In the winter of 1932, New England was battered by the most brutal nor'easter in years, wreaking havoc on land and creating a wind-whipped peril of the freezing Atlantic. In the early hours of Monday, February 18, while the storm raged, two oil tankers, the Fort Mercer and the Pendleton, broke in two. The Coast Guard raced its cutters to the Fort Mercer to rescue the men huddled in the halves, and when the Pendleton proved to be in danger of capsizing, sent out into the storm two 36-foot wooden lifeboats, each manned by four crewmen, in what every crewman realized could be a suicide mission in the enormous seventy-foot seas.