When I was a child, I loved a story about little tugboat called Little Toot.
He was a tugboat in New York Harbour.
He wasn't the biggest boat in the harbour. He wasn't the strongest. And he certainly wasn't the sort of vessel anyone would have expected to do anything particularly important.
But Little Toot had something the big boats sometimes lacked.
He was willing to have a go.
I hadn't thought about Little Toot for years.
Then I read about what happened in that same New York Harbour on September 11, 2001.
And suddenly I remembered him.
Because when the towers fell that terrible day, there were hundreds of thousands of people trapped on the southern end of Manhattan.
And down at the water's edge, people were looking across the harbour and wondering how they were going to get out.
And somewhere, in the back of my mind, I could almost hear that little tugboat from my childhood saying:
“I'll have a go.”
This is the story of what happened next.
At 10:45 a.m. on September 11, 2001, a Coast Guard lieutenant in New York Harbour keyed a radio and said a sentence that would become one of the most remarkable calls to action of that terrible day.
“All available boats. This is the United States Coast Guard. Anyone wanting to help with the evacuation of Lower Manhattan, report to Governors Island.”
But the boats were already coming. The bridges were closed. The tunnels were closed. The subway system was dead.
South of the towers, hundreds of thousands of people had nowhere left to go.
Some had made their way to the waterfront. Some had entered the Hudson. Others stood on seawalls and improvised landing places that had never been intended to receive passengers, waiting for anything that floated.
And then the boats began arriving.
Ferries. Tugs. Pilot boats. Private yachts. A retired fireboat.
The call that organised a rescue already underway
Lieutenant Michael Day had been scheduled to attend a meeting at the World Trade Centre that morning.
After the second plane struck, he grabbed life jackets, a Coast Guard ensign and an old plan left over from Operation Sail 2000. It wasn't an evacuation plan. It simply contained something suddenly invaluable: a list of piers and staging points around New York Harbour.
He boarded the Sandy Hook pilot boat New York with harbour pilot Andrew McGovern.
Communications were failing.
People were calling for help on every available channel.
Day hoisted the Coast Guard ensign and began broadcasting.
The famous call went out.
All available boats.
Day later admitted what the day had required of him:
“I broke more rules that day than probably I’ve enforced in my whole Coast Guard career.”
The call mattered.
It gave the harbour a rallying point and a coordinating voice.
But it did not start the rescue. The captains had already decided.
Ordinary boats, extraordinary work
Jessica DuLong later documented the maritime response in Saved at the Seawall.
The short film Boatlift, narrated by Tom Hanks, brought the story to a much wider audience.
NY Waterway didn't wait for instructions.
After the second plane struck, its fleet began moving.
Captain Rick Thornton manoeuvred his ferry against a seawall that wasn't a ferry terminal and began taking people aboard.
Some passengers had come down from the streets. Others had been pulled from the water.
The company eventually estimated that its vessels carried somewhere around 150,000 people away from Manhattan that day. On an ordinary Tuesday, its entire system carried roughly 34,000. That gives some idea of what was happening.
The Staten Island Ferry carried more than 50,000 people.
Then it went back.
It returned carrying water, bandages and people who still had work to do.
And then there was the John J. Harvey.
The old fireboat had already been retired.
That morning it was brought back into service.
It first helped remove civilians from the waterfront.
Then, when the water supply to Lower Manhattan became a problem, it did what it had been built to do.
It pumped water.
There were vessels that had never been intended to carry hundreds of frightened people suddenly doing exactly that.
There were close calls. The improvised landings were difficult. Drafts didn't always match the available water. Radios failed. Dust reduced visibility.
And yet the boats kept coming. No boat went down.
How big was it?
This is where the numbers require a little care.
Estimates vary.
Coast Guard leaders, including then-Commandant James Loy, put the number of people moved by water as high as 500,000.
Other estimates are lower, generally falling somewhere between roughly 270,000 and 400,000.
There was no turnstile at the waterfront. Nobody was standing there with a clipboard counting every passenger. Some early reports went as high as a million.
The precise figure is therefore uncertain.
The scale isn't.
Whatever number is used, hundreds of thousands of people were evacuated from Manhattan by water in roughly nine hours.
That is extraordinary by any standard.
And it is why the comparison with Dunkirk has endured.
In 1940, the famous evacuation from Dunkirk brought approximately 338,000 Allied troops off the beaches over nine days. Bear in mind too, that the Channel was under constant threat from the Luftwaffe. And it was 30 miles. It was a military withdrawal conducted under attack.
New York was different.
On September 11, 2001, a civilian harbour became an improvised evacuation fleet.
The comparison isn't that the two events were the same.
They weren't.
The comparison is that, in both cases, ordinary vessels suddenly became part of something much larger than themselves.
Why didn't we hear more about it?
Because the cameras were pointed elsewhere.
The defining images of September 11 belong to the towers.
The smoke. The people running.
The firefighters walking towards the disaster. The harbour was different. It was difficult to film.
And once people reached New Jersey, Staten Island, Brooklyn or Queens, many simply went home.
The people who had rescued them didn't necessarily stay for applause.
They went back. For water. For supplies. For more passengers. For whatever needed doing.
Yet even now, many people who remember September 11 don't realise that one of the greatest mass evacuations in American history happened almost entirely out of sight of the television cameras.
Nobody told them they were heroes
That's perhaps the part of the story I like best.
There was no grand plan. There was no roll call of heroes.
There was simply a harbour full of people looking towards Manhattan and seeing other people who needed help.
So they went.
Hundreds of thousands of people had been carried away from danger by men and women who had begun that morning as ferry crews, tugboat operators, pilots, yacht owners and ordinary citizens.
They had not been waiting for permission to become heroes.
They had simply answered the call.
All available boats.
And I wouldn't mind betting there were a few Little Toots having a go that day.
Shaydee
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