The real story behind 'Finest Hours'

The new film “The Finest Hours" is closely based on a real-life rescue that took place at sea in February 1952.

During a storm at least as extreme as the nor’easter immortalized in “The Perfect Storm” (2000), two oil tankers broke apart off the coast of Cape Cod. The ships — hastily built of inferior metal during World War II — were sometimes known as “serial sinkers,” given their tendency to snap in half during cold weather.

One of the broken ships, the Pendleton, drifted perilously close to the shoals off Chatham, Mass. The captain and seven others in the bow were lost, but the 33 sailors trapped aft — with electric power for a while — navigated until the hull began flooding and they drifted so close to shore that the ship could be seen from the beach.

All of the available cutters were busily trying to rescue the other tanker, so, in the falling darkness, the Coast Guard sent a 36-foot wooden motor lifeboat with just four young crewmen.

That the little boat — with the utilitarian name CG36500: “CG” for Coast Guard, “36” for the length, “500” for a serial number — reached the Pendleton, let alone back with all but one of the 33 stranded sailors, remains a source of wonder to naval historians, who consider the event the greatest small-boat rescue.

Snow was driving almost horizontally, with the visibility poor, and waves were cresting at close to 70 feet.

Across the Chatham shoal bar, the CG36 rolled over twice and its compass and windshield were smashed. The engine stalled several times; the youngest crewman, Andy Fitzgerald, crawled into the compartment for a re-priming, becoming severely burned in the process.

Everyone associated with the rescue later credited the helmsmanship of skipper Bernie Webber for keeping the lifeboat from being swamped.

As the Pendleton crew members, in sight of the rescuers, started clambering down a rope ladder and jumping off the deck about 70 feet into the sea, Webber decided to pick up all of them — even though the CG36, with an official capacity of only 12, would be wallowing up to the gunwales. He didn’t think he could maneuver over the shoal bar and back out a second time.

The rescuers, especially Webber, didn’t feel comfortable with the notion of themselves as heroes. They saw themselves as simply earnest young men grateful to be employed — even in hard, dangerous jobs — at a time when work wasn’t easily found in postwar New England.

The understated quality of the story is what appealed to Walt Disney Studios, producer of “The Finest Hours.”

The film, opening today in theaters nationwide, takes its title from a history of the rescue by Casey Sherman and Michael J. Tougias.

The director, Craig Gillespie, has said he spent more than a year in postproduction, far longer than he expected, and needed almost 1,000 special-effects shots to create the waves. The overall budget: about $80 million.

The movie — starring Chris Pine as Bernie Webber and Casey Affleck as a Pendleton engineer who reluctantly takes command of the aft section — was filmed mostly in the fall of 2014 on a soundstage at the former Fore River Shipyard in Quincy, Mass.

Production assistants scuttled back and forth on scooters and bicycles across the vast space, whose 800,000-gallon tank relied on wave and wind machines, and what amounted to a giant, ceiling-mounted shower head. A dry-land replica of the CG36 was mounted on gimbals so that it could roll and plunge, and another replica floated in the tank along with a full-size, tiltable mock-up of the Pendleton hull.

A replica of the Pendleton engine room — floodable, hydraulically shakable and exact down to the grime on the gauges and rust on the pipes — lay only a short hike away, as did a mock-up of Coast Guard Station Chatham, dusted with unmelting artificial snow.

Much of the shoot required that the actors look cold and wet — not hard to achieve. For some scenes, they were soaked with a hose even before the overhead shower was turned on.

Most wore wet suits under their costumes and, between takes, wrapped themselves in sweatsuits and stuck their feet in Ugg boots.

Three of the four Coast Guard crewmen — Webber, Ervin Maske and Richard Livesey — have died.

Fitzgerald visited the set one day in September 2014 — as did Mel Gouthro, who, because of an illness, was replaced by Fitzgerald that February night.

“I was glad for the chance,” said Fitzgerald, white-haired and in his mid-80s.

“I was third-class, and, most of the time, all I got to do was paint the bottom.”

Together with their wives, the two men watched the filming on a video screen while seated on director’s chairs in a small tented area with a heater. They seemed interested but not overwhelmed to see their former lives re-enacted.

“We were cold and miserable, but we weren’t afraid,” Fitzgerald said. “We couldn’t really see the waves. We had complete confidence in that boat and in Bernie. We didn’t think of it as a suicide mission; it was just a job we had to do. I never thought of it as a big deal.”

He paused.

“My wife didn’t even know about it,” he said. “I didn’t tell her until we had been married for about three years.

"I don’t know why — I guess because she never asked.”