving snow and sleet, and 70 foot waves caused havoc off Cape Cod, causing two huge T-2 oil tankers to break in half- leaving over 80 crewmen and officers in all 4 ship sections at the mercy of the ocean. The US Coast Guard was alerted first to one of the ships, the Fort Mercer, and sent their cutters and lifeboats out in extremely dangerous waves to try to save any survivors. When the shocking news came that a second tanker had been broken in two- there was only one small lifeboat left to go after it- but first it had to survive what was known as the Chatham Bar- a shoal so dangerous that no one believed this boat would make it. But the unofficial motto of the Coast Guard was and is- "You have to go out there...you don't have to come back". And they went.
The Finest Hours is a 2016 American action thriller film[ directed by Craig Gillespie and produced by Walt Disney Pictures. The screenplay, written by Eric Johnson, Scott Silver, and Paul Tamasy, is based on The Finest Hours: The True Story of the U.S. Coast Guard's Most Daring Sea Rescue by Michael J. Tougias and Casey Sherman.[9] The film stars Chris Pine, Casey Affleck, Ben Foster, Holliday Grainger, John Ortiz, and Eric Bana, and chronicles the historic 1952 United States Coast Guard rescue of the crew of SS Pendleton, after the ship split apart during a nor'easter off the New England coast
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The Oh, Hello everyone. This is your host John Hagadorn and welcome to |
| 0:30.8 | 1,001 Heroes, Legends, Histories, and Mysteries Podcast. |
| 0:35.0 | Today's Story, The Pendleton Rescue of 1952, |
| 0:39.0 | the U.S. Coast Guard's Greatest Rescue. |
| 0:42.0 | The February 1952 Norreaster, the Coast Guard's greatest rescue. |
| 0:42.8 | The February 1952 Norreaster that hit New England was ranked as a category 1 on the Northeast |
| 0:48.2 | Snowfall impact scale and was accompanied by extremely high winds, which lasted for two full days, a long time for a winter hurricane, |
| 0:57.0 | causing untold damage to buildings, roadways, marinas, boats, and ships, and taking over 42 lives with it between February 17th |
| 1:06.6 | and 19th of that year. |
| 1:09.2 | The 1952 Nor'easter was actually an extra-tra-tra-tropical or mid-latitude cyclone, bought about by the weakening of the |
| 1:16.4 | west-to-east jet stream which dipped from the latitude of Boston to the latitude of Charleston |
| 1:21.8 | South Carolina, and then met with a low pressure |
| 1:24.7 | system which had formed over the Gulf. The meeting of the two caused an incredibly |
| 1:29.7 | dangerous storm which coalesced over Long Island and struck everything north of there in the next days. |
| 1:36.0 | In Maine alone, over 1,000 travelers became stranded on roadways. |
| 1:41.0 | Their cars becoming buried in deep drifts before they had a chance to get off the highways, |
| 1:45.7 | with some not being found for days. It was a blinding wind-driven, freezing hell on land. |
| 1:53.2 | In the ocean off Cape Cod, Massachusetts, all this was magnified by extremely high seas |
| 1:58.8 | that carried murderous 70-foot waves, whipped up by constantly increasing winds that reached hurricane |
| 2:04.6 | force in places. Thousands of stories of near-death experiences were to come out of |
| 2:09.6 | that storm and there were many heroes, police, rescue, and civilian, involved in saving lives, but none were as constantly busy and facing extreme danger for extended periods of time as the men of the United States Coast Guard. |
| 2:25.0 | In the harbors, where boats were ripped from their moorings, the Coast Guard worked tirelessly |
... |
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