On Feb. 18, 1952, at about five in the morning, a 500-foot tank vessel named the Pendleton broke in half off the shores of Chatham, buffeted by reported 60-foot waves and 70-knot winds. The captain and seven crew members died when the ship’s bow broke off and sank. Thirty-three survivors clung to the wreckage of the stern section, praying for a rescue but realizing, with a sense of dread, that they had failed to get a mayday call out in time.
Ten hours later, the Coast Guard station at Chatham noticed two radar blips about five miles offshore. Almost immediately, Webber and a three-man all-volunteer crew began rushing to the scene; they were given a wooden motorized boat and not much else.
The boat, emblazoned with the moniker CG36500, was just 12 yards long and already had four men on board; the likelihood that Webber and his team would find the precise location of the radar blips in such insane weather, that they could rescue anyone off a floating piece of wreckage, and that they could make it home safely was almost impossibly low. A friend of Webber’s called out to him as he was trying to get past the breakers: “You guys better get lost before you get too far out.’’ The implication was clear: Nobody would condemn them for hiding out a few days, feigning an attempted rescue, but coming home alive.
All but one of the 33 remaining members of the Pendleton crew made it home. Webber’s rescue was more of a dance than anything else: one by one, men worked their way down a Jacob’s ladder over the heaving piece of hull as Webber timed the rise and fall of the waves, ensuring he didn’t bash his boat straight into the wreck of the Pendleton as he prepared to take another man aboard. Then Webber would pull back, time the waves again, and come back in to get the next man.
