Collision Course

by Moscow, Alvin;

  The men continued to struggle against the mechanics of launching the eight boats on the high side of the ship, and Captain Calamai watched the situation from the wing of the bridge. After about five or six minutes Captain Magagnini, who had kicked off his slippers, padded back up to the bridge and reported the hopelessness of trying to launch the boats from the high side of the ship. Captain Calamai told him to see to the launching of the eight boats on the starboard side. Both men still feared the likelihood of imminent capsizing. They both realized also that with the eight portside lifeboats useless, the remaining eight boats on the starboard side could accommodate at absolute full capacity 1,004 persons. There were 1,706 passengers and crew aboard.

  Resigning himself as best he could, after consultation with his staff captain and others, to the loss of his ship, Captain Calamai turned to saving the passengers. Second Officer Badano was sent again to the loudspeaker system, and with the captain standing beside him, dictating, Badano announced: “Si pregano, i signori passeggeri di portarsi ai propri posti di reunione.” He repeated it in Italian and then made the same announcement twice in English: “If you please, passengers are requested to go to their muster stations.”

  Badano, after making the announcement, turned to the captain. “Is there any more?”

  “No, no more,” said Calamai.

  “Shall I ring the alarm?” asked the younger officer.

  “No, no, we have only half the lifeboats,” said the captain. He told Badano to go into the chartroom and plot the ship’s present position for a distress message. He wanted to send an SOS for help in getting the passengers off the ship.

  Captain Calamai had resolved not to sound the regular abandon-ship alarm, required by law. The prescribed alarm was the sounding of six or seven staccato blasts followed by one long blast on the ship’s sirens or bells, or both. All passengers had supposedly been instructed how to respond to the alarm during the abandon-ship drill which had been held the day after the Doria left Naples. But Captain Calamai had been around ships and the sea long enough to know that drills during a pleasure voyage were no measure of what passengers or crew would do in response to a real alarm on a listing ship that might sink. The captain, in short, feared panic if the ship’s alarm sirens were set off. He feared a stampeding of the starboard lifeboats if it were learned that there were not enough lifeboats available for everyone on the ship.

  Captain Calamai had one slight hope for saving the Andrea Doria. It was he who had telephoned the Engine Room concerning the use of the engines. Sixteen years before, when he was executive officer of the torpedoed Italian converted cruiser Duilio, he had saved that ship by running her up on a nearby beach before she sank. Now, he decided to try the same thing with the Andrea Doria. The shallow off-shore waters of the United States were to the north. Although he did not stop to compute the actual distance, he knew that if he could reach shallow water or a sandbar, the Doria could be inexpensively refloated. Actually, the nearest haven was Davis Shoal, some twenty-two miles to the north near Nantucket, where the water depth was twenty feet, shallow enough for the Doria’s keel to rest on the sandy bottom with her A-Deck and the tops of her watertight bulkheads above water.

  The captain, with hope in his heart, pushed the left handle of the engine telegraph gently forward to the position SLOW AHEAD. The bell signal of the telegraph was answered from the Engine Room and the ship began to rumble with the vibrations of the motor. The ship moved slowly in the water for perhaps an instant or more and then she wobbled precariously. The captain jerked the telegraph handle to STOP and he realized that the last hope for saving his ship was gone. To try to run the ship with a 40-foot hole in its side was too dangerous for the welfare of his passengers. It would increase the risk of capsizing. It would prevent the safe launching of the starboard lifeboats and even if the Doria did reach the shoals, no rescue ship could be expected to follow her into shallow waters. The captain decided to rest his hope in the speedy arrival of rescue ships. He hoped there were many ships nearby in these heavily traveled waters between New York and Nantucket.

  When Second Officer Junior Badano arrived in the chartroom behind the wheelhouse, he discovered Senior Second Officer Franchini and Third Officer Giannini there before him. Giannini had reached the chartroom first and had begun to take a quick dead-reckoning position of the ship. Before he had finished, Franchini arrived to take a more accurate position by loran. Badano entered the small room in time to help. As Franchini called out the readings of the loran signals Badano scribbled them down on a scrap of envelope and then he laid positions off on the navigational chart. The men worked with extreme care. With the mood of imminent disaster upon the bridge, they knew that the accuracy of their work might mean the difference in being rescued before the ship sank.

  Badano handed the captain the scrap of envelope with the ship’s position written on it and Captain Calamai added the few words needed to complete the distress message. The captain did not notice his chief radio operator, Francesco Guidi, who had been standing by for orders unseen in the dark wheelhouse, reluctant to approach the busy and distraught commander of the ship. Captain Calamai handed the message to the nearest man, Third Officer Antonio Donato, who rushed the message to the Radio Room. Radioman Guidi scampered after him.

  The important message was given to Radio Operator Carlo Bussi, who had been on the eight-to-midnight radio watch. The transmitter was warmed up and tuned to 500 kilocycles for the expected distress message. Bussi tapped out three dots three dashes three dots, known the world over. Next he sent the ship’s call sign, ICEH, and then he flicked the switch of the automatic radio alarm. The automatic device emitted over the airwaves twelve long dashes, each exactly four seconds long, designed to trigger automatic alarms set on all ships which did not maintain a round-the-clock watch for distress messages on 500 kcs. When the automatic alarm signal was completed, the radio operator of the Andrea Doria tapped out the message that was to set in motion the greatest sea rescue operation in peacetime history:

  SOS DE ICEH

  SOS HERE AT 0320 GMT

  LAT. 40.30 N 69.53 W

  NEED IMMEDIATE ASSISTANCE

  Chapter Six

  “WE’RE GOING ON A PICNIC”

  As they were designated in law, the 1,134 passengers on the Andrea Doria were indeed innocent parties. Happenstance or fate—call it what you will—decided life and death. Marion W. Boyer, a director of the Standard Oil Company (New Jersey) and former general manager of the Atomic Energy Commission, probably owes his life to his wife’s whim for a second cup of coffee. As the hour approached eleven, he suggested they retire for the night. He was tired and they had to rise uncommonly early for the morning arrival in New York. But Mrs. Boyer wanted another cup of coffee and then she wanted a cigarette. “Let’s stay up a while,” she pleaded. “There may be some excitement yet.”

  The last night out on the Doria, as it is on so many ships, was rather dull. The now familiar luxury and carefree bliss of shipboard life was ending. Party clothes had been packed away that afternoon. The time had come for reality: the handclasp with gratuities for waiters, stewards, and bartenders, and the goodbyes and the address exchanging with shipboard friends for whom you would never find time ashore. The night altogether had been a quiet one. There was dancing in the small Belvedere Lounge but the First Class Ballroom was dark and empty. The Grand Bar was sparsely occupied. Most people had turned in early. The Boyers, though, were in the Salon, Mrs. Boyer dawdling over her last cigarette waiting for something to happen, at the moment the Stockholm bow wrecked their de luxe two-cabin suite below on the Foyer Deck. Enough “excitement” followed.

  Walter G. Carlin, an elderly and successful attorney, chairman of the board of a bank and a political leader in Brooklyn, also was tired and sleepy, but he prevailed upon his wife. They declined an invitation of friends for a cup of coffee and retired to their first-class stateroom on Upper Deck, one deck above that of the Boyers. Mrs. Carlin propped herself in bed with a boo
k while her husband finished the last-minute packing and went to brush his teeth in the bathroom at the end of a long corridor of their stateroom. The collision smashed him against a wall and to the floor. When he staggered back into the main section of his cabin, his wife was gone. Her bed was gone and the night table and light she had been reading by were gone. Beyond the wreckage in the room, he saw a gaping hole in the wall and beyond that was the night air, the fog and the sea.

  The hole in the Doria’s side extended at the Upper Deck from the Carlins’ Cabin 46 to Cabin 56. In the latter cabin. Mrs. Martha Peterson also had been reading a book in bed but a few minutes before eleven she and her husband switched off their bed lights and rolled over for a night’s sleep. Mrs. Peterson occupied the inside twin bed, separated from her husband’s bed by a built-in chest of drawers. Her husband, Thure Peterson, a giant of a man, tall, broad and muscular and well known in his own circle as a chiropractor and president of the Chiropractic Institute of New York, probably was the only man aboard who saw the Stockholm bow inside the Andrea Doria and survived. Awakened from his short sleep, he was conscious of a tremendous thud, the sound of steel ripping and the vision of a grayish-white hulk which was the Stockholm prow passing by him. It occurred to him that he was flying through space and then he lost consciousness.

  He heard none of the commotion in the corridors as first-class passengers poured out of cabins on the starboard and port sides of Upper Deck. The ceiling came crashing down upon Kenneth F. Merlin and his wife in Cabin 60 but they managed to crawl through the debris to the corridor. People streamed from their cabins, trying to walk on the slanting decks and slipping and falling to the smooth, polished linoleum floor. A thick acrid white smoke drifted down the passageway.

  Ten doors down on the starboard side, in Cabin 80, Richardson Dilworth, Mayor of Philadelphia, awoke on the floor between the twin beds of his cabin. His wife, sitting beside him, was flabbergasted. “I think we hit an iceberg, like the Titanic,” she suggested. Dilworth, a Marine Corps rifleman in World War I and a captain in World War II, holder of the Purple Heart medal, survivor of the slaughter on Guadalcanal, also had read the bestselling book, A Night to Remember, but he reasoned calmly. “No, Ann,” he told his wife, “there are no icebergs off the coast of Massachusetts.” It was something else, and although he did not know what, the handsome fifty-seven-year-old mayor convinced his wife there was nothing to be unduly concerned about on a modern ship such as the Doria. They dressed in the clothes they had laid out for the next morning and left their cabin.

  Across the hall, in Cabin 77 on the port side, a young couple half the age of the Dilworths and of an entirely different social background, scampered from their cabin in their underclothes. They were Nora Kovach and her husband Istvan Rabovsky, Hungarian ballet dancers who three years earlier had fled Communist rule to dance in the West. The dancers, having completed a successful European tour, had boarded the Doria in Genoa and, because of a misunderstanding concerning the price of the first-class cabin assigned to them, they had switched to the small and less expensive First Class Cabin 77. The cabin for which they had been booked was number 56.

  In Cabin 56, the fifty-five-year-old Mrs. Peterson awoke to find herself racked from her shoulders to feet in a tangle of splintered furniture and ceiling fragments. She was unable to move. Her body seemed numbed and aching as if it in some detached way was in pain and she herself could not feel it. The cabin, or what was left of it, was dark, a grayish-black. All she could see was wreckage about her but she became numbly aware that she was not alone in this purgatory. Almost directly above her legs within arm’s reach—if she could raise her arm, which she could not—was someone else.

  Jane Cianfarra, who had turned off her night light in Cabin 54 where she had occupied the outboard bed near the portholes, regained consciousness in the wreckage of Cabin 56. She was aware immediately of her husband, Camille Cianfarra, nearby. She could hear him groan, murmuring as if in excruciating pain, but she could not see him. She strained to locate him, but then he was silent.

  Of her two daughters in what had been the adjoining cabin, number 52, Mrs. Cianfarra knew nothing. She feared the worst. She remembered bidding the girls good night before she and her husband had gone to bed and she recalled the girls talking and giggling before they dropped off to sleep. Linda was fourteen years old, the child of her previous marriage to Edward P. Morgan, the radio news commentator. Joan was eight, the daughter of her marriage to Camille Cianfarra, foreign correspondent for The New York Times in Spain. Linda, being the older, had taken the outboard bed beneath the two portholes, leaving the bed on the opposite wall for Joan.

  Mrs. Cianfarra, in a state of severe shock, realized she had heard her husband die. She believed her own life was ebbing. Her head and face were wet with blood, one hand was smashed and her legs somehow were trapped. Her body, immovable in a crouched half-sitting position, was pinned against the steel wall of an elevator shaft which backed on the Peterson cabin.

  The two women, after discovering one another, oriented themselves to their situation. They had concluded they were alone and lost and would go down with the ship, and then they heard the voice of Mrs. Peterson’s husband. He had been hurled through a connecting wall into Cabin 58 where he regained consciousness half buried in debris. But the six-foot 200-pound chiropractor from Upper Montclair, New Jersey, wriggled free, called to his wife and staggered out into the corridor and then back into Cabin 56. In the dark of the wrecked hallway leading into the main section of the cabin, Peterson, crawling on his hands and knees, brushed by the lifeless body of Cianfarra, his shipboard neighbor.

  Ironically, Cianfarra, returning from Madrid for a vacation, had in a way prognosticated the collision. The fog which had clung to the ship since that afternoon had been the major topic of conversation through the day and dinner that night. Cianfarra, perhaps with a touch of wishful thinking indulged in by every newspaperman, joshingly told his daughters at dinner that there might be a collision, a major catastrophe, and then he would have to go to work and write a story. Mrs. Cianfarra, noting that the two girls might be taking their father seriously, reassured them. The captain had not come down for dinner as usual, she said, so he must be up on the bridge taking good care of the ship’s navigation.

  Hours later, as the body of Cianfarra lay still in the hallway of Cabin 56, he was the object of the poignant envy of his colleagues in the third-floor newsroom of The New York Times. As rewrite men pieced together stories from scant pickings of radio messages and old news clippings in the files, they talked of a newspaperman’s dream come true: being on the scene of a major newsbreaking story. They had no doubt they would soon hear from Cianfarra. The office talk, what time there was for it, revolved about how lucky Cian—as he was known by his friends—was to happen to be aboard the Doria. City Editor Frank Adams, who rushed from his suburban home to the office at 4 A.M., listed Cianfarra’s name for an eyewitness account among the twenty-one stories he scheduled on the collision. As the early morning hours wore on, the men thought and talked of how each of them, if they were on the scene like Cian, would manage to telephone or radio their story to the paper.

  Later, when the first casualty list came in, the men in the New York Times office were struck with a rare sense of shock as they realized the chasm between the view they as journalists held of a disaster in which 50 or 100 unknown persons were killed and their reaction to the death of a single colleague.

  Peterson reached his wife and Mrs. Cianfarra only by returning to Cabin 58 and wriggling his massive body under the wall partition which divided the cabins. Actually only half of the wall remained and that was attached only to the ceiling. The half of the wall closer to the hull had been torn away completely with that section of the cabin. Inside Cabin 56, he was surrounded by the wreckage which held the two women trapped. Beyond the wreckage was the hole in the side of the ship. He tried to move debris but it was too heavy to do alone. He needed help if there was to be any chance of saving the
women. Both his wife and Mrs. Cianfarra, in the quiet of the wrecked cabin, told him to leave them and save himself. But he assured them he would return shortly with enough manpower to move a mountain of wreckage.

  One deck below, on the Foyer Deck, Ferdinand M. Thieriot, business manager of the San Francisco Chronicle, and his wife, the former Frances de Figuera, were killed instantly in the bedroom of de luxe Suite 180, one of the four specially designed luxury suites of the ship. Their eldest son, Peter, survived only because the Thieriots, having made a last-minute change in plans not to fly from Gibraltar, were only able to book the bedroom of the two-room suite. The sitting room, with its sofa-bed and wall bed, had been taken in Genoa by the Max Passantes of Denver, Colorado. Peter Thieriot, who was thirteen years old, was given a solitary single cabin about fifty feet aft from that of his parents. His cabin was on the other side of the ship’s Main Foyer, which served as entrance from the pier to the ship’s first-class quarters. On one side of his cabin was the First-Class Dining Saloon and on the other a telephone booth and the ship’s bank. It was to this cabin that his father escorted him shortly after ten o’clock, when they had finished playing at the ship’s horse races, bade him good night for the last time and walked across the foyer to his own cabin where Mrs. Thieriot had retired a half hour earlier.

  The collision barely awakened the thirteen-year-old boy from his deep slumber. He rubbed his eyes, donned some clothes, looked out into the corridor, saw nothing, and returned to his bed and sleep.

  He failed to see that the spacious foyer was heaped with rubble. The ceiling had exploded from the shock of the collision into thousands of pieces, the plate-glass front of the Gift Shop splattered across the floor. Two third-class pursers, Adolfo Bonivento and Emilio Bertini, on the way to their cabins, threw themselves against a wall in poses of hide-and-seek, shielding themselves from the avalanche. Behind that wall, on the starboard forward side of the foyer, three steel vaults in the Purser’s Office withstood the pressure of the impact and saved the bewildered pursers from injury.