Word: bibb
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...radio bearing, got it. It was three hours later when Kindley Air Force Base in Bermuda heard from it again. This time the message was terse, urgent: the B-29 was running out of gas and preparing to ditch. A few minutes later the Coast Guard cutter Bibb heard a faint SOS. After that, there was nothing...
...acclaimed hero of the Bermuda Sky Queen crash was Pilot Charles Martin. When his big Boeing flying boat ran low on gas over the stormy North Atlantic last month (TIME, Oct. 27), he had brought her neatly down off the U.S. Coast Guard cutter Bibb and saved the lives of 69 passengers and crewmen. But as Civil Aeronautics Board hearings began last week, Pilot Martin (and crew) looked a lot less heroic...
Swamped Raft. After that, the heaving arena between ship and plane became the scene of desperate endeavor. The Bibb laid down oil slicks. A bigger, 15-man raft was maneuvered up to the plane, loaded and gotten out to open water where a small boat pulled passengers aboard. Three loads-seven people, then ten, then eleven -jumped or were pushed out of the plane into the raft. It was wild work...
...fourth trip-with 16 aboard the raft-went badly. The raft was swamped; a motor launch which managed to get its people aboard was hit by a wave which killed its engine and all but swamped it, too. Captain Cronk took the Bibb over to the swamped launch. As passengers began to be washed out of it, seamen leaped into the water for them; others reached out from life nets over the cutter's side to haul them to safety...
...Greater Happiness. Through that nerve-racking night, the Sky Queen was blown 60 miles, and there was little the Bibb could do but make a lee, keep her searchlights on the plunging plane and wait for the worst. There were still 24 men and one woman aboard the plane. But the flying boat's hull stayed intact. In the morning, with the wind abating, the last of the passengers and crew were safely taken off. The cutter riddled the Sky Queen with gunfire, stood by while she burned and sank, then turned home...