Sterling, Stewart "Fire Eater"
Lt. Eddie Relch of the New York City Fire Dept.’s Marine Division is none too pleased when 28-year veteran Gus Dagnan is transferred to his unit. He believes that Dagnan is too old to work on the line and indeed thinks a desk job a better fit for the older man. But a major blaze at an Army depot and dock on the Hudson River proves how wrong he was after Relch and a number of stevedores become trapped in the cargo hold of a ship which had been loading war materiels dockside when the fire had begun. All too soon the freighter (the fictitious FURBETT) is ablaze herself, and with a particularly dangerous cargo (menthol-benzol, a chemical designed to be used by PT-boats and cruisers in throwing out smokescreens) that threatens to add to the conflagration. But Gus Dagnan comes to the rescue of the trapped men. Wearing an asbestos suit and carrying an oxy-acetelyne torch with him, the older man manages to cut his way into the hold where they are trapped and then, as the FURBETT slowly turns turtle and sinks into the Hudson, cuts an escape hatch in the vessel’s hull, thus freeing all the men. Later Dagnan admits that he’d been frightened all along, but, as he tells his now grateful battalion leader, patriotism plus paternal pride had guided him in his act of bravery:
“... all that stuff on the pier – I was afraid that it might go up all in smoke. I got a boy over there on the other side, in the Marines ... I’d sure hate to feel that any of the stuff he might be needing was burned up here if we could stop it.”