In the first hour of February 3, 1943, red lights began blinking across the black water of the North Atlantic. Each light was fixed to a life preserver. Each marked a person cast into the sea after a German torpedo struck the U.S. Army transport Dorchester.
The ship was gone in about 20 minutes. More than 900 troops, civilian workers, and crew had been aboard. By the time Coast Guard cutter Escanaba reached the wreck site, many survivors were so cold they could not climb a ladder, hold a line, or help themselves. Ordinary rescue methods were not enough.
So Coast Guardsmen went into the water after them.
A Convoy Bound for Greenland
Dorchester sailed as part of convoy SG-19 from St. John’s, Newfoundland, toward Greenland. The Coast Guard cutters Escanaba, Tampa, and Comanche served as escorts. It was a hard wartime passage through seas patrolled by German U-boats, and winter conditions coated decks and superstructures with ice.
At about 1:00 a.m., submarine U-223 fired the torpedo that struck Dorchester. The transport sank before an organized evacuation could be completed. The National Archives records that 674 of the 904 people aboard were lost.
Among the dead were Army chaplains George L. Fox, Alexander D. Goode, John P. Washington, and Clark V. Poling. The four helped others reach safety, gave away their own life jackets when the supply ran out, and remained aboard. Their sacrifice became one of the best-known stories from the sinking. Less familiar is the rescue technique waiting aboard Escanaba.
The Lesson of an Earlier Sinking
Eight months before the Dorchester disaster, Escanaba had responded after the troop transport Cherokee was torpedoed. The cold quickly incapacitated people in the water. Lieutenant Robert Prause, Escanaba’s executive officer, reportedly had to hang headfirst over the cutter’s side while shipmates held his legs. Despite the effort, the cutter recovered only 22 survivors.
Prause understood the problem: a life preserver might keep a man afloat, but it could not make him conscious, warm, or strong enough to grasp a line. A rescue ship could stand only feet away while a living person remained unreachable.
He began developing what became known as the Escanaba retriever method. Volunteer swimmers wore rubber exposure suits and parachute-style harnesses attached to lines. They trained with deck crews who could haul both swimmer and survivor back to the ship. The teams drilled until they could work from a rolling deck under wartime blackout conditions.
Into the Water on a Line
When Dorchester disappeared, the system faced its first large-scale test. The survivors’ blinking red lights stretched into the darkness. Some men clung to doughnut-shaped rafts. Others floated alone in life preservers. Hypothermia had left many unable to use Escanaba’s sea ladders or cargo net.
The tethered swimmers entered the water in exposure suits. Among them were Forrest Rednour, a ship’s cook, and Warren Deyampert, an officers’ steward. They swam from the cutter to the rafts and floating victims, checked for signs of life, secured people to retrieval lines, and signaled the deck crews to haul them in.
The work carried its own dangers. A swimmer could be crushed between a raft and the cutter’s steel side or pulled toward the propeller as the ship maneuvered. Coast Guard records credit Rednour with swimming beneath the fantail to keep helpless victims clear of the propeller’s suction. Both Rednour and Deyampert remained in the icy water for nearly four hours.
Some victims appeared dead from the cold. They were not. The official Coast Guard account states that 38 of 50 people who seemed lifeless were actually alive. Getting a swimmer directly to them saved time when every minute mattered.
Eight Hours, 133 Lives
The operation continued for eight hours. By its end, Escanaba’s crew had saved 133 people—more than six times the number recovered after the Cherokee sinking. Other rescuers worked the field as well, including Comanche, where mess attendant Charles W. David Jr. repeatedly entered the water to save survivors.
The numbers matter, but they do not fully capture the scene: a blacked-out cutter drifting through an oil-slicked sea, red lights winking in every direction, deck crews tending lines, and swimmers feeling their way toward men who could no longer call out or reach back.
It was practical seamanship at its best. Prause had studied a failure, designed a better method, trained the crew, and made sure the gear was ready before it was needed. When the real emergency came, the system worked because the people already knew their jobs.
That same quiet preparation runs through other Coast Guard rescues, including the 1952 Pendleton rescue by CG-36500 and Rasmus Midgett’s 1899 rescue at the wreck of the Priscilla. The equipment changes. The obligation does not.
The Loss of Escanaba
The triumph did not last long. On June 13, 1943, Escanaba suffered a catastrophic explosion while escorting another convoy between Greenland and Newfoundland. The cause remains uncertain. The cutter sank within minutes, taking 100 Coast Guardsmen with her. Only two survived.
Prause, Rednour, and Deyampert were among those lost. Their rescue work lived on in the record, although the tethered system itself did not immediately become the model for the modern Coast Guard rescue swimmer program. It stands instead as an early, successful cold-water rescue method built by a crew confronting a problem no one else had solved.
What Sailors Should Remember
The sea does not care whether a plan looked good on paper. It exposes every weak point—gear, training, communication, and nerve. Escanaba’s crew met that truth before the Dorchester sank. They trained in the dark, learned the lines, tested the suits, and turned hard experience into a method that saved 133 lives.
For sailors, that may be the most lasting part of the story. Courage got the swimmers over the side. Preparation brought people home.
Learn more about the service’s working traditions in our guide to Coast Guard history and culture, or browse the Coast Guard Life collection.