Feb. 18, 1952, remains the U.S. Coast Guard's greatest small boat rescue, epitomizing the service's unofficial motto: “You have to go out, but you don't have to come back.”

With two tankers foundering on a sandbar off the Massachusetts coast during a raging nor'easter, Boatswain's Mate 1st Class Bernard Webber recruited three volunteers at Chatham Lifeboat Station to search for survivors from the SS Pendleton, which had split in two near the Chatham Bar.

Riding across the bar in a 36-foot motor lifeboat, the crew lost their windshield and compass in transit but found Pendleton by searchlight in whiteout conditions and 60-foot waves. Webber, Engineman 1st Class Andrew Fitzgerald, and seamen Ervin Maske and Richard Lively maneuvered the boat to a ladder dropped from the ship, advancing and retreating with each pounding wave 32 times to rescue the survivors.

All four were awarded the Coast Guard's Gold Lifesaving Medal.

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